Adulterous Affair Research Articles

Situating senior women in film through positive reflections and sensuous touch: subverting Nichols’ The Graduate in Vernoux’s Bright Days Ahead

ABSTRACT As a French feminist subversion and contemporary reimagining of Mike Nichols’ classic American film, The Graduate, Marion Vernoux’s Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) rebukes Hollywood for its general exclusion of leading women aged 40 or over and its Oedipal portrayals of them. Vernoux’s film subverts The Graduate by portraying the latter film’s adulterous affair between a younger man and an older woman through the woman’s eyes. Using Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage of development and Laura Mulvey’s explanation of how to overturn the male gaze of traditional film, this paper argues that Vernoux conceives a new language of desire for women, or a female gaze, in Bright Days Ahead through the younger lover’s positive reflections on the older woman, Caroline (Fanny Ardant) and close-up images of sensuous touch between Caroline and her younger lover. Scenes of touch between Caroline and her lover were filmed in extreme close-up as they mutually caressed one another. The film’s overall messages are that some men will always be philanderers, but women do not have to accept them, and women including actresses can be sexual throughout their lives.

Gierigheid is die wortel van alle kwaad

Gierigheid is die wortel van alle kwaad

Bathsheba and the Witch of Endor: The Fall of the Two Royal Houses and its Polemics in 1 and 2 Samuel

Bathsheba’s role in the story of the house of David bears an often-overlooked intertextual connection to the story of the Witch of Endor. In the books of Samuel, the two women triggered a chain of events that later led to the fall of the houses of David and Saul, respectively. While past scholarship has independently studied the importance of the stories of these two women, the present paper describes the intertextual connections and the significance of these two stories in the matrix of 1 and 2 Samuel and the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH). The two royal houses in the stories of these two women are subtly indicted for adulterous affairs against Yahweh. Consequently, the story of Saul at Endor and the story of David’s adultery with Bathsheba are not only intertextually connected to each other but also fulfil a subversive agenda.

Encoded Confessions: D. H. Lawrence’s Secretive Fruits

Critical readings of D. H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) have regarded this collection of poems as about, well, birds, beasts, and flowers, rather than about the poet himself. Whereas Lawrence’s 1917 collection, Look! We Have Come Through!, was explicitly and directly autobiographical, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers—as W. H. Auden put it in an influential essay—Lawrence does not write about “men and women with proper names” but “describes the anonymous life of stones, waters, forests, animals, flowers,” making him “the most enchanting companion imaginable, tender, intelligent, funny and, above all, happy.” This article argues, however, that the five opening poems of the collection, poems collectively entitled “Fruits,” are profoundly autobiographical poems in which Lawrence teasingly fails to reveal himself transparently, by transmuting the autobiographical material on which they are based into encoded, paradoxical, learned humor, and that the poems draw attention to this very process by lecturing the reader on the symbolical nature of the fruits described. This knowing symbolism, the article suggests, echoes the representation of fruits in Italian Renaissance poetry and painting; the autobiographical context of the poems is an adulterous affair that the poems could not represent directly. Rosalind Baynes, the woman who inspired the poems, does not appear in the poems as a woman with a proper name, but her name recurs throughout the sequence as a series of puns on Rosalind, figured as the rose and as Rosaceae.

Race, Sex, and God

Race, Sex, and God

The Art of Guilt and Self-Division: Anaïs Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love

Anaïs Nin’s semi-autobiographical novel, A Spy in the House of Love (1954), subjectivizes the physical experience of a wife’s infidelities while personifying the mental terrors of her guilt by means of a male figure: The Lie Detector. Embarked on a tournée of self-discovery, Sabina is an offstage actress who aestheticizes her adulterous affairs in a sophisticated art of self-division, whereby she intermittently plays the roles of a Byronic Doña Juana and a melodramatic Emma Bovary to continue to cherish her sexual freedom with many lovers, without losing the protection of her fatherly husband. Although guilt is part of Sabina’s artifice, the real risk inherent in her self-divisions and self-contradictions as a result of her infidelities, is to lose herself in her own lies and to fail to find her true identity beyond the Cubist canvas of her fragmented selves.

