The Novel of Adultery. by Judith ArmstrongReview by: Patricia ThomsonNineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Dec., 1977), pp. 346-347Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933392 .

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346 Nineteenth-Century Fiction

JUDITH ARMSTRONG, The Novel of Adultery. London: Macmillan, 1976. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1976. Pp. viii + 182. L5.95. $21.50.

The unequivocal title raises different expectations from the charming eighteenth-century picture on the cover. L'amant Surpris shows a maiden playfully surprising her young lover as he dotes on her letters -an idyll strictly a deux. And something of the same disjunction haunts the book.

This is ostensibly a "study of major and minor novels written during the second half of the nineteenth century by French, Russian, American and English authors"-a huge enough task, one would think, in all conscience-and yet a third of it is given over to attitudes toward mar- riage throughout history in Europe, Asia, and America, from Greek and Roman mores of the seventh century B.C., through adultery in the reign of Justinian, early Russian matriarchal society, to courtly love, Puritanism, and the Hardwicke Act of 1773. While much of this mis- cellaneous information is fascinating, it is hard to see the connection between late nineteenth-century fiction and the ways of Tartars with their women, or even Theodore Roosevelt's attitude toward contracep- tives. Judith Armstrong herself talks of "a bird's-eye survey," an un- fortunate reminder of Lady Psyche's famous lecture in Tennyson's The Princess in which she took "A bird's-eye view of all the ungracious past; / Glanced at the legendary Amazon . . . Ran down the Persian, Grecian, Roman lines / Of empire, and the woman's state in each, / How far from just; ... and came to chivalry...." We, too, issue "gorged with knowledge" but unconvinced that a pattern has emerged "of uni- versal tendencies and national differences" (virginity in France, mother- hood in Russia, marriage in England) that is going to affect our reading of nineteenth-century novels.

Although we are not told specifically, I imagine that the starting point for this enterprise may well have been those three great novels in which adultery plays an important part-Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and The Golden Bowl. The fact that one is French, one Russian, and one Anglo-American must have invited speculation about national characteristics, so that one thing led to another-indeed, back- wards, to many others. It is a pity that Armstrong yielded to this temp- tation because a very good book could certainly have been written on the handling of adultery in the three novels alone, and when she gets down to them, her response is lively and intelligent.

When she is not telling the story of well-known novels, which she does too often, her detailed analyses, especially of Anna Karenina, can be stimulating. Stimulating, rather than sensitive, however. It does violence to that e'minence grise of The Ambassadors, Mrs. Newsome, to materialize her as "a raw, tasteless, uncomprehending New England

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Reviews 347

prig," as it does to Emma Bovary to dismiss her as "worthless" and "earning her creator's profoundest contempt." Often, too, Armstrong has simply got her facts wrong. Had she read on to George Sand's second novel, Valentine, she would have found that the Frenchwoman did not eschew adultery as a theme. The comment that "the two deaths at the end of In the Whirlpool are less tragic than the tortured survival of the characters in The Return of the Native" is demonstrably wrong. The effect may indeed be less tragic, but the Hardy novel ends with three deaths, one contented marriage, and the stoical survival of Clym. Nor does Thomasin marry Damon "because of the shame of being jilted by Clym." This is as slapdash as her remark that The Worm zn the Bud "has scotched any lingering beliefs in Victorian virtue," or her uncritical use of what she calls "the Fiedler framework."

More generally, it is not easy to see why she chooses some books rather than others-or indeed excludes poetry and drama from her nine- teenth-century discussion when she has used them earlier. Meredith's Modern Love provides a much deeper psychological treatment of in- fidelity than his novels, and Clough's "Mari Magno" and Tennyson's Idylls of the King are also significant. And if we are going into the minor fiction league, why no mention of East Lynne-that best seller of adultery and retribution? The truth is, of course, that the topic is un- manageably ambitious, and Armstrong does not even shelter within the confines of actual, technical adultery. Although that, for a time, seems to be the reassuring guideline, she then introduces "adulte'res manques" -and even "anterior liaisons"-which let us loose into an entire new pasture in which we pause occasionally to crop a few juicy blades, won- dering the while about all the others that we have passed by. Why, for instance, Izz Huett rather than Louisa Gradgrind? And even as we ask the questions, we know the answer (one in keeping with the theme): de- sire has outrun performance.

It would be churlish to fault the book for its random sampling, if indeed Armstrong stuck to the admission she makes at one point-that "it is difficult to draw any useful conclusion from these scantily-docu- mented and somewhat arbitrary accounts"; but the fact remains that she does often draw conclusions which other fiction challenges. We are told also that "the book pragmatically bestrides questions both of literary stature and sociological interest," but once we have reached the nineteenth century the sociological substantiation is slight. Is Zola's tolerance of lower-class adultery "almost insulting" or is it accurate ob- servation? Can national characteristics stand firm when literary indebt- edness is as well documented as, say, James's to French novelists? Judith Armstrong unintentionally poses more problems than she solves.

PATRICIA THOMSON University of Sussex

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