SOURCE: “The Honourable Cuckold: Models of Masculine Defence,” in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1992, pp. 1–19.

[In the following essay, Millington and Sinclair trace the use of the cuckold in literature, citing several examples including Graham from Barnes's Before She Met Me.]

A large number of works of literature contain husbands whose wives are unfaithful to them. There is, however, a glaring lack of attention paid to those neglected spouses both within the works of literature and in critical discussion of those works. Yet it is in the portrayal of those husbands that we can see the centre of patriarchy's concern with a phenomenon which appears to proclaim its weakness as a system, since it points to the lack of social power and sexual potency of the man considered to have authority—the husband.

Our initial proposition is that there are two models or paradigms for the portrayal of the offended husband: either he is mocked for the situation he finds himself in, or he is admired for his attitude and action in the face of his wife's infidelity. That is, he is portrayed either as a cuckold or as a man of honour. The portrayal of the former seeks to provoke mirth rather than sympathy, to invite a detached rather than an engaged attitude. The portrayal of the latter presents us with a protagonist in relation to whom the final intended emotion of the spectator is likely to be admiration, in conformity with a system that requires that the authority of the husband be upheld.

Some literary examples are taken to illustrate briefly these models in their simple paradigmatic forms, which may seem initially to be not only distinct but also sharply contrasting. A closer look at the models, however, reveals an underlying connexion, and discussion of two further twentieth-century examples shows this yet more clearly, and also emphasizes the degree to which the models avoid certain areas of the husband's experience. In these last two texts, the models are not exemplified singly, but rather contain protagonists who possess characteristics of both models. From this we can perceive that the cuckold and the man of honour are points on a continuum, and that, since there are not only differences but also similarities to be observed between them, a number of questions are raised about the sort of concerns society either does or does not express in its literature.

In patriarchy, the mode of organisation is the rule by men over both men and women. This “controls” women, and one needs to pause here. Control is not imposed without there being a feeling that there is indeed something that requires control. That is, patriarchy is not simply the exercise of power, per se, and for itself alone, but rather it exercises control as a response. The response, it could be argued, may be to a desire to meet the needs of self-interest, but we would focus on control as a response to anxiety, anxiety about potential disorderliness, or lack of control.¹ The analogy here which brings out the intensity of intention in this reaction is the observation made by Freud that neurosis arises from defences against anxiety. Insofar as a defence is simply that, a defending against something feared, it creates a fragility in the order imposed because of the initial anxiety that gave rise to the need for defence. Thus we can observe that, in patriarchal systems, the strong expression of control testifies to a level of fear about what might happen were that control not to be exercised. Patriarchal society is one which lays particular emphasis on potency, expressed both in the ability to exercise power over others, but, no less important, and in a form with which we can all connect in human terms, in the implied sexual potency of the men who exercise that power. That is, the collective expression of power, in the form of social control, may be one which gives voice to and meets the needs of individuals to manage fear and anxiety. Since potency is so frequently expressed at an individual level in terms of sexual power, it is at that level and in that form that it is so frequently expressed in the human and individual form in literature.

What happens when patriarchal power, embodied in an individual man, is threatened by the infidelity of woman, an infidelity that might be construed both by him and by the society about him either as disobedience or as treachery? At two extremes of reaction to this are the cuckold and the man of honour, the former model containing mockery but robust in its overall view of the event, the latter model presenting a man capable of decisive action, but contained in a structure of tension and anxiety.

The cuckold is a stock comic figure of medieval ribaldry, shown in fabliaux and their reworkings in Chaucer and Boccaccio. Here, the husband cuts a ridiculous figure, being deceived by his young wife, and a similarly youthful lover. This model is clearly typified in January, the elderly husband of Chaucer's “Merchant's Tale” in The Canterbury Tales (1386). Here is a man we are invited to laugh at, to ridicule because his wife has found her sexual satisfaction outside the marriage bed. January marries late in life, and insists on choosing a young wife. She falls prey, with little pressure, to the affections of the groom Damian, and the two plot to outwit January. This requires some ingenuity, despite the fact that January becomes blind, because of January's extremely suspicious nature. Finally a swift and urgent act of copulation takes place in a pear tree—an act to which January is suddenly made witness by the intervention of the gods. His wife, however, true to the tradition of cuckolds' wives, is able to persuade him that he has been mistaken in what he has seen, and January, the gullible husband, accepts her explanation.

Other aspects of the cuckold and his story are exemplified in Boccaccio's Decameron (1350). In X.2, for example, the wife of the story appears as a person with unmet sexual needs. Here an elderly husband limits the number of days on which he and his wife might have intercourse by insisting that they observe (through abstinence) a large number of holy days. When his wife is abducted, and subsequently seduced, by a pirate, she finds that her new fate contrasts rather happily with her previous one, and refuses to return to her husband, who she upbraids for having failed to attend to her sexual needs. In the Decameron VII.5, the cuckold's jealousy as a point for ridicule is emphasized. In this story, the wife successfully manages to have an affair with a priest, using her husband's jealous habits not only as the mechanism to make the affair possible, but also as the justification for subsequently scolding him, thus ensuring that he will not guard her so jealously in the future.

