Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on March 10, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Also available in print.

M.A. (Psychology) / Research shows that infidelity has been and continues to be one of the major causes of divorce. Current literature on infidelity appears to focus on the effects infidelity has on one‟s health and has alluded to a woman‟s experience of her „self‟ as being intertwined in her relationship. The primary aim of the research was to explore the ideas, feelings, and attitudes a wife has about her identity, worth, capabilities, and limitations following her husband‟s sexual infidelity. A qualitative approach was adopted to explore the experience and the meanings which participants attribute to their circumstances. Participants were interviewed using a series of semi-structured questions and were afforded the opportunity to openly share their experience, thoughts, and feelings. Participant interviews were transcribed and analyzed using an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Despite both participants experiencing infidelity in their marriage and revealing accounts of the experience which proved to be quite different, the researcher identified three master themes across both participants‟ experiences. These themes are encapsulated as follows: (a) Laying of the self aside for the betterment of others; (b) Spirituality; and (c) Health. The researcher has highlighted overarching themes which concluded that the effect infidelity had on each participant‟s self appear to be comparable.

This thesis uses the language of adultery to examine the relationship between law and society in ancient Rome. In particular, questions will be asked about the ways in which this exchange functioned – do social norms determine law or vice versa? To begin, the lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis will be contextualised within Augustus’ wider programme of moral reform, and definitions will be given for adulterium and stuprum, the terms which the law used to classify the actions it penalised. The thesis will use these two terms as a lens through which to investigate changes in attitudes to adultery following the introduction of the lex Iulia. A survey of the use of adulterium and stuprum, including their derivatives and the borrowed Greek form moechus, will be made within Latin literature from the 2nd century BC until the 2nd century AD. It will be argued that changes in the use and meaning of the terms following the introduction of the lex Iulia are indicative of changes in attitudes to adultery within the Roman male elite. This in turn will show that law can and does impact on society and it can be used as a positive force to change society’s conception of a given behaviour. Chapter two looks closely at the punishment of adultery in the republic in order to provide a framework through which to understand the lex Iulia as an innovative piece of legislation. The provisions of the law will then be recreated using the juristic texts of the sixth century legal compilations and the chapter will conclude by looking at the attempts to revive the lex Iulia by later emperors and the changes that were made to the law. The focus of chapters three and four is the use of the terms adulterium and stuprum in prose and verse literature. A selection of authors has been chosen to provide a sample that covers the chronological period in question and to include a wide range of genres. It will be shown that in the republic stuprum was the more frequent term as it could be used to refer to sexual transgression in general, including adultery. However, following the introduction of the adultery law, adulterium is found with much greater frequency and its use reflects the new legal definition of adultery and the need to qualify accusations in terms of the law. Moreover, whereas previously stuprum had been conceived of as the more damaging and disgraceful concept, adulterium became to be of greater concern. The legal significance which the lex Iulia gave to adultery and the terms used to describe it are also evident. Overall, it is the aim of this thesis to show how the introduction of the lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis shaped and altered attitudes to adultery within Roman society. Nevertheless, the validity of using law to control morality continued to be questioned by some of the authors studied and there were negative effects on ideas of marital fidelity and sexual morality as a result of the law.

This thesis takes up J. G. Ballard's contention, that 'the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else,' to show that Don DeLillo uses a particular sexual, cultural economy of adultery, understood in its many loaded cultural and literary contexts, as a model for semantic reproduction. I contend that DeLillo's fiction evinces a promiscuous model of language that structurally reflects the myth of the adulterous triangle. The thesis makes a significant intervention into DeLillo scholarship by challenging Paul Maltby's suggestion that DeLillo's linguistic model is Romantic and pure. My analysis of the narrative operations of adultery in his work reveals the alternative promiscuous model. I discuss ten DeLillo novels and one play - Americana, Players, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II,Underworld, the play Valparaiso, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and the pseudonymousAmazons - that feature adultery narratives. I demonstrate that these narratives resist conservative models of language, space, and sex by using promiscuity as a method of narrative control. I argue that DeLillo's adultery narratives respond subversively to attempts to categorise his work, and that he extends the mythologised rhetoric of the adulterous triangle by adopting sexual transgression as a three-sided semantic structure that connects language, sex, and space. I refer to theories of narrative, postmodernity, space, desire, and parody to show that DeLillo's adultery narratives structurally influence his experiments with linguistic meaning. My analysis reveals that contradiction performs at several spatial, sexual, and dialogical levels to undermine readings that suggest DeLillo's language models pure meaning. I identify the sexualised fissure within DeLillo's semantic style that is exposed by the operation of contradiction. I believe this gap distinguishes DeLillo from postmodern fiction's emphasis on the placeless, because it is a meaningful space that emphasises the reproductive adulteration of signification. I expose several sites of dialectic rupture, including the hotel/motel room, oppositional and metaphorical description, the journey, the image, and the secret. I contend that sex in these transgressive narratives is a model for something else: promiscuous meaning. This thesis demonstrates that DeLillo's fiction charts the typography of the mythical third side of the adulterous triangle in order to respond to language's own promiscuity.

