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This book explores the relationship between two statements as they apply to husbands, but also as they apply to the notion in general of being a man. The first is about the fate of man as husband, and the second is about the (unspecified) things a man must do if he is to be a man. They express in brief form the much more extensive expectations about the nature of men as husbands and as deceived husbands that will be revealed by the literary examples to be discussed. What is fascinating about the portrayals of these husbands in their suffering of marital infidelity is the degree to which there are common characteristics to be observed in them, characteristics which suggest a generality of pattern, formation, and explanation. The book targets two main types of portrayal of the husband – the cuckold and the man of honour – and discusses the principal theoretical framework on object-relations theory.

The concept of sexual infidelity is both widespread and ancient. It requires, as a precondition, the concept of sexual fidelity, and further that it has as its context a society in which there is the institution of marriage, or some similar long-term heterosexual and exclusive relationship, and in which the expectation is that there shall be conjugal fidelity, at least on the part of the wife. The language relating to infidelity reiterates patriarchal concern with the infidelity of wives rather than that of husbands. At first sight, some of the language relating to the cuckold appears to give weight to the socio-historical argument that matters of inheritance are the reason why the fault of wives appears to cause interest and concern, whereas the sexual fault of husbands that leads them from the marriage bed is taken so much for granted that it is not equally regarded as a fault.

In considering the tale of a cuckold, Geoffrey Chaucer's Miller's Tale, and others, in the light of Kleiman analysis, there is a major distinction to be made. Within the character of the cuckold himself, one can observe an extremely primitive level of development, characterised by splitting, denial, reaction formation, and envy. As often as not, the cuckold is one who can barely tolerate the taking-in of information; that is, he is in an infantile state that appears to be prior to the paranoid-schizoid position, in which there is at least the defensive splitting of the self to cope with information, welcome and unwelcome, from the outside world. This primitive state of the cuckold as a character, however, contrasts sharply with what one can construe as the meaning of his portrayal in literature, and it is this meaning that this chapter explores first, before turning to examples of cuckolds in Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio.

A different, and complementary, view of the wronged husband is presented by the concept of the man of honour. To distinguish in general terms between the two, this chapter highlights the respective attributes of the cuckold and the man of honour, taking as paradigms for this the characterisation of the cuckold as he has emerged from Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio, and the man of honour as he is generally conceived in the Spanish Golden Age drama. In the case of each type, there is a question of identity at stake. The husband who is a cuckold is automatically removed from centre-stage and placed firmly in an ancillary role. His identity has depended upon his status as a husband who could assert his patriarchal rights in marriage, and this identity disappears with his failure to do so.

Adulteresses' husbands represented in the nineteenth-century adultery novels discussed in this chapter range through the entire spectrum from cuckold to man of honour, with the majority moving between the two. The chapter takes examples of texts where the husband can most closely be aligned with one or other of the models discussed so far: Madame Bovary, He Knew He Was Right, and Effi Briest. It then takes La Regenta as an example of a text where the treatment of the husband is more complex, but the central theme is still the husband's relation to infidelity. Dombey and Son and The Kreutzer Sonata are then taken as examples of narratives containing powerful subtexts of denial and splitting in the face of emotion and sexuality. Finally, Anna Karenina provides a text where the complexity of the husband's reaction to infidelity is set in a web of meditation upon marriage and society.

In his discussion of The Winter's Tale, Wilbur Sanders dwells on the unusual fact that Leontes, wrongly suspecting his wife of adultery, and receiving the news that she has died as a result of his wrath, opts to draw close to his grief, and face it in all its intensity. This chapter concentrates on those images of exceptional husbands, men of distinction. The idealised belief is that it may be possible to locate the ultimate depressive position in relation to the deceived husband. Such an ultimate position would have two dimensions: the capacity of the deceived husband as character to confront his grief, and the capacity of the literary text to contain and articulate that experience. The depressive position vis-à-vis women's infidelity is sketched, if not in relation to the cuckold, at least in the social fact and implications of the literature of cuckoldry. In its turn, it is replaced by the depressive position as exemplified in the adultery novels.