Illegitimacy in fiction
This is a list of fictional stories in which illegitimacy features as an important plot element. Passing mentions are omitted from this article. Many of these stories deal with the social pain and exclusion felt by illegitimate "natural children".
Illegitimacy was a common theme in Victorian literature. "Illegitimacy was a popular subject for Victorian writers, not only because of its value as a plot device, but also because of the changing laws affecting illegitimate children and their parents which kept the topic in the public eye."[1]
Written works
Pre-Victorian
- Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur (1485 prose romance): King Arthur is conceived illegitimately when his father Uther Pendragon utilizes Merlin's magic to seduce Igraine, a noblewoman married to Duke Gorlois. Later, Arthur unwittingly begets a bastard son, Mordred, on his own half-sister Morgause. At Arthur's court, Mordred and his half-brother Agravain incite growing discontent about the Queen’s adulterous relations with Sir Lancelot, and a civil war ensues. While Arthur is preoccupied fighting Lancelot, Mordred spreads word that Arthur has been killed, seizes the crown for himself, and attempts to seduce the queen. She resists, and Arthur quickly returns, attacking and defeating his son’s armies. Mordred dies in combat, and Arthur is fatally wounded and dies shortly thereafter with his kingdom in ruins.
- William Shakespeare:
- Richard III (1591 play): Richard, Duke of Gloucester, usurps the English throne, justifying the coup by claiming that the young nephew he deposed, King Edward V, and his younger brother, the Duke of York, are both illegitimate, as their father (Edward IV) was promised in marriage to another woman when he wedded their mother.
- King John (1595? play): Phillip Falconbridge, bastard son of Richard the Lionheart, helps save England from ruin at the hands of Richard's incompetent younger brother, John of England.
- Much Ado About Nothing (1598 play): The envious and melancholy villain of the comedy, Don John, is a bastard, and invents schemes to thwart the marriage of his legitimate brother’s close friends.
- King Lear (1605 play): Edmund, bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, first cheats his legitimate brother Edgar of his lands, then stands by while his father is declared a traitor, blinded, and sent to wander in the wilderness. Edmund finally makes an attempt on the English crown itself by bedding Lear's two daughters Regan and Goneril.
- The Tempest (1611 play): Caliban, a savage, deformed slave of the play's protagonist, Prospero, is the offspring of a witch and a sea demon.
- Thomas Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy (1607 play): In addition to cuckolding his father and plotting against his legitimate brother, the Duke's bastard son, Spurio, also becomes heavily embroiled in the Revenger's plot to undo the Duke and the rest of his family.
- Benjamin Franklin, "The Speech of Polly Baker" (1747 story): a woman is put on trial for having an illegitimate child. She had been convicted four times in the past for this same crime. Each time, she said, the full blame was placed on her shoulders but not the father's.
- Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749 novel): Tom, the bastard infant of a country girl, is left in an anonymous bundle to the care of the rich and kind-hearted Mr. Allworthy. Mr. Allworthy raises Tom, who grows up and has a number of adventures over the book's thousand-plus pages.
- Jane Austen, Emma (1815 novel): Harriet Smith, a young woman who attends a local school, is described as the "natural daughter of somebody" ("natural" in this sense meaning illegitimate). She is befriended by Emma Woodhouse, who imagines that Harriet is the child of a royal duke and introduces her to the local vicar, Mr. Elton, who she thinks is a good match. Elton, however, sees Harriet as far below him socially, and instead woos the unsuspecting Emma. It is revealed later in the novel that Harriet is the child of a prosperous tradesman.
Victorian
- Alexander Herzen, Who is to Blame? (1847 novel): Krutsifersky is the tutor of Lyubonka, an illegitimate daughter of the retired general, Negrov. Upon forming an emotional attachment to Lyubonka, Krutsifersky is allowed to marry her. The emphasis given to Lyubonka's illegitimacy was of personal concern to Herzen, who was himself illegitimate.[3]
- Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (1853 social novel): a compassionate portrayal of an orphaned young seamstress, Ruth Hilton, who is seduced, impregnated and abandoned by gentleman Henry Bellingham.
- Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853 social novel): One of the novel's many secrets is the illegitimacy of heroine Esther Summerson. Illegitimacy is one of the social questions that Dickens addresses in the novel, making Esther its moral heart despite her illegitimacy.
- Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne (1858 novel): two sets of country gentlefolk fallen on hard times are especially proud of their "pure blood", but the well-meaning doctor brings up his illegitimate niece as a lady and then discovers that there is no place for her in their social world.
- Alexandre Dumas, fils, in his play The Illegitimate Son (1858), espoused the belief that if a man fathers an illegitimate child, then he has an obligation to legitimize the child and marry the woman.
- George Eliot. Adam Bede (1859 novel): Hetty is seduced by a young officer who abandons her; she then abandons her baby in a field where it dies, and is tried for its murder.
- Wilkie Collins. Collins had relationships with two women "For Collins, the theme of illegitimacy was more than just a plot mechanism: through his fiction he continually questioned society's condemnation of the unmarried mother and her child."[4]
- The Dead Secret (1857 novel), concerns the unexpected discovery of a character's illegitimacy and the resulting moral dilemmas that face the character.
