SOURCE: “The Honourable Cuckold: Models of Masculine Defence,” in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1992, pp. 1–19.

In the following essay, Millington and Sinclair trace the use of the cuckold in literature, citing several examples including Graham from Barnes's Before She Met Me.

A large number of works of literature contain husbands whose wives are unfaithful to them. There is, however, a glaring lack of attention paid to those neglected spouses both within the works of literature and in critical discussion of those works. Yet it is in the portrayal of those husbands that we can see the centre of patriarchy's concern with a phenomenon which appears to proclaim its weakness as a system, since it points to the lack of social power and sexual potency of the man considered to have authority—the husband.

Our initial proposition is that there are two models or paradigms for the portrayal of...