I teach Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith in medical humanities course. This is a bildungsroman about a young medical scientist who tries to fight a plague, along with various other public health undertakings, and partially my teaching emphasizes those public health angles.
Fair enough, you probably should react strongly against infidelity in your daily life. But in fiction, I think you need to think about why it's there. Why include this infidelity subplot in a novel largely about public health and what it means to have a scientific mindset?
Though it's a late example, I would classify Arrowsmith as a realist novel. The realist novel is, I would argue, about testing and exploring systems of knowing the world. (As is the bildungsroman, in a somewhat different way.) In claiming this, I draw on both George Eliot, one of the original practitioners of the genre, and George Levine, my academic grandfather. Specifically, Eliot lays out her manifesto for realism in Adam Bede, saying we need to remember regular people that that we do not "leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes." Similarly, Levine says that realist novels "turn on the power of protagonists to develop the proper temper and state of mind to allow realistic confrontation with the 'object'—what one might see as acquisition the proper 'method.'" What makes this difficult, Levine goes on to say, is "the problems caused by the body and the passions in gaining access to the truth... as novels, they can never dismiss the body as trivial or irrelevant." The realist novel is about testing theories and methods of accessing knowledge by putting them into the context of people's actual lived experiences. (This sounds very dry, I think, but of course Adam Bede and Arrowsmith are anything but dry.)
The theory being put to the test in Arrowsmith is the vision of the scientist. This is laid out very well by Martin's mentor, Gottlieb, who has a very long speech about what a scientist thinks and how. Here's some of it:
To be a scientist—it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer.... [I]t makes its victim different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious—he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, be cause they are an insult to faith.... He lives in a cold, clear light.
So, if we believe the two Georges, the point of the novel is to put that philosophy to the test. Is thinking scientifically something that will work in the real world, among real people who have real bodies? The novel's climax, which is about Martin trying to see if he can implement a controlled scientific experiment in the middle of a plague, is all about this.
But this semester, I realized that it was also true of the infidelity subplot. I have a friend who's a marriage therapist, and he once told me there's two things you have to work on to recover from infidelity: there's the person who did it, and the relationship.
So I asked my students this semester: why was Martin unfaithful? what was up with him? They gave some pretty good answers: he has this need for approval, probably stemming from being an orphan, he likes to be seen as right and Orchid never disagrees with him. I also asked them what was wrong with the marriage: Martin's wife, Leora, isn't always a good communicator herself even though she is devoted to Martin.
Something we've talked about in class is that Martin is bad at people. The thing about public health is that it unites scientific knowledge with political acumen. Martin's boss has no scientific knowledge but lots of political acumen; Martin, on the other hand, has lots of political knowledge but no political acumen. Each man is a disaster of a public health official in his own way. Martin is good at accessing scientific truth, but bad at accessing emotional truth.
What infidelity is rooted in, I would claim, is a lack of understanding of the self. There's something in yourself in that you're afraid of, or unable to acknowledge, or simply unwilling. Martin's inability to access emotional truth isn't just about other people, it's also about himself. He doesn't understand himself. If he did, this wouldn't happen.
Thus, to cycle back around to realism, what we see is that when it comes to himself, Martin is willing to accept quarter-truths, he does not live in a cold, clear light. So is he religiously devoted to truth, is he different to other men? No, he's not. Martin's scientific perceptions do a lot of good, he saves a lot of lives. But he very much falls victim to "the problems caused by the body and the passions in gaining access to the truth." I have a lot of sympathy for Martin, but his system of knowledge fails the test that Levine articulates. The reason for the infidelity subplot in the novel is to show how Martin doesn't live up to his own aspirations when it comes to the self.
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