‘If you would like to see the whole proceedings’: Criminal Conversation in Byron’s Don Juan Canto I

In his insightful monograph on Don Juan , Bernard Beatty emphasises the discursive nature of the poem which ‘invokes such diverse categories as epic, comedy, satire, romance, burlesque and novel’. 1 However, one category missed off Beatty’s list is that of matrimonial litigation discourses, an extremely popular subgenre in Georgian print culture. Almost every Canto in Don Juan has at least one allusion to the legal proceedings and the published trial narratives which ‘form a sad climax to romantic homages’ ( DJ , XII, 65) in Regency England. In this article I discuss the presence and purpose of these legal discourses, considering how Byron manipulates ‘the delicacies of the law’ into an extended frame of reference for the consummation and exposure of Juan and Julia’s adulterous affair. In this episode, he offers one of the most sustained fictional treatments of matrimonial litigation in English literature, exploring the power of the publicised adultery trial to shape popular mental landscapes.

Metacontingency and Macrocontingency Analysis Related to Honor Crimes in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Honor crimes are extremely violent cultural practices against women in general, and women in the Arab region in particular, culminating in murder by a male family member. The notion that religion, mainly Islam, enforces honor crimes is a misconception. Honor crimes are committed when a woman shames her family by having a premarital sexual relationship, an adulterous affair, other “inappropriate” behavior, or simply by being accused of such. Many families deal with this covertly by choosing a male family member, usually the brother, father, or uncle, to “cleanse” the family’s honor. In this paper we offer a descriptive analysis of cultural contingencies that maintain honor crimes as a cultural practice using the country of Jordan as a case study. The description of Jordan’s cultural milieu allows the identification of selected metacontingencies participating in the recurrence of this cultural practice. We will conclude with several recommendations on how to alter the number of aspects in the cultural milieu that may change how individuals within the Jordanian culture perceive honor crimes.

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet

Hong Kong: A Recommended Reading List

TO CURATE A reading list of ten to fifteen Hong Kong books that will inspire the international reader of literature is no easy task. For one thing, ten to fifteen is an arbitrary range, and for someone who has devoted so much time and her writing to her birth city, I am keenly aware there are many other titles that could and even should be on this list. But to curate is a curious task, and what I’ve selected might be best defined by this OED example: We are conscious of the debt we owe to those who built what we are now privileged to curate (1985, M. Diamond). A brief word on selection and presentation criteria: only four of the fifteen titles are translations of Chinese literature. Hong Kong’s literature has a short history, and translations of literary work are sadly lacking . At this time, Chinese is still not quite the global language that English is, and in time, we can only hope that this translation oversight will be rectified. Likewise, only four titles are poetry; the rest are prose. It is worth noting that there are significantly more volumes of poetry than literary prose works, and a list of only poetry titles would be a worthwhile one for a poet to curate. Generally , I have chosen work that best showcases the true character of the city through perspectives that are local/global. Some titles are not necessarily the most well-known Hong Kong books in the genre. However, anglophone publishing has favored books by foreigners that are often exoticized depictions , more genre than literary. The list is chronologically arranged by English-language publication date and begins in the mid-twentieth century, which is when, I feel, a truly Hong Kong literature first began to emerge, although the earliest books are by Chinese foreigners who were temporary residents. For obvious reasons, I did not include any of my own titles. Han Suyin A Many Splendored Thing (1952) Fiction – Novel This story of an interracial adulterous affair is one of the least sentimental portraits of postwar Hong Kong. Based on the author’s actual experience (she was a Eurasian medical doctor), it is also a feminist view of the modern Chinese woman. C. Y. Lee The Virgin Market (1965) Fiction – Novel This surprising novel by the Chinese author of the better-known Flower Drum Song is a rare and insightful look at an out-ofwedlock Eurasian red-haired girl raised in Hong Kong’s fishing folk boat community. Leung Ping-kwan City at the End of Time Trans. Gordon T. Osing with the author (1992 / 2012) Poetry If Hong Kong has a poet laureate, it would be the late “PK” or “Ya Se” as he was known. His work is canonical. He honors the Cantonese language and investigates the city from many angles. Nury Vittachi Only in Hong Kong (1993) Nonfiction – Satire This Sri Lankan comic author is a longtime resident who chronicles the comedy of bilingualism, colonialism, and Hong Kong’s mercantile character. Simon Elegant A Chinese Wedding (1994) Fiction – Novel Of the myriad novels by journalists, sinologists , foreign residents, and visitors—some Hong Kong A Recommended Reading List by Xu Xi COVER FEATURE HONG KONG 74 WLT SPRING 2019 good, many indifferent, and the majority dreadful—this one stands out as one of the most sympathetic explorations of an EastWest marriage, primarily from the foreign woman’s point of view. It is also an excellent portrayal of the complexity of being a “typical” Hong Kong Chinese man who is westernized but not. Plus, it beautifully details Cantonese food culture in the wedding banquet. Xi Xi My City: A Hong Kong Story Trans. Eva Hung (1994) Fiction – Novel No book celebrates the city the way My City does. Surreal, fantastical, wry, and deliciously detailed, no writer gets inside Hong Kong’s head and heart quite the way Xi Xi can. Ackbar Abbas Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997) Nonfiction – Cultural Studies Twenty-two years later, this book remains the most prescient and incisive commentary on the cultural and political reality of Hong Kong. Louise Ho New Ends Old Beginnings (1997) Poetry To date, this...

