On Adultery
“To judge by literature, adultery would seem to be one of the most remarkable of
occupations in both Europe and America,” writes Denis de Rougemont in Love in the
Western Love, and the history of literature certainly confirms this statement. Writers have
explored and continue to explore adultery from a variety of angles, sometimes
condemning the sinful lovers, sometimes defending them, and sometimes simply
investigating the nature of the illicit love affair. As readers, we have been shocked,
appalled, brought to tears. We have loved and hated the adulterous characters. We have
encountered many of them, but if someone suddenly decided that no more novels should
be written on adultery, we would all rebel against such a decision. The theme of adultery
is explored in all literary genres, from the psychological novel to a science fiction one,
and in all literary epochs, from antiquity to post-modernity. Adultery is timeless, even if
it takes place in a particular historical setting. What is it about adultery then that makes it
a never-ending source of inspiration? What do stories of adultery convey? And how is the
theme of adultery revisited in literature? In searching for answers to these questions, I
will compare Kowalska’s revisiting of the theme of adultery with its literary precedents:
the myth of Tristan and Iseult, Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina, all of which Kowalska, who had studied Literature at college, must have been
familiar with. In the course of my reflections I will allude to other novels that take up the
theme of adultery, but the main focus of my work will be the novels listed above.
Agata versus Iseult, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary
De Rougemont says that the myth of Tristan and Iseult is a dangerous one,
because it exists in the European mentality as a model for passion and ideal love. The
myth tells us that Tristan, who is the King’s nephew, and Iseult, who is the King’s wife,
fall in love with each other as a result of a magic potion, which was given to Iseult so that
she falls in love with her new husband, and which Tristan and Iseult drink by accident.
They deceive the King, until the King discovers their betrayal. They run away together,
they return to the palace, they beg for forgiveness. Their love ends tragically, because
Tristan dies falsely believing that Iseult doesn’t love him anymore, and Iseult doesn’t
have a chance to say goodbye to the only man she ever loved. As Tony Tanner writes in
Adultery in the Novel, “(…) all available areas of the given world would ultimately seem
inhospitable to the adulterous lovers” (34), and their ultimate “Happy Palace” can only be
death. The myth points out one of the most important elements of the adultery
narrative—the illicit lovers have to conduct their encounters secretly, because in the eyes
of society there is no place for them to exist. So is the fate of Anna Karenina and Emma
Bovary, and so is the fate of Agata. The myth of Tristan and Iseult, however important
for the literary tradition, forces to question the nature of the love potion. De Rougemont
suggests that the love between the mythical lovers is fake, because it is a result of magic,
and he reminds us that when they first meet, they are not particularly fond of one another.
I would argue that rationalizing the myth is, in some way, misreading it. The myth, due to
its very nature, is composed of a variety of supernatural elements, which are to be
interpreted symbolically, not literally. The drinking of the love potion symbolizes to me
not falseness, but a means to express the inevitability and power of passion, which,
translated into modern language, would be, “They fell in love suddenly, as if they drank a
love potion.” This is why the myth survives many centuries; it is timeless, because its
subject—passion stronger than life, oaths and social constraints—is timeless too. Having
said that, it is interesting that Iseult, unlike Agata and Anna Karenina, and Emma Bovary
to some degree, isn’t portrayed as a woman filled with guilt. In his Introduction to
Beroul’s Romance of Tristan, Alan S. Fedrick suggests that if the love potion is indeed
responsible for the love affair, then Tristan and Iseult cannot be held morally responsible
for the crime they commit. Metaphorically, this is an adultery story that promotes
adultery as the pure love, and in this light it corresponds to Kowalska’s agenda. The love
between Agata and Borys is presented to the readers as a pure, idealistic feeling, which,
as if being a result of a magical potion, can exist on its own terms, without being affected
by any outside circumstances. And yet, in the myth the lack of guilt on the lover’s side
does not end, whereas in The Seed Agata commits suicide, presumably because of the
guilt, among other reasons. Despite this, the myth of Tristan and Iseult presents a basis
for the adultery story—great passion that ends unhappily.
Tolstoy’s initial attempt was to write a story of a husband’s tragedy in the
light of the unfaithfulness of a wife. However, as he began drafting the novel, he became
more and more fond of the main heroine. Indeed, Anna Karenina is presented in an
ambivalent light. We pity her, we understand her, we do not want to condemn her. She
betrays a rather dull and older than herself husband, she welcomes passion for the young
and handsome Vronsky, but the sense of guilt is always with her. She is in a tragic
situation, because she has to choose between her motherly love for her son and her
womanly love for Vronsky. When she leaves her husband, she cannot be happy. Just like
we condemn Anna’s cold husband, we condemn Teresa, Borys’ wife. The adulterous
woman, and the woman who has an affair with a married man, become the ones we
sympathize with. Anna, like Agata, “is too radiant and too likeable figure for us to
disapprove of her” (Overton 149). Both heroines chase after their own happiness, and at
the end both realize that personal happiness is connected to moral responsibility, that one
cannot be happy knowing that one causes the suffering of others. Even though Agata and
Anna are presented in a similar light, the authors’ agendas differ from one another. “The
case against female adultery would be all the stronger if readers could be brought to
symphonize with the adulteress” (139), writes Overton in The Novel of Female Adultery.
