Dickens and the Rise of Divorce

The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition

Kelly Hager

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754669470
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317151173
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Questioning a literary history that, since Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, has privileged the courtship plot, Kelly Hager proposes an equally powerful but overlooked narrative focusing on the failed marriage. Hager maps the legal history of marriage and divorce, providing crucial background as she reveals the prevalence of the failed-marriage plot in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels. Dickens's novels emerge as representative case studies in their preoccupations with the disintegration of marriage, the far-reaching and disastrous effects of the doctrine of coverture, and the comic, spectacular, and monstrous possibilities afforded by the failed-marriage plot. Setting his narratives alongside the writings of liberal reformers like John Stuart Mill and the seemingly conservative agendas of Caroline Norton, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Sarah Stickney Ellis, Hager also offers a more contextualized account of the competing strands of the Woman Question. In the course of her revisionist readings of Dickens's novels, Hager uncovers a Dickens who is neither the conservative agent of the patriarchy nor a novelistic Jeremy Bentham, and reveals that tipping the marriage plot on its head forces us to adjust our understanding of the complexities of Victorian proto-feminism.

Chapter 1
Contextualizing the Failed-Marriage Plot: Ian Watt, the Domestic Novel, and the Law of Marriage

In Aurora Floyd (1863), Mary Elizabeth Braddon sets the agenda for the present study as she asks her readers,

Yet, after all, does the business of the real life-drama always end upon the altar-steps? Must the play needs be over when the hero and heroine have signed their names in the register? Does man cease to be, to do, and to suffer when he gets married? And is it necessary that the novelist, after devoting three volumes to the description of a courtship of six weeks’ duration, should reserve for himself only half a page in which to tell us the events of two-thirds of a life-time? Aurora is married, and settled, and happy; sheltered, as one would imagine, from all dangers, safe under the wing of her stalwart adorer; but it does not therefore follow that the story of her life is done. She has escaped shipwreck for a while, and has safely landed on a pleasant shore; but the storm cloud may still lower darkly upon the horizon, while the hoarse thunder grumbles threateningly in the distance. (163)

Dickens and the Rise of Divorce focuses on the “storm cloud” and the “hoarse thunder” as it seeks to contest the privilege students of fiction have accorded the courtship plot since Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957). It questions the critical commonplace that marriage establishes closure and demonstrates instead that marriage is just as frequently the impetus for further, often highly-elaborated, narrative development. More specifically, Dickens and the Rise of Divorce uncovers and argues for the existence of the failed-marriage plot: the plot Braddon has in mind when she suggests that “half a page” is not enough “in which to tell us the events of two-thirds of a life-time,” the plot that considers at length and in detail the failure of the wedded relationship. The goal of this chapter is to understand why the history of the English novel has ignored or overlooked the failed-marriage plot, a project I begin by exploring theories of the novel that fail to take into account the unhappy marriages that litter the pages of the domestic novel and by trying to figure out why marital misery has received so little critical attention in narrative theory. I then canvas eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels for examples of marital dis-ease and the strategies novelists have employed to construct narratives from what happens after the vows have been exchanged and the courtship plot successfully resolved. I conclude by looking at the legislation enacted from 1753, when clandestine marriages were forbidden and marriage more stringently codified, to 1857, when divorce was legalized. Looking at the legal versions of the courtship plot, the failed-marriage plot, and the divorce plot helps us see, in another register, just how pervasive and perplexing the interrogation of marriage was in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain. The matrimonial legislation enacted in that period suggests yet another reason to insist on a more balanced and complete view of the institution of marriage as it was reflected through the medium of literature. As Niklas Luhmann reminds us, the codification of relations between men and women “not only regulated behaviour, but also documented its own recurrence in the very area of behavior it regulated” (32). Specifically, “codification becomes reflected” in the novel, and “already by the seventeenth century it was common knowledge that the lady had read novels and therefore knew the code” (31). Luhmann draws attention to the way in which cultural systems (which include literature and the law, not to mention the economy, politics, and science) both influence and depend upon each other for their successful reception.

