L'Adultera

[This page by Patricia Howe]

L’Adultera (1882)

L’Adultera was written between December 1879 and April 1880, serialised as a novella in 1880, and published in book form in 1882, when it is described as a novel. It has been translated into English as The Woman Taken in Adultery (see English translations, below). It is based on events in the life of Therese von Ravené, which were known to Fontane, and is the first of his novels to have a contemporary subject and setting.

Fontane took his title from a painting attributed to Tintoretto of the woman taken in adultery appearing before Christ. References to the painting frame the story, from the beginning, when the heroine’s husband buys a copy of it for his private gallery, to the end, when he sends her a miniature of it as a Christmas present. The miniature is concealed in an apple, echoing the allusions to the Fall that recur throughout the novel. Between the references to the painting lies the story of Melanie de Caparoux, a young woman of aristocratic, Swiss-French origin, married at seventeen, after her father dies leaving only debts, to Ezechiel van der Straaten, who is twenty-five years older. Van der Straaten, son of a rich father, is a successful Berlin financier, embarrassingly forthright but generous, especially to those whom society neglects, such as servants and elderly spinsters. After ten years of marriage Melanie is ‘more his pride than his joy’; she enjoys the trappings of wealth and social success conferred by her marriage, but, indulged and restless, she has a vague desire to be tested: as she watches snowflakes falling outside her window, she longs to fall and rise as they seem to do.

Melanie’s ‘fall’ occurs when Van der Straaten takes into his home Ebenezer Rubehn, the educated, well-travelled son of a Frankfurt banker, who is sent to Berlin to establish a branch of the family bank. An affair develops between Rubehn and Melanie, she becomes pregnant and decides to leave Van der Straaten and their two young daughters, and to escape to Italy with Rubehn. There follows divorce from Van der Straaten, marriage to Rubehn and the birth of their daughter. After an interval the new couple return to Berlin, where, with a few exceptions, the society in which Melanie had previously moved, shuns them. When Rubehn’s business fails, however, they earn the respect of those around them through their hard work and their devotion to each other.

While L’Adultera shares some characteristics of the ‘novel of adultery’ and has been seen as a forerunner to Effi Briest, Melanie is unique among Fontane’s more aristocratic heroines in that she successfully defies societal pressures, although this is at the cost of being ostracised and of losing her daughters by Van der Straaten. Among the more dramatic moments of the novel are her sudden confrontation with Van der Straaten as she is about to leave his house for ever, and her later meeting with the daughters she has deserted. Their distress at being abandoned by wife and mother and Melanie’s sense of rejection are set against her overwhelming need for self-fulfilment, which she finds in her new life. As the material and social conditions of her life decline from the pampered luxury of Van der Straaten’s house in Berlin, with its private art gallery and lavish hospitality, and of his villa outside the city with its fashionable glasshouse and exotic plants, through temporary lodgings in Venice and Switzerland, to the modest life she shares with Rubehn in Berlin, Melanie discovers new strengths and capabilities.

Melanie’s aristocratic sense of self-worth and her capacity for justifying her actions – if only to herself – are matched by the belief of both her husbands in their ability to increase the financial and social success to which they are accustomed. Rubehn embarks on his career in Berlin with the confidence and sophistication that his background confer; Van der Straaten displays his prosperity – literally, in his art collection –, and relishes his connection with government, seeing in it the possibility of social advancement. There are suggestions that both Van der Straaten and Rubehn are of Jewish origin, but have been baptised, a step sometimes motivated by pragmatism or ambition, since certain professions and positions would otherwise have been closed to them. Pragmatism prevails over pride when Rubehn’s business fails and he accepts that he will have to find employment, and when Van der Straaten acknowledges Melanie’s choice with a final gift, a gesture that may be seen as conciliatory or ironic. By contrast, Van der Straaten’s equally pragmatic, but less generous brother-in-law, fearing for his reputation or his prospects, forbids his wife to visit or to receive Melanie, who is her sister.

The aspirations of the socially and politically ambitious bourgeoisie, with its desire for wealth, social acceptance and public recognition, its taste for art and music, and for the company of artists and musicians, furnish the backdrop to the heroine’s personal crisis. They contrast with the values of the – sometimes impoverished – nobility and of ordinary people, such as servants, who can overlook or forgive Melanie’s transgression, if not condone it. These contrasting attitudes characterise a society in flux, informed by social and economic change, and by a complex and shifting mixture of traditional values and modern sensibilities. In Van der Straaten’s circle of acquaintances the fear that personal ambitions or public recognition may not be realised is underlined by discussions about the political situation, the Franco-German crisis of relations in 1875, the Anglo-German clash of interests in the near east, the possibility of war and rumours circulating on the Stock Exchange.

In contrast to the narrators of many late 19th-century novels, Fontane’s narrator neither moralises nor implies a political bias, but maintains a humane, relatively neutral stance. The characters express their opinions and feelings, justify their behaviour and freely pass judgement on each other in private conversations and in the course of social gatherings. The combination of different voices and attitudes creates a balanced view that leaves space for the reader’s own interpretation of the behaviour and beliefs of individual characters and of the society they inhabit. With the discretion demanded by late 19th-century sensibilities, the development of the affair emerges through allusion, metaphor and metonym. The author’s awareness of the attitudes and anxieties of individuals and of social groups, conveyed both in conversations and in almost understated narratorial asides, together with the authenticity of his portrayal of Berlin and its environs, the topical references and precise knowledge of political and social developments, introduce the reader to the features that will become the hallmarks of his realism in subsequent works.

English Translations

‘The Woman Taken in Adultery’ and ‘The Poggenpuhl Family’, trans. by Gabriele Annan (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1979), pp. 1-129; with notes, pp. 229f. (re-issued 1995)

L’Adultera, trans. by Lynn R. Eliason (New York: Peter Lang, 1990)

Further Reading in English

Nicholas van Passavant, ‘Performing the Philistine: Gossip as a Narrative Device and a Strategy for Reflection on Anti-Semitism in Theodor Fontane’s L’Adultera’, in Fontane in the Twenty-First Century, ed. by John B. Lyon and Brian Tucker (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2019), pp. 48-62

John Ward, Jews in Business and their Representation in German Literature 1827-1934 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 113-30

Further Reading in German

Winfried Jung, Bildergespräche. Zur Funktion von Kunst und Kultur in Theodor Fontanes “L’Adultera” (Stuttgart: M & P Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1991)

Franziska Schößler, ‘Der jüdische Börsianer und das unmögliche Projekt der Assilimation: Zu Fontane’s Roman L’Adultera’, in Poetische Ordnungen. Zur Erzählprosa des deutschen Realismus, ed. by Ulrich Kittstein and Stephanie Kugler (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2007), pp. 93-119; revised version: Franziska Schößler, ‘Der jüdische Börsianer und das unmögliche Projekt der Assilimation: L’Adultera von Theodor Fontane’, in Franziska Schößler, Börsenfieber und Kaufrausch. Ökonomie, Judentum und Weiblichkeit bei Theodor Fontane, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler und Emile Zola (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2009), pp. 39-67