Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction

353 Pages·2016·2.567 MB·English

by  Talia Schaffer

Romance’s Rival

Romance’s Rival
Familiar Marriage in
Victorian Fiction
z
TALIA SCHAFFER
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© Talia Schaffer 2016
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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