Two features of the cuckold model as illustrated above need stressing: loss or lack of potency, and a lack of “lifemanship,” in the form of foolishness, gullibility, failure to be aware of what goes on. First, there is the implication that, if the man's wife has been unfaithful to him, then he lacks or has lost some of his potency. Not only does he visibly have no power or authority over her, but his lack of power is linked to an (implied or real) lack of sexual power. Since many (but not all) cuckold figures are elderly, the emphasis is more on loss than lack of sexual power, a loss (which for good natural reasons) is attributed to the ageing process. This does not necessarily mean that old men are destined to be cuckolds: more is needed, and is supplied in the second feature, that of foolishness. January does not suffer his fate of cuckold because he has a wife of sixty who has decided to cavort in a tree with the groom, but rather because he has a wife who is young and thus more likely to engage in this style of dalliance. That is, January brings on his fate as cuckold by an act of initial foolishness, an imprudent venture into age-inappropriate activity. So cuckolds are also fools.

Similarly, Ricciardo de Chinzica, in the first example from Boccaccio, displays the foolishness of the old man who has married a much younger woman, and resorts to rule-giving in order to escape fulfilling his sexual obligations towards her, and indeed seems to have erred by being unaware of her sexual needs—his unawareness as much a sign of his state as is his loss of power. Being foolish and inept in the ways of life, cuckolds are also characteristically men who are unaware of their fate: the horns of the cuckold (an attribute acquired with the state in many traditional tales) are, as it were, visible to the world, but not to the men who bear them. Remaining unaware of their fate they will take no action in response to the infidelity of their wives: those who do learn of it will, if they are true cuckolds, tolerate their fate, in the role of the “mari complaisant,” who allows his wife her infidelity. Such is the attitude forced upon the husband of the Decameron VII.5.

The cuckold, then, is a man who no longer exercises rights of monogamy over his wife. What the associated traits of age, unawareness, and foolishness also say is that he has forfeited those rights. Such rights are sanctioned only by what we might call natural law, which demands that power of control be associated with a sexual power that justifies such control.

A further feature of the cuckold's position to be stressed is that, unusually within a patriarchal society, apparent recognition is given to the sexual rights and desires of the woman. This is most clearly shown in the example of Ricciardo de Chinzica's wife. The implications of the mockery that society metes out to the cuckold are as follows: since the husband, has failed to meet his wife's needs, it is understandable, or only to be expected that, given the opportunity, she will accept the attentions of another. It is of course the case that in this story the action of the abducting brigand moves events along, but the wife's decision not to return to her husband is her own. We could view what takes place as rough justice, based on “natural” law, in which both sexes have claims to sexual satisfaction, despite their unequal positions in the power structure, and in which the husband is penalized and deprived of his power because he has failed to exert a minimal level of sexual potency in relation to his wife.

Contrasting with the cuckold is the man of honour, exemplified in the male protagonists of the Spanish honour drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and who apparently is all that the cuckold is not. Not only are the husbands of these plays aware of conjugal transgression, but they are prepared to suspect it at every turn (as may also be the case of the cuckold). Once it is suspected, such husbands will (unlike the cuckold) take action, preferably on both wife and lover. The conclusion of the honour drama in blood is one which affirms a return to what, for patriarchy, would be the proper order of things. Seen in its bare outlines, there is no allowance for the sexual rights of woman, nor any hint allowed that the husband is anything less than socially and sexually potent.

In A secreto agravio, secreta venganza (1635) by Calderón de la Barca, Don Lope, recently married (by proxy, interestingly enough) deals swiftly with the advances made to his wife by her former suitor Don Luis. He arranges for the lover to die in a sailing accident, and then sets fire to the house his wife is in. Running parallel to his situation is a reminder of how one must deal swiftly with honour problems: his friend Don Juan reacts with all speed, and no little violence, when his mistress (not his wife, we may note) is seen in public, and it is commented that she has had two suitors, and that, in opting for Don Juan, she has chosen the worse of the two. In El médico de su honra (1635) by the same author, the husband, Gutierre, is tormented by terrible jealousy when he suspects that his wife has been visited by another man. His method of achieving secret vengeance is to arrange for his wife to have a blood-letting—one which will be fatal. In both of these plays, emphasis is laid upon the considerable social standing, that is the social honour, of the two husbands concerned. As a result, the emotional strain they suffer on learning or suspecting the infidelity of their respective wives is markedly coloured by their awareness of the social implications for their honour should it be the case or should it be discovered that they have an unfaithful spouse.

