Playing with Matches: Matchmaking as Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot (original) (raw)

Playing with Matches: Matchmaking as Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot by Colleen Cusick Advisor: Talia Schaffer This dissertation examines the narrative treatment of matchmakers in British marriage plots across the nineteenth century. The matchmaker stands at the nexus of several simultaneous cultural negotiations underway in the period. In an era of increasing state control over marriage and the rising ideology of romantic marriage, the matchmaker represents the communal courtship practices of the past. As such, she offers both a threat to the emerging status quo and a reminder of the persistence of superseded cultural forms in the emerging modern marriage system. Simultaneously, she constitutes an image of female creativity and authority that speaks to concerns about the professionalization of novel-writing and the place of women writers within that profession. My argument joins recent critical attempts that challenge stable definitions of Victorian marriage; thr...