Hong Kong: A Recommended Reading List

TO CURATE A reading list of ten to fifteen Hong Kong books that will inspire the international reader of literature is no easy task. For one thing, ten to fifteen is an arbitrary range, and for someone who has devoted so much time and her writing to her birth city, I am keenly aware there are many other titles that could and even should be on this list. But to curate is a curious task, and what I’ve selected might be best defined by this OED example: We are conscious of the debt we owe to those who built what we are now privileged to curate (1985, M. Diamond). A brief word on selection and presentation criteria: only four of the fifteen titles are translations of Chinese literature. Hong Kong’s literature has a short history, and translations of literary work are sadly lacking . At this time, Chinese is still not quite the global language that English is, and in time, we can only hope that this translation oversight will be rectified. Likewise, only four titles are poetry; the rest are prose. It is worth noting that there are significantly more volumes of poetry than literary prose works, and a list of only poetry titles would be a worthwhile one for a poet to curate. Generally , I have chosen work that best showcases the true character of the city through perspectives that are local/global. Some titles are not necessarily the most well-known Hong Kong books in the genre. However, anglophone publishing has favored books by foreigners that are often exoticized depictions , more genre than literary. The list is chronologically arranged by English-language publication date and begins in the mid-twentieth century, which is when, I feel, a truly Hong Kong literature first began to emerge, although the earliest books are by Chinese foreigners who were temporary residents. For obvious reasons, I did not include any of my own titles. Han Suyin A Many Splendored Thing (1952) Fiction – Novel This story of an interracial adulterous affair is one of the least sentimental portraits of postwar Hong Kong. Based on the author’s actual experience (she was a Eurasian medical doctor), it is also a feminist view of the modern Chinese woman. C. Y. Lee The Virgin Market (1965) Fiction – Novel This surprising novel by the Chinese author of the better-known Flower Drum Song is a rare and insightful look at an out-ofwedlock Eurasian red-haired girl raised in Hong Kong’s fishing folk boat community. Leung Ping-kwan City at the End of Time Trans. Gordon T. Osing with the author (1992 / 2012) Poetry If Hong Kong has a poet laureate, it would be the late “PK” or “Ya Se” as he was known. His work is canonical. He honors the Cantonese language and investigates the city from many angles. Nury Vittachi Only in Hong Kong (1993) Nonfiction – Satire This Sri Lankan comic author is a longtime resident who chronicles the comedy of bilingualism, colonialism, and Hong Kong’s mercantile character. Simon Elegant A Chinese Wedding (1994) Fiction – Novel Of the myriad novels by journalists, sinologists , foreign residents, and visitors—some Hong Kong A Recommended Reading List by Xu Xi COVER FEATURE HONG KONG 74 WLT SPRING 2019 good, many indifferent, and the majority dreadful—this one stands out as one of the most sympathetic explorations of an EastWest marriage, primarily from the foreign woman’s point of view. It is also an excellent portrayal of the complexity of being a “typical” Hong Kong Chinese man who is westernized but not. Plus, it beautifully details Cantonese food culture in the wedding banquet. Xi Xi My City: A Hong Kong Story Trans. Eva Hung (1994) Fiction – Novel No book celebrates the city the way My City does. Surreal, fantastical, wry, and deliciously detailed, no writer gets inside Hong Kong’s head and heart quite the way Xi Xi can. Ackbar Abbas Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997) Nonfiction – Cultural Studies Twenty-two years later, this book remains the most prescient and incisive commentary on the cultural and political reality of Hong Kong. Louise Ho New Ends Old Beginnings (1997) Poetry To date, this...

