Literary ideology of adultery

Like everyone else in the country, I have followed the revelations of Gov. Mark Sanford’s on-the-job adultery with stomach-turning fascination. The most striking thing about the story so far, though, has been the dignity and good sense of Jenny Sanford’s prepared statement to the press.

“I believe enduring love is primarily a commitment and an act of will, and for a marriage to be successful, that commitment must be reciprocal,” Mrs Sanford said, exposing the gulf between her and her husband, who believes instead in the Stendhalian passion that sweeps a man away against his interests. The whole sorry episode reveals not that Sanford is a hypocrite, as some political antagonists will chortle, but on the contrary: he lives by the same literary ideology of adultery that rivets pretty much the entire Western world.

All the literary world loves a lover, especially if passion overwhelms his commitments and will. I dare you to name a single work of literature that focuses upon the sufferer of adultery, detailing her grief, loneliness, shame, self-loathing, and dejection. The injured party in the literature of adultery is more likely to be Othello, driven mad by jealousy. Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel The Good Soldier is narrated by a cuckold, but John Dowell’s narrative function is to be a man whose lack of passion sets off by contrast the passions of others. The “saddest story” of the first sentence—Ford’s original title for the novel—is not Dowell’s, but those who are made to suffer for their passionate rejection of commitment and will.

The word passion originated in Latin as a Christian theological term, referring to the sufferings of Jesus. Thus it is related by blood to the word passive, which originally meant “subject to passion or emotion, capable of suffering or feeling.” The literary ideology of the Western world is that the adulterer is subjected to erotic passion, as if he were the unwilling victim of a power outside his control.

The Jews have a word for this. The word is idolatry. Why novelists find such an experience dramatically compelling is beyond me. I am far less interested in Gov. Sanford’s five days of “crying in Argentina”—for that phrase alone he deserves to be banished from public life—than in what Mrs Sanford and her four children were going through. But then I am not a novelist, but only a poor literary critic. Although it would going too far to say that literature celebrates adultery, it is fair to say that only the adulterer’s viewpoint is represented in literature.

When a woman’s experience of adultery finally breaks into literature, the woman simply becomes the adulterer and enjoys the passion earlier reserved for men. Neither Madame Bovary nor Anna Karenin lifted the taboo on the grief of betrayal. When the shattering incomprehension of loss is fully dramatized, as in Graham Greene’s End of the Affair or Claire Messud’s Emperor’s Children, the sufferer is the unmarried lover, not the abandoned spouse. And the effect on children is entirely absent, but then, as I have noted before, American literature (and English too) is largely a literature without children.

The only novel I can think of that admits the reader into the experience of what Denis de Rougemont calls “active love, or keeping faith,” is Janet Lewis’s chaste and lovely Wife of Martin Guerre. I have discussed Lewis’s slim novel at length. Bertrande de Rols, who is victimized by a double of her missing husband, loves deeply the man she knows as Martin Guerre, but when she becomes convinced that he is not her husband and has seduced her into adultery, her passion withers in the act of will by which she reasserts her marital commitment. The very fact that Lewis’s novel is not merely another example of propaganda on behalf of erotic passion makes it stand out from nearly every other novel ever written.

But even it is not an account of adultery from the other side. As a literary kind, the novel’s preference for the adulterer over the wife and children he has discarded like soiled rags is perhaps the best measure of its social position. Perhaps the itch to épater la bourgeoisie was of some slight social value when “decency” and “respectability” were the dissembling of political coercion by means of class, but in the postmodern world almost exactly the opposite is the case. The literary ideology of adultery is a means of control by those who dread the responsibility of keeping faith. I will never understand the fuss that my fellow conservatives kick up over gay marriage. A few homosexuals who wish to enter into monogamous relationships is not the biggest social problem facing us. The biggest social problem facing us is marriage. If a few homosexuals can restore commitment and fidelity to the institution, then I am firmly on their side, although I am skeptical that they will be any more successful than the rest of us in resisting the literary ideology of adultery.