All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (32 page)

Adulterous Passions

In the annals of love, adultery has ever played a raucous part. Being crazy about the ‘you’ who belongs to someone else unleashes a havoc that can reverberate through the generations.

Paris, in bedding and stealing away Helen, Queen of Sparta and wife to Menelaus, begets the destruction of Troy and brings down mass carnage on the victorious Greeks. Clytemnestra, lost to lust for her lover Aegisthus and maddened by her husband Agamemnon’s earlier sacrifice of their daughter, murders him in the bath on his return from Troy. She is in turn murdered by her son, urged on by his sister’s fury.

Born of passion and the irrational, adultery breeds more of the same, engendering, in its antique heroic mode, death and devastation which catapult through the generations. Eros and Thanatos are close kin, the Greeks tell us, well before Freud linked desire and the death-wish. Death, the dark side of oblivion, haunts passion untamed by the social constraints, the contractual arrangements and the daily habits of marriage. Making one out of two, possessing the other, is an annihilating business, all the more so if rules are being broken.
La petite mort
, as the French nickname orgasm and its temporary oblivion, can catapult into the larger one.

The Ten Commandments enshrine adultery as a major prohibition. Number seven of the Decalogue states: ‘You shall not commit adultery’, while number ten echoes it, doubling its force by moving inward from the realm of action to that of desire: ‘You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife.’ The New Testament, always alert to the importance of policing thoughts, further elaborates: ‘That whosever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’ (Matthew 5.28). The strength of the prohibition against adultery, the severe punishment for the act which all the major religions pronounce, is a certain sign that the transgression was widespread–as, of course, it continues to be.

One might disingenuously ask why such a common human act is conceived as so fundamentally transgressive? The answer is simple enough. If marriage constitutes our primary social and legal bond, creating that unit, the home, through which society regenerates itself, then a breach of that bond is a ‘criminal’ act which challenges both social order and social cohesion. Adultery is both revolutionary and treacherous. Aeschylus in
Agamemnon
pinpoints the treachery by underlining that Paris violates not only Helen but the crucial rules of hospitality, a form of love that functions as a bringing together rather than a tearing apart. Paris is, after all, a guest, a stranger in Menelaus’ house: that social love, which hospitality is, welcomes strangers, but in welcoming them incurs a debt of honourable behaviour, not theft.

Having transgressed, having turned hospitality into hostility, Paris takes to Troy not only Helen, but a dowry which includes war and death.

Adulterous passion may be ecstatic, but it is also deadly, particularly for women. Guardians of hearth and home, their person long their husband’s possession, women’s passionate transgression is ever greater than the male’s. It brings with it the danger of miscegenation, a bastard in the familial nest, poised like a cuckoo to endanger the hereditary line. The Greeks permitted concubinage. Up to a point, so did the Abrahamic religions. But wives were severely punished for even presumed infidelity. In Western literature, male adulterers fare far better than their female equivalents. Adultery, after all, doesn’t mean ‘sex for adults’ as the worldly quip would have it, but takes its meaning from ‘adulterate’, to pollute or contaminate, by mixing the wrong combination of things together. ‘If society depends for its existence on certain rules, governing what may be combined and what should be kept separate,’ Tony Tanner writes, ‘then adultery, by bringing the wrong things together in the wrong places (or the wrong people in the wrong beds), offers an attack on those rules, revealing them to be arbitrary rather than absolute.’

In our own Western, post-patriarchal and largely secular times, in which rules are looser and a certain hybridity championed, punishment is not quite so harsh. We draw the boundaries of the permissible differently. Yet some kind of punishment persists, particularly where public figures in the Anglo-American world are concerned. President Clinton and a variety of other American and British politicians have been persecuted for their affairs by the media and by opposition politicians, however forgiving their wives may have been. Persecuted, too, despite the evidence of rampant hypocrisy, given that so-called upholders of family values were often soon themselves outed as adulterers. Tiger Woods strayed and lost his sponsors, if not immediately his wife, and made a mind-numbingly long public apology. England football captain John Terry was stripped of his captaincy for allegedly bedding the wife of a team-mate: private pain was augmented by public humiliation, and social order was only partly restored by the intervention of the coach, Fabio Capello. And the tabloids could then blame England’s poor performance in the World Cup of 2010 on their former captain’s adultery! The personal transparency demanded of our public figures, full confessions of where they stray and betray, together with the public clamour scapegoating their acts, may be evidence of our own unease. We demand retribution all the more vocally when betrayals mirror, or are projections of, our own transgressive desires.

