Adultery as ruin in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Greene’s The End of the Affair

Abstract

Indeed God demands that marriage vows be kept, without considering the state or authenticity of the marriage. Greene thus seems to imply that while adultery is a sin and the punishment for adultery is inexorable and swift, God does not seem to heed the authenticity of the marriage being violated or the true passion that is destroyed by God seeing to the punishment of his laws through swiftly punishing adultery by having Sarah meet an early death and destroying the affair between Sarah and Bendrix. Emma is also destroyed by adultery as her lovers desert her after she accumulates debt and she commits suicide.