1 Introduction

The presence of boredom with marriage is currently addressed by researchers on psychology of boredom, who attempt to clarify what are its personal and environmental catalysts—mainly to improve intimate relationships (Nichols, 1988; Reissman, Aron, and Bergen, 1993; Watt and Ewing, 1996; Tsapelas, Aron, and Orbuch, 2009; Safipouriyan et al., 2016). On the contrary, there was a time when boredom with marriage was understood as an experience only suffered by (upper-class) women. At least, this is the view we have inherited from some 19th-century Western oeuvres. Some magnum works of the 19th-century Western literature introduced upper-class female characters who suffered from boredom because of being trapped in their very often forced marriages to the point of ending up committing suicide. Frequently, their emotional and romantic expectations—solidified by the tradition and enhanced through literature itself—were unsatisfied, which, together with the socio-cultural pressures of that period in Europe, led to the experience of an unbearable boredom to which there was no other remedy but to commit adultery, at the very beginning, to then put a definitive end to the suffering.

In this approach, we will assume that literary manifestations are a means to understand the socio-cultural reality to which they belong to analyze which were the causes of female boredom in upper-class marriages in the 19th century. Notably, we will pay attention to those socio-cultural oppressive factors that may result in female boredom from the reading of some of the most well-known novels of some main representatives of the 19th-century Western literature. We want to talk about the work of writers such as the French Gustave Flaubert, the German Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or the Russian-European Lev Tolstói, to name a few. Our central purpose is to understand such socio-cultural factors influencing female boredom in marriage in that period. Moreover, we aim to clarify how the emotion of boredom was used by writers, as an annoying experience, to denounce female oppression as a result of social and marital pressures. Eventually, we would like to introduce socio-cultural factors and pressures that may be causing female boredom with marriage today to compare them with those of the 19th century and see if some of them are still present in our society, and to reflect on how female revolution throughout the 20th century has been able to eradicate some others.

2 Boredom: a Reaction to a Context

As Dr. Camilo Retana (University of Costa Rica School of Philosophy) states, in his paper “Considerations on Boredom as a Moral Emotion” (2011, p. 183, a. trans.), “when we are bored there is something of the context that we are rejecting.” In other words, we are reacting to a particular situation that makes us feel dissatisfied because there is a flow break between our need for stimulation and the environmental stimuli, according to Csíkszentmihályi’s flow theory set out in his work c (1975; see also 1990; 1998; 2000). Our colleague, Dr. Christian Rafael Parreño Roldán, explains, in “Boredom and Space: Experience, Modernity and History” (2013), that boredom is experienced by the subject (S) in an environment (E) that is boring. Following Dr. Peter Toohey (University of Calgary, Canada), in Boredom. A Lively History (2011, p. 11), boredom “is a result of predictable circumstances that are very hard to escape […] when an experience is repeated and repeated […] like satiety. When a situation seems valueless.” This situation-dependent boredom, according to the well-known definition of Mikulas and Vodanovich, in “The Essence of Boredom” (1993), which generates the feeling of having nothing to do, makes our arousal system go down because of the non-interesting, monotonous, or repetitive situations in which we are immersed. However, our boredom promotes a reaction to instigate moments of experimentation.

In this regard, boredom is a signal that something in the environment is not going as expected to meet our psychological needs. It makes us aware of our relationship with the environment and tells us what we have to change to reestablish the flow. Thus, boredom involves a critical element, as Toohey (2011) points out; a profound expression of dissatisfaction, following the words of Dr. Lars Svendsen, in his well-known bestseller Philosophy of Boredom (2005), that moves us to react. Boredom is reactive, as Dr. Jerome Neu (University of California Santa Cruz Department of Psychology) says, in “Boring from within: Endogenous versus Reactive Boredom” (1998; see also Todman, 2003). Boredom is, in this sense, and according to the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, in his posthumous Description of Man (2011, p. 530, a. trans.), a combined action between “the lack of stimulation and the prohibition of falling asleep.” Not only does boredom alert of the situation that needs to be changed but opens the door to the action to promote such changes, which, according to Blumenberg and also Toohey, makes of boredom an adaptive emotion in a Darwinian sense (see Ros Velasco, 2016a, b, c; 2017a, b, c, 2018, 2019, 2020). Boredom is, in Heideggerian terms—and as well as Parreño captures in his work (2013)—a latent capacity, as stated in his lessons of 1929–1930 at the University of Freiburg (1995).