Tolstoy does not officially condemn Anna, but by showing her gradual death, both
morally and emotionally, he lets us know that Anna’s weakness is the cause of her
tragedy. What is more, as Overton notices, it is uncommon in adultery novels to see
examples of happy marriages. Tolstoy presents us with the marriage of Levin and Kitty,
which stands as a contrast to the passionate and ultimately destructive love between Anna
and Vronsky. Levin’s example proves that happy marital love is possible, whereas the
love outside of marriage must end tragically. Kowalska, on the other hand, seems to be
criticizing the marital relationships that are based more on necessity and habit than on
love. As Sabina informs us, Agata, who is presumably the author’s alter ego, “always
said that in life and literature, as a result of law and duty, the betrayed spouse has a
monopoly on respect and compassion. She threatened to one day write an epic about the
illicit love.” This illicit love would, according to Agata, be the pure love. Through those
words we learn that Kowalska’s agenda is to challenge the society’s standards of
morality, and to prove that love outside of marriage may be as legitimate, if not more,
than the one within marriage. A good example is a comparison of the first sexual acts in
the Polish and the Russian novels. Tolstoy writes of Anna, “Shame at her spiritual
nakedness crushed her and infected him. But in spite of the murderer’s horror before the
body of his victim, that body must be hacked to pieces and hidden, and the murderer must
make use of what he has obtained by his crime” (171). He portrays Anna’s first physical
act of adultery as an act of shame, in which the lover, Vronsky, is a murderer who kills
her. Here, adultery equals death, and Anna’s suicide appears to be inevitable in this light.
Kowalska describes Agata’s first sexual act very differently. “(…) freedom and
carelessness are finally with you. ‘Borys,’ says Agata, she smiles and says, ‘Come. Come
to me.’ The sigh with which she throws herself to you, is no longer a whisper, it is a
scream” (74). Unlike Tolstoy’s scene, the sexual intercourse is Agata’s triumph over the
hesitant Borys, and Agata’s bliss. In fact, throughout the novel sex continues to be
Agata’s escape from reality, her escape from judging her own situation, her heaven. Both
Agata and Anna are women sensitive to the world, who care about the feelings of others,
and yet Agata fails to realize the suffering she causes to Borys’ family until she sees
Teresa after Borys left her for Agata—this scene, not coincidentally, takes place a few
days before Agata’s suicide.
Flaubert’s heroine, Emma Bovary, is also a sensitive woman. She marries, hoping
that marriage will transform her life into an exciting and romantic adventure—an
expectation based on the books she read—but soon realizes that her fantasy will not come
true. Unsatisfied and simply bored with her husband, she seeks happiness outside of
marriage. She involves herself in love affairs with two men, and none of the affairs
makes her happy. Depressed and in financial debts, she commits suicide. The aspect of
her personality that strikes me as different to that of Agata and Anna is that Emma lied
and felt no guilt about it. As Flaubert writes, “Lying became a need, a mania, a positive
joy—to such a point that is she said that she had walked down the righthand side of the
street the day before, it meant that she had gone down the left” (308). Emma becomes
addicted to lying, and her double act of adultery brings yet another moral downfall, a
dirty water that keeps sucking her in. Unlike Agata and Anna, Emma is self-involved,
and she is not a highly moral person, she does not act according to a set of ethical rules.
And yet, she is not portrayed in a condemning light, either. She strives for something
unreachable and undefined. On her way she hurts people, and this is not right, but she
doesn’t find happiness either. We feel pity for Emma, and annoyance at times. Flaubert
himself says that “the artist should have no religion, no country, not even any social
conviction, only absolute truth” (Heath 23). Flaubert describes Emma’s provincial life
and her provincial longing in many details, with some neutrality, but also in a thirdperson close to the main heroine. Emma, more so than Anna, is a product of her
environment, and her adultery is a reaction to that environment, her battle against the fate
of a provincial housewife who, arguably, achieves nothing in life. Emma wants
something more, but she is incapable of sacrifice. As Tanner writes, her “passional quest
for original expression can only and inevitably result in the opposite condition of eternal
monotony” (268), and this situation is Emma’s biggest tragedy. The more she lets herself
be carried away in her romances, the more pathetic she becomes, and her ultimate
disillusionment culminates in suicide. As Flaubert says, “Adultery, Emma was
discovering, could be as banal as marriage” (330). The message that seems to come
across is that relationships are whatever we make them to be—Emma fails in finding the
meaning in her life. Agata, on the other hand, knows the meaning of her life, and she
therefore sacrifices everything for love. The thought that comes to mind is: if Anna
Karenina is an aristocratic story of adultery, and Madame Bovary is a bourgeois story of
adultery, then what is The Seed? Agata and Borys belong to the middle class, and yet
their status in society does not affect their relationship. It is more likely that Kowalska
chooses regular people in order to show that the story of Agata and Borys could happen
to anyone.
Adultery and Suicide
The image of Agata is highly romanticized—she appears to be perfect. Her
longing for passion is similar to Emma’s longing. Why then doesn’t she fall in the traps
of Emma? Why, instead of degradation (Emma and Anna), she grows together with the
growth of her love for Borys? If Kowalska’s work is a dialog with Tolstoy and Flaubert,
then she tells them that true love can exist, and that it can exist outside of marriage. In
this light, it is strange that, unlike Agata, Tolstoy’s and especially Flaubert’s heroines
become unhappier as their affairs progress, and yet the three women end up in the same
place at the end—they commit suicide. Emma swallows arsenic, and her death scene in
bed, accompanied by her naïve husband, is long and painful. It is Anna’s death that
Kowalska rewrites. The omniscient narrator is with Anna on the day of her suicide. Hours
prior to her desperate act Tolstoy gives Anna a stream-of-consciousness voice, filled with
fears about Vronsky’s lack of love for her, about her shameful position, and about her
dark future. Anna, like Agata, sacrifices everything for the romantic love, and she
realizes that the man she loves is most likely having an affair, that he is getting bored
with her. At the train station, Anna overhears random conversations, and everything
seems to be fake. “There, in the very middle, and I shall punish him and escape from
everyone and from myself” (867), she thinks before she throws herself on the tracks. In
the last moment she hesitates, but it is too late—the train crashes her. Anna’s suicide is
then an escape from herself and the world that will continue to condemn her; it is also a
revenge on Vronsky. Agata’s suicide takes place in a similar setting—busy tram stop,
crowds of people, overheard conversations; Agata talking to Sabina, shivering, her face
traveling from “enchantment” to “unspeakable despair.” A few days before Agata sees
Teresa with the shopping bags, and when she returns home, she tells Borys to return to
his family—she suddenly knows that their love, however wonderful and meaningful,
destroys everyone involved, that is Teresa, Borys, their children, and herself. Before she
throws herself on the tracks, “(250) she said something, slightly spreading her lips” (?),
but Sabina cannot hear her. Contrary to Tolstoy’s omniscient narrator who has access to
Anna’s last thought, Kowalska’s narrator, Sabina, is not able to see inside Agata, even
though she witnesses her best friend’s suicide. It is clear, however, that Agata kills
herself for reasons different to those of Anna—not revenge, not depression, not shame,
but rather the very human and humanist realization that her love causes pain.
“Happy love has no history” (15), says Denis De Rougemont in Love in the
Western Tradition. Love and death, or “a fatal love,” accordingly, are the themes that
excite both writers and readers. Romance or stability, idealism or pragmatism—those are
some of the most basic dilemmas of humanity Rougemont suggests that we live in a
society, which glorifies passion, which defines happiness as the burning flame of adultery
rather than the stable marriage. He adds that we are no longer aware of the suffering that
inevitably follows this passion instead we see only what is “thrilling.” The writer calls
this state of consciousness a delusion. Love and death—are they inseparable, is
passionate love bound to end in death? The adulterous love is always intense, when it
comes it dominates every piece of one’s being. Can such intensity last, or is it so intense
because of its short nature? Vronsky falls madly in love with Anna, but when they live
together, his passion decreases. If adultery symbolizes escape from reality, then once it
becomes domesticated, it loses its power. As the married Charlotte from The Sufferings
of the Young Werter says to Werter, who is in love with her, “I fear, I fear, that it is only
the impossibility of possessing me that makes your desire for me so strong” (Goethe 72).
This implies that what attracts us about adultery is its forbidden character, and
consequently a married man or a married woman may appear more attractive because he
or she is unavailable. Tolstoy and Flaubert and Goethe seem to confirm this statement,
but not Kowalska. Agata falls in love with Borys without knowing about his marital
status, and she remains in the relationship for many years—until she dies. Agata’s love
goes against the common definition of passion as a short-lived feeling that fades with
time. She kills herself not because her love for Borys decreases, but because she realizes
that her happiness is based on the suffering of Borys’ wife and children. Had she not
committed suicide, would Borys and her live happily ever after? This question is difficult
to answer, and Kowalska, unlike her literary precedents, and maybe rather idealistically,
does not doubt that the eternal nature of Agata’s love. She is more concerned with the
definition of happiness, and how or whether it connects to moral responsibility.