In the midst of the eighties backlash against single professional women, the film
Fatal Attraction
(1987) acted as a moral warning of the havoc adultery can breed. It turned a casual weekend infidelity between the married attorney, Daniel (Michael Douglas), and the publisher, Alex (Glenn Close), into a nightmare of bloody proportions. An increasingly deranged Alex stalks the straying Daniel, kidnaps his daughter and tries to murder his wife, only to be shot by her in a grotesque finale. The family must be kept intact against all odds, the film loudly proclaims, all the while underlining the sexual danger of voracious single women.

Despite early promiscuity, despite the prevalence of prior relationships before the moment of commitment, despite serial unions, no-fault divorce and remarriage, we continue to believe or wish to believe in sexual exclusivity and punish infidelity and adultery. A conviction seemingly born out of inner choice and idealization, rather than strict convention, arguably calls for greater blame–as well as guilt and self-and-other flagellation–when a partner strays.

But why are we prostrated by a partner’s betrayal, when we know the act is so common?

Betrayal calls upon our deepest feelings. It involves, the
Oxford English Dictionary
states, ‘A violation of trust or confidence, an abandonment’ as well as ‘A treacherous giving up to an enemy’. Deceit, cheating, perfidy, violation of faith, misleading, seducing–all fall into the purview of betrayal. The philosopher Judith Shklar includes it amongst her ‘ordinary vices’, reflecting that there is ‘an irreducible experience in betrayal: desertion. This brings into play the greatest of childhood anxieties, the fear of abandonment. In quitting a bonded group, an equally primeval fear is stirred: of the failure to distinguish kin and stranger.’ Betrayal at the level of the couple, our primary social bond, is tantamount to treason in state terms. Yet, as Shklar also points out, people invite betrayals. ‘If one idolizes or imposes excessive moral demands… one may well be betrayed unintentionally by the overburdened person… It is not the idol’s fault that he has feet of clay.’

Thorny contradictions rumble through our ideals of coupledom. Our marriages are based on a romantic notion of passionate merger for ever, an intimacy in which our inner lives are shared. Betrayal brings with it the spectre of the dissolution not only of the couple, but of the betrayed partner’s very being. Losing the other becomes losing oneself, as if we were all babes at the breast and had grown no thicker skin or survival skills since. Simultaneously, we live under a cultural order that tells us we’re entitled to develop our own individuality and can continue to fulfil our unmet needs, those lacks left over from early childhood, for the entirety of our lives. What more common way of developing our individuality than falling in love or in lust? Would it not be self-betrayal to renounce the passion that promises transformation in the name of a deadening or warring coupledom? In this thicket of inconsistencies, the perils of adultery loom, all the while giving off a sulphurous glow.

While people suffer and harm for their adulteries, they also continue to commit them and ‘adulterate’ their marriages. Perhaps because we grow up in triangles, we go on to recreate them, sometimes over and over again. Even our earliest blissful oneness with Mummy, first site of our romantic possessiveness, was, after all, shared–with Daddy or those other siblings in the wings. Third parties shadow our coupled lives in a variety of ways: old lovers or partners hover in the anterooms of our minds; women or men spied on streets or on Internet sites intrude into our minds and into our togetherness. In
Monogamy
Adam Phillips notes, ‘The couple is a resistance to the intrusion of the third, but in order for it to last it is indispensable to have enemies. That is why the monogamous can’t live without them. When we are two, we are together. In order to be a couple, we need to be three.’

The Way of All Marriage

In older worldly times, dominated by aristocratic patterns of marriage based largely on property, adultery was often conceived in a sardonic vein, whatever religious, moral or political edicts might (hypocritically) demand. Adultery was simply the way of all marriages that could afford it.

