Feydeau's Fanny and the Critics: Jealousy, Marriage, and The Bourgeois Culture of Possession

Abstract

Taking as a point of departure critical reception of Ernest Feydeau's 1858 début novel Fanny, this article considers cultural perceptions of sexual jealousy in nineteenth-century France. I argue that jealousy was inextricably bound up with changes in both law and cultural attitudes toward marriage in post-Revolutionary French society. These changes linked jealousy more than ever before to the notions of property and ownership, casting the husband's jealousy as a legitimate instrument of control over the wife. Because of this link, sexual jealousy became a central issue around which ideological positions were crystallized and debated in medical, journalistic, and moralist literature of the time.