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Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction PDF

353 Pages·2016·2.567 MB·English
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Romance’s Rival Romance’s Rival Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction z TALIA SCHAFFER Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Talia Schaffer 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schaffer, Talia, 1968– Romance’s rival : familiar marriage in Victorian fiction / Talia Schaffer. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–046509–4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–19–046510–0 (ebook (updf)) 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Marriage in literature. 3. Courtship in literature. 4. Love in literature. 5. Domestic fiction, English—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Title: Familiar marriage in Victorian fiction. III. Title: Marriage in Victorian fiction. PR878.M36S33 2016 823ʹ.8093543—dc23 2015024576 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan, USA To the Musser family, with love and appreciation Contents Preface  ix Acknowledgments  xiii 1. Theorizing Victorian Marriage  1 2. Historicizing Marriage, Developing the Marriage Plot  41 3. Neighbor Marriage: Loving the Squire  77 4. Cousin Marriage: Reading on the Contrary  123 5. Disability Marriage: Communities of Care in the Victorian Novel  159 6. Vocational Marriage, or, Why Marriage Doesn’t Work  199 Notes  239 Bibliography  291 Index  315 Preface Romance’s Rival began when I started noticing a pattern in the marriage plot that was so endemic, so widespread, that I only saw it when I encountered a novel in which it had disappeared. In Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family, I was flummoxed by the wedding scene of Ermine and Colin. The climax of their decades-long love is to sit side by side, in wordless bliss, in a room that is a replica of Ermine’s childhood parlor. An infantile regression, an asexual merger, a religious experience—it was all those things, but the one thing it was not was erotically charged. How was I to understand a form of love that paid no attention whatsoever to desire? I might have ascribed this asexuality to some particular strangeness in Clever Woman, but the pattern persisted in all the Yonge novels I read. Proposals were filtered through family members. Young couples insisted on living with elderly relatives. Characters fell in love with people who were severely disabled. In short, marriages seemed designed to consolidate familial structures, not to sat- isfy desire. Perhaps the problem was in Yonge, who was a lifelong spinster; per- haps she simply did not know about sex, or was especially maladroit in writing about it. Yet that seemed a nastily condescending judgment to make regarding an author who was so observant regarding other aspects of love—suffering, same- sex desire, self-development, self-suppression. Suppose Yonge did know about desire and simply didn’t see it as important, I wondered. How might we read her relationships then? How might we understand marriage without desire? As I continued reading, I realized that we might understand it very well already. To read the nondesiring marriage did not require immersion in the work of a marginalized writer like Yonge, I began to understand, but in fact simply demanded a different sort of attention to the major texts of the tradition. The pattern I had first noticed in Yonge in fact pervaded Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Dickens, and Trollope. Once I started looking for it, I found it everywhere. The nondesiring relationship pervades nineteenth-century fiction. Of course, the desiring relationship does too. Indeed, I began to see a pattern in which a

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