The Courtship Plot and the Novel Tradition

Ruth Yeazell points out in her study of the modest heroine that the period of courtship is traditionally viewed as “the special province of the English novel” (Fictions of Modesty 50). As Yeazell’s phrase implies, it is a controlling assumption of the history of the novel that Continental novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrote novels of adultery, concentrating on extramarital liaisons which occur after the marriage ceremony, while their English counterparts produced novels of courtship, relying on a narrative culminating in the exchange of wedding vows to provide closure. But this assumption deflects attention from the fact that many English novels pay attention to the wedded relationship itself, that many novels of courtship also examine the events that take place after the courtship plot has been resolved. In other words, the strong critical emphasis on the courtship plot has led many critics to ignore another, equally important, generic impulse. All English novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries do not, in fact, end with the marriage of hero and heroine, and the domestic novel does not always establish closure and ask its readers to believe that society has thus been stabilized. Indeed, the novel of courtship’s plot-motivating tension between hero and heroine that must be resolved in order for them to marry is often mirrored in the tension between husband and wife. Privileging the courtship plot effectively preempts a theory of the novel that takes into account the prevalence of postmarital plotting and that recognizes the failure of marriage as the subject of this plot. That is, while the courtship plot certainly emerges in the eighteenth century with novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), formalist critics like Dorothy Van Ghent and J. Hillis Miller—and even a Marxian historicist like Mary Poovey—have established this plot as a critical paradigm, a formalization critics abstract from the messy and uncontainable history of the novel and thus one continually questioned in the novels themselves. While no one would argue that there are no unhappy marriages in English novels, critics of the British novel tend to abstract as a norm a version of union that the texts themselves everywhere put in jeopardy. Hence critics as various as E.M. Forster, Leslie Fiedler, and Nancy Armstrong (all of whom at times write skeptically about heterosexual union, whatever their other differences) have viewed marriage as the goal of the domestic novel and have written histories of the novel that take for granted that the marriages depicted in the English novel are successful.

I want first, then, to think about how and why students of the novel subscribe so faithfully to Watt’s theory of the novel, how even the most subversive of critics base their understanding of the domestic novel on a theory that has shaped our understanding of the genre for over 50 years. I want to examine why Mary Poovey, a critic who is otherwise impatient with received wisdom and critical truisms, accepts that a “generically new novel” that “would take as its subject marital unhappiness as well as bliss … of course, would not begin to appear in Britain until the very end of the century, when Thomas Hardy finally broke the stranglehold of the marriage plot with a mode of realism that denied readers the gratification of romantic wishes fulfilled” (“Recovering Ellen Pickering” 448). The strength of Watt’s hold on novel criticism reveals itself in Poovey’s “of course,” and in what follows I want to articulate some of the reasons for that powerful grip, to provide an explanation for the overwhelming and long-lived success of his conservative thesis, and to suggest an alternative account of the domestic novel.

Poovey’s assertions are symptomatic; her work has voluminously undermined any totalizing claim about the Victorians and their affective life, yet we see the persistence of the Victorian symbolic of contented marriages in her otherwise revisionary oeuvre. Poovey is also a good place to begin tracing the attractive power of Watt’s thesis, for she, like so many other students of the novel, assumes that the end of the Victorian period (not accidentally) coincides with the end of the courtship plot, or, at the very least, the beginning of a move away from it. In The City of Dickens (1971), Alexander Welsh nominates E.M. Forster’s insistence that “if it was not for death and marriage, I do not know how the average novelist would conclude” as “a fair description of the English novel before Forster’s time” (220). Similarly, in Tradition Counter Tradition (1987) Joseph Boone argues that the “tragic wedlock plot” does not emerge until the end of the nineteenth century (10).1 More subtly, Jonathan Loesberg, in his essay “Deconstruction, Historicism, and Overdetermination: Dislocations of the Marriage Plots in Robert Elsmere and Dombey and Son” (1990), invokes the passage in Aurora Floyd which is my point of departure in this chapter and argues that “when with casual humor and merely for heightening suspense, a suspense writer calls attention to the breaking of a novelistic convention, we can safely guess that the convention being broken is no longer an all-powerful one” (460). Loesberg’s point here is especially significant, for while he points to the fact that the convention of ending a novel in marriage is “no longer an all-powerful one,” he also implies that it was at one point a convention, and an “all-powerful” one at that. Indeed, he assumes this convention to be one that held before 1863. While his dating of the breaking of that convention predates Poovey’s (Hardy) and Welsh’s and Boone’s (the end/turn of the century), his argument reveals that he, too, equates the domestic novel with the courtship plot. Whether critics point to Hardy or Forster or Braddon as the instigator of the move away from a conventional marriage plot, all of these moves are variations on Watt’s theme that there is in fact a convention to be broken, whereas I would argue that the failed-marriage plot was a competing and complementary plot from the beginning of the novel’s emergence in the eighteenth century.

