In nineteenth-century France an obsession with jealousy swept the culture as a whole. Virtually every major French novelist employed it as a central plot device. At the same time, jealousy became a key theme for a broad range of medical, journalistic, and moralist authors interested in the study of contemporary mores. In The Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century French Culture, Masha Belenky argues that it was through narratives of jealousy that writers grappled with the crises of political and moral authority, anxieties surrounding changing gender roles, and new ideas about marriage that defined post-Revolution