Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660-1740 (review)

Turner's Fashioning Adultery explores the changing representations of marital infidelity in religious, moral, legal, and popular English literature between 1660 and 1740. Turner analyzes an impressively broad array of sources, including the periodical press, pamphlets, scandal literature, plays, novels, moral essays, religious sermons, and the occasional private diary or letter. He places these texts in their legal context of civil and ecclesiastical suits related to matrimonial causes, including annulments of marriage. Turner shows how a decline in church prosecutions for adultery, the growth of print culture, the expanding discourse about polite, gentlemanly behavior, and new sensibilities about the private sphere helped to transform attitudes toward adultery from a "public" matter to be disciplined by the church to a private dilemma between husbands and wives, the wronged spouse, and an interloping lover.

Turner is squarely in the camp of new cultural history, which blends the insights of social historians of class and gender with those of literary scholars who argue that texts are not, in Turner's words "passive 'reflectors' of 'attitudes' towards infidelity, but rather ... elements of a dynamic process of communication, not only describing but also constituting and shaping changing perceptions and understandings of conjugal disintegration" (3). In the chapter, "Language, Sex and Civility," for example, Turner shows how idioms of infidelity, such as references to "gallantry," could influence values and even encourage behavior, in this case by "present[ing] adultery in an attractive, genteel way" (40). His finest sections emphasize how material phenomena—from the growth of the periodical press to the use of bed curtains—shaped representations of adulterous relations. In a section on private space (157-165), Turner illuminates how trends in architecture, design, and entertaining created both new norms of polite behavior and new spatial and social possibilities for marital infidelity. He analyzes how lovers' breaking social conventions about the use of rooms, such as lounging in the dining room during the day, could become evidence of adultery to a servant—or anyone with the information—who knew how and when such spaces were legitimately used (160).

Fashioning Adultery primarily addresses textual representation, and because British authors appear to have been particularly concerned about the consequences of wives' betrayals for husbands' honor and authority, this book emphasizes masculinity and a male point of view. In his chapter on the legal innovation of a new type of civil suit that husbands could bring against their wives' lovers—called criminal conversation or "crim.con."—Turner shows how the legal and pamphlet literature covering these cases focused on disputes between males and helped to articulate the proper boundaries of masculine behavior in the eighteenth century.

Although incorporating more material on the effects of husbands' affairs on their wives might have allowed Turner to make more far-ranging claims about the differences in eighteenth-century women's and men's emotional lives, sexual desire, and ideals about marriage, Fashioning Adultery is an important contribution to our understanding of gender relations within the family. It particularly enhances our sense of men as husbands and lovers during a period that began to see the rising dominance of a middle-class, conjugal, domestic ideal, and provides a valuable addition to the growing historical literature on masculinity.