Closely linked to Watt’s thesis that the English novel most often finds its plot in courtship is the corollary thesis that there is no way to plot a marriage, that novels end in marriage not only because that institution marks the successful end of a courtship, but also because it puts an end to all narrative possibilities. This view is not unlike Forster’s sense that death and marriage are the only ways to end a novel, and it is an important consequence of Watt’s argument to consider in the context of my argument about the failed-marriage plot, for marriage does not always put an end to novelistic plotting (unlike death, marriage does not mean the end of a character’s story), and marriage does not always establish closure—for the novel or for the characters the institution unites. Indeed, the preponderance of second-chance plots and remarriages in the English novel indicates that the form neither requires nor insists that its plots always end in marriage or that marriage is always a static state of affairs. Yet adopting too easily the courtship model leaves us without a theory of the novel that takes into account the prevalence of postmarital plotting. The implications of the many novels that take a more sustained view of the institution of marriage itself—that find their plots in the lives of husbands and wives—have yet to be taken up by novel theory.2 Critical emphasis on the courtship plot has had the strange effect of occluding the plot that concerns the future of that desired end.

The kind of post-courtship plotting that forms the focus of my study is the failed-marriage plot, precisely because it is this plot that most explicitly contradicts the accepted notion that marriage establishes closure. But there are also, of course, novels devoted to the marriage plot in the most literal sense, novels of remarriage, as I suggest above, and novels in which a man and woman who have married for reasons other than affection—-the attraction may be one-sided, or they may have been forced to marry for economic or familial reasons or to escape some other fate—come to love each other. In novels like these, the courtship plot is almost exactly reproduced within the wedded relationship. Yet for critics as various as D.A. Miller, Mary Poovey, and Carolyn Heilbrun, marriage is “nonnarratable” (the term is Miller’s); it has no capacity “to generate a story” (Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents 5).3 Poovey assumes that marriage in general “brings the plot to closure and thus ends the writer’s work” (“Recovering Ellen Pickering” 452, n. 5), while Miller finds that happy marriages, like those that mark the end of Austen novels, “inhibit narrative productivity”—that they have “no narrative future.” “The ‘perfect union’ of Emma and Mr. Knightley virtually must end the novel,” he argues, “otherwise, it would not be a ‘perfect’ union” (Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents 5). Carolyn Heilbrun shares Miller’s view that marriages are not the stuff of fiction and that Austen’s marriages are especially devoid of plot. In “Marriage Perceived: English Literature 1873–1941” (1977), she argues that until the beginnings of the modern novel (a line of demarcation fast becoming familiar), “marriage was not allowed to enter into literature, except as a condition universally acknowledged, but either unobserved, or glimpsed so occasionally that little was discovered beyond casual misery or boredom or both.” She accounts for this omission on the grounds that marriage is “quotidian” and that happy marriages are “not news” (163).4