During the 19th century, there were many contextual reasons for people to experience this symptom, i.e., many factors involving a flow break. Boredom was a normal part of the daily life of men and women, and literature genuinely represented this (Martin, Sadlo, and Stew, 2006). Boredom was the result of massive transformations generated during the previous century. It came into play as a consequence of the bureaucratization of the standardized institutions of rationalization of space-time. In other words, modern boredom, experienced in the 19th century, was a product of capitalism and secularization that brought the detachment of the spiritual values and the lack of sense that would be compensated, at least for the upper classes, with vain and repetitive entertainments.

3 Some Literary Examples of Female Boredom in Marriage

Many writers captured the nonsense feeling and boredom in that period, and some of them focused on how this was affecting primarily upper-class married women, who were experiencing their socio-cultural pressures as a result of their female and economic condition. The ennui was present in works like Madame Bovary (1919), by Flaubert, Elective Affinities, by Goethe (2005), Effi Briest (2015), by Fontane, or Family Happiness, by Tolstói (2005). The pictures of an Emma, a Charlotte, an Effi, or a Maria, those women who were not allowed to have more personal goals or specific interests than being good wives, keeping a straight face and appearances, and respecting the protocols of high-society, tell us about the situations that made them experience boredom. As well, their reactions to boredom through adultery and, when oppressive circumstances became extreme and impossible to change, through suicide to put an end to the boredom of domestic mediocrity, reflect their eagerness for exciting experiences in their boring marriages.

To start reviewing a few examples, we have chosen the case of Emma Bovary. The female character of Flaubert’s novel has no other goal than getting married to a rich man, as expected and imposed by social cannons. However, after getting married, her sole purpose is to escape her boring life. She seems to be dazzled by her husband’s luxury promise and his purchase power at the very beginning. However, soon after, she falls prey to a “web of an interminable ennui,” as Dr. Brian Tucker (Wabash College, Indiana) points out, in his work “Performing Boredom in Effi Briest: On the Effects of Narrative Speed” (2007, p. 186). Women like Emma spent time thinking of leaving their country houses to go to the city to attend social events. Women were confident that they would finally find the stimuli they expected and wished in the metropolis, with the “noise of the streets, the buzz of the theatres and the lights of the ballroom […] where the heart expands, the senses bourgeon out” (Flaubert, 1919, p. 44). However, even there did they find boredom. We can imagine them exclaiming desperately: ‘What a boredom! What a boredom!’ (1919), as Emma did, while, at the same time, saved face during boring meetings in which everybody was bored, but nobody decided on leaving. Despite Emma’s efforts to get rid of boredom through her love affairs, this silent spider had woven its web “in the darkness in every corner of her heart,” following Flaubert’s metaphor (1919, p. 44), to the point of driving her to suicide.¹

As Flaubert, Goethe also paid attention to the situations and, overall, the oppressive factors that made upper-class married women experience boredom. Elective Affinities is a novel to criticize the fundamentals and rationale for marriage in this period and its irrational moral basis. Goethe focuses on boredom as a sickly alienation caused by the social difficulties to release creative passions. Charlotte experiences such a taedium vitae as a result of having to cut back her feelings towards the Captain to meet the social conventions. From the very beginning, she is forced to marry Eduard, a man who holds a higher social position than her family, instead of marrying the poor man she loves. Social pressures lead Charlotte to join Eduard to ensure individual economic security and social position not to have to deprive herself of anything. Despite having a good education, she does nothing with her boring life: opportunities such as finding a job or a new man were excluded, and she had no other thing to do but to find a marriage of convenience to achieve stability, and, later, satisfy her husband’s desires to preserve it.

