I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
As part of the art project I’m working on, I’m studying the six books I’m including. Four of the six were written by men, but use a female protagonist to explore and critique social morality, property laws, and class structure.
This blog post shares some research I’ve done into the four novels written by men that will be included in the artwork: Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Scarlet Letter, and Anna Karenina.
Note: while this isn’t about my writing practice, it is about great works of literature, and thus informs my writing. So I feel like it’s an ok topic for Wednesday Writing.
AI alert: I used Gemini to gather this information.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
Hawthorne presents his protagonist Hester Prynne as a strong and independent woman who survives the harsh machinery of Puritan society. He highlights her resilience, her ability to confront injustice on her own, and her transformation into an admired member of society.
He has sympathy for what the system has cost her. He portrays her as a noble almost proto-feminist figure but he also harps on her beauty, and how it’s deteriorated due to the punishment, shaming, and censure she faces.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856–1857)
Flaubert treats Emma Bovary with chilly detachment. He portrays her as shallow, romantic, and intellectually hollow, using her as a vehicle to satirize the falseness of the middle class.
While he is harsh about her character flaws, he is sympathetic to her plight. He depicts the rigid and suffocating limitations placed on women of her era. They were denied any real agency or meaningful intellectual life. And he uses her downfall to critique the oppressive society that left her with no viable path to fulfillment.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1878)
Tolstoy’s perspective reportedly evolved significantly during his writing process, moving from a position of judgment to one of compassion. The novel is sometimes misread as a moralistic tale about the dangers of adultery, but it is rather a condemnation of the hypocrisy of Russian high society. Tolstoy portrays Anna as a sensitive and moral person driven to destruction because she refuses to live a double life in a society that demands the appearance of virtue over truthfulness.
Tolstoy is sympathetic to Anna’s plight. He respects her intelligence and her desperate need for the authentic love she finds with Count Vronsky. The moral weight of the narrative shifts from her personal sins onto the superficial corrupt society that isolates her and leads to her mental breakdown and suicide.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1928)
Lawrence views Constance Chatterley’s adultery not as a moral failing but rather as a life-affirming act. For Lawrence, Constance’s marriage to the paralyzed, emotionally detached Clifford represents a death of the human spirit. Her physical awakening via her affair with Mellors is portrayed as a virtuous pursuit of truth and vitality.
Lawrence considers her affair to represent an act of defiance against a dehumanizing, mechanized industrial society. He invites the reader to judge her not as a loose hussy but as someone who courageously breaks free from societal taboos.
The gender dynamics of infidelity
In general, female characters who commit adultery are punished much more harsly than male, often facing tragic ends such as Anna Karenina’s suicide. This reflects societies which typically consider a woman’s infidelity more serious than a man’s.
Consider these outcomes:
- Anna is stripped of her son, isolated from society because she chooses honest love rather than discreet dishonesty, and throws herself under a train.
- Emma Bovary faces financial ruin and the total collapse of her romantic delusions, then kills herself by consuming arsenic, dying an agonizing and unglamorous death.
- Edna Pontellier of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening realizes that her newly awakened independence cannot coexist with the rigid expectations of motherhood and society. She drowns herself by walking into the sea.
- Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter survives, but is socially exiled and must wear the physical indicator of her sin.
- Maria Bertram’s elopement with Henry Crawford in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is portrayed as an unpardonable sin. She is permanently banished to live in a distant farmhouse with her bitter aunt, entirely cut off from family and society.
When men commit adultery in classics of literature, they may suffer guilt, torment, and marital strife but they rarely suffer social erasure or are moved to suicide.