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Adultery-Within-Marriage: Joyce's Love Plot Janine Utell. James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery, Desire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. x, 177 pp. $75 cloth.
Janine Utell's James Joyce and the Revolt of Love explores why Joyce came to see adultery as a part of conjugal life and not as a unique site for passionate love. Utell argues that Joyce moved away from dramatizing the story of adultery as the model of a rebellious love; instead, he presented adultery as an ethical problem that can be solved within marriage, in which each partner must be reconciled to the other's right to sexual desire outside the margins of marriage. She supports her argument by applying to Joyce's adultery narratives the postmodern concept of alterity, the idea that men and women cannot be fully known or appropriated as sexual beings. Utell also addresses the significance of Joyce's adultery-within-marriage narrative for a theory of comedy. She demonstrates that Finnegans Wake posits an older couple, educated in the ethics of desire, as a model for comic reconciliation.
Keywords: adultery / marriage / ethics / comedy / James Joyce
Janine Utell's subtle and close analysis of Joyce's narratives explores the following development in his use of the adultery plot: he came to see adultery as a story contained within the larger narrative of conjugal life, and not as a unique site for exploring passionate love. Utell argues that although it is common knowledge that Joyce was against marriage as an institution, he did not see adultery and marriage as oppositional structures that cannot be reconciled. She does not deny Joyce's progressive sexual views, but she situates adultery in his major fictions as an important subplot that moves his characters towards strengthening their marriages and towards reconciliation. She points out that he saw marriage in two very different ways: "Marriage is rendered as a site in which erotic love transcends instrumentality, a serious counter to the institution of marriage as Joyce and his contemporaries saw and rejected it" (89). Utell raises the question whether the common "subversion" argument - that Joyce was a progressive thinker and artist - adequately represents his view of committed relationships. She concludes: "adultery becomes a site not for passion nor a rejection of the constraints...