• 1 “Ik zal u nooit verlaten want mijne vrouw kan mij niet voldoen zoals gij”. Testimony of Catherine D (...)

1On May 14^th, 1887, Catherine Delamotte declared in front of a judge that she had overheard the neighbour saying to his mistress “I shall never leave you, because my wife cannot satisfy me quite like you can”1. Catherine did so at the request of the man’s wife, who had been filing for divorce and needed hers and other testimonies to endorse her claims of her husband’s debauchery. Several witnesses in this case alluded to the husband’s adulterous behaviour, making it not only one of the very few nineteenth-century divorces requested by a woman based on adultery alone, but also one in which the focus on male sexual needs and demands is remarkable. Although Catherine’s story in court was clearly one of contempt for the adulterous husband, the ease with which she and other witnesses related male adultery to sexual satisfaction shows to which extent both were connected in popular discourse. Moreover, it appears to have been current to depict the “betrayed wife” in this case as a helpless victim, whereas both her husband and his mistress were represented as active agents.

• 2 Stone, L., Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987, London, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 7.
• 3 Phillips, R., Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society, New York, Cambridge Univers (...)

2The mere existence of these testimonies casts doubts on historians’ conviction that, until well into the twentieth century “ Adultery by the husband (...) was generally regarded as a regrettable but understandable foible, rather than a serious threat to a marriage, and therefore was something best ignored by a prudent wife”2. That is, the narrative of the various witness accounts do echo the nineteenth-century sexual double standard, but simultaneously contain a protest against the legal and material consequences of this double standard for the deceived wife by pleading for her right to end her marriage with an adulterous man. What this paper aims to do, is involving litigants and witnesses in the story of the nineteenth-century divorces on the ground of adultery. In doing so, the strong gender-dichotomous image of adultery as codified in the Civil Code can be held up against the light of its application in legal practice and the consequences of this “double standard” on gendered differences in the access individuals had to the divorce court can be scrutinized3.

• 4 Adultery could also be persecuted through the penal code. Here, only its use as a “cause de divorce(...)
• 5 “Lorsqu’il aura tenu sa concubine dans la maison commune”. Servais, J., and Mechelynck, E., Les cod (...)
• 6 Sumner Holmes, A., “The Double Standard in the English Divorce Laws, 1857-1923”, Law and Social Inq (...)
• 7 A great distinction was made – as will be shown later – between male and female forms of sensuality (...)
• 8 Sumner Holmes, A., “The Double Standard…”, op. cit., p. 611.
• 9 In the nineteenth century, (bourgeois) Christian women were put on a pedestal and hailed as “domest (...)
• 10 Battan, J. F., “The “Rights” of Husbands and the “Duties” of Wives: Power and Desire in the America (...)
• 11 Gowing, L., Domestic Dangers. Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London, Oxford, Oxford Universit (...)

3Indeed, the rules regarding adultery outlined by the Code Civil uncover a striking difference between “male” and “female” adultery4. Not only did the creators of the Code deem it necessary to create two separate articles, one defining a husband’s the other a wife’s right to demand a divorce on the grounds of adultery, the content of both articles greatly diverged. Art. 229 stated that “a husband has the right to file for divorce on the grounds of his wife’s adultery”, the next article defined a woman’s right to do the same, but narrowed her possibilities considerably by only allowing her to demand a divorce if her husband “kept a concubine under the marital roof”5. Contemporary arguments to maintain this “double standard” entailed not only the greater danger that female adultery was to the patriarchal society, that is, the very real risk of bringing illegitimate children into the marriage, but also the “idea that a husband had a property interest in his wife”6 resulting in the impossibility for a man to tolerate his wife’s adultery in order to retain his own status in the community. But most importantly, the distinction between male and female adultery was based on perceived “natural” differences in male and female sexuality7. Whereas men were believed to be “physically incapable of chastity”8, women were expected to forgive their husbands’ adultery because of their tolerant and self-sacrificial nature9. With regard to female adultery, the opposite was true: since women were considered sexually “dormant”, female adulterous acts were necessarily “unnatural”10, and since male tolerance was not only not expected but also despised, cuckolded husbands were socially pressured to react vigorously (and violently) to their wife’s behaviour11.