In the same vein, Goethe stated that women were bored with their marriages because of the social pressures, in his work Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1995). He pointed out that those suddenly rich wives had to deal with the unbearable boring comfort of adapting themselves to upper-class protocols: “I remembered this or that woman consumed by boredom in the midst of wealth and comfort” (1995, p. 322). As good wives, they had to read, go to the theater, walk around, or play the piano, prisoners of the slow married life.

Boredom linked to women, love, and marriage in Goethe’s oeuvre is a demonstration of how social pressures oppressed females and made it difficult for wives to respond to their situation in the 19th century. They were able to figure out thousands of stories to escape boredom and change their condition. Authors like Goethe or Flaubert have indeed been considered misogynists, and, perhaps, what they did through their female characters was to try to show how was women personality. However, their stories, deliberately or inadvertently, tell something about those social—and sometimes even masculine—pressures. Goethe acknowledged that such predefined entertainments, to which women and men—but especially women who, as we will see later, had no other choice—were confined, were endlessly boring: theater was boring, journeys were boring because the same was in all parts, meetings were of an unbearable nasty boredom, as he explained in From My Own Life: Truth and Poetry (1848). Nothing seemed to be able to “alleviate the endless tedium of daily life,” explained (1848, p. 243), for those women who were the representation of a time in which institutions managed feelings and emotions, and responses to boredom were rationalized and provided in advance without no other choice, stifling freedom for creativity and emancipation.²

We may continue with some other examples. For instead, Tolstói’s literary work was a galvanizing of emancipatory criteria, which brought him to the peak of realism. This author weaves boredom and marriage from the first page of his novel Family Happiness (2005), through the story of a couple for whom the most important thing, according to social expectations, was to support marriage instability towards the future: it is not true love or passion but money. Almost just after getting married, Maria Alexándrovna experiences the effects of being a good upper-class wife: “before the winter ended, this sense of dejection, solitude, and simple boredom increased to such an extent that I refused to leave my room or open the piano or take up a book” (2005, p. 1). From its part, we can see how the female character of Ibsen’s theater piece Hedda Gabler (2002, p. 37) claimed, in the second act, “I’m bored! Bored! I am so bored!” Moreover, we can say the same of Effi’s boredom in Fontane’s homonymous novel (2015). Although we have no time to go deeper into these titles, we are going to focus on their implications for women.

4 Female Pressures Translated into Boredom

Boredom, during the 19th century, affected men and women but not equally. Both of them fell prey to boredom as a result of their social, economic, and cultural structures, upper-class morals, and protocols. However, women experienced higher disorientation concerning leisure time since they were facing many other pressures because of their female condition. Goethe said that upper-class men suffered from boredom because of the monotonous business life in the city. If men were bored despite going out to establish professional relationships with other men, what could we say of women?

Charles, Eduard, von Innstetten, or Serguéi—that is to say, the husbands—had well-organized lives, most of the time, around daily hours and calendar days. They never experienced the hours were too long. Instead, on the contrary, time quickly flew as they were submerged into their duties. Women, from their part, stayed at the domestic environment, looking desperately for a distraction in which to spend money and with which filling time—as the writer Thomas Mann says once century later, in his work Buddenbrooks (1998). According to Dr. Tucker, upper-class women were doubly excluded: “they were allowed to participate neither in the professional world (reserved for men) nor in the world of domestical labor (reserved for servants)” (2007, p. 189). Similarly, Dr. Meyer Spacks pointed out, in Boredom. The Literary History of a State of Mind (1995, p. 174), that “no longer needed for household tasks, young women [had] no clear responsibilities and no meaningful occupation” in such a society that limited their creative desires beyond the fact of satisfying their husbands’ ones and meeting high-class social clichés.

