Courtship, Marriage and Marriage Breakdown

Approaches from the History of Emotion

Katie Barclay, Jeffrey Meek, Andrea Thomson, Katie Barclay, Jeffrey Meek, Andrea Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000734027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

This book explores the history of marriage and marriage-like relationships across five continents from the seventeenth century to the present day. Across fourteen chapters, leading marriage scholars examine how the methodologies from the new history of emotions contribute to our understanding of marriage, seeking to uncover not only personal feeling but also the political and social implications of emotion. They highlight how marriage as an institution has been shaped not just by law and society but also by individual and community choices, desires and emotional values. Importantly, they also emphasize how the history of non-traditional and same-sex relationships and their emotions have long played an important role in determining the nature of marriage as an institution and emotional union. In doing so, this collection allows us to rethink both the past and present of marriage, destabilizing a story of a stable institution and opening it up as a site of contest, debate and feeling.

1 Marriage and emotion in historical context

Katie Barclay, Jeffrey Meek and Andrea Thomson

Man when created,

At first alone, long wandered up and down,

Forlorn and silent as his Vassal Beast;

But when a Heav’n-born Maid to him appear’d,

Strange Passion fill’d his Eyes, and fir’d his Heart,

Unloos’d his Tongue, and his first Talk was Love.

—Otway, quoted in Gideon Archer, Social Bliss Considered: In Marriage and Divorce; Cohabiting Unmarried, and Public Whoring (London: R. Rose, 1749)

Many cultures, ancient and modern, contain myths and legends that revolve around love and partnering that have transformative impacts on them or the world.¹ Two people meet, find connection, and family, society, nation is born. In this sense, love has long been associated with the history of marriage in many cultures, even if what love and marriage meant and included varied enormously.² Histories of courtship, marriage and marital breakdown have thus frequently given some consideration to ‘love’, even if it is to downplay its significance.³ Yet, marriage, its formation, duration and dissolution, is not just about love. As a key institution in which human beings have explored how to engage with each other and produce meaning, marriage has incorporated a rich emotional fabric – happiness, anger, jealousy and apathy, to name a few.⁴ It is also a relationship that is about not just a couple but also families and nations, as marriages produce social groups.⁵ Recently, new methodologies from the history of emotions have moved beyond identifying marriage as a place where people ‘feel’ to asking what difference such feeling made. New theories have highlighted emotion, whether catching the eye of a beloved across a room or feeling anger at a parent’s decision to veto a marriage, not just as a response to wider historical processes but also as an active dynamic in social life.⁶ For some, emotion has even moved to a social structure in its own right, shaping people’s decisions, behaviours and possibilities.⁷

This collection engages with new research and methodologies from the history of emotion to explore how incorporating them into the scholarship of courtship, marriage and marital breakdown might provide a richer and more complex understanding of the topics. Applying histories of emotion to marriage is increasingly significant to European scholarship, and this is reflected in the makeup of the volume.⁸ However, one of the aims of the collection is to ask how a scholarship of emotions and marriage – both concepts that vary over time and place – might be recast when incorporating perspectives from relationships and cultures across the globe. This volume brings together scholars working on West Africa, South Korea, Mexico, India and the United States, alongside Europeanists, to explore how the intersection of geography, culture and period produces different emotional histories of marriage.

As this introduction will suggest, processes of modernization and globalization have in some places flattened the diversity of emotional experiences associated with marriage, and thus this collection also incorporates perspectives from the seventeenth century to the present. Global mobility, exchange in ideas and beliefs and not least intermarriage were well under way in much of the world by 1600.⁹ Taking account of this long history of global engagements helps elucidate the meaning, operation and interaction of emotion and marriage over time, both locally and transnationally. As these chapters suggest, applying approaches from the history of emotions raises new and significant questions in various historiographies – from enabling a rethinking of early modern divisions between family, economy and the individual in marital choice to highlighting the ongoing impact of state control on family life in contemporary South Korea – but each chapter offers an engagement with the history of emotion as a productive mechanism for moving forward historical debates and our understanding of past relationships.

Histories of courtship, marriage and marital breakdown

The household has long been posited as a fundamental unit of society, law and governance. For much of the world, and for much of history, marriage has been the institution through which orderly households have been produced. Of course, what is meant by ‘marriage’ is messier, especially once global forms of household are incorporated. If European marriage customs, given rough shape by medieval Christianity and evolving across time and place, are used as the baseline, then marriage is the union of two individuals, typically through a ritual or ceremony, that brings together families or kin groups.¹⁰ For most Europeans, in its ideal form marriage was and is monogamous, establishes a new household and produces children and lineage; its dissolution should be difficult. In practice, married life did not operate so smoothly, with adultery, bigamy and polygamy found in Europe and its colonies – issues highlighted in chapters in this volume by Katie Barclay, Marie Rodet and Claire Langhamer.¹¹ Marriage and the households built around it did not always persist over time; they could fail in heirs or in productive relations.¹² Rather than enabling order, they could disrupt, cause neighbourly disharmony or challenge normative ways of living.¹³ As a history of just four hundred years highlights, marriage – who it could include, what it should achieve, its role in society – has constantly been evolving to reflect new ideas, values, economies and cultures.

