Challenging Female Roles: Realism, Adultery and Liberation in Three 19th Century European Novels

By Izzy (BA English and German at Oxford, recipient of the Proxime accessit Gibbs prize, Distinction in Masters at Oxford, currently funded by the Wolfson Foundation for a DPhil in comparative medieval literature)

In 19th century Europe, to be a woman was to be a wife. Of course, this was not news to society as whole or women as individuals. The problems of getting married, being married, childbirth, widowhood and all the attendant joys or sorrows had always been a central concern in real life and for women in literature. The Gothic novel and romanticism of the 18th and early 19th centuries made the pursuit of love and matrimony into an adventure, fraught with danger and peopled with villains, heroes and, sometimes, a dash of magic. Female writers, such as Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe, played a large part in the development of this genre for a quickly growing, and largely female, readership. The Adelines and Emilys of these novels dash around Europe and eventually end up wealthy and married to young and attractive noblemen. While such books were vastly popular for their entertaining and thrilling plots, and represent an important stage in the history of female authorship, they did not provide a realistic portrayal of female life and marriage. Even the later Jane Austen, who satirised the Gothic and dealt with the more mundane and everyday conflicts for women in contemporary society, had all her heroines married to the ‘right’ man at the end of her novels. How Mr Knightley, Mr Darcy and Captain Wentworth interact with their wives beyond the wedding lies beyond the literary world.

This all changed as the European novel turned steadily more towards realism, also called naturalism, in the later half of the 19th century. After all, a woman would spend the vast majority of her life in the state of matrimony, bound to one particular individual but also bound by the value system and expectations of society placed on that marriage. Three female characters emerge from European literature in this time period; Anna Karenina in Russian, Madame Bovary in French and Effi Briest in German. The formula for the female in literature is inverted in these novels. Rather than ending the narrative with the engagement or wedding of the female protagonist, both Madame Bovary and Effi Briest are wed at the beginning, while Anna Karenina had already been married for years when the story opens. These are not stories where marriage represents the final stage, the solution, but ones where marriage itself is pried open to be examined. These women are portrayed as individual agents, unable to find freedom and personal happiness within their marriages, but also failing as they transgress social and moral boundaries in a search for love and meaning. All three find themselves trapped in the institution of matrimony and trapped by societal judgement of their attempts to liberate themselves by various means, primarily through adulterous relationships. In the novels, titled for their respective heroines, the realist literary mode strips back romantic notions to deal with questions of marriage, adultery and female freedom, making them landmark works in the European corpus.

Madame Bovary, published in 1857 by Gustave Flaubert, is famous for its portrayal of a young, pretty woman who marries a doctor in the French countryside. Emma Bovary’s relationship with her husband, Charles, is not negative but he quickly seems decidedly lacklustre to her: ‘Charles’s conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone’s ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought.’ Longing for excitement, she hurls herself into consumerism, driving her husband into debt, and extramarital affairs. By the end of the novel, Emma swallows arsenic in despair, Charles discovers her infidelity and dies of a broken heart, and their only daughter, Berthe, is left in poverty and sent to work in a mill. Despite this, Flaubert’s work is far from being a straightforwardly moralising and didactic tale about the dangers of adultery.

There are three important aspects to this novel, which places it in conversation with other literary portrayals of women and marriage. First, there is Emma’s reliance on romantic and sentimental literature, which informs her view of love: ‘Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.’ She finds herself disappointed in real life when compared to the books she loves to read and in this she is similar to Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817). Catherine also expects to find ghosts and dark plots when she goes to visit her suitor’s estate and is disappointed. However, her story ends well as the suitor corrects her misguided imagination and finally asks her to marry him, the happiness of real life trumping her earlier fantasies. But where Catherine is humorously and kindly engaged by her suitor, Emma finds no spark of sentiment or poetry in her husband and she struggles to apply her notions of romance: ‘By moonlight in the garden she recited all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him many melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after as before, and Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved.’ While Emma might be criticised for her sentimentalism, the lack of emotional response she receives from her husband absolves her from being solely to blame for the breakdown of her marriage and family.