Boredom was compensated by the risk and the danger of being found cheating their usually older, snobbish, and strict husbands, or by freeing “all the various hatreds that resulted from […] boredom” (1919, p. 107) against them, following Flaubert’s words. Perhaps suicidal responses have more to do just with literature, as Toohey said (2011), but these other reactions were means to escape boredom we may recognize today. The boredom of such oppressed women makes themselves even boring to their husbands. For example, the protagonist of Tolstói’s novel The Kreutzer Sonata told us how he had experienced his honeymoon as an abomination: “one felt awkward, ashamed, repelled, sorry, and above all dull, intolerably dull!” (2014, p. 153), as a result of spending time with his boring, and bored, wife. Also, the Swedish writer August Strindberg made his male character say, in his work Getting Married, that ladies were bored to death because they “had nothing with which to occupy her minds” (2013, p. 300).

The matter is not that women had nothing with which to occupy their minds but that the socio-cultural environment made it difficult for them to break with the many dogmas surrounding their lives. Upper-class women in the 19th century were driven, according to the literature presented, to get married to men with whom they were not in love, still being very young, to maintain economic and social position. Their dangerous means to escape such pressures, translated into boredom, were adultery and suicide, and other kinds of tragedies and deviant behaviors. They were not allowed to ask their husbands for a divorce without losing everything and being socially ostracized. Hopefully, this generalized boredom would be, following Nick Butler et al., in “Work, Play and Boredom” (2017), the potential element of emancipation.

Emancipation is perhaps the single most vital element that the upper-class woman craved, yet few ever indeed attained. Socio-cultural pressures, clichés, and stereotypes all played a pivotal role in the confinement of domesticity expectations for the upper-class women of the 19th century. Women were property, not individuals who have aspirations of their own. The typical stereotype that women within the upper-class were to be seen and not heard was the norm and expectation. Society’s cliché that her goals were only that of home and children much overshadowed the reality of potential that lay dormant for many. The British journalist Kathryn Hughes states, in Gender Roles in the 19th Century (2014), that the two Separate Spheres only came “together at breakfast and again at dinner.” Women were expected to not only live this way but also to prepare their children for the same. Cultural expectations were for her never to attain personal goals or education but rather to find a husband to appease both society and father.

A blue-stocking was one who “devoted too much time too enthusiastically to intellectual pursuits and were considered to be ‘unfeminine’” (Hughes, 2014). Therefore, drying up the ovaries and making one the unmarried type. We can see that the only pursuits suitable for the upper-class woman were to please everyone but herself. Many upper-class families denied their daughters entry into Cambridge when this became an option in 1869. Women writers during the period of 1880–1910 explored themes of women populated utopias, where women were finally free to define their own culture. That was a reaction to the current culture of living according to the standard of man’s expectations. Boredom, within these spheres, opened up a world of literary genius, which persuaded scholars that the experiences of women were indeed remarkable.

We even see in that period paintings images of women, focused solely on her child, never looking directly outward. The struggle to keep her identity is one addressed in The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, in which the heroine, Edner Pontellier, states, “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself” (Hughes, 2014). The point of the story is that desiring a life of one’s own does not dilute the capabilities to be a good mother. Messages, overall, were to focus on the children, the family, and anything but herself. As a result of such limitations and the constant push to keep women confined to these spheres, the divorce rate began to surge between the years of 1870 and 1920. We see literary works of that time addressing women’s rights and reforming divorce laws, which would be steps towards change, albeit little by little. We can see that boredom and the repetitious expectations were quite the driving force behind many of these steps.

5 Boredom as a Driving Force towards Emancipation

When socio-cultural circumstances that trigger boredom are maintained over time and for a broad social group, reactions to get rid of this nuisance may lead to the most unexpected consequences. Boredom tells us that something in the context is going wrong. It makes us develop some strategy to promote a change and to figure out novelties, as Dr. Todman says (2003). According to Parreño Roldán (2013), boredom promotes introspective action and cognitive reevaluation. It moves us to curiosity and exploration, as an anticipatory mechanism, as Butler et al. claim (2011).

And why not women emancipation?

