This thesis examines the sociolegal context of the representation of infidelity in the Anglo-American novel. It locates the first serious Anglo-American treatment of infidelity in the novels of Henry James and Ford Madox Ford; and it situates these writers for the first time in their immediate legal context. The dominant mode through which infidelity was discursively defined during this period was simultaneously legal and sensational: the publication of "Divorce Court" trials in the daily newspapers. The implication of this context for the novel is twofold. The focus on narration from the perspective of the betrayed party prompts a local questioning of knowledge (of knowing one's spouse), and a more general questioning of the epistemoloigcal premises of the realist novel itself. The novels considered here make clear the limitations of a legal discourse committed to a disinterested record of "what happened." In the process, they illustrate several of the narrative innovations most distinctive to the modernist novel. Secondly, what will be called an "aesthetics of suspicion" and "domestic surveillance" distinguishes James's and Ford's novels from the central critical tradition which reads the representation of infidelity as subversive of social norms. Instead, these novels reinforce, thematically and formally, the legal policing of infidelity. Doubt of both conjugal and narrative fidelity, then, becomes the means through which the legal policing of infidelity in the divorce court is covertly extended in the novel.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.74644 |
| Date | January 1990 |
| Creators | Leckie, Barbara |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001237596, proquestno: AAINN67708, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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