Instructor

Vinken

Date/Time

W 3:45 - 5:45 pm

During the 19th century, marriage and family were promoted as the new religion; a woman’s fulfillment was that of a wife and a mother. With Madame Bovary, Flaubert created the icon of the adulteress. The novel was denounced as morally offensive: a paean to adultery. Madame Bovary influenced Effi Briest, Fontane’s most successful novel, as well as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Even today, we continue to write, dance, and film this tragic story, in works by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Claude Chabrol, Vincente Minelli, Jean Renoir, Mike Baal, and Posy Simmonds. What do Fontane and Flaubert tell us when writing about adultery? Do they praise adultery as a liberation of the female libido, or condemn it as a force of destruction? Or do they condemn their contemporary societies for their self-righteous bigotry?