Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France

Chris Roulston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317090663
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the eighteenth century, when the definition of marriage was shifting from one based on an hierarchical model to one based on notions of love and mutuality, marital life came under a more intense cultural scrutiny. This led to paradoxical forms of representation of marriage as simultaneously ideal and unlivable. Chris Roulston analyzes how, as representations of married life increased, they challenged the traditional courtship model, offering narratives based on repetition rather than progression. Beginning with English and French marital advice literature, which appropriated novelistic conventions at the same time that it cautioned readers about the dangers of novel reading, she looks at representations of ideal marriages in Pamela II and The New Heloise. Moving on from these ideal domestic spaces, bourgeois marriage is then problematized by the discourse of empire in Sir George Ellison and Letters of Mistress Henley, by troublesome wives in works by Richardson and Samuel de Constant, and by abusive husbands in works by Haywood, Edgeworth, Genlis and Restif de la Bretonne. Finally, the alternative marriage narrative, in which the adultery motif is incorporated into the marriage itself, redefines the function of heteronormativity. In exploring the theoretical issues that arise during this transitional period for married life and the marriage plot, Roulston expands the debates around the evolution of the modern couple.

Chapter 1
Advice Literature and the Meaning of Marriage

The paradigmatic shift in the meaning of marriage in France and England—from its seventeenth-century conception based on the model of sovereign and subject to one based on mutuality and companionship1—produced equally distinct and yet overlapping responses from both advice literature and the domestic novel. For each type of cultural production, certain questions were pushing the representation of marriage in new directions: What did a more private, individualized marriage look like? What were the new roles for husband and wife? How was the relationship between public and private spheres to be managed? On the one hand, advice literature posed a different set of problems in terms of the representation of married life than did the novel form. Focused on rules and prescriptions rather than stories, it privileged the real and saw itself as a corrective to the dangers of novel reading. It also played a more direct role in the dissemination of new ideas and models of marital behavior, allowing, as David M. Turner argues in terms of English advice literature, “ordinary people…greater scope to discuss their marital problems and affairs in print.”2 On the other hand, in England in particular, advice literature and novelistic discourse were produced through a combining of each other’s discursive practices. For example, Samuel Richardson’s bestselling Pamela (1740), came out of a series of didactic ‘familiar letters’ “which fellow printers had encouraged him to write on the problems and concerns of everyday life.”3 Advice literature and the domestic novel, therefore, were reflecting and borrowing from one another while implicitly positioning themselves as distinct generic categories.

Defining advice literature in its broadest sense, to include conduct books, periodicals, didactic short stories, sermons, pamphlets and treatises, this chapter traces the ways in which rhetorical strategies and tropes used to represent marriage shifted and changed from the late seventeenth through to the late eighteenth centuries. While the role of advice literature—in contrast to the equally prevalent satirical literature on marriage—was to present marriage in its best possible light, and to offer recommendations on how to achieve the ideal marriage, the advice in question was far from homogeneous. As discussed in the introduction, while both England and France were moving toward a sentimental companionate model, culminating in England with Richardson and in France with Rousseau, each tradition is marked by a different history. As Peter Wagner has argued, while realism in England can broadly claim to have come with middle-class authors and a middle-class audience, “[i]n France…it was the tradition of vice and worldliness, recorded in fiction from Crébillon fils to Laclos, which contributed to the development of realism.”4 This is reflected, in turn, in French advice literature’s greater emphasis on sexuality and the body, and in its more sustained questioning of the marital institution. While more examples will be drawn from the English tradition—which underwent an unprecedented increase from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century5—French examples will be used to highlight the contrasting ways in which the question of intimacy was being addressed, and to foreground the French concern with divorce.

Early Advice Literature on Marriage

In the late seventeenth century, marriage in both England and France still tended to be imagined according to a strictly hierarchical model—along a vertical rather than a horizontal axis—with a particular emphasis on paternal authority. According to Natalie Zemon Davis, the legal subjection of wives to their husbands was not only embedded in, but enabled by, the centralized political structures of England’s concept of dutiful citizenship and France’s absolute monarchy.6 We will therefore examine the extent to which, over the course of the eighteenth century, advice literature privatized the married subject through, for example, its metaphorical use of the architecture of the home and its exploration of conjugal sexuality, and to what extent it unsettled domestic boundaries. An examination of the impressive range of advice literature on marriage reveals that while it sought to redefine the marital experience, there was no unique template for the transformed relations between husband and wife.

A key paradox of advice literature was that as marriage was being constructed as a private realm in ideological terms, it was also being discussed and analyzed in increasingly public forums. According to Jürgen Habermas, this formed part of the dialectic between the public and the private, in that the construction of a civil society in which public opinion could function democratically depended on the simultaneous construction of an autonomous private subject nurtured within the bourgeois family, and an institution that “was the scene of a psychological emancipation that corresponded to the political-economic one.”7 This ‘private’ subject therefore had to be rendered both visible and intelligible. Yet Habermas also acknowledges that the bourgeois family’s image of itself as emancipated functioned as a fictional construction, since “the family was not exempted from the constraint to which bourgeois society like all societies before it was subject.”8 To an important degree, advice literature negotiates this tension between the ideal narrative of marriage and its everyday reality in its refashioning of the private sphere.