Sin and a Tiger Skin: The Stickiness of Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks

This article considers how the press announcements about Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks (1907) and then the reviews of the novel, titillated the reading public. It then considers how sex, pleasure and desire function in the novel, centring on the tiger skin on which the adulterous love affair between Paul Verdayne and the Lady is consummated. The article also considers not only how desire and pleasure are located within the novel, but also how the tiger skin is embedded with those desires and pleasures. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) on how emotions and feelings travel, penetrate and stick to particular bodies, the article reflects upon how the circulation of affect, of affective value, can fix the objects of emotions. If an object such as a book which has received a great deal of advance press regarding its possible censoring, or a tiger skin on which an adulterous affair is consummated, is associated with a particular discourse repeatedly, then certain affects will stick to this object. In short, how does a tiger skin come to function as erotic shorthand for sex, pleasure and desire? The tiger skin in Three Weeks became a marker of all these emotions and affects, circulating in the cultural afterlife of this text in significant ways. Considering how the tiger skin functions in the novel complicates the understanding of generic codes and readerly expectations, and how desire is messily articulated.

Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote by Johanna Neuman

Reviewed by: Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote by Johanna Neuman Karen Pastorello Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote. By Johanna Neuman. New York: New York University Press, 2017. 240 pages. $24.95 Cloth. Gilded Suffragists is exactly what Johanna Neuman intends it to be—an informative and compelling narrative about the fight to win woman's suffrage. Neuman successfully chronicles the lives of white elite New York City women who arrived at their place of power and privilege by marrying well and who supported suffrage for women. Women with surnames such as Astor, Belmont, Vanderbilt, and Whitney achieved celebrity status for their activism. They did not hesitate to dirty their hems on the streets of the city in the name of this important turn of the century social and political movement. As compelling as this story may be, it has been told before. One of the highlights of the book describes the 1907 establishment of the seven-hundred member Colony Club by Florence "Daisy" Harriman. Hailing from a privileged and politically well-connected family, Harriman founded the city's first exclusive women's social club and guided its evolution into a space for civic engagement. Although all club members could afford the annual $100 dues, they did not all agree with Harriman's suffrage sentiments. Harriman and the other suffragists viewed club debates as opportunities to win reluctant members over to the side of suffrage. While elite women's suffrage activities fascinated observers, gossip often focused on the women themselves rather than suffrage issues. One convert [End Page 484] to suffrage, novelist Katherine Duer Mackay, became the archetypical club member as she vied to "leverage [her] social status for political power." The descendant of a prominent New York family and the wife of a postal telegraph and cable magnate, Mackay used her flair for fashion to attract the attention of reporters whom she hoped would print her pro-suffrage proclamations in their newspapers. Mackay's eminence did not last long. An adulterous affair with her husband's doctor culminated in Mackay abandoning her family to follow her lover to Europe in the midst of the First World War. Neuman notes that renowned suffrage advocate Alva Belmont compiled over fifty suffrage scrapbooks but not one contained a single mention of the scandal involving Mackay. For publishers of New York's more than twenty dailies however, Mackay's exploits meant "big news." In the interest of promoting the cause (and thus an untarnished historical memory), Belmont chose to ignore the negative publicity. The strength of Neuman's study lies in her claim that virtually all New York City suffrage elites recognized the value of public appeal and effectively used it to convince others (primarily other elites) to support women's suffrage. They directed their activism toward collecting signatures on petitions, welcoming audiences into their private parlors, parading, stumping from soapboxes and automobiles, and hosting costume balls. With their motives for involvement in the suffrage cause running the gamut from sincere political conviction to having "fun," wealthy suffragists craved attention. Much of the publicity these media celebrities generated had to do with the clothes they wore. Neuman contends that the activists' appearance meant as much as their arguments. Delighting in challenging the suffragist reputation for dressing like "frumps," early twentieth century suffragists prioritized fashion as put their campaign strategies into effect. In the process of incorporating modern notions of beauty and glamour by wearing lacey dresses with shorter hemlines and feathery hats into their campaign, they appealed to more men but also subjected themselves to harsh criticism. Antisuffragist women such as Josephine Jewell Dodge, president of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, virulently objected to the suffragists' use of fashion because of what she perceived as their overt promiscuity. Regardless of the controversy that these fashionable displays caused, Neuman concurs with Margaret Finnegan's assessment [End Page 485] that supporters (in this case "gilded" supporters) sold suffrage by making it fashionable. Fashion sense aside, according to Neuman, involvement in the suffrage movement often came at a price. Tensions erupted over campaign tactics between the moderate...

