When a book is published today that includes the story of an affair between
             a married man and/or woman, hardly anyone raises an eyebrow in protest.
             After all, this is 2003, and extramarital affairs occur regularly in real
             life and even more so in literature and films. However, the situation was
             quite different in earlier centuries when affairs were looked upon much
             differently and novels covered the topic of marriage but not of illicit
             love affairs. Although adultery is mentioned in works from the earliest
             times as in Homer, chivalric literature and Shakespeare's plays, the
             subject takes on a much greater significance in the latter 18th and 19th
             Early fiction that deals with infidelities often centers on
             "seduction, fornication and rape" and how these related to different
             classes (Tanner 12). In the 18th century novel, for example, sexual
             activities are much more visible, often directly related to considerations
             of money and class. Frequently called the Age of Reason, 18th century
             literature was dry and lucid. Poetry became so intellectualized that it
             lost all its appeal to the senses and the imagination. Because of the
             dominating bourgeois power, the emphasis was on marriage rather than love.
             During the 18th century literature, society nor the institution of
             marriage are threatened by adultery. During the 19th century, however,
             "adultery introduces an agonizing and irresolvable category-confusion into
             the individual and thense unto society itself" (ibid). Rather than having
             an emphasis on the act, the focus is on the effect the action has on the
             In books such as Lady Chatterley's Lover, the plot revolves around
             the actual relationship between the individuals and the characters' role,
             usually the woman, in her culture. For example, French works including
             Honor de Balzac's La Femme de Trente
             Ans, Jules Champfleury's Les Bourgeois de Molinchart, and Gustave
             Flaubert...