Adultery

Nevertheless, women do also commit adultery, and were more commonly accused of having an affair by their husbands [2]. Many women were forced into marriage to a man by their parents and the financial successes of an upward marriage; thus, women found themselves to be unhappy and unsettled in their relationships with their husbands. Most women simply submitted to the lives they were born into; however, others refused to accept the fates handed to them, and pursued their own desires instead. Alana Haynes describes these sexually deviant women in his book Sex in Elizabethan England as “wives who daily quit their husbands for sexual encounters, a category of sexually active women frequently characterized by writers in Elizabethan England as ‘loose’. The wives declared themselves not verbally but by assigning their bodies for diversion with equally reticent men. The acute irony is that in Renaissance England the silence of the wife betokened bodily purity. The male misreading of silence has a wild consequence; silence does not equate with submission to his patriarchal intention, but allows a space for development of private ideas and fantasies” [15]. Therefore, women’s submission to their husbands was often revered as pure and appropriate; however, little did their husbands know, these “quiet” women were actually quite content not in their marriage but in secretly satisfying their desires through the pursuit of other men. Thus, marriage in some respects was a license for sexuality because a woman, who was not caught, could hide her sexual desires behind the façade of being married.

However, some wives were unable to hide their sexual deviance from their husbands and the community. Since divorce did not exist in the 1600s, marriages could only be terminated by death. For women who were caught in adulterous affairs, separation from their husbands was understandable, as the Earl of Northumberland once said, “There can no dishonour rise to a man by a woman’s whoredom, being separated” [16]. A separation removed the shame and disgrace of a husband whose wife committed adultery; however, a man whose wife has been unfaithful was portrayed as being sexually inadequate as well as incapable of controlling his household [36]. Many of these men suffered public mockery of “cuckoldry”, a public display of horns, the symbol of cuckoldry, and taunting from the community [36]. Adultery, however, becomes a vicious cycle of a constant battle for control between husband and wife. While a man wants to maintain the power expected of him within his household, the restraint he puts on his wife makes her more likely to rebel against his expectations to fulfill her own yearnings. This idea relates to women’s desire to be “leaky”, or free in their bodies as whores are thought to be. For a woman who gives into her desires is thought to be deviant; however, the male supremacy in early modern England only perpetuates the female desire to be unbound by societal expectations.