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience

“Such a Poor Finish”

Historians usually analyze changing gender constructions in the criminal courts after World War I through cases involving men and women. Using a different analytical lens this article explores two well-publicized murder trials involving war veterans and illegitimate children, one of a soldier who murdered his wife’s daughter from an adulterous affair and one who killed his own son. Although notions of masculinity had changed, the police, courts, and Home Office used traditional factors to assess punishments, including the degree of provocation, the behavior of the women involved, and the issue of deterrence. The press, however, was more sympathetic to the veterans, regarding them as victims of circumstances, much like women who committed infanticide. This new presentation did not succeed with the Home Office, especially as the war moved further into the past. By 1925, men’s war service had less influence on punishment than Victorian ideas of gender and criminal responsibility.

‘You know I am all on fire’: writing the adulterous affair in England,c.1740-1830

This article analyses rare surviving adulterous love letters alongside published epistles and trial reports to reveal the practical and emotional importance of letter-writing in conducting an affair in England c.1740–1830. While attitudes to adultery have received widespread scholarly attention, illicit letters remain largely overlooked. The article is the first to outline distinguishing features of adulterous letters, and the language of infidelity. It distinguishes missives from courtship letters as a secretive genre carefully shielded by writers. By scrutinizing the letters which sustained affairs, the article rediscovers the happiness, jealousy and desire of illicit love in the words of lovers themselves.

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

The Problem of Look-Alike Characters in theVulgate Cycle of the Arthurian Romancesand Juan Manuel'sEl Conde Lucanor

Medieval people knew as well as we do that no two people could look exactly alike. But the question of look-alikes was nevertheless a fascinating one because it opened up a potential gap between external manifestation and deeper identity. What did it mean for the ontology of the self if one person could be substituted for another with nobody being the wiser? This article examines two medieval reflections on the possibility of an absolute resemblance that enables one character to be substituted for another. The first is the case of the “False Guenevere” in the Lancelot section of the enormous thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle of the Arthurian romances, and the second is from Spain: El Conde Lucanor by the great fourteenth-century writer Don Juan Manuel. The two instances contrast nicely. In the first, Queen Guenevere's look-alike half-sister arrives at Arthur's court with the false claim that she is the true Guenevere and that the sitting queen has usurped her place. Indeed, she triumphs temporarily until Lancelot restores the proper order through trial by combat. In the second, an angel counterfeits a king's physiognomy (after the king commits blasphemy) and dresses in his clothes, leaving him only a pauper's vestments. In the Arthurian tale, the problem posed is how to know the true inner self when two identical-looking women both claim to be the “true” queen — a question that is complicated by the fact that the “true” Guenevere has been “false” for many years due to her adulterous affair with Lancelot. Conversely, Juan Manuel poses the question of identity as one of context: when the king is deprived of the trappings of his kingship, no one recognizes him. Both texts point up the problems of signification and identity that haunted medieval thinking. What is the relationship between one's outer appearance and inner nature? What is the relationship between a sign and what it signifies?

The Opposite of the Double Standard: Gender, Marriage, and Adultery Prosecution in Late Medieval France

W h e n c o n s i d e r i n g t h e c o n s e q u e n c e s of adultery in medieval Europe, popular imagination often paints a picture of considerable gender disparity. One imagines adulterous wives such as Arthur’s Queen Guinevere burned at the stake while their husbands freely indulged in extramarital liaisons. Scholars too generally assume that wives in medieval Europe could be subject to severe judicial and extrajudicial punishment for any adulterous affair but that their husbands’ dalliances were usually tolerated. Premodern societies are widely known to have had such a double standard, and medieval Europe is often put forward as an example of such a time and place. According to Jacques rossiaud, in medieval Europe female adultery, and only female adultery, “was always very rigorously punished.” This double standard happened regardless of christian teachings that prohibited male adultery. As ruth Karras wrote in 2005: “Adultery by women was far more serious than that by men. The church did preach equality in this area, that it was just as bad for a married man to violate his marriage vow as for a woman to do so. In practice, however, adultery was treated more seriously in cases where the woman was married.” As Karras explained, female, not male, adultery cast doubt on paternity and was also “part of a more generalized fear and distrust of feminine independence.” I made a similar argument in 2010: