No Annulment: Three Women Characters of the Mid-1880s Confront the Problem of an Impossible Marriage (Manuel Cubas, Sawa, Galdós)

Authors

Vernon Chamberlin

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

4

Issue

2

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2007

First Page

19

Last Page

32

Abstract

Distaff discontent with matrimony has been a subject of literary treatment throughout the ages. In Classical, Renaissance, and Golden Age times, the emphasis was often on the cleverness of the wife in securing and protecting a lover—one who could supplement or even fulfill completely the husband’s amatory role. Certainly, there was a diversity of reasons for the wife’s discontent and her need for remedial action. For example, in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, the problem is that the wife has a more zesty nature than does her spouse (IX, 407). In Boccaccio’s Decameron, the husband’s neglect of his wife in preference for (male) sodomy is the mainspring of the plot (I, v, 10: 434).¹ And in Cervantes’s El viejo celoso, the husband is clearly impotent (151).

Recommended Citation

Chamberlin, Vernon, "No Annulment: Three Women Characters of the Mid-1880s Confront the Problem of an Impossible Marriage (Manuel Cubas, Sawa, Galdós)" (2007). Decimonónica. Paper 158.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/decimononica/158