Marriage Quote by Lafcadio Hearn

Hearn’s sentence is doing two things at once: diagnosing a literary obsession and quietly indicting a national prudery. By calling French fiction “generally” preoccupied with women “after marriage,” he signals a shift in where the drama is allowed to live. English novels, in his framing, keep their erotic and moral suspense safely upstream: courtship, reputation, the wedding as narrative finish line. French novels, by contrast, treat marriage as the beginning of plot rather than its resolution, which inevitably invites the most combustible question in bourgeois life: what happens when desire outlasts the vow?

The loaded word here is “consequently.” Hearn makes adultery sound like a natural byproduct of realism, not a decadent fixation. If you write honestly about marriage as an institution, he implies, you run into its contradictions: unequal freedom, boredom, property, the wife as social symbol more than person. “Improper relations” is also a neat bit of ventriloquism, borrowing the English moral vocabulary he’s critiquing. He doesn’t say the things are improper; he says the public wouldn’t “allow” them, revealing censorship as cultural preference masquerading as virtue.

Context matters: Hearn is a cosmopolitan mediator, writing in a period when English-language publishing was policed by respectability and French realism (think Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant) was notorious precisely for dragging sex, hypocrisy, and female interiority into the open. The subtext isn’t “French are naughty.” It’s that English culture, by refusing to narrate women’s lives after the altar, also refuses to fully imagine women as adults with desires that don’t end on the wedding day.