Female Adultery, Ideology and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, while denouncing the art of his time, Leo Tolstoy declared that ‘Adultery is not only the favourite, but almost the only theme of all the novels.’1 As he was only too well aware, adultery had figured largely in his own fiction, although he could not be accused of the erotic preoccupations which he was attacking. What Tolstoy did not say, and might not necessarily have recognized, is that the novel of adultery is in effect the novel of female adultery. This is all the more surprising in that he did not support the double standard of sexual morality which has long been entrenched in Western as in most other cultures.2 He had already written The Devil (1911), centred on male adulterous desire and published after his death, and he was already working on Resurrection (1899), which condemns male fornication. Yet his most famous achievement is his own novel of female adultery, Anna Karenina (1878), and his most notorious work, The Kreutzer Sonata (1891), is based on a husband’s suspicion of his wife’s infidelity.