Defining marriage is troubled further when global practices are incorporated. If monogamous unions of various forms can be found in many countries across the world, polygamy has also been significant. Many groups across Africa permitted taking multiple wives well into the twentieth century; some groups, such as the Buganda in contemporary Uganda, had distinct hierarchies for wives that enshrined women with more or less authority or resources in the kin unit.¹⁴ In Qing China, concubinage was possible for powerful men, reflecting their wealth and status.¹⁵ In some countries, the bride or groom was incorporated into an existing household, required to find her or his place within a broad network of kin.¹⁶ For the Dayak in Indonesian Borneo, sexual partners did not cohabit, but men visited the matrilineal household, where children were raised.¹⁷ Global perspectives challenge a European idea of marriage, whether through destabilizing the nature of the household, the number of parties within the ‘marital relationship’, or its purpose and function. Despite this, the authors contributing to this collection have all focused on ‘marriages’ where ‘the couple’ has been central, if complicated by larger familial interests or the challenges of dissolving a previous connection. This may reflect that a focus on emotion tends to lead us to individuals, rather than groups. Yet, many chapters in this volume hint at the potential of expanding outwards, whether that is Julie Hardwick’s insights into parent-child loyalties shaping behaviour in courtship in seventeenth-century France or Rachel Hope Cleves’s discussion of how a same-sex relationship inspired new romantic desires in a younger generation in nineteenth-century America. Histories of group intimacies are a suggestive area of further research.¹⁸

The focus on pair-bonding, at least in part, reflects that across the period captured by this collection – 1600 to the present day – international movement, trade and imperialism ensured that European marriage customs were increasingly widely known and in some instances transformative to local customs.¹⁹ Tensions between systems of knowledge through colonial encounters emerge in several chapters, whether that is Margarita Ochoa’s exploration of how indigenous and non-indigenous Mexicans alike used the courts to enforce their own moral codes, or Amalya Layla Ashman’s exploration of new forms of love in twentieth-century South Korea. Closely tied to a story of modernity, the history of courtship and marriage often highlights the growing emphasis on love as both a human right and a key source of personal liberty.²⁰ Thus, individual choice of marital partner becomes located as a moral and ethical good from the eighteenth century, slowly disconnecting marriage from family interests, prioritizing the couple and placing love at the heart of civil rights campaigns, such as the removal of restrictions on interracial or same-sex marriage.²¹ In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between colonialism, missionizing efforts, international popular culture, and the growth of Western nations as global powers, Western ideas of romantic love were increasingly influential, drawn on in the production of new political systems or nations.²² And yet the impact on couples and how they applied it to their everyday lives varied enormously, as this collection suggests.

Whether wider family and kin have become a distant party in marriage remains a topic of debate. Family has often played an important role in marital decisions, from whom to marry and the location of the household to when a marriage should be dissolved. Early modern families across the globe helped select partners for their children in an arrangement that was often expected to promote the interests and agenda of the kin group, whether dynastic ambitions or economic security.²³ The significance of family to marriage was enhanced where the bride or groom entered an established household and was incorporated into a group dynamic, as Ruth Vanita highlights here in work on India.²⁴ In some contexts, gender segregation in households reinforced same-sex bonds, from sister wives to mothers-in-law and their new daughters-through-marriage; it was not the relationship with a new spouse that was key but those with the other men or women that one worked alongside, shared resources with and spent time with.²⁵ Even as complex households have declined and families have retreated from formally benefiting from marriage, the opinion of parents and siblings continues to inform the success or failure of a relationship over time. Clashes in family cultures can impact on household dynamics as marriages are practised in the everyday, and many marriages produce children, introducing new actors into married life.²⁶ Thus if histories of group intimacies are still embryonic, that the emotional lives of couples are played out within the context of wider kin networks is increasingly recognized.

The involvement of family in married life was often informed by the role that marriage played in the economy. In many cultures until recently, the household was the central location of production, as well as reproduction. From farms to family businesses, much industry was performed either in the household or nearby; rather than clear divisions between work and home, boundaries were blurred, with all members of the family expected to contribute to the success of the household through their labour.²⁷ Marriage was a key mechanism for promoting economic success, whether through consolidating dynastic, business or working partnerships, providing a route to promotion for the journeyman who married his master’s widow, or bringing a key worker’s income into the family.²⁸ As women’s paid labour outside the home became less significant for some groups, marriage also promoted male professional success through their domestic and reproductive work in managing households.²⁹

As the chapters in this collection highlight, the intertwining of economics and emotion is often more visible for early modern families than more recent couplings. Yet, this is not necessarily evidence that families prioritized the pragmatic functions of the household over its affective dimensions. Barclay’s case study of eighteenth-century Scotland is suggestive of the ways that failures in emotional connection could have repercussions for the successful functioning of the household and the economies based upon it. Rather, as Hardwick and Edward Behrend-Martínez suggest, building on the insights of David Sabean, emotion was central to economic decision-making.³⁰ Interestingly, the practical concerns of work and housework are downplayed in chapters addressing twentieth-century emotions, but even here the ways that labour and gender roles inform each other have implications for how couples negotiate their relationships, as Janet Fink and Jacqui Gabb highlight in their discussion of twenty-first century couples. As the purpose and function of marriage across the globe become increasingly associated with self-actualization and the practice of love, teasing out how structures of feeling interact with marriage’s economic dimensions may provide distinctive insights.

As an institution that has been so central to the functioning of economies, societies and family life, m...