She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage."

–Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary tells the story of the foolishly romantic Emma Bovary, whose boredom with married life drives her to seek excitement and fulfillment in extramarital affairs. Originally published in 1856, the novel was met with immediate criticism and even led to an obscenity trial the following year. In 2025, it is known as one of the most famous and infamous novels of adultery, often situated alongside other canonical texts such as The Scarlett Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like all of these novels, Madame Bovary ends tragically. Ultimately unable to cope with the fallout from her affairs, Emma drinks arsenic to end her own life.

Novels of adultery and affair narratives have historically been as pervasive in literature as the well-known and commonly critiqued marriage plot. While affair narratives today are often still shrouded in scandal and deceit, wildly popular and critically acclaimed novels like Raven Leilani’s Luster, Miranda July’s All Fours, and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, all take a vastly different approach to the conventional representation of adultery. In different ways, each novel undermines the impropriety typically associated with affairs. Instead, they tell stories of people whose affairs serve as a gateway to rethinking monogamy and reimagining traditional relationship configurations.

This panel seeks to discuss the ways in which these scandalous novels and stories serve as a stark contrast to the “happily ever after” promised in the marriage contract. We are interested in challenging the ways we think and construct the institution of marriage, the nuclear family unit, and the idealized dyadic relationship configuration of “the happy couple.”

We welcome papers that discuss adultery, emotional affairs, physical or sexual affairs, scandalous or untraditional relationship configurations, ethical or unethical non/monogamy, polyamory, monogamy, swinging, cheaters and cheating, the institution of marriage, the nuclear family, family abolition theory, queer love, theories of desire, and the decolonization of love and romance, among others.

This panel will ask questions such as: How do we think about affairs in 2025? In what ways does the “scandal” of adultery open up conversations about monogamy and in turn non/monogamy? How does desire relate to structures of monogamy? How do theoretical approaches to intimacy alter our conception of marriage, the family, relationships, and selfhood? What are the ethics of adultery?

Please submit abstracts to https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21931

Feel free to email me at casey.o_reilly@tufts.edu if you have any questions or issues submitting!