The 19th-Century Adultery Novel: Thinking Europe before the EU

The late nineteenth century in Europe did not yet know transnational organizations as we understand them today. But in the realm of the imagination, in literature, writers considered something like transnational organizations. Early efforts to assert a common European culture can be found in 19th-Century European Realist adultery novels. The genre of the adultery novel spreads across 19^th-Century Europe and creates a generic similarity that transcends national and linguistic boundaries. In addition, such novels portray both national and transnational tendencies.

If marriage is integral to the state, as Aristotle, Hegel, and Engels all assert, then thinking beyond marriage, as adultery novels do, points beyond the state. Tony Tanner, in Adultery and the Novel, asserts that “adultery can be seen as an attempt to establish an extracontractual contract, or indeed an anticontract” that threatens a family structure. By extension, then, adultery suggests some kind of extracontractual contract, even an anticontract, where a state might reach outside itself while still maintaining its identity. The closest analogy to this kind of relationship would be the relationship of the state to the transnational organization.

I focus on three of the best-known representatives of the 19^th-Century adultery novel: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Leo Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina (1878), and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1896). In each of these, the nation is not simply latent, a feature in the background. Instead, each novel reflects both a national consciousness and an attempt to transcend the nation, that is, to conceive of Europe.