Abstract
In most accounts of nineteenth-century fiction, the novel of adultery is seen as a standard narrative form showing little essential deviation from one example, one national setting, to another. The cases of Jacobsen and Fontane demonstrate that individual novelists, working in different cultures and out of different traditions, varied the theme considerably. Although both followed precedent as male writers who produced impersonal narratives centred on female adultery, both also challenged it. As the previous chapter has shown, both Marie Grubbe and L’Adultera vindicate the heroine; while Fontane went further still by basing Beyond Recall on male adultery, and by foregrounding, in Effi Briest, a culture of rigid conformism and emotional repression.
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Notes
‘Realism in Spain and Portugal’, in The Age of Realism, ed. by F. W. J. Hemmings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 317.
Obra Completa, 2 vols, ed. by João Gaspar Simões and others (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia José Aguilar Editõra, 1970), I, 551–840. The Campbell translation, the only one available in English, is both incomplete, cutting many short passages and some of considerable length, and extremely unreliable. Chapter numbers are indicated for both texts because Campbell’s numbering is incorrect from Chapter VII onwards; where I have modified the translation, this is indicated by the abbreviation ‘TM’. There is a nineteenth-century American translation by Mary J. Serrano inappropriately entitled Dragon’s Teeth (Boston: Ticknor, 1889). Although this is more complete than Campbell’s, and generally more accurate, it is explicitly a bowdlerized version of Eça’s text and it introduces further chapter divisions.
See, for example, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. and ed. by Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, 1 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)
and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. by Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature, 8 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
‘On Monstrous Birth: Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta’, in Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives, ed. by Brian Nelson (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1992), pp. 191–209 (pp. 198–9).
‘Mysticism and Hysteria in La Regenta: The Problem of Female Identity’, in Feminist Readings on Spanish and Latin-American Literature, ed. by L. P. Condé and S. M. Hart (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ont., and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), pp. 37–46 (p. 41).
See Raymond Carr, Spain: 1808–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966; repr. 1975), pp. 320 and 355–379.
‘Kiss and Tell: The Toad in La Regenta’, in “Malevolent Insemination” and other essays on Clarín, ed. by Noël Valis, Michigan Romance Studies, 10 (1990), pp. 87–100 (p. 97).
See Maryellen Bieder, ‘Between Genre and Gender: Emilia Pardo Bazán and Los Pazos de Ulloa’, in In the Feminine Mode: Essays on Hispanic Women Writers, ed. by Noël Valis and Carol Maier (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990), pp. 131–45.
See Lisa P. Condé, Stages in the Development of a Feminist Consciousness in Perez Galdos (1843–1920): A Biographical Sketch, Hispanic Literature, 7 (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ont., and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), pp. 150–1, 159–60, 171–2, and 182.
La de Bringas, ed. by Ricardo Gullón (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967). Woolsey’s translation is neither complete nor always accurate; and after Chapter VI it fails to follow Galdds’s chapter divisions. References are therefore to the Spanish edition as well as to the translation, with chapter numbers included for both.
‘Narrative Ambiguity and Situational Ethics in La de Bringas’, in Galdós’ House of Fiction: Papers Given at the Birmingham Galdós Colloquium, ed. by A. H. Clarke and E. J. Rodgers (Llangrannog, Wales: Dolphin, 1991), p. 19.
For a discussion of organicism in nineteenth-century thought, see Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), especially Chapter 1, ‘Science and social thought: The rise of organic theory’.
For discussion of the historical parallels, see Geoffrey Ribbans, ‘Contemporary History in the Structure and Characterization of “Fortunata y Jacinta”’, in Galdós Studies, ed. by J. E. Varey (London: Támesis Books, 1970), pp. 90–113; and Peter A. Bly, Galdós’s Novel of the Historical Imagination, pp. 85–115.
‘Individual, Class and Society in Fortunata and Jacinta’, in Galdos Studies, II, ed. by Robert J. Weber (London: Támesis Books, 1974), pp. 49–68; repr. in Galdos, ed. by Jo Labanyi (London and New York: Longman, 1993), pp. 116–39 (p. 124).
Quoted by Peter B. Goldman in ‘Galdós and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Need for an Interdisciplinary Approach’, Anales Galdosianas, 10 (1975), 5–18; repr. in Galdós, ed. by Jo Labanyi, pp. 140–56 (p. 144). The ellipsis marks in the quotation are Goldman’s.
See also Lisa P. Condé, Women in the Theatre of Galdós: From Realidad (1892) to Voluntad (1895), Hispanic Literature, 6 (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ont., and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990).
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© 1996 Bill Overton
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Overton, B. (1996). Church and State: Eça de Queirós, Alas, Galdós. In: The Novel of Female Adultery. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25173-5_8
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