A simple formula relating the cuckold to the man of honour is to view the man of honour as one who has a decisive and socially acceptable (albeit violent) manner of responding to the fate exemplified by the cuckold. Both in a sense have the same fate, though not all wives in plays of honour are actually unfaithful, and indeed might seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Thus the example of Desdemona, who is killed for suspicion and out of jealousy by Othello, rather than in retribution for action. But whereas the termination of the cuckold story is open-ended, and leaves a great deal of scope for change and elaboration, the honour story must, inevitably, lead to the death of parties either guilty or supposed to be guilty.²

If taken at face value, and judged on action, it appears that the husband of honour plays is powerful, his capacity for retaliation in the face of marital injury being a sign of strength. A closer look, however, at the detail of what happens in honour plays, and at the psychological mechanisms which underlie the honour code, suggests that this may not be the case.

Patriarchal systems, as observed earlier, have an investment in control, and this immediately raises the question of what it is that is felt to be so threatening, dangerous, or chaotic as to require such control. Two areas of theory are helpful for an understanding of what may be taking place: the theories of Melanie Klein about the mechanisms of splitting and projection which take place in the face of threat from external or internal forces, and theory deriving from observations of anthropology about the nature of the honour code.

Klein identified and clarified the concept of psychological projection as an extreme and primitive reaction to pain, threat, or discomfort. In projection, any negative experience or feeling which the self cannot actually accommodate internally, is disowned, projected out into the external world, where it then comes to constitute a threat from the outside.³ The mechanism involved is, in Freudian terms, a defence against anxiety. Klein's theories, however, take Freud's work further, and while Freud inevitably forms part of one's vocabulary for discussing such operations, a prime reason for not using either Freud or Lacan, in his rereading of Freud, as a theoretical framework for this issue is that both privilege the position and importance of the father in society, and in the development of individuals, without questioning that the father should be so privileged. Klein's work, by contrast, highlighted the primitive and early formative experience with the mother, a being so frightening and powerful in relation to the small infant as to produce reactions that are extreme and dramatic, and which will be repeated in later life in situations of danger and threat. The work of Klein on splitting and projection (with the extension on a group level of these mechanisms as explored by Wilfred Bion) provides a useful tool for viewing the portrayal of the offended husband, and does so without having to have recourse to theories of gender formation and definition which accept without question the power of the father/husband. In this way, Klein enables us to get behind the power structure assumed by Freud and emphasized by Lacan, so that we can examine the investments in the establishment of that power structure.

Klein's theory postulates the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as different modes in which events, experiences, or persons felt to be harmful, threatening, or uncomfortable are dealt with by the person who experiences them. These positions serve to give us insight into the two models of the deceived husband. Briefly, the paranoid-schizoid position is one in which there is an intense splitting-off from threat and pain, and a projection outwards of distressing emotion. By contrast, the depressive position is one in which there is an ability to contain and relate to what is distressing without resorting to the mechanisms of splitting and projection.

Portrayals of cuckolds, while they ridicule the unfortunate husbands, are in themselves tales characteristically full of mirth and vitality, and, viewed as the literary representations of views of society, present a robust accommodation of the unwelcome facts of cuckoldry, including the attendant features of impotence and ageing in the man. As such they can be understood as an exemplification of the depressive position. In the earthy realism of the cuckold tales we can see an ability both to face the unwelcome, and, by their form, to celebrate vitality.

In literature containing men of honour, by contrast, there is a distinct inability to accommodate unwelcome information or experience, and thus it exemplifies the paranoid-schizoid position: men of honour retaliate swiftly and in no uncertain manner since they cannot accommodate perceived threats to their honour and their social identity. In the paranoid-schizoid position, there is a primitive and intense defence against what is felt to be threatening, in the course of which all unwelcome or distressing feeling or experience is projected out into the external world, where it comes, unfortunately, to present a yet greater threat—and the paranoia of the subject, including the man of honour, is increased, thus spurring him into action that is fast and extreme.