• 12 Ireland, R.M., “Frenzied and Fallen Females: Women and Sexual Dishonor in the Nineteenth-Century Un (...)
• 13 Gowing, L., Domestic dangers…, op. cit., p. 195.
• 14 On the function of legal codes as a means of controlling social behaviour and preserving community (...)

4The difference in legal stipulations on adultery was, therefore, not a matter of degree, but rather one of kind. It was not simply the fact that female adultery allegedly caused more serious harm to the family and was therefore more severely punished, but rather that the mere possibility of a sexual, sensual woman posed a threat to the community and had to be precluded12. As Laura Gowing suggests, the problem was that “adultery involved a certain assertion of female autonomy. At the very least, it meant the privileging of female sexual desire over marital stability”13. The Civil Code, then, was designed precisely to protect that stability14. The articles regulating divorce were part of that endeavour, even if their direct purpose was to dissolve a marriage. By defining and punishing the acts that were thought to endanger the marital structure, these articles cemented not only the discourse on marital rights and wrongs but also norms of (married) masculinity and femininity.

• 15 Beauthier, R., La répression de l’adultère en France du XVI^e au XVIII^e siècle. De quelques lectures (...)
• 16 Art. 212 : “Les époux se doivent mutuellement fidélité, secours, assistance”, Art. 213 : “Le mari d (...)

5The message implicit in the separate rules on male and female adultery was not so much that men and women should be treated differently, but rather that they were different, and, as a corollary, that adultery by women was a real vice to be dreaded but adultery by men was a (legal) non-issue. That is, masculinity and adultery were regarded as mutually exclusive terms15. Looking at the articles in the Civil Code defining wives’ and husbands’ marital duties, this did indeed make sense. Even though art. 212 stated that they “owed each other mutual fidelity”, the following article made blatantly clear how fidelity was to be interpreted according to one’s gender16. Whereas a husband’s fidelity consisted of his “protecting” his wife, her fidelity encompassed “obedience” to her husband. As a result, a wife’s infidelity entailed every action that went against her husband’s will, while a husband’s infidelity meant his refusal to protect her. Art. 229 and 230, then, were particular translations of these marital duties unto a specific situation, and the specification that a man was only to be accused of adultery when he kept his mistress in the marital house was the logical outcome of a structure in which being a faithful husband consisted of providing for and protecting the family rather than (sexual) monogamy.

• 17 Gustave Beltjens was a counsellor at the Court of Cassation at the turn of the century.
• 18 Beltjens, G., Encyclopédie du droit civil belge, Liège, Bruylant, 1905, p. 285.
• 19 “Il y a différence entre le mari et la femme. (...) On donne pour cause, les conséquences plus grav (...)
• 20 Professor and vice chancellor at the university of Liège, member of the late nineteenth-century com (...)
• 21 Thiry, V., Cours de droit civil professé à l’université de Liège, Liège, H. Vaillant-Carmanne, 1892 (...)

6Despite this specificity and distinctiveness, arts. 229 and 230 were open to interpretation. In the Encyclopédie du droit civil belge (Encyclopaedia of Belgian civil law) by Gustave Beltjens17, we find the definition of adultery refined and narrowed down: adultery, it states, could only be performed when married, had to be intentional and supposed sexual relations with an “accomplice”18. This view was echoed in courses taught at various Belgian universities. As different jurists struggled to pin down a sound definition of adultery, the differences between its male and female form became even more marked. In 1882 a student at the university of Louvain noted in his civil law course that “there is a difference between the husband and the wife” because one had to take into account “the more serious consequences of the wife’s child”19. Published courses on civil law and the aforementioned encyclopaedia pointed to the same divergence in more nuanced terms. Victor Thiry20 commented that – in principle – male and female adultery were equally inadmissible but because of the inherent risk to the state and the familial patrimony female adultery had to be dealt with in a more severe way21.