The 17th century was a time of change in Sweden. During the century many of the Swedish laws were altered. In the beginning of the 17th century this alteration resulted in a more severe sentence for most of the committed crimes, but a mitigation of the sentence for some of those crimes was effected in the middle of the 17th century. The aim of this study is to see how two local courts in the judicial system during the mid 17th century in Sweden treated adultery, and those who committed the crime against the background of what the law regarding adultery stipulated. The source material used are court records from Fryksdals hundred and Jösse hundred in western Sweden, and laws regarding adultery during the 17th century. This research shows that the laws regarding adultery were in themselves not gender specific, and their main concern was the marital status of those involved. The punishment for all forms of adultery was a death sentence during the first half of the 17th century, but during the latter part of the century the punishment for a specific form of adultery, when only one of the involved was married, was mitigated to a fine which differed according to marital status. In most of the cases both courts in Fryksdals hundred and Jösse hundred applied the law as it was written in their verdict, and the verdicts of acquittals were few. There is however a tendency in the findings towards a difference between the actual local courts at the end of the first half of the 17th century. Court records show that Fryksdals hundred, which generally had more crimes regarding adultery than Jösse hundred, during that time applied a more rigorous attitude towards those crimes. The conclusion is that, although the results from both hundreds do not differ much from the general picture of adultery in Sweden, there is still a tendency of a difference between the actual local courts themselves.

Thesis supervisor: Sam V. Cochran. Thesis supervisor: William M. Liu. Includes bibliographic references (p. 135-147).

Thesis (B.A.)--Bi-College (Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges) Comparative Literature Program, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / Social Work and Social Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Extramarital relationships and women's sexuality are by far some of the most controversial and elusive subjects in our society, and most of the empirical literature and popular opinion about the connection between women and infidelity perceive it as unequivocally taboo. Following the work of feminist researchers who valorize the potential for women's sexual experiences and view heterosexual relationships as a form of oppression, I explore the extramarital relationships between single women and married men. To perform this exploration, I completed two-part, in-depth interviews with eleven single women who had an intimate relationship with a married man. Once the interviews were transcribed verbatim, I completed a four-step voice-centered relational reading and analysis of the interviews in which participants' experiences were summarized into three relationships: with themselves, with the married man, and with the married man's wife. I set aside the themes that emerged from this inquiry and I performed a discourse analysis on the participants' narratives for each of these three relationships. Since the resulting themes from the voice-centered relational analysis overlapped considerably with the dominant discourses that emerged from the discourse analysis, a more in-depth feminist analysis was performed exclusively on the latter. In summary, the most commonly occurring dominant discourses were a struggle with morality, identity development and identity reconstruction; responsibility toward women (the married man's wife); and a negative emotional aftermath following the end of the relationship. Consequently, this analysis also found an occurrence of three types of extramarital relationships: satisfying, distressing/distancing, and emotionally abusive. Each dominant discourse was deconstructed per participant and per interview by using a feminist theoretical lens. / The analysis paved the way for a relational and socio-political examination of single women's experiences of infidelity. The implications of this study are discussed by comparing them to existing investigations, both feminist and traditional, of women's intimate relationships. This study thus aimed to understand the experiences of single women who have had intimate relationships with married men, to empower them as well as the mental health professionals and educators who work with this particular clientele.