That is the reason why, according to Cioran, in History and Utopia (2015), human history may be considered the result of fear of boredom. Boredom, as an inverse genealogy, establishes the present time as the starting point from which we can investigate the past (Parreño Roldán, 2013). From this point of view, history might be the result of a tension between boredom and novelty. Boredom might be understood—we are still following Parreño Roldán (2013)—as an analytical framework of the causality of historical moments of transformation. We might be tempted to say that human history is nothing but the attempt to avoid boredom, that is to say, in the words of Dr. Revers (University of Salzburg), in “Anthropological Perspectives of Boredom” (1967, p. 41, a. trans.), boredom is “the shadow that drives our impulses towards our fate and history.” In line with sociologist Émile Durkheim, in The Suicide (1966, p. 45), boredom brings original “forms of conduct” that might be, following now to Walter Benjamin, in The Arcades Project (1999), the threshold of great deeds.

Boredom, as a generalized unpleasant emotion, might have been the reason for women to be aware of their oppressed situation, especially from their role in marriage, and for driving them towards their liberation as a strong reaction. As they discard the chains of imposed socio-cultural stereotypes and cannons, they would reduce such boredom and frustration. At this point, we can say that, in present times, stereotypes that encourage such a female role in marriage are being depleted and are less propagated by the mass media—the living testimony of our time, as literature was during the past centuries. However, female boredom still exists in marriage. Thus, it is our firm belief that it is time to reflect on which socio-cultural factors may be leading boredom in marriage today, and whether they are the same as in the past or not.

More women today face the pressure of the second and third shifts, which ultimately leads to additional pressure within the marriage. There were over 74 million women in the workforce in 2017. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “mothers are the primary sole earners for forty percent of households with children under 18” (DeWolf, 2017). As the feminist Arlie Hochschild stated, in her book The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (2012), wives disproportionately undertook the domestic labor that makes up the second shift. Although she found this to be more accurate in working-class families, it was still apparent within all classes. Upper-class women can purchase help, but that again comes with issues of placing demands upon the working-class woman for which she employs. With increasing numbers of women earning college degrees and working outside the home, we see women less inspired by marriage and more so by her personal goals. However, women are still facing issues of boredom within marriage in the 21st century and overwhelmingly taking on the second and third shifts, therefore, often leading to resentment and other feelings of confusion and inadequacies.

Mary Mann points out in How Researching the Science of Boredom Prepared Me for Marriage (2017, pp. 776–777), that boredom “contributes to creativity.” However, this is not always a positive, as we must analyze what does boredom inspires one to do. Does it propel one into infidelity? Does the desire to go outside our expected daily margins become a reason when dealing with never-ending shifts of life, such as the upper-class woman of the 19th century? Are we still confined to the home and societal expectations, yet in a different form? Experts like Mann believe that to say one is bored within the confines of a relationship is the kiss of death. According to psychologist Adam Phillips, in his post On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (1998), “there’s the possibility of hurting the other person’s feelings, for one thing—nobody wants to be perceived as boring and many of us worry that we already are. It’s a common adult fear.” Perhaps, we must address the expectations of roles within the marriage in the same way that experts agree we must address the very issue of boredom.

Also, the temptation of a social media crazed society paints a picture of what life should look like but rarely mimics. Up to 90 percent of women in long-term marriages have experienced boredom and often fantasized about affairs and experienced questions of what the future holds when the present is so unfulfilling. That brings us back to Chopin’s statement about not being willing to give up oneself, but outside work and family pressures and expectations often overload today’s woman, leaving little to no time to do just that. Even the upper-class woman is often still very much tied to Victorian-era expectations of keeping home and fire going while her husband is the primary wage earner. We see this same reaction to boredom and the fact that this will manifest in some action as a result, as the writers of the 19th century stated.

6 Final Considerations

The 19th-century Western literature provides evidence of the historical and sociopolitical factors, such as social protocols and cannons, imposed on women that led the experience of boredom in marital relationships. In this context, the female figure is key to understanding the emotional processes taking place before and after marriage, and how they have evolved through the release of social pressures throughout the 20th century. Did past female constrictions fall through this process of social liberation? Are there lower levels of frustration and boredom after marriage than in the previous centuries? How do socio-cultural structures influence female boredom in marriage, and how have they evolved because of Western institutional changes and improvements? What emotional impact does this transformation have for the future concept of marriage? These are just some questions that we wanted to pose for discussion.