• 22 “Ce n’est pas l’infidélité du mari que la loi a voulu punir, mais c’est l’outrage lancé par lui à s (...)
• 23 “Sous les yeux de la famille”. Thiry, V., Cours de droit civil…, op. cit., p. 319.

7Despite his assertion that male and female adultery were equally despicable, however, Thiry also acknowledged intrinsic differences between adulterous wives and husbands. Most notably, in his published course book – as in the encyclopaedia – male adultery was considered unimportant unless it became an insult to the betrayed wife. For Beltjens, this was connected to the space in which the adultery took place: “It is not the husband’s infidelity that the law has aimed to punish”, he stated, “but it is the insult launched at his wife by choosing the marital home as the place for his misconduct”22. He went even so far to state that when a husband provided his mistress with an apartment or house other than the one he had indicated as the marital home, this would not constitute adultery. Thiry put rather less stress on the judicial question over what constituted the marital home, but accepted any sexual or amorous splurge “ within the family’s eyesight “ as injurious enough to constitute a ground on which to base a divorce claim against an adulterous husband23.

• 24 Egedius Rudolf Nicolaus Arntz was a professor of law at the university of Brussels.
• 25 “Les torts des deux époux sont certes les mêmes ; donc le droit qui en résulte pour la partie lésée (...)
• 26 Nathalie Ferket notes a similar disposition towards husbands and wives in the penal law (Ferket, N. (...)
• 27 Beltjens, G., Encyclopédie…, op. cit., p. 285.

8The course in civil law by E.R.N. Arntz24 formed a notable exception to the majority of late nineteenth century interpretations of adultery. Arntz vigorously rejected any moral differences between male and female adultery and pleaded for the abolition of the legal ones. “The wrongs of both spouses are certainly the same” he argued, “therefore, the justice resulting from them for the injured party also has to be the same”25. However, Arntz seems to have been quite alone with this opinion. In general – in legal publications as in legal practice – the presupposition that men and women were intrinsically different and therefore had diverging rights and duties towards their spouses was maintained26. As a result, female adultery – as Beltjens noted – “can be established by a number of presumptions which does not leave any doubt in the judge’s mind”27, which would logically lead to a far greater amount of female adultery cases than male ones.

• 28 Meulders, C., and Matthijs, K., “On ne se jouera pas du divorce ! Echtscheiding in de negentiende e (...)
• 29 Muys, E., Vrouw en (echt)scheiding in de 19^e-20^e eeuw: een socio-juridische studie, met raadpleging (...)
• 30 Ibid., p. 130.

9The preponderance of cases based on simple female adultery is also confirmed by sheer numbers. The catholic society of nineteenth-century Belgium hardly allowed marital break-ups, which limited the number of actual divorces28. Between 1860 and 1900, the yearly number of demands for divorce evolved steadily from 60 to 826, ten percent of which were usually rejected from the outset, and another ten percent was not carried out. At the end of the nineteenth century, only 0,5 to one percent of the Belgian marriages ended in divorce each year29. More detailed information on the grounds and initiators of these divorces are not available on a national level, but the case-study of Mechelen by Eva Muys can give a general idea of the divorce practice in Flanders. Her findings show that, although for both men and women, violence and injuries were the most important complaints on which to base a request for divorce, adultery figured in a large portion of the cases initiated by husbands, while art. 230 of the Civil Code was largely absent in divorces requested by women. 20% of the husbands filing for divorce did so, on the legal ground of adultery, whereas in wives’ requests, adultery was always conflated with other injurious acts30.

• 31 “Relaties met andere sexe”. Muys does not mention homosexual adulterous relations, neither seems th (...)
• 32 Ibid., p. 132.

