In the 19th century, they had to choose between sex, e.g. having fun, and spirituality, e.g. being pure. Literature was filled with people like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina who got what was coming to them for daring to step outside the boundaries of civilized behavior.
Their interior struggle which always spilled over into messiness and heartbreak and always, always, eventual death for the sinner was not only the subject of novels; Jules Massenet, a French composer, took one of...
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