We can apply Klein's theory to the relationship between the sexes as observed in anthropology as follows. In societies where there is extreme polarisation of attributes between sexes, the attributes thought proper to one sex will be disowned by the other. If weakness, vulnerability, and sensuality, for example, are identified as belonging to women, then such features may be violently disowned by men. They are then projected forcefully into women, as perceived by men, where they constitute a threat. That is, men disown their own weakness, vulnerability, or the like, project them into women, and then find their lives and structures threatened by that very external weakness and vulnerability. Thus, in the honour system, man's honour is threatened by the vulnerability of woman to approaches by others.⁴ (By the same token, it could be argued that women, also participants in the system, project into men traits considered as masculine, such as aggression, which they find a threat to them.) Woman is restrained and constrained within the honour code, but why? The answer would seem to be fear, but whether the plausible social fear of illegitimate offspring, or the obvious fear of loss of power, or whether a deeper, less conscious fear of women's sensuality, is a matter open to speculation. The social divisions of the honour code push sensuality aside (thus making it more threatening), and simultaneously raise the possibility that the husband, with his emphasis on a quasi-legalistic code to assert his rights, has no more natural claim to them than has the cuckold. As for his wife's rights, the very concept appears quite out of the question: to acknowledge them would be to threaten the whole system. In this splitting and projection, the man of honour reveals himself as threatened and firmly defending. In the rigorous division of attributes and activities between the sexes such as obtains in honour systems, an essential part of the systems is that extreme control is exercised by men over women. The reason for this is made explicit in the literature of honour: it is the anxiety about the threat to the honour of the men posed by the possible loss of honour of the woman that is at the root of the need to exercise control. The position of the man of honour is revealed as being intensely paranoid, and ultimately fearful—thus showing him to be far from the simple, decisive, and strong alternative to the cuckold he might originally have seemed.

A closer look at some of the Spanish honour plays shows up this aspect of paranoia. There is more than a hint of projection, leading to the effect of paranoia, of an anxiety-driven over-reaction, of the need to project fears on to the outside, to be observed in the exaggerated attitude of suspicion on the part of the husbands of the plays, and in their extreme and violent reactions, and indeed in the rigid social norms that form the honour code itself. This is an over-reaction displayed, for example, in the case of the husband in Los comendadores de Córdoba (1596) by Lope de Vega, who brings about the death not only of his wife, but also of the servants and all domestic animals and pets (including the monkey and the parrot). In the two examples of honour plays given earlier, while there is not the level of over-reaction of the Veinticuatro just given, there is evident tension and paranoia shown in the husband. In A secreto agravio, for example, there is the question of whether the husband, told that he need not go to fight for the king, feels that the act of getting married may in some sense (and in an obvious and social sense) have unmanned him. The level of Gutierre's suspicion in El médico de su honra is, in its turn, extreme—the pathology of his reaction being in part hinted at in the title of the play, since his action is undertaken to “cure” his honour problem.⁵

So much for the models. But how do they work out in practice? In this delineation they have been simplified, in order to give more clarity. When we look at two modern examples in literature, we can see the models more clearly for the different types of defence that they are. The models, rather than being modes of reaction to infidelity which are socially and historically bound, are revealed as polarized but related ways of dealing with what is experienced to be a fundamental threat: the threat of woman to man and his potency. It is of interest that the models for the offended husband still obtain in some recognisable form, but, unlike the examples of paradigms given earlier, expose the situation of the husband as being both painful and problematic, while still drawing back ultimately from a full confrontation with his emotional distress.

The first example comes from the Spanish theatre of the early twentieth century: Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín (1933) by García Lorca.⁶ Don Perlimplín is a bachelor in his fifties who is persuaded by his maid Marcolfa that he should marry his young neighbour Belisa. On the wedding night, Belisa is unfaithful to him with five men, representatives of the five races of the earth. Don Perlimplín is mainly concerned, however, with his own new area of experience, and his new happiness. Then suddenly a decisive Perlimplín emerges. He arranges for Belisa to receive love-letters from a mystery lover, and discusses the letters with her in a kindly, fatherly fashion. He arranges for a meeting between his wife and the mystery lover, then, finding her waiting for this man, he declares that he will go and kill the rival, and leaves, shortly to return with a dagger in his chest, and saying that he has been killed by Perlimplín. Belisa's reaction to this event is of limited comprehension. She is taken aback by Perlimplín's death, but remains preoccupied with the whereabouts of the mystery lover.

The play at first sight looks like no more than the move from the position of cuckold to that of man of honour. Perlimplín fulfils cuckold criteria: an old, bookish, and apprehensive husband, entering marriage with a sensual young woman. After the infidelity, his awareness of it seems limited. He does ask why there are five hats, and five silken ladders hanging from the balconies of the wedding chamber, but accepts his wife's explanations without demur. Then, instead of looking for a solution that would restore his honour, he resolves matters simply by killing himself.

Halfway through the play, however, some of Perlimplín's actions make him seem like the man of honour. He takes on a role of paternal authority; he becomes decisive and active in constructing a scenario to solve his marital difficulties (which, with its subterfuge and elegance, is a pure Golden Age coup de théâtre, involving, as traditionally required, the shedding of blood). While initially he shares the lack of sensuality of the man of honour (before his marriage he is happy with his books), marriage changes him. Having crossed the fearsome threshold into marriage, he is not, unlike the man of honour, beset by paranoia about the threat to honour that marriage can bring, nor does he have the man of honour's inability to consider the feelings of his errant wife.

