When Jane Carlyle was cleaning and sweeping and keeping the accounts within discreet limits she certainly did not set a price upon her actions. But, of course, there was a hidden price. It was that in exchange for her work, her dedication, her special if somewhat satirical charms, Carlyle would, as an instance, not go out to Lady Ashburton when she would rather he stayed at home. This is the unspoken contract of a wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin — consideration for their feelings. And it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.

The illicit, as R.P. Blackmur writes in his extraordinary essay on Madame Bovary, and its identification with the romantic, the beautiful, and the interesting, lies at the very center of the dramatic action in the novel form. “The more lawful the society, as we say the more bourgeois the society, the more universal is the temptation to the illicit per se, and the stronger the impulse to identify it if not with life itself at least with the beauty of life.” For us now, the illicit has become a psychological rather than a moral drama. We ask ourselves how the delinquent ones feel about their seductions, adulteries, betrayals, and it is by the quality of their feelings that our moral judgments are formed. If they suffer and grieve and regret, they can be forgiven and even supported. If they boast or fall into an inner carelessness, what they are doing or have done can seem to be wrong. Love, even of the briefest span, is a powerful detergent, but “destructiveness” is a moral stain. In novelistic relations, where the pain inflicted is only upon the feelings of another person, everything is blurred. It is hard to know when rights have been exceeded or when obligations are adamantine.