Balzac’s
Physiology of Marriage
, a kind of guide to the wedded state written under the heady influence of Rabelais and Sterne, was begun when Balzac was only twenty-six. Here he plumbs, sometimes in cool, sometimes in hyperbolic, vein the secrets of both the male and the female mind to satirize the hypocrisies and expose the conventions which attended the institution. Still a seething, ambitious and relatively innocent provincial poised to take on
le tout Paris
, Balzac was granted insight into the feminine psyche by his generous mistress, Madame de Bernay, who at the age of forty-eight and after nine children took the young genius on as her lover. It was her last passion and his first. It’s worth noting here that in the paradigm of love between a married older woman and a young man, which takes in all the romantic and courtly tropes, the affair acts as a civilizing experience for the man, a kind of finishing school in life. In Balzac’s case, in the writing of his book, a second and younger woman about town also revealed her secrets to him. As for men, he knew their ways only too well and had merely to look around him.

In his preamble, Balzac suggests that the germ of his book on marriage lies in the word ‘adultery’, confronted during his studies as a student of the French legal code put in place by Napoleon, who believed that marriage was an institution of culture and not of nature, and could thus be radically improved. Under the Code Napoléon, as already noted, adultery for men occurred only if they brought a mistress into the sanctity of the family home. For women, if the husband so wished, it could lead to imprisonment for up to two years and constitute grounds for divorce, though that could be obtained by mutual consent as well, if the woman’s adultery was kept private and concealed.

Balzac confesses that the word ‘adultery’ began by conjuring up in his mind a ‘mournful train of consequences. Tears, shame, hatred, terror, secret crime, bloody wars, families without a head, and social misery rose like a sudden line of phantoms.’ But later on, when he ‘became acquainted with the most cultivated circles of society, the author perceived that the rigour of marriage laws was very generally mollified by adultery. He found that the number of unhappy homes was larger than that of happy marriages.’ Everywhere men kept mistresses and seemed incapable of fidelity; while women, except the religiously virtuous who ended up in Swiss spas, had lovers often stupider than their husbands and certainly younger. These came from amongst the scores of gallant and seductive young men who couldn’t marry during their most ardent years. ‘The laws of love are simply stronger than human law,’ Balzac notes, himself amongst the most ardent of young seducers. It may well be ‘the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love’.

Balzac’s
Physiology
is a sardonic observer’s guide to worldly mores. The double sexual standard of Victorian England and America, which exonerated men and punished women far more brutally for adultery, and which prevailed in divorce laws that robbed straying women of home and children well into the second half of the twentieth century, has little place in the
Physiology
. Marriage, for Balzac, is merely a way of extinguishing passion and letting society reproduce itself–unless everything changes. To begin to pave the way for ‘unadulterated’ happiness in marriage, Balzac argues, would entail a social revolution in which girls were educated and free to love early, in concert with the young males’ most ardent phase. This in turn would mean that they could later be faithful to their husbands and as wives no longer prey to the advances of desiring young males. Marriage itself would need to be based on passion as well as on property. And both parties would need to be as intelligent as philosophers and as inventive as artists. If in our own liberated times we have reached these first two points, we have scarcely arrived at the other two.

For Stendhal, that literary psychologist who is Balzac’s near-contemporary, love is also, often enough, an adulterous matter. In his great novel of Romantic realism,
The Red and the Black
(1830), the young and ardent Julien Sorel engages in a passionate and formative relationship with the mayor’s wife, Madame de Rênal. He is an ambitious young man, and rivalry, the displacing of a more powerful figure, inevitably plays into a passion that we might now label ‘Oedipal’. The passion will be the death of him. First, however, after an interim of Parisian intrigues, it is Madame de Rênal he attempts to shoot for exposing him to the father of the aristocratic Mathilde, the woman the plebeian Julien has meanwhile fallen in love with and hopes to wed. But awaiting execution, Julien’s first love for the maternal Madame de Rênal resurfaces and he goes to his death buoyed by her beneficent love. Three days later, she gives her children a final embrace and follows him, her heart having given way.