On Adultery and Virginity

Abstract Focusing primarily on Joyce’s Ulysses, this essay reviews Joyce’s reading of three French authors on the subject of adultery, as recorded in notes that he made while composing his play Exiles: Molière, Paul de Kock, and Gustave Flaubert. It argues that adultery is akin to both “adulteration” and “adult,” so that growth itself can be considered a kind of adultery. Both Molière and Paul de Kock (in the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, respectively) regard the evils of female adultery from the perspective of the man: it gives him horns (Molière) or it risks giving him another man’s child (de Kock). Flaubert’s treatment of adultery is different, in that it sees adultery as arising out of the social insistence on purity. Madame Bovary influences Joyce’s treatment of Stephen Dedalus (whose idealism resembles Emma Bovary’s) and Leopold Bloom, who is partly based on Flaubert’s cuckold, Charles Bovary. The second part of the essay, on virginity, relies not on Joyce’s own reading but rather on Angela Carter’s discussion of the Marquis de Sade in The Sadeian Woman to formulate an argument that virginity or purity as a self-concept is pornographic to the extent that it resists change. It proposes Joyce’s Gerty MacDowell as a version of what Carter calls the “beautiful clown,” someone who has disappeared behind her perfect, airbrushed image. Finally, it suggests that for Joyce, reading that does not result in any change or transformation in the reader is also pornographic.