The fact that Perlimplín appears to take on the guise of the two models, within a single marital and social situation, shows the models for what they are: not a set mode of responses that men are expected to produce when their wives set off down an independent primrose path of sexuality, nor a set of responses that gives any answer to the husband, any ministering to his personal as opposed to his social hurt. It is by deviating from both of the models that Perlimplín, first fleetingly, then more definitely, shows us the reality of the offended husband—the one who is vulnerable, who is wounded, but who faces his fate with calm and dignity. He takes his fate on, rather than either ignoring it (the cuckold), or attempting to cancel it out with another's blood (the man of honour).

Since it is by deviating from the models of behaviour and response that Perlimplín shows his painful humanity, which simultaneously accords him his dignity, the two models emerge as stereotypes both of which allow us not to think about the pain of the injured party. That is, here we have some explanation of what is going on when we see a patriarchal society apparently displaying its own undermining in literature and apparently celebrating it: it is only going through the motions of so doing, since there is no real confrontation of the actual hurt felt by the husbands, at least when the offended husbands fit one model or the other.

The first hint that Perlimplín is his own man comes when he declares his love for Belisa, and is adamant that this is real, and no conventional compliance (335). It becomes evident from his post-nuptial happiness that, whatever might or might not have passed between him and Belisa (with the emphasis perhaps on the latter), he has had an experience which is new and clearly not negative. Contrasting with Chaucer's elaboration of how January, with his stubbly chin, slobbers all over May, we have Perlimplín's question to his wife about who has kissed her (342). Here we have a discreet implication of experience: he would not be able to detect the traces of another had he not been there himself. The fact is that Perlimplín, for all his limitations, is a man who enters real experience, perhaps now for the first time in his life. His awareness of the primacy and irreplaceability of real experience will ultimately acquire a tragic tinge when he realises that some levels of experience will perforce remain unattainable for him, but this does not detract from the value and the sharpness of those pleasures and experiences he does have. This is the man who now waits to see the dawn, and feels himself to have been wounded by love, demonstrating a reality of experience comparable with Boccaccio's sole elderly lover not to be ridiculed, Alberto, of the Decameron 1.10.

Again, Perlimplín is atypical in his reaction to his wife's flirtatious behaviour (the five lovers on the wedding night having been a mere prelude to later extra-marital activity). He is dismissive about his maidservant's concern for his honour: he is neither unaware, as the cuckold, nor suspicious and outraged, as the man of honour. He is simply fascinated, and intrigued by his wife's behaviour (345), not, it would appear, in any voyeuristic fashion, but simply as the result of being animated by the experience of marriage.

This experience, coupled though it is with instant betrayal, has brought not just animation, but maturation, which accounts as much for Perlimplín's casual unconcern about the model of cuckold he is seen to fill, as for his unconventional assumption and deviation from the model of the man of honour. He takes action, but it punishes neither his wife nor her lovers, except the lover that is himself, and for whom death is evidently not a punishment but a merciful, indeed, the only possible release. He also undertakes the action in the hopes of elevating his wife's concept of love: he has learned what it is like to love the unattainable, and he wishes now to give that chance to her.

Perlimplín's solution also shows him as taking responsibility for his own grief, and containing it, maintaining a concern for others at the same time. The combined elegance and eccentricity of the solution may blind us to the problematic nature of the so-called solutions traditional to the man of honour. In the course of the action traditionally employed by the man of honour, there is a resolution of a social situation, since the principal players in the drama are removed from the stage by death, but there is no resolution of the underlying human situation. There is no certainty that the husband's jealousy is actually resolved, merely that those who caused it have been annihilated. That is, even if the man of honour, in committing wife-murder, is no longer the man whose wife is unfaithful to him, he is nonetheless the man whose wife has been unfaithful to him, with all the doubts about his worth and potency this may leave him with. The force of the feelings potentially involved here are what is brought out so effectively in Julian Barnes' Before She Met Me (1982).⁷

We have commented on Perlimplín's lack of paranoia. He is, additionally, brave, and possessed of insight. When he intercepts Belisa's letter from the mystery lover (himself), he declares that he wants to help her as any good husband would help a wife whose virtue was less than perfect, declaring that he recognized their problem at once, in that he is old and she is young. That is, he acts as the ideal man of honour in that he does know, and is in control (running counter in this to various less than ideal protagonists of Golden Age honour drama), and adds the character of father to that of husband, as he assures Belisa that he will look after their situation. But he also recognizes the disparity of their ages, and thus his destiny of cuckold. This very act of recognition and self-knowledge, however, sets him apart from the traditional cuckold, who is marked as much by his lack of awareness as by his lack of potency. Perlimplín's relationship to the two models, which shows both contact and detachment, a detachment which permits him to stand outside and be a human being, also permits him to engage briefly in a role which would be inimical to either cuckold or man of honour, in that he acts as go-between for his wife and her new mystery lover. Thus he is mediator for his wife's desires and the object of her attentions. But in becoming the object of her attentions, however briefly, he will thus act as mediator for some at least of his own desires.