10The divergence between uses of male and female adultery becomes even clearer when we move away from adultery as a strictly legal term and consider what Muys categorizes as “relations with individuals of the opposite sex”31, entailing suspicions of adultery as well. 20% of the wives filing for divorce mentioned this form of adultery in their requests, while 37% of the husbands did the same32. Altogether, these numbers suggest not only that wives were less likely to file for divorce when not endangered by marital violence, but also – judged by the high percentage of male initiated divorces on the sole ground of adultery – that female adultery was considered a decisively serious offence by the legislator as well as petitioners.

• 33 The documents are held at the National Archives in Beveren-Waas: Archief van de rechtbank van eerst (...)

11What follows is based on a small sample of divorce cases brought before the court of first instance of Ghent between 1885 and 1890. The sample consists of approximately 120 divorce cases, 60 of which also contain witnesses’ testimonies33. These documents show how divorce cases heavily relied on fixed legal formulas and how “court language” both of jurists and laymen was steeped in the prescriptive discourse of the gender-dichotomous bourgeois morale on which the Napoleonic code was based, but also how those involved in court dealings managed to tweak and turn this discourse in order to make it compliant with their own community norms. Although the sample used is too small to make any statistic claims, its composition largely corresponds to Muys’ figures. Men and women seem to have been equally likely to file for a divorce, but the grounds on which these requests were based, differed. Whereas the majority of male petitioners based their claims on their spouses’ (non-recurrent) adultery female plaintiffs mostly relied on a cluster of complaints, mostly containing acts of violence and of adultery and/or severe insult.

• 34 Lenters goes even so far to state that, in the courtroom, two divorces are being performed, a legal (...)
• 35 “Que ces faits constituent le délit d’adultère”. Zwendelaar, J.H., Code formulaire du divorce et de (...)
• 36 “Ik was in dat huis geroepen om het overspel van Marie Thys vast te stellen”. Testimony of Jules Lo (...)

12The interpretations of adultery in the Civil Code and in divorce requests only indicate how legal practitioners defined marital infidelity. But divorces were not simply a legal argument – litigants and their environment (stepping forward as witnesses) participated in the process of breaking the marital bond and brought their own understandings of infidelity into the courtroom-arguments34. Looking at divorce requests and witness narratives, it is striking how rarely the term “adultery” is used. In the requests, constructed by lawyers, based on their “clients’” stories, the word only emerges in the fixed formula at the end of the document: “That these facts constitute the offence of adultery”, or in the context of false accusations of adultery35. If the term “adultery” could not be quoted from an injurious spouse, it did not appear in the documents. In witnesses’ testimonies the term is also largely absent: apart from the rare policeman called into a house to “establish the crime of adultery”36, none of the witnesses seems to have felt compelled to use the legal terminology.

• 37 “Qui de notoriété publique passait pour sa maîtresse”. Request by Marie Amelie Verheuge, wife of Gu (...)
• 38 “Au vu et au su de tout son entourage”. Request by Mathilde Van Loo, wife of Théophile Geenens, Aug (...)
• 39 Beltjens even stated in his Encyclopédie that a divorce on the ground of male adultery actually was (...)
• 40 “Qu’elle vit publiquement avec un militaire”. Request by Joseph van Wemmel, husband of Julie Thienp (...)
• 41 “Sa femme se conduisait souvent du scandale dans le village (…) ceux-ci se sont ouvertement moqués (...)