Examples from the late seventeenth century reveal the extent to which representations of marriage were still dominated by the conventionally patriarchal model of the family, in which the husband and father was the reflection of the sovereign, the family being perceived as a miniature version of a monarchical state.9 According to Kathleen Davies, in both Puritan and Catholic sermons on marriage: “the overwhelming preoccupation of the seventeenth-century writers was with the relationship which subordinated the wife to the husband,”10 a preoccupation which continued well into the eighteenth century.11 Within this paradigm, relations of social authority rather than intimacy defined the ways in which marriage was being constructed and imagined.

In light of this, the story of Genesis acted as a template for marital relations, as in Richard Allestree’s The Ladies Calling (1673):

[I]t being the mulct [penalty] that was laid upon the first womans disobedience to God, that she (and all derived from her) should be subject to the husband; so that the contending for superiority, is an attemt [sic] to reverse that fundamental law, which is almost as ancient as the World.12

Such examples reveal the absolute terms in which marriage was being cast. Another fashionable Puritan preacher, William Gouge, describes marriage as follows:

[T]he Moone hath not so much light as the Sunne, and that which it hath it hath from the Sunne: and as in governing, the king and other magistrates have a fellowship, but in the measure, and manner of government they are inferior to him: Even so is it betwixt man and wife.13

Here the organic, natural metaphors of moon and sun confirm the political relationship of king and magistrate, and finally, that of husband and wife. The variety of the examples—whether natural or social—all tended towards the same end, and became an unquestioned paradigm for how relations between the married couple were to be conceived.

Another common trope for married life was the image of the wife as a reflection of the husband. The image of the mirror worked as a way of simultaneously inscribing and erasing the wife’s presence; in Jacques Du Bosc’s popular French tract L’Honneste femme (1665), translated as The Excellent Woman (1695), the narrator writes:

How much reason had Plutarch to compare a Woman that is Obedient, to a Glass that represents well! For, What is there more Complaisant than a Glass? If you speak, your Image moves the Lips; if you turn Pale, that changes Colour as you do; if you go away that disappears; it is nothing else but what you are.14

Here, the wife is a literal reflection of the husband, the feminine functioning as an extension of the masculine subject. The image of the mirror reappears in John Sprint’s widely disseminated sermon of 1699, The Bride-Woman’s Counseller:

A good Wife should be like a mirror, which hath no Image of its own, but receives its Stamp and Image from the Face that looks into it…to rejoyce when he rejoyceth, to be sad when he mourns, to grieve and be troubled when he is offended and vexed.15

In the above descriptions, the potential dynamism of the couple is effectively erased, as the two become one, with the wife-as-mirror reflecting the husband back to himself. Heterosexual marriage is imagined in monologic terms, rendering invisible the very difference that structures it.

The paradox of this reflective model is picked up by Lady Mary Chudleigh’s (1656–1710) response to Sprint’s sermon in The Female Advocate (1700):

A good Wife should be like a Mirror (a wonderful Discovery, that a Woman should be so exactly like a Looking-glass!) But marke the Design of it in the following words; Which has no Image of its own, but receives its Stamp and Image from the Face that looks into it. Now by this rule, whenever ’tis a frowning, peevish, fretful, stormy Face, that looks into this Glass, the Mirrour must send back the very same agen, or else ’twill be a false Glass.16

Chudleigh—an admirer of Mary Astell—follows the logical extension of the mirror metaphor, and thus inverts Sprint’s argument; the husband would simply be confronted with himself as he is, not as he would like to be. The wife-as-mirror would reflect the real, not the ideal, “or else” as Chudleigh argues, “’twill be a false Glass.” Chudleigh humorously exposes the burden of this closed specular economy, which, like the rest of Sprint’s advice, relies on seeing the couple from a hegemonically masculine perspective.

In England, critiques such as Chudleigh’s were being formulated against the backdrop of the 1688 Glorious Revolution—which replaced King James II with William of Orange—and which destabilized the idea of the established monarchy’s divine right to rule. Combined with the growing influence of John Locke’s (1632–1704) and Thomas Hobbes’s (1588–1679) contract theory—picked up later in France by the philosophes—the hierarchical organization of families could no longer be assumed with the same confidence.17 Although removed from political discourse, the repercussions of these political shifts and new political theories could be felt in advice literature’s contesting representations of marriage at the turn of the century, both in England and on the Continent. While the husband continued to be considered the head of the household, the configuration of the couple, and in particular their relationship to public and private spaces, was being represented in a decreasingly unified and homogeneous fashion.

From Obedience to Mutuality

While the ubiquity of references to husbands as kings, lords, and governors effectively limited the ways in which marital relations could be imagined, critiques such as Chudleigh’s and Astell’s reveal that a sophisticated attack on these models was underway.18 As Michael McKeon has argued in relation to Pamela (1740), by the mid-eighteenth century, m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Translations
• Introduction: After the Wedding
• 1 Advice Literature and the Meaning of Marriage
• 2 Accounting for Marriage
• 3 Marriage and the Colonial Imagination
• 4 Disruptive Wives and theBalance of Power
• 5 Narrating Wife-Abuse
• 6 Having It Both Ways?The Eighteenth-Century Ménage-à-Trois
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index