In British legal terminology, adultery used to be called “criminal conversation.” Until the middle of the 19th century, one had to prove that one’s spouse had committed adultery before one could sue for divorce – by private petition to Parliament.
The Wife as Her Husband’s Property
It was the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act that made it possible in Great Britain to sue for divorce in a court of law. However, the 1857 act did not apply to Ireland. Legal practice there thus remained unchanged: A man who had sex with a married woman could be sued by her husband for financial compensation. This was because the law regarded adultery as a crime of property; an extramarital relationship turned the wife into ‘damaged goods.’ In Ireland, it also remained impossible to sue for divorce in court.
As the wife was legally subordinate to her husband, she could not sue him for adultery. If a woman petitioned Parliament for divorce – which was rare – she was not required to show that her husband had previously been condemned in court. However, one thing remained the same: The Irish Press turned all divorce proceedings into a scandal.
Ulysses: Extramarital Sex Remains Unspectacular
Joyce was highly critical of the institution of marriage. In his play Exiles (1917), he had depicted a complex network of relationships in order to thematize the twin questions of self-determination and freedom within a long-term relationship.
In Ulysses, the “Calypso” chapter already suggests that the Bloom’s marriage is no simple idyll of togetherness: Leopold hides a mysterious note in his hatband and also wonders about the contents of a suspicious letter addressed to his wife. We will see later that Molly does indeed have a lover. Leopold, far from daring and generally not a ‘typical’ man, refrains from interfering and practices tolerance. Clearly, he does not regard Molly as his property, but as an individual whose personal freedom he tries to respect as best he can.
Such a relaxed attitude toward extramarital sex would long remain inacceptable in traditionally Catholic Ireland. It took until 1981 for “criminal conversation” to be struck from the statute books, and divorce was only made legal in 1996.
Table of Contents
- James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Law: An Introduction
- Obscenity and Literature: Legal Context around 1915
- James, Nora, and the “Konkubinatsverbot”
- Adultery as a Crime of Property
- Doubt as a Virtue
- Joyce Files a Lawsuit in Zurich
- Dying Without a Safety Net
- Ulysses Outlawed in the U.S.
- A Victory for Free Speech
- Suicide as a Crime
- A Difficult Return: Stricter Migration Laws
- A Defamation Case Against the BBC
Sources: Luddy, Maria and Mary O’Dowd. Marriage in Ireland, 1660–1925. Cambridge UP, 2020. | Urquhart, Diane. “Irland’s Criminal Conversations.” Études irlandaises, vol. 37, no. 2, 2012, pp. 65–80. | Utell, Janine. “Criminal Conversation: Marriage, Adultery, and the Law in Joyce’s Works.” Joyce and the Law, edited by Jonathan Goldman, UP of Florida, 2017, pp. 15–30.