13The absence of the term adultery does, however, not indicate an absence of references to marital infidelity in litigants’ and witnesses’ narratives. Deceived wives and husbands alike referred to their spouses’ unfaithfulness but usually laid more stress on the publicity of adultery than adulterous acts per se, mentioning a woman who “by public knowledge passed as his mistress”37 or stating that a husband visited prostitutes while “his complete entourage was fully aware of it”38. The problem seems to have been the injury of making a woman into a deceived wife before the community, rather than actual infidelity. For female litigants, this made legal sense, too, since divorce requests could not be based on simple male adultery and cuckolded women had to fall back on art. 231 and present their husbands’ infidelity as a severe injury if they wanted to include adulterous acts into their list of complaints39. For cuckolded husbands, on the contrary, it was quite possible to demand a marital break up on the grounds of simple adultery, but they too tended to emphasize the publicity of their wives’ debauchery instead of the mere act of adultery. One husband complained that his wife “publicly lives with a service man”40, while another pointed to the consequences of his wife’s lack of discretion, stating that the neighbours “openly made fun of him” because “his wife often behaved scandalously in the village”41.

• 42 “Des maisons mal-famées”. Request by Mathilde Van Loo, wife of Théophile Geenens, August 5, 1890.
• 43 “souvent sortait de chez elle (…) sans songer à son enfant de six ans”. Request by Victor Charles D (...)
• 44 “Abandonnée à une vie de désordre”. Request by Victor Theophile Leon Van Hecke, husband of Marie St (...)
• 45 “Eene familiariteit”. Testimony of Charles de Vogelaar, in the case Marie Brant versus Remi Roels, (...)

14In all of these divorce requests, adultery is never explicitly mentioned as a term. The narratives entail lovers, “ill-reputed houses”42, a wife who “often went out without thinking of her six-year-old child”43 and one “losing oneself in a life of disorder”44, but only the husband of this last woman actually included the term adultery in his request. The multiplicity of words used shows that adultery was to a great extent a technical, juridical term eschewed by non-jurists who preferred to comment upon their spouses’ and peers’ sexual or amorous escapades within their community rather than in the courtroom, using their own vocabulary (that could be both more explicit and less definite than the legal terms). Witnesses’ narratives show the same vast vocabulary, pointing to a wide range of acts and characteristics understood as incompatible with marital fidelity and considered as a ground for marital break up by spouses and their peers. One witness even considered the fact that she could recognize “a certain familiarity” between an adulterous spouse and his mistress severe enough a matter to be mentioned in the witness box45.

• 46 Testimony of François Degieter, in the case Marie Louise De Loof versus Emile Joseph Ghijsbrecht, J (...)
• 47 Regina Schulte shows in her study on bourgeois men and prostitution that the perception of prostitu (...)
• 48 “Un mal devant servir de remède à un mal plus grand encore”. Thiry, V., Cours de droit civil…, op. (...)

15Included in both litigants’ and witnesses’ stories were not only a spouse’s adultery, but also (false) allegations of infidelity and inappropriate public behaviour, such as frequenting pubs with other women46. What was reacted against by the whole community, then, is not infidelity in and of itself – although that too was repudiated – but rather the choice for a “wrong” lover or a life outside the normative pattern of the monogamous heterosexual relationship, such as affairs with servants, minors or prostitutes47. When husbands or wives chose to leave their spouse in order to form a new family with an “acceptable” lover, this was considered as the creation of a new marital constellation rather than the undermining of an existing one. Granted, in these cases too witnesses chose sides and deceived spouses pictured their adulterous partners as the sole wrongdoers in order to obtain a divorce, but in these cases of “stabile adultery” it was blatantly clear that a divorce could indeed be “an evil serving to remedy a still greater evil”48.

• 49 On masculinity and language, see Kamensky, J., “Talk like a Man: Speech, Power and Masculinity in E (...)
• 50 Request by Victor Charles D’Hoosche, husband of Anaïs Billen, September 10, 1889.
• 51 “Elle cassa et brisa la vaisselle”. Request by Severin Butaye, husband of Pascaline Vande Velde, Ma (...)
• 52 “Dat zij verplicht is de scheiding aan te vragen”. Testimony of Philomène Herpelinck, in the case A (...)
• 53 Request by Ernest Hooghstoel, husband of Emma Van Lancker, May 5, 1883.

