# Fiction: Constance and other famous cheaters



## LongWalk (Apr 4, 2013)

Did you ever read Lady Chatterley's Lover? Could you stand to read it today? Who are your (least) favorite cheaters in literature?


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## maincourse99 (Aug 15, 2012)

I read it many years ago and liked it. It would definitely sicken me now.


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## ThePheonix (Jan 3, 2013)

I don't waste a lot of time reading fiction. A most of of it ain't even true.


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## alte Dame (Aug 7, 2012)

Dorothea in 'Middlemarch' is my least favorite protagonist. I also am not particularly fond of Nick Carraway in 'The Great Gatsby.' There are others, of course, that I don't like, but usually that was the author's intent.

As for cheating wives, I never found Emma Bovary or Lawrence's Connie to be particularly sympathetic. Anna Karenina, on the other hand, is very much so.


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## Acabado (May 13, 2012)

alte Dame said:


> Anna Karenina, on the other hand, is very much so.


I can't stand Anna. Horrible moms get the better of me. And boy she was.

To answer OP I puked first time I saw David Lean's "Ryan's daughter" after DDay.

Anyway I stopped triggering so badly. My wife still can't read anything which idealize, romantize or simply "normalize" affairs, the very - so glamorous - word: "affair" makes her flinch.


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## alte Dame (Aug 7, 2012)

'East of Eden' is probably the worst.


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## LongWalk (Apr 4, 2013)

I don't they normalized affairs. Infidelity was a bigger deal in those days. Dorothea was for sure annoying. The characters in the book seem all too real. Anna K deserves another read, dámn that karma train. Tolstoy didn't approve if cheating.
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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## walkonmars (Aug 21, 2012)

Acabado said:


> I can't stand Anna. Horrible moms get the better of me. And boy she was.


Yup - couldn't stand Anna 

another least fave is Pearl Kantrowitz


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## HarryDoyle (Jan 19, 2013)

I think you have to look at the time period. Until only recently, the last 40 to 50 years, did divorce even become acceptable. Divorce used to be one of the most unacceptable things you could do, legally, morally, spiritually and socially. The old attitude was "better to have an affair than to divorce". Now it seems to be "better to divorce than to cheat on you spouse." I keep this in mind when I read classic literature. Divorce was not an option in the not so distant past.


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## alte Dame (Aug 7, 2012)

walkonmars said:


> Yup - couldn't stand Anna


Maybe it's Greta Garbo that I like....


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## walkonmars (Aug 21, 2012)

alte Dame said:


> Maybe it's Greta Garbo that I like....


The version with Greta was one of the better ones. The BBC version was pretty good too.


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## LongWalk (Apr 4, 2013)

Harry, I agree with you. Do you think TAM sometimes lacks historical perspective? The changes in attitude towards marriage in my life time are big. The Internet has become a new factor that is not understood. TAM itself is amazing. Some of the writing is a kind of literature.
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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## PreRaphaelite (Dec 15, 2012)

Forgiven? D.H. Lawrence was writing against the stifling Victorian morality of his day, and he always believed that love and sex between a man and woman was the highest kind of physical/spiritual sharing we can know. Lady Chatterley embodies a desire for intimate expression and virility that had been crushed. Lawrence btw had a very good relationship with his wife. He eloped with her and eventually she divorced her then husband to be with him. Ha! Later on, Lawrence's wife had an affair on him. 

So I guess you could say that Lawrence was writing about his own self as the OM and about himself as cuckold.

To me the greatest cheating WW is Emma Bovary, because Flaubert understood extremely well how affairs are nothing but fantasies and illusions. Emma Bovary wants to be the heroine in the romances she reads, she wants to look herself in the mirror as say, I'm a lover! I'm a lover! She wants to throw her clothes off and make passionate love to her lover, but it's all staged and dramatized. Flaubert captures it beautifully. Meanwhile her husband, who's a bore and a clod, comes off as the only character in the whole novel who has some real integrity, even though he's cuckolded over and over again.


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## LongWalk (Apr 4, 2013)

The Iliad makes a lot more sense to me after being on TAM


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## alte Dame (Aug 7, 2012)

Aren't all the great themes found here? Isn't that the point of good literature? To portray the human condition? Infidelity is certainly timeless.


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## LongWalk (Apr 4, 2013)

alte Dame said:


> Aren't all the great themes found here? Isn't that the point of good literature? To portray the human condition? Infidelity is certainly timeless.


Yes, shocking to realize that infidelity and sexual jealousy are sufficient cause for war and the destruction. From Wikipedia:



> The war originated from a quarrel between the goddesses Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, after Eris, the goddess of strife and discord, gave them a golden apple, sometimes known as the Apple of Discord, marked "for the fairest". Zeus sent the goddesses to Paris, who judged that Aphrodite, as the "fairest", should receive the apple. In exchange, *Aphrodite made Helen, the most beautiful of all women and wife of Menelaus, fall in love with Paris, who took her to Troy.* Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and the brother of Helen's husband Menelaus, led an expedition of Achaean troops to Troy and besieged the city for ten years because of Paris' insult. After the deaths of many heroes, including the Achaeans Achilles and Ajax, and the Trojans Hector and Paris, the city fell to the ruse of the Trojan Horse. *The Achaeans slaughtered the Trojans (except for some of the women and children whom they kept or sold as slaves)* and desecrated the temples, thus earning the gods' wrath.


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## LostViking (Mar 26, 2013)

Margot Macomber from _The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber _,by Hemingway, was a slvt of the highest eschelon. They don't make them meaner and more heartless than her.


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## LongWalk (Apr 4, 2013)

Is that the short story in which the guy is dying in Africa?


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## LostViking (Mar 26, 2013)

LongWalk said:


> Is that the short story in which the guy is dying in Africa?


Yeah. She cuckolds him with their hunting guide. So Francis grows a spine, kills a charging lion and then tells his gold digging wife that nothing she can do will hurt him anymore. Thinking he's going to leave her, she "accidentally" shoots him in the back of the head when a buffalo is bearing down on them. 

It has been a long time since I read that story but I think that is the basic theme.


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