| During the last half of the nineteenth century a distinct type of the novel was widely produced in Continental Europe: the novel dealing with female adultery. Madame Bovary by Flaubert, Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, and Effi Briest by Fontane are the most famous examples of the adultery novel in France, Russia, and Germany respectively. The features of novels of this type are strikingly similar. With minor variations, each tells the story of a married woman belonging to the upper or middle class, her adultery, broken marriage, and atonement by death. Although adultery was understood as a crime that husbands could commit too, a double standard of morality and legal inequality between men and women in reality made husbands exempt from the crime of adultery.;The failure to recognize sufficiently the gender bias of nineteenth-century adultery fiction is the single most important limitation of the previous comparative treatments of the subject. Hence, the major purpose of this study is to show the woman's oppression in patriarchy and the way in which the texts themselves help reveal this oppression. To do this I will apply French Feminist theories to deconstruct the canonical texts of the three major European novels of adultery in reading them for gaps and resisting forces of signification within the texts themselves. |