16In spite of the double standard included in the legal code, then, female and male adultery were treated in remarkably similar ways by various participants in the divorce proceedings. Nevertheless, adulterous and cuckolded husbands were imagined as different from their female counterparts. In the divorce requests brought forward by men, the victim-role was interpreted in a decidedly “male” voice49. Contrary to deceived wives, for which a self-representation as helpless victim was often used as a way of obtaining a divorce from an allegedly cruel adulterous husband, cuckolded men tended to present themselves as the defenders of their family and the active exposers of their wives’ marital unsuitability, mostly by pointing out their lack of motherly care for the children50. One husband even added that his wife “broke the dishes”51. Whereas women often hid behind the legal rules, claiming they “felt obliged”52 to demand a divorce (usually to avoid their husbands’ violence), men presented their divorce request as their personal decision to contribute to the cementing of the moral and legal codes of the community, embarrassed as they were because their wives adopted a behaviour “that compromised their honour”53.

• 54 Request by Marie Amelie Verheuge, wife of Gustave Joseph Hye, October 13, 1888.
• 55 On the functions and workings of gossip in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Teb (...)
• 56 “Zekere Philomene, die bij Tytgat inwoonde”. Testimony of Marie Vleurinck, in the case Marie Thérès (...)

17From these diverging positions as active or passive victims, the “offenders” and their motives were presented in specific ways. A first distinction made by both litigants and witnesses was the importance of the adulterous spouse’s accomplice in deciding whether the infidelity was to be considered as a problematic form of debauchery or as a new pseudo-marital formation. A large amount of deceived women expressed to be offended by the fact that their husbands chose the “wrong” accomplice for their infidelity: affairs with “femmes de mauvaise vie”54 or with (often very young) maids were understood as a severe insult, whereas long-lasting relationships with mature women did not figure as adultery, but rather as a way of showing that the original marriage had already been dissolved by the defendant. In witnesses’ accounts, a similar distinction becomes apparent in the way in which adulterous affairs were described. Whereas new “stabile” relationships were merely mentioned, affairs with “wrong” women where obviously stories rehearsed in community gossip and could be narrated in very elaborate versions in court55. Many of these stories were mere hearsay turning into community lore, such as that of a husband who was known to buy his mistress clothes and go on holidays with her. The witness recounting this story hardly knew the litigants, but considered herself a valuable witness because she had spoken to “a certain Philomène who lived in the husband’s house”56.

• 57 Zwendelaar, J.H., Code formulaire…, op. cit., p. 32.
• 58 Being branded as a “cuckold” could have far reaching consequences: Gowing, L., “Gender and the Lang (...)

18As an “active victim” of infidelity, men presented a very different construction of the link between masculinity and adultery: not as a “natural” couple, but as a complete oxymoron. The divorce requests presented by deceived men show a paradoxical relation between male “victims” and legal practice. On the one hand, the great majority of cases in which an adulterous wife figured consisted of a simple and clear statement of the correctional court in which the adultery had been proven57. The husband himself barely speaks in these documents, and the proceedings seem very simple and straightforward. In the more elaborate cases, not supported by “proof” of adultery provided by the police however, husbands were compelled to portray their wives as the only offenders, which was difficult to obtain without a self representation as an innocent victim. Similarly, whereas in cases of male adultery, claims that a wife could not fulfil her husbands’ sexual needs could be included as a logical assumption that would hardly harm her reputation, the reverse case had to be carefully crafted as proof of a wife’s “unnatural” sexuality in order to remain “useful” (and harmless) to the claimant58.

• 59 For a (quantitative) cross-section of the characteristics of male adultery from 1870-1940 in France (...)
• 60 “Que puisqu’elle ne lui donnait pas d’enfants, il fallait bien qu’il en eut chez d’autres femmes”. (...)

