By B. Overton
Women's adultery presents a few of the plots that run via nineteenth century eu fiction. This e-book discusses how novels of adultery were theorized, argues its personal theoretical point of view, and analyzes 'circumtexts' of the fiction of woman adultery: its pre-history in 18th century Britain, and its decline through the Naturalist interval in France. it's the first committed learn of the idea of the radical of adultery, and of the illustration of adultery in prior British and later nineteenth century French fiction.
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Extra info for Fictions of Female Adultery 1684-1890: Theories and Circumtexts
Example text
28 Just as Tanner says little of Julie as an epistolary novel, so he does not acknowledge the significance of the Novelle for Elective Affinities. Instead, he treats it as if it differed little from what he loosely calls the 'bourgeois novel'. In drawing attention, for instance, to 'the level of generality, verging on allegory, on which the book is conducted' (184), he refers to a central feature of the Novelle form, but apparently without recognizing that this is what it is. The result is that he gives disproportionate emphasis to qualities that are intrinsic to the form rather than peculiar to Goethe's novel.
Here Eduard and Charlotte, the married couple at its centre, have sex while each is thinking of another with whom they are in love: Eduard of Ottilie, Charlotte of the Captain. As Tanner argues, what is so unsettling about this episode is its suggestion 'not just that married sexual activity may effectively be adulterous sexual activity but that it may not in fact be possible to tell - or to keep - them apart' (191). com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-11 36 37 desire and in exploring some of the most searching implications of that conflict.
While, within Tanner's terms of reference, Julie's account of her father's behaviour could be read as implying suppressed desire on his part rather than hers, the key fantasy that requires attention is authorial, ideological, and cultural. Tanner's interpretation succeeds in establishing that the novel underscores the power of the father. It also suggests, more debatably, that the source of that power lies in sexual desire that culture requires to be repressed. What it leaves out are other sources of the father's power, and Rousseau's own agency in figuring them.