Three strands linking these various accounts are worthy of remark: the frequency with which Hardy or the modern novel is linked to the beginnings of the novel’s exploration of marriage and its failures; the similarity between Carolyn Heilbrun’s insistence in 1977 that marriage is “not news” and D.A. Miller’s description of it in 1981 as “nonnarratable”; and, more generally, the surprising consonance between E.M. Forster and Jonathan Loesberg, Carolyn Heilbrun and D.A. Miller, Alexander Welsh and Mary Poovey, between pioneers of novel criticism and latter-day, more self-consciously historicist and more skeptical critics. I will return to these three correspondences in formulating an explanation of the longevity of Watt’s thesis, but I want first to turn to some more scattered evidence of Watt’s reach, to bits and pieces from recent studies of the domestic novel that suggest how widely scholars subscribe to the basic thesis of The Rise of the Novel. Consider, for instance, Ann duCille’s The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (1993), which begins thus:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a great fortune must be in want of a wife.” This oft-quoted opening line from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice suggests both the degree to which the marriage plot is indigenous to the genre of the novel and the extent to which the middle and upper classes have historically been preoccupied with matrimony and affairs of the heart and pocketbook. It is a truth not so widely acknowledged, however, that the single everyman in Jane Austen’s universal is not only wealthy but white. This study is concerned with what happens when the players change, when the fictive figures “in love and in trouble,” to use Alice Walker’s metaphor, cease to be white men and women of means and property and become black men and women, poor as well as propertied. What happens to the marriage tradition—to Leslie Fiedler’s notion of love as “the subject par excellence of the novel,” for example—when it is considered in the context of a literature by and about American men and women who for generations were denied the hegemonic “universal truth” of legal marriage? (3)

In her groundbreaking study of the courtship plot in African-American fiction, duCille applies Watt’s thesis to novels by William Wells Brown, Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Zora Neale Hurston, but in so doing she accepts what she calls that “hegemonic ‘universal truth.’” She extends the reach of the courtship plot when she argues that, “making unconventional use of conventional literary forms, early black writers appropriated for their own emancipatory purposes both the genre of the novel and the structure of the marriage plot” (3).

duCille’s acceptance of The Rise of the Novel’s privileging of the courtship plot is similar to Mary Poovey’s articulation, in Uneven Developments (1988), of the way in which a novel like David Copperfield both describes and reproduces “a specific model of desire” that “ideally” is “stabilized and its transgressive potential neutralized in the safe harbor of marriage” (90). duCille’s approach also resembles Nancy Armstrong’s groundbreaking (yet fundamentally Wattian) assertion in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) that

when Austen and the Brontës sat down to write novels, they apparently knew they were writing novels, and they knew what a novel was. … For by then it had been established that novels were supposed to rewrite political history as personal histories that elaborated on the courtship procedures ensuring a happy domestic life. (38)

Armstrong further reveals that her revision is one that works within the domain of a discipline-defining hypothesis when she argues that

around the time Austen wrote, the novel was being defined by Scott, Barbauld, and others in a way that gave meaning to such narratives whose resolution depended on marriage. The novel was identified with fiction that authorized a particular form of domestic relations. But if Austen could not vary the form and still write a respectable novel, she could modify the content and thus the nature of the social conflict that marriage appeared to resolve. (50)

Her awareness of the ways in which Austen modifies the content of the domestic novel highlights our assumption that the form itself is inviolable and that we respect the boundaries established by Watt and the truths his thesis appoints as “universally acknowledged.” Further, in the epilogue to Desire and Domestic Fiction, Armstrong demonstrates that the English novel presents us with the kind of heterosexual, normative, conservative plot that Watt has trained us to read for, and she suggests that this plot is one that she, and most readers of English fiction, have internalized. In the following passage she not only spells out what is at stake in her account of the domestic novel, but she also reveals the debt her revisionary thesis owes to Watt. I thus quote from her epilogue at length:

I am convinced that the household Richardson envisioned for Pamela has grown more powerful during the time that has passed between his day and ours. This is true not only because the self-enclosed family often conceals a host of abuses, but also because, with the emergence of the professional couple as an economic reality, gender roles have changed in significant ways. The ideal of domesticity has grown only more powerful a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Contextualizing the Failed-Marriage Plot: Ian Watt, the Domestic Novel, and the Law of Marriage
• 2 Monstrous Marriage in Early Dickens
• 3 Making a Spectacle of Yourself, or, Marriage as Melodrama in Dombey and Son
• 4 Estranging David Copperfield
• 5 Hard Times and the Indictment of Marriage
• Epilogue How to Read the Failed-Marriage Plot: “Leave Sunny Imaginations Hope”?
• Bibliography
• Index