19The compatibility of adultery with femininity, then, seemed to differ greatly from the way in which masculinity and adultery were linked59. Not only were men considered “natural” offenders and women “natural” victims of sexual and marital infidelity, the very way in which one could be unfaithful to a spouse depended on one’s gender. These community-directed interpretations of adultery did however not correspond to the differentiation made by the Civil Code. The specification that only the housing of a concubine constituted male adultery, for one, is absent in witnesses’ and litigants’ narratives. Rather, typically “male” forms of adultery were described as active, connected with lust or were – on the contrary – very rational. One husband was recounted to have told his wife he had taken a mistress “because she did not give him any children” and that therefore “he damn well needed to have them with other women”60. Female adultery, on the other hand, was often represented as a story of unnaturalness and derailed motherhood.

• 61 Beauthier, R., La répression de l’adultère…, op. cit, p. 229.
• 62 “Ik zal er niet meer bij slapen”. Testimony of Theodorus Martens, in the case Benoite Hevens versus (...)
• 63 Being a part of a group of pub goers and drinking was an essential feature of manhood, see Frank, M (...)
• 64 “Omdat zij te oud voor hem was”. Testimony of Sophia Gypens, in the case Ursule Burmans versus Jose (...)

20The representation of men as “natural” offenders in adultery begs the question of the mere possibility of male marital infidelity. That is, if men were really considered to be polygamous “by nature”, one could possibly argue – as Régine Beauthier does – that male adultery was, until fairly recently, impossible to associate to guilt of adultery61. The fact that witnesses accepted sexual infidelity as masculine behaviour did however not mean they approved of adulterous acts. Rather, witnesses’ and litigants’ accounts alike pointed to the incompatibility of norms of masculinity and marital expectations. The (male) witness recounting how a husband bragged about his extra-marital conquests (apparently stating that he “would not sleep with her [his wife] anymore”62) on the one hand clearly disapproved of the man’s behaviour as a husband, but was at the same time one of the pub-mates encouraging him to display the rugged, “masculine” behaviour of which sexual libertinism was a part63. And the witness stating that a husband charged with adultery had likely done so because his wife “was too old for him”64 similarly underscored the perceived normality of a man’s need for a young sexual partner, but simultaneously showed his contempt for adulterous behaviour precisely by making such a statement in court in order to support a request for divorce by his wife.

• 65 Raewyn Connell provided an analytical tool to grasp this paradoxical idea of masculinity as consist (...)

21Instead of providing a clear-cut picture of the experience of the failing marriage, then, these documents rather show how expected and prescribed gendered behaviour were not synonymous and often even collided, leading to scenes of sexualized conflict. When focussing on prescribed or codified and expected masculine behaviour, it becomes clear that both could be opposites and that – in court – this opposition could be played out to either obtain or prevent a divorce. The recounted pub-scenes are the most explicit examples of this “play” on gender-identities, but similar exaggerations and parodies were used in other narratives. Husbands could “use” legal and community norms and their paradoxical nature to be exonerated from a role as a vicious adulterer. On the other hand, male “victims” of adultery could allude to the same paradox in order to avoid being considered “weak”65.

• 66 On male homosociability, see e.g. Volger, G. and Von Welck, K. (eds.), Männerbande, Männerbunde, zu (...)

22But the paradox of marital masculinity was not a matter of friction between “legal norms” on the one hand and “community practice” on the other – rather, expectations towards masculinity were intrinsically inconsistent, especially when masculinity has to be constructed in cooperation with a woman – as was necessarily the case for married men. Firstly, the legal norms – though seemingly straightforward – show the contradiction of “mutual aid” versus a vision of the protective man and his protected wife. Secondly, community-expectations entailed the simultaneous membership of married men to both heterosocial and homosocial groups, requiring them not to simply adjust their behaviour according to the “spaces” they occupied at any given moment, but also to continuously fit the norms of both spaces at the same time66.

• 67 On the companionate marriage of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, see e.g. Davidoff, L. and Ha (...)