- The Woman in White (1859), centred around illegitimacy, and the lengths one of the main characters goes to conceal it.
- No Name (1862). Two sisters are disinherited when their parents' death reveals them to be bastards; one accepts her reduced circumstances, but the other plots revenge.
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869 novel): one of the principal protagonists, Pierre Bezukhov, is an illegitimate child of a dying father who has many other illegitimate children. Pierre is chosen as the one who inherits his father's fortune and gains the title of Count Bezukhov.
- Anthony Trollope, Ralph the Heir (1871 novel): The estate of Newton Priory is entailed upon the legitimate heir, nephew of the current Squire; the Squire tries to buy the reversion from the spendthrift and debt-burdened heir so that he can leave it by will to his illegitimate son.
- Anthony Trollope, Lady Anna (1874 novel): The vicious Earl Lovel has told his wife that their marriage was invalid; during the two decades that she has struggled to prove its validity, their daughter Anna has grown up with her legitimacy in question. He dies intestate, and the disposal of his large fortune depends on her status.
- Alphonse Daudet, Jack (1876 novel): about an illegitimate child, a martyr to his mother's selfishness.
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877 novel): Anna has an affair with Count Aleksei Vronsky, which leads to an illegitimate daughter, whom she names Annie. This incident drives the rest of the plot towards its tragic conclusion.
- Ivan Turgenev, Virgin Soil (1877 novel): the main character, Nezhdanov (whose name means "unexpected"), is an illegitimate son of a Russian aristocrat. With a desire to do something in the world, he joins the Narodniki, hoping to find his place by "going to the people". In the end, Nezhdanov's confusion about his divided life causes him to commit suicide.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880 novel): Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is the father of three sons, and widely rumored to have fathered a fourth, illegitimate son, Pavel Smerdyakov. Although the eldest son, Dmitri, is put on trial for the murder of his father, Pavel later confesses the crime to Ivan, another of Karamazov's sons.
- Thomas Hardy:
- Two on a Tower (1882 novel): the heroine, Lady Viviette Constantine, chooses a loveless marriage over the shame of giving birth to an illegitimate baby.
- Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891 novel): the eponymous heroine is seduced and abandoned by a gentleman; she gives birth but the baby dies.
Twentieth century
- C. S. Forester, Brown on Resolution (1929 novel): the protagonist, an illegitimate British sailor and the only survivor of his ship, escapes custody aboard an Imperial German raider making repairs off an island in the South Atlantic and delays the ship's departure long enough for a British ship to arrive and destroy it, losing his life on the island in the process. The captain of the ship finds the sailor's body and discovers it is his own illegitimate son whose existence he has denied.
- Marcel Pagnol, Fanny (1932 play)
- Marcel Pagnol, César (1936 play)
- Grace Metalious, Peyton Place (1956 novel): The main plot follows the lives of three women in a small New England town — lonely, repressed Constance MacKenzie, her illegitimate daughter Allison, and her employee Selena Cross.
- Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss (1968 historical novel): centres on a man's quest for meaning in his life, and the consequences of his illegitimate birth on his mother (devastating) and his father (very little). Belgian filmmaker André Delvaux adapted it into a movie in 1988.
- Melina Marchetta, Looking for Alibrandi (1992 novel): involves a main theme of illegitimacy—of a year-12 student, whose father comes back into her life after having left her mother 18 years earlier. It also involves a massive theme of multiculturalism.
Musicals
Music
Movies
- Marius—Marcel Pagnol's 1931 French-language film adapted from his 1929 play Marius
- Fanny—Marcel Pagnol's 1932 French-language film adapted from his 1932 play Fanny
- Brown on Resolution (1935), based on C.S. Forester's book of the same name
- César—Marcel Pagnol's 1936 French-language comedy-drama conclusion to his trilogy about a Marseille couple, played by Pierre Fresnay and Orane Demazis.
- Port of Seven Seas—1938 dramatic film written by Preston Sturges, based on the plays of Marcel Pagnol and the films based on them. The film was directed by James Whale, starred Wallace Beery, and featured Frank Morgan and Maureen O'Sullivan.
- Sailor of the King (1953), also based on Brown on Resolution. The film has two endings; in one, the sailor dies and his origin is revealed; in the other, he survives and his origin is not revealed. In both endings the sailor is shown to be Canadian, as the actor chosen for the part (Jeffrey Hunter) was American.
- Peyton Place (1957), based on the best-selling novel by Grace Metalious
- Fanny (1961, adapted from the musical play, which in turn had been adapted from Marcel Pagnol's trilogy of plays, Fanny, Marius and César)
- Gosford Park (2002), a murder mystery set in 1932, driven by hidden illegitimacy
Television
See also
Notes
- ^ "Representations of illegitimacy in Wilkie Collins's early novels." Philological Quarterly, 22-MAR-04 . [1]
- ^ Tad Szulc, Chopin in Paris, p. 161.
- ^ Charles A. Moser, The Cambridge History of Russian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) pp. 229-230.
- ^ "Representations of illegitimacy in Wilkie Collins's early novels." Philological Quarterly, 22-MAR-04 .[2]
References
- Tad Szulc, Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer, New York, Scribner, 1998, ISBN 0-684-82458-2.