Playing with Matches: Matchmaking as Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot (original) (raw)
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Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 2010
From Ian Watt on, accounts of the rise of the novel have focused on historical processes such as the emergence of the companionate domestic sphere, the rise of middle-class individualism, and the feminization of the literary marketplace. The novel has been analyzed in such terms as an agent and/or a product of the forces of modernization and secularization. I want here to make a case that this fundamentally secular account cannot explain key elements of the early novel's representational repertoire, and in particular why the topic of the legitimate marriage became so crucial to the genre's development after samuel Richardson, at least until Jane austen's time. This is not to reject the historicism implicit in all "rise of the novel" theses but to insist on the explanatory power of a different history. In particular, I want to make the case that the settings from within which marriage came to acquire sufficient signifying power to become a central event for english prose fiction were primarily political and religious-or, better, theopolitical-rather than simply social or literary. This is to say that literary history needs a new understanding of both history and social theory to account for the marriage plot's particular negotiation of connections among the sacred, the governmental, and the civic.
Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism: Adultery and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
2015
This course illustrates how literary theory is applied to the nineteenth-century novel. The approach is basically practical, focussing on how formalism, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis (to name a few schools) have studied fiction, and how you, as students, read both fiction and critical material. The nineteenth-century novel is chosen for two basic reasons: first, for its focus on the modern institutions of life which theory has taken a deep interest in, such as romance, marriage, the family, the nation-state; second, the nineteenth-century novel not only represents the golden age of English literature but it is also the genre and century which all critical schools have arguably felt the need to analyse in great depth.
2015
A notorious characteristic of English society is the universal marketing of our unmarried women ; a marketing peculiar to ourselves in Europe, and only rivalled by the slave merchants of the East. We are a match-making nation. 1 Th e 'universal marketing' of 'unmarried women' referred to by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1836 in his critical refl ection on English culture and society recognizes the economic implications of what would become known as the Victorian marriage market. Th e idea of women being for sale via transactional marriage arrangements is not new in feminist critical studies and has been frequently considered in the context of the marriage plot. 2 Th e valuing of a marriageable woman according to her beauty dates back for centuries, and was also tied to her social class, economic fortune, virginity and virtue , and accomplishments . Such qualities made her an object of desire in a marriage system that imitated the conditions of market sales. Th is book began as an attempt to understand the Victorian marriage market , a cultural cliché so widespread in Victorian fi ction that it appears to be taken for granted in literary and cultural history. My understanding of the Victorian marriage market is two-pronged. At the outset, it is a metaphor for the way in which families sought to arrange fi nancially and socially advantageous marital unions between their sons and daughters in order to preserve 'the two interrelated factors of social and economic interest, which traditionally determined marriage choice' . 3 Relatedly, the marriage market also refers to publicly organized events intended to bring eligible men and women together, or as Patricia Jalland notes: 'elaborate social conventions were created to restrict and regulate young love among the upper-middle and upper class. Th e London season , 'coming out' country house parties and balls -all operated to ensure that young people only met others of desirable social background' . 4 Th e London season in particular served as a more literal kind of marriage market because a young woman's presence at various social engagements during this season announced her candidature for marriage, with the result that many 784 Aestheticism.indd 1 784 Aestheticism.indd
The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and …, 2011
Reading Sir Charles Grandison soon after its publication in 1753, Mary Wortley Montagu famously remarked, "Richardson is so eager for the multiplication of [marriages] I suppose he is some parish curate, whose chief profit depends on weddings and christenings." 1 Her mock complaint-steeped in a routinely Whiggish anti-clericalism-points toward a fresh line of inquiry for novel studies, namely that mid-eighteenth-century English novels that placed marriage at their center did so with ecclesiastical ends in view. Most historicist work on the rise of the novel has understood its setting in sociological terms, through concepts like the growth of the middle class or of liberal individualism, or as an aspect of associated regimes of gender, sexuality, family, and domesticity. 2 In these terms, scholars have generally assumed the English novel develops its marriage plot within processes of modernization and secularization. 3 Relatively little sustained attention has been paid to dimensions of the marriage plot that cannot be read progressively: its genesis in Samuel Richardson's novels as a High Church missionary project emphasizing proper ceremony, for instance; the distinctly male, public, and gentlemanly concerns of its earliest practitioners; or its insistence on the centrality to the social imaginary of the rural landed estate and parish presided over by vicars and squires.
Cambridge UP, 2019
Why did marriage become central to the English novel in the eighteenth century? As clandestine weddings and the unruly culture that surrounded them began to threaten power and property, questions about where and how to marry became urgent matters of public debate. In 1753, in an unprecedented and controversial use of state power, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke mandated Anglican church weddings as marriage's only legal form. Resistance to his Marriage Act would fuel a new kind of realist marriage plot in England and help to produce political radicalism as we know it. Focussing on how major authors from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen made church weddings a lynchpin of their fiction, The Origins of the English Marriage Plot offers a truly innovative account of the rise of the novel by telling the story of the English marriage plot's engagement with the most compelling political and social questions of its time.
FAILED MARRIAGES AND SPINSTERHOOD AS SYMBOLIC FEMINIST CONCEPTS IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
FAILED MARRIAGES AND SPINSTERHOOD AS SYMBOLIC FEMINIST CONCEPTS IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL, 2022
In nineteenth-century Britain, a woman's place was regarded to be in the domestic area, devoted to housework and family life. However, thanks to certain political, economic and social changes, women progressively began to engage in pursuits that were previously exclusive to the men. Writing a novel was one of these pursuits for some women in the Victorian era. Although under the pseudonym of a man, women writers like Mary Ann Evans published significant works during this era. In many of their works, these women writers challenged the role that women were supposed to take in Victorian society. Using various literary strategies, they opposed to conventional representations of the woman in Victorian novel. In this context, the present study examines two canonical works by George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell to illustrate how these women writers portray marriage and spinsterhood as symbolic feminist concepts. The findings of the study suggest that by illustrating devastating results of undesired marriages and offering a utopian world of happiness for spinsters, Eliot and Gaskell, respectively, take up feminist stances against oppressing power of patriarchal society in England in the Victorian era.