Chaste Polygamy: Mormon Marriage and the Fantasy of Sexual Privacy in <em>East Lynne</em> and <em>Verner's Pride</em>

Abstract

Victorian sensation fiction is usually regarded as an indigenous product, circulating a set of anxieties about bigamy, divorce, and remarriage that have been persuasively correlated to important challenges to English marriage law at mid-century. However, this article argues that two sensation novels in particular, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Verner’s Pride (1863), participate in a much broader conversation about the shifting status of monogamous marriage in Western culture that was animated and inspired by the chaste, scientific, and progressive polygamy offered to Victorian women in Salt Lake City. Wood’s novels, I argue, are instinctively repulsed by the Mormon mission, but experiment with a fantasy of female domestic privacy and sexual autonomy within polygamy that monogamy appears, by contrast, to deny.