This leads onto the second aspect, which all three novels engage with, namely the lack of an intimate relationship between the spouses and how this stifles and disappoints the women who see no end to their marriage. The husband in Theodor Fontane’s 1895 novel Effi Briest, is also lacking in trying to emotionally engage his wife: ‘Innstetten was kind and good, but he was not a lover. He felt that he loved Effi; hence his clear conscience did not require him to make any special effort to show it.’ This emotional distance is heightened in the portrayal of the husband in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, published in 1877. Karenin is shown to be dismissive and actively mocking of the suggestion of intimacy between spouses: ‘‘Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,’ he said in his deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always took with her, a tone of jeering at anyone who should say in earnest what he said.’

The third aspect which Flaubert brings to the forefront, and which is taken up by both Tolstoy and Fontane, is the boredom and monotony of married life for women. One of the primary criticisms of Effi Briest is that it is a novel in which barely anything happens. Even the affair, which leads to the breakdown of the marriage years later, is not actually portrayed in the novel but simply alluded to as having happened. This sense of boredom for the reader actively parallels the boredom that Effi suffers as a young, intelligent and social woman trapped in a remote town with only her husband for company. All the husbands follow their routines like clockwork. Tolstoy writes of Karenin: ‘Every minute of Alexey Alexandrovitch’s life was portioned out and occupied. And to make time to get through all that lay before him every day, he adhered to the strictest punctuality.’ Similarly, Effi’s husband plans out not only his evening of work but creates a routine for interaction and affection with his wife: ‘At nine Innstetten would come back for tea, usually with the news- paper in his hand, and would talk about the Prince, who was having so much annoyance again. [...] Then he would read over the list of appointments made and orders conferred, to the most of which he objected. Finally he would talk about the election and how fortunate it was to preside over a district in which there was still some feeling of respect. When he had finished with this he asked Effi to play something, either from Lohengrin or the Walküre, for he was a Wagner enthusiast. [...] At ten Innstetten relaxed and indulged in a few well-meant, but rather tired caresses, which Effi accepted, without genuinely returning them.’ Charles Bovary also makes a habit of their relationship: ‘he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony of dinner.’

In these novels, we see a woman’s inner life examined within marriage, and acknowledged to be greater than simply the house and husband which matrimony provides. In fact, it is Charles whose mind and imagination are shown to extend to further than his small domestic world: ‘For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.’ Anna, Effi and Emma all seek something that is greater and outside the limited space they apportioned by society. In seeking something greater they also develop their own sense of personal agency and identity. The institution of marriage is portrayed not as a contract between two individuals but rather one between them and society, who are invested in keeping the marriages, and thus the social stability of their circle, intact. Therefore, the authors are realistic in their portrayal of the female experience within marriage but equally realistic when in comes to the censure and breakdown of relationships which their actions entail. Emma and Anna both commit suicide, while Effi goes through a nervous breakdown and eventually dies of illness exacerbated by her weakened state after being cast off by her husband. As readers we are sympathetic and conscious of these characters as complex human beings, but nonetheless presented with their ultimate failure. It is noteworthy that all these novels were written by male authors who, while interested in and sympathetic to the position of women in marriage at the time, would have equally struggled to formulate a viable alternative route for female happiness and freedom.

It is significant that these early literary explorations of real female experiences and attempts at self-liberation all involve adultery, which certainly represents a breaking of societal bonds, but again makes the female dependent on the male, even if it is a lover rather than a husband. These novels move towards creating a literary space where the woman’s life is not completed by marriage, but it is problematic that there still seems to be difficulty in viewing the female as independent of any male at all. However, by examining married life from the female perspective and crafting a nuanced sense of their characters and actions, the authors of these 19th century adultery novels open up questions of marriage, adultery and routes for female liberation.