He emerges as a man transformed, first into maturity, then into a man with a capacity for action, then for devising his own defence against distress: he is able, without ignoring his condition, to transcend it.

Our second example, Julian Barnes' Before She Met Me, comes from contemporary Britain, and here again the question of the mixing of elements from the two models is of importance and will lead us to draw some final conclusions about their nature and viability.

After over a decade of stable if unfulfilling marriage to Barbara, Graham is introduced by Jack to Ann. They begin an affair which leads to Graham's divorce. Not long into the marriage to Ann, Barbara suggests that Graham take their daughter to see a particular film on her weekly visit to him, a film in which, as he discovers, Ann appears. Though at first not very concerned by his wife's role as a “gangster's lover,” Graham soon finds that he is returning to see the film again and again, and that he has developed an insatiable appetite to see his wife in all the films that she made, no matter how bad. He becomes obsessed by the relationships which Ann had before he met her, both on and off the screen. Neither Ann nor Jack is able to persuade Graham that he has no grounds to consider Ann unfaithful. He gradually deteriorates in his obsession, and becomes convinced, by reading Jack's novels, that Ann has also had an affair with Jack which has continued after her marriage to him. Graham kills Jack and then, in the presence of Ann, he kills himself.

In certain ways Graham fits the model of the cuckold quite clearly: he is variously described as wet (77), as a “weed” (70), and (connoting his age) as virtually retired at thirty-eight (12). And his weakness is contrasted with the evident knowledge and mastery shown by Ann, especially in the area of sex: Ann's earlier independent life stands in stark contrast to the limitations of Graham's previous experience in his first marriage.

But, partially contradicting the model, Ann does not seem to be completely dissatisfied with Graham sexually—they do have a sexual relation. However, at times Ann does not seem wholly satisfied either and tends to view Graham's attempts to make love to her with a certain detachment: she is bemused and tolerant towards his shortcomings (107–08, 121). Moreover, Ann's “infidelity” is unorthodox, since it takes place prior to the moment at which she could be unfaithful to him, in other words, before she met him. It is also striking that the trigger for Graham is seeing the film since he knows that there have been other men in Ann's life and has met some of them before he sees the film. The fictional form of the infidelity in the films is also significant later in respect of his crucial reading of Jack's novels as supposed evidence of Ann's current affair with him.

In addition to the unorthodox nature of the “infidelity,” Ann appears unperturbed by her past: she seems to make no obvious attempt to conceal it from Graham (e.g., 15–16), except at a point when he is in deep distress and she warns Jack not to mention their past affair to him (67). In fact, and again breaking with the model, there is no sense of Graham's receiving a public humiliation because of her previous affairs. He alone construes the past as “infidelity,” while Ann and Jack are unable to acknowledge Graham's worries and in that they seem to express a view representative of one section of contemporary British culture.⁸

However unorthodox the grounds of Graham's feeling that Ann has been unfaithful to him, there is no doubting the intensity of his anxiety and his feeling of inadequacy. The anxiety is clear in certain features: his fantasies in which he kills or is in rivalry with the actors associated with Ann's past; the attempt to control his sexual activity by recourse to pornography; the obsessive visits to the cinema to see all Ann's films (and eventually all the films in which her leading actors have appeared even without her); and the huge amount of research he does relating to her past. Indeed, this last activity becomes a classic symptom of anxiety in which the excessive attempt to pin down “the facts” actually exacerbates the problem.

The anxiety which Graham feels about his relation with Ann appears to derive firstly from his feeling of being a cuckold or anticipating that danger (and he does once call himself a cuckold [119]); and secondly (and reading between the lines) from fear of her sexuality. This second area has its roots in her strong, independent past: she has known other men before Graham and therefore may have points of comparison by which to judge Graham, and she has experience that will allow her to take the initiative in their sexual relations. This past (however it is construed) breeds a dependency on Ann that makes her into a kind of mother-figure which may create problems for Graham's sense of control over his own identity: there is a suspicion of Graham's feeling that he is rendered weak, childlike, and less potent by Ann's past.

