Children and Childlessness in the Novel of Wifely Adultery

Abstract

Given the importance of matters of inheritance and legitimacy in the novel of wifely adultery, it is not surprising that two of the most interesting critical approaches to this kind of fiction have focused on questions raised by the transgressive woman’s childbearing. As I have indicated in Chapter 1, one of the main tenets by which the double standard of sexual morality was rationalized in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe was that of legitimate inheritance. On the grounds of rights to inheritance and the continuance of the male line, it was generally held that the wife should not have sexual contact with any man but her husband, in case offspring conceived outside the marriage might covertly supplant his own. On such grounds alone, and leaving aside what may underlie them,¹ much is at stake in the role of children in the fiction of wifely adultery. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, through reference to a range of examples, mostly novels of wifely adultery but also several that border on or foreshadow the form, it analyses patterns both of childbearing and childlessness. Second, it considers and evaluates two previous treatments of the question from approaches that are in several respects quite different. My approach is the one I employ throughout the book.