23In most cases of adultery, men can be observed trying to juggle two different strands of heteronormativity, on the one hand trying to fit into the late-nineteenth century model of “companionate marriage”, while on the other hand trying to preserve the patriarchal right over their wives’ bodies67. Linked to these contradictory demands on an institutional level were equally paradoxical expectations towards husbands as emotional and sexual beings. Parallel with these diverging identities as “companionate husband” and dominant pater familias were gendered conceptions of fidelity and desire that, on the one hand, tied together different forms of masculinity and – on the other – enlarged the divide between male and female married identity.

• 68 On conceptions of male sexual “needs” and young women, see e.g. Dubinsky, K., Improper Advances. Ra (...)
• 69 “Gij moet het toch verdragen, zij is een schoon meisken, gij zijt ne vuilen dweil. Zij is een treff (...)
• 70 “Qu’elle est devenu servante dans un petit cabaret”. Request by Pierre Anteunis, husband of Marie H (...)
• 71 “Dat zij haar tenemaal geheel ontkleed had”. Testimony of Alfred Schelstraete, in the case Isidore (...)

24The “double standard” regarding adultery, then, was not the mere consequence of a dichotomous understanding of sex, but an active agent in its creation. By providing wives and husbands with highly diverging means to react against a spouse’s infidelity, arts. 229 and 230 of the Civil Code helped to create gendered identities grounded in sex-specific understandings of lust (and lack thereof). The references to sexual satisfaction and the importance of the attractiveness of one’s spouse in the cases considered show how both litigants and witnesses understood men and women as “sexual beings” in very different ways. In cases of male adultery, many cheating husbands seem to have explained their behaviour in terms of sexual attraction, usually looking for women considerably younger than their wives68. One husband even told his wife: “You must surely understand, she [his mistress] is a beautiful girl, you are a filthy rag. She is a reasonable person, you are a foul scandal, I have never felt any love for you, I am sorry I ever married you”69. When (supposedly) adulterous women were described as lustful, however, their sexuality seems to have been unrelated to the specific qualities of their accomplice (or their husband). One woman was accused of becoming “servant in a small Cabaret”70, suggesting that she became a prostitute (there is no mentioning of any “customers”, though), while another adulteress apparently “undressed completely” while spending the night with her lover in a brothel71. These stories not only explicitly link female sensuality to prostitution, but also focus the attention of the court on the female body only, ignoring the male bodies involved in the adulterous sexual acts. They suggest that these “unnatural” women chose to prostitute themselves because of their exaggerated sensuality and rejoiced only in their own sexual bodies.

• 72 “De vrouw heeft mij gezegd dat zij een lief genomen had omdat haren man achter haar niet meer keek” (...)
• 73 “Ik zal van De Smet meer voldoening hebben dan van mijnen man, hij zal wel den ressort kunnen plooi (...)
• 74 See also McLaren, A., Impotence. A Cultural History, Chicago – London, University of Chicago Press, (...)

25Regardless of the division of the roles of victim and perpetrator, stories of adultery were centred on male actions and female bodies. Even the few remarkable exceptions in which a woman was heard to allude to the sexual satisfaction received from a lover instead of her husband, underscore this duality. One woman reportedly told a neighbour that “she had taken a lover, because her husband did not take care of her any more”72, a phrase cited by this neighbour in the witness box to endorse her husband’s attempts to dissolve the marriage. The phrasing shows the witness’ contempt for a sexually demanding woman, but simultaneously his acceptance of the demand to be “taken care of” as an explanation for adultery shows that husbands were indeed expected to be more “active” in the bedroom than their wives. In a similar case, a wife allegedly told a witness that she would “have more satisfaction from De Smet than from [her] husband, he will know how to move the bedsprings”73. Although, as this type of case shows, the male privilege on lust and desire could be used as a way of obtaining a divorce by portraying a wife as a lewd and lustful woman, the general expectation towards male desire (linked to ideas of virility and potency74) made divorce on the ground of female adultery a dangerous road to walk.