At a certain point, his anxiety reaches an intensity where Graham appears to switch into the man of honour role. After that switch, Graham seeks a violent resolution to his anxiety—only violence appears decisive and clear enough.⁹ And it is significant that, in the preparation for the final violence, Graham seems to isolate himself from others and to relish the fact that others do not seem to understand him (163): in fact, neither he nor they can cope with the nature or intensity of his feelings. An interesting feature of the novel is the way in which he loses the awareness he has of the warring sides of his experience (114–16). And the switch to violence in Graham is underlined and rendered the more chilling because of his initially being an articulate, gentle character.¹⁰

His violence is directed against Jack and against himself. Jack has been identified by Graham as a current rival. Through reading Jack's novels as though they were history (and he is a professional historian), Graham decides that Jack is guilty of still having an affair with Ann: again, as with his film-going, fiction is the basis of his action. In killing Jack, Graham appears to be acting as the classic man of honour. But in killing himself rather than Ann, he is not. In taking himself as an object of violence and leaving Ann, Graham is not simply attempting to restore the integrity of his position by eliminating perceived threats to his control. On the one hand, his suicide seems to suggest a continuing sense of inadequacy—to that extent Graham appears not to have moved out of the sphere of the cuckold. On the other hand, the suicide also seems to be a last, desperate means of expressing to Ann the hurt that he feels and of carrying out an emotional aggression against her. Given the way that he stage-manages the suicide so that Ann has to witness it, Graham seems to be seeking a way of demonstrating an emotion that neither he nor she has fully been able to comprehend. But this expression of hurt is also a sign of a loss of ability to cope: the hurt is split off and projected. And that is characteristic of a patriarchal society which does not cope with male problems flexibly but which tries to control and deny them.

Rather than shifting simply from the role of cuckold to that of man of honour, Graham in fact can been seen to represent elements of them both—simultaneously. He has certain expectations of himself deriving from his position within a patriarchal society: he wishes to lay claim to his traditional, exclusive “rights” as a husband. But his problem is that he cannot succeed in the role of husband (as he conceives it) with either his first wife, Barbara, or Ann. In this sense, he has expectations (of cultural derivation) about his masculinity which he fails to fulfil. Graham emerges therefore as a product and a victim of patriarchy. Patriarchy provides certain controls, delimits the areas of gender activity, and confers power on men, but in so doing it inevitably creates the mechanism for failure. If the controls break down, if the areas of activity are (or are perceived to be) infringed, or if men fail to achieve the power made available to them, then all that patriarchy seems to leave open to the man are violent reactions and retribution, whether against others or the self: the attempt to enforce conformity. Graham shows that patriarchy cannot deal well with hurt in men, which belongs to areas split off and projected. Hence, Graham can act as a source of critique of our discrete models, and of masculinity's identification with men's control of women and of their own emotions and desires.

In conclusion, one can say that the models of the cuckold and the man of honour are both positions and conceptualizations which delimit (and delimit too narrowly) the state of the offended husband and without allowing for his need to deal with his feeling and emotional damage. It seems to us that the evidence of the applications of the two models shows that they manifest in fact different intensities of the same thing: the desire to control female sexuality. This is most obvious with the violence of the man of honour model, but it is also arguably the case of the cuckold model, where the underlying logic is that the young, sexually active woman “needs” to be paired with an appropriate young male who, unlike an old man, is capable of controlling her within a monogamous relationship. Here we might remember that Belisa's brief excursion into plural lovers is replaced by a single fixation on the fictitious lover created and played by Perlimplín. In this context it seems clear that the models are not alternatives but simplified versions of different intensities of the underlying need of patriarchy to respond decisively to infinitely variable perceived challenges from women. The stress here on the word “perceived” is crucial since all the texts with which we are dealing here were written by men. Even though our reading seeks to encompass the logic of the texts and to question them where appropriate, it is significant that the problem thrown up by the texts (however undogmatically) is an acute crisis in masculinity and patriarchy caused by the behaviour of wives. It is by no means clear that any of the texts actually manages to focus on the underlying question of men's expectations of their gender identification, in other words, to question the foundation of the represented “crisis” and to suggest constructive ways of reformulating it which might lead beyond currently existing concepts of gender.

A further problem deriving from the use of these two models is that they may encourage us to lose sight of the experience of wives, something which may not be paralleled in the original texts.¹¹ The danger is in following the tendency of patriarchy to see Belisa and Ann as merely the wives of a cuckold or a man of honour, as merely functions of male crises. It seems to us important to keep the wives clearly in view as a source of potential critique of patriarchy. This leads to a final problem to do with language: the conventional terms, cuckold, man of honour, and offended husband, all suggest a subscription to patriarchal norms which seem to deny that husbands can be hurt as individuals rather than offended as beings within a social structure. It is an uneasy compromise to have to use these terms while wanting simultaneously to question the structure out of which they emerge. But our engagement with and questioning of the terms and concepts may be precisely the sort of negotiating which we have identified as being crucially and damagingly absent within the patriarchal system.

Notes

1. The awareness of an ever-present world of disorder running alongside a world of order is what is viewed in a much more positive and optimistic way in Bakhtin's exploration of carnival. See M. Bakhtin, L'oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance, trans. Andrée Robel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) 15–19. See also, on the importance of disorder in an orderly society, and the inclusion of images of folly and topsy-turvydom, N. Z. Davies, Les cultures du peuple (originally Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 1965), trans. Marie-Noelle Bourguet (Paris: Editions Aubier-Montaigne, 1979) 159, 165.

2. Where death does not ensue, the alternatives, such as repudiation, are problematic. See Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed With Kindness (1607), and Chiarelli, La maschera e il volto (1916), for examples where alternatives to death for the wife are explored.

3. See Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, (London: The Hogarth P and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1986) 25–27.

4. See J. Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J. G. Peristiany (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1965) 42, on masculine and feminine parts in the honour system, and 52 on the exaggerated split of attributes between the sexes. See also J. K. Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage (Oxford: The Clarendon P, 1964) 270, and J. du Boulay, Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village (Oxford: The Clarendon P, 1974) 118.

5. Teresa Scott Soufas, in “Calderón's Melancholy Wife-murderers,” Hispanic Review 52 (1984): 181–203, has highlighted the pathology of Calderón's husbands, but using psychological models of Calderón's time, so that she views Don Lope and Don Gutierre as men who degenerate into melancholy. Other recent criticism has challenged the view that the man of honour was a type necessarily to be admired. Thus contrasting with the view of David Larson, The Honour Plays of Lope de Vega (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1977) 42, that the act of the Veinticuatro in Los comendadores de Córdoba is one of “positive worth, a deed to be celebrated,” Alix Zuckerman-Ingber, in El bien más alto: A Reconsideration of Lope de Vega's Honour Plays, U of Florida Monographs, Humanities no. 56 (Gainesville: U Presses of Florida, 1984) 27, perceives the rage of the Veinticuatro, sees the action as one of extravagant vengeance, and (37) views the Veinticuatro as a weak, dependent character. For further re-readings of honour plays, see Melveena McKendrick, “Celebration of Subversion?: Los comendadores de Córdoba reconsidered,” Golden-Age Studies in Honour of A. A. Parker, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LXI (1984): 352–60; “Lope de Vega's La victoria de la honra and La locura por la honra: Towards a Reassessment of His Treatment of Conjugal Honour,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LXIV, 1 (1987): 1–14; “Honour and Vengeance in the Spanish comedia—A Case of Mimetic Transference?” Modern Language Review 79 (1984): 313–35. The belief implied in the honour code that emotions are to be defended against is given shape in the view of doctors that jealousy and love were “serious pathological derangements” (A. K. G. Paterson, “The Alchemical Marriage in Calderón's El médico de su honra,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 30 (1979): 262–82 [265 and 274, n. 20]).

6. Federico García Lorca, Obras completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1980), II: 323–60. Page references will be included in parenthesis in the text. For a recent discussion of the play, see John Lyon, “Love, Imagination and Society in Amor de don Perlimplín and La zapatera prodigiosa,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LXIII, 3 (July 1986): 235–45.

7. Julian Barnes, Before She Met Me (London: Picador, 1986). Page references will be included in parenthesis in the text.

8. On changing views of gender since the 1960s see Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell, and John Lee, “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity,” in The Making of Masculinities. The New Men's Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987) 63–100, and Arthur Brittan, Masculinity and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) ch. 7. The latter also contains a comprehensive overview of work on masculinity from a sociological perspective.

9. On male violence and sexuality see Tony Eardley, “Violence and Sexuality,” in The Sexuality of Men, eds. Andy Metcalf and Martin Humphries (London and Sydney: Pluto P, 1985) 86–109.

10. In “Violence and Sexuality,” Eardley says: “If we look at the more extreme instances of male violence against women we often expect to find psychopaths and sadists. In reality, research into domestic violence and rape suggests that batterers and rapists are not necessarily specially disturbed, come from all walks of life, and in most respects are ordinary men. What does come out clearly … is that the wider the gulf between a man's notion of proper masculine character and behaviour and his own perception of himself, the more likely he is to be violent. The more ill-equipped to deal with these contradictions emotionally, the more likely he will react to any challenge by lashing out” (106). It is worth noting that there are several allusions to a possible physiological explanation to Graham's behaviour. Jack introduces the scientific theory of the three-tiered human brain with superimposed layers dating from different periods of evolution but such that the highest, most sophisticated layer can come into conflict with the other more primitive layers (75–76). Graham himself takes up this theory and uses it to explain to himself his increasingly obsessive and uncontrollable behaviour. While not dismissing this view from within the novel, for the purpose of our argument here we have concentrated on cultural and psychological issues.

11. Calderón, for example, has no reticence in exploring the plight of women in his plays, though they are relegated by being victims not protagonists. In connection with this see Thomas O'Connor, “El médico de su honra y la victimización de la mujer: la crítica social de Calderón de la Barca”, Actas del séptimo congreso de la Asociación International de Hispanistas (Venice, August 1980; Rome: Bulzoni, 1982) 783–89.