Frances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern LegacyMarriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy. Frances E. Dolan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 235.

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Previous articleNext article FreeFrances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy. Frances E. Dolan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 235.Mary TrullMary TrullSt. Olaf College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreGiven that Frances Dolan’s Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1500–1700 (1994) is a classic statement of feminist New Historicism, her return to early modern domestic space with a “presentist historicist” perspective in Marriage and Violence is a major event. Until recently, “presentism” has been a term of opprobrium wielded against the search for universal truths about human nature in works of the past, a term connoting indifference to cultural specificity and the desire to claim that one narrow definition of what it means to be human is natural or universal. Like Terence Hawkes, Ewan Fernie, and others flying the banner of presentism, Dolan acknowledges her own “situatedness” as a critic.1 Rather than attempt to shed the present in order to recapture an authentically original past, she makes the present’s concerns the explicit goal of her scholarship. Dolan aims her presentist historicism directly against the essentializing stance of the older, disgraced presentism. She shows that the ideal form of marriage celebrated by today’s social conservatives as innately proper to human nature is both a historically determined idea traceable to the early modern period and a model consistently marked by inequality and violence. Dolan’s subject is a view of marriage characterized by what she calls the “economics of scarcity”—a view that marriage is a zero-sum game in which one partner’s gain in agency or power inevitably signifies a loss to the other. Her first chapter argues that such a view informs a continuous tradition of writing on marriage from the sixteenth century to even the most optimistic twentieth-century proponents of traditional marriage, from Christian fundamentalists to self-help writers who advise women to “surrender” to their husbands. Dolan’s presentist historicism produces enlightening revelations about the logic of inequality and violence and its persistence over the centuries in a tradition she terms an “Anglo-Protestant” legacy of marriage.At this book’s core is the disturbing argument that violence is endemic to our concept of marriage and seeks an outlet in a third party if not within marriage itself. Dolan sets out to make this case in her second chapter by linking legal coverture to early modern and contemporary discourses on spousal abuse and murder. Both eras reveal a common logic: that marriage only has room for one full person, and the subjected partner can claim personhood only through violence. Dolan links this logic to what has been called the early modern “birth of the subject,” showing the important role that marriage plays in our understanding of how one counts, or fails to count, as a person. Just as the early modern legal concept of coverture allotted to the husband the legal rights and responsibilities of both spouses, Dolan points out, some legal defenses of battered women who have killed their abusers attempt to remove legal responsibility for her act from a wife because abuse has stripped her of any sense of selfhood or autonomy. Similarly, popular films absolve the wife from responsibility for her acts until the killing of her husband constitutes her as an independent agent. However, other legal arguments emphasize the rationality of the battered wife and argue that a reasonable belief that her life is in immediate danger might lead her to use lethal force in self-defense. These latter arguments clearly do not participate in the cultural fiction of coverture that Dolan finds persisting even into the twenty-first century; they assume that two full persons exist in marriage, even though the marriage is violent and ends in death. Dolan too quickly dismisses these counterexamples for using the same “binary logic” as the “learned helplessness” defenses. But here careful distinctions between the experience of violence and its representation in divergent discourses, each shaped by different pressures, seem warranted.Is one method of symbolic analysis—an essentially literary-critical method—an adequate tool for analyzing and evaluating so many different kinds of discourse? Dolan’s argument addresses not only legal, psychological, domestic advice, true-crime narrative, and filmic representations of spousal violence but also the first-person accounts of abused women who have killed their abusers. She treats all representations as reflections of the same “zero-sum” mentality, which she assumes is a fictive, socially constituted construct. Similarly, New Historicists often used literary-critical methods to analyze diverse cultural products, from plays to court records to life writing to decorative arts. This method weaves the universe of human activity into one integrated text held together by analogy and metaphor. The weakness of this brand of New Historicism lay in its temptation to elide meaningful differences of genre, medium, place, occasion, speaker, and audience in the service of drawing analogies that reveal the ideological coherence of the larger culture. Most problematic is the (often implicit) equation made between experience and representation, both of which the term “culture” readily subsumes. Though Dolan breaks away from New Historicism by refusing to alienate or defamiliarize the past, she retains its metaphorizing tendency. For Dolan, coverture “lives in and structures the very stories we tell about marital conflict and by which we impose shape on experience” (95). This argument, so compelling when applied to our cultural fantasizing about marriage, becomes less so as a characterization of the actual experience of domestic violence, in which a zero-sum mentality may be an accurate risk assessment: sometimes it really is “either him or me.” When both Mary Hobry’s seventeenth-century account of her husband’s rapes and beatings and those of contemporary women all build to the same conclusion that “Here am I Threatned to be Murder’d, and I have no way in the World to Deliver myself, but by Beginning with him” (91), assigning blame to coverture for shaping women’s understanding of marriage seems dismissive of the social and psychological roots of violence and the lived experience of its survivors.When Dolan turns her attention to cultural fictions about marriage in chapters on servants and marriage and on historical fiction, her method proves its power to illuminate both early modern and contemporary culture through surprising juxtapositions. In an examination of “shrew-taming stories” from Shakespeare to Noël Coward and early modern diaries by William Byrd and Samuel Pepys, Dolan shows how the wife’s power to beat servants resolves the problem of unequal gender roles in marriage. The presence of a subordinated third party allows both husband and wife to dominate another person and elides the wife’s actual subordination, releasing the potential violence of that subordination by inflicting it upon the servant. In texts such as Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, husband and wife equally desire to dominate, and the clash of these desires creates the erotic frisson spectacularly demonstrated by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1967 film adaptation. Dolan shows that marital violence appears both as a pleasure and a threat, both as the problem in marriage and its solution, for Kate, Lucy Byrd, and other wives establish a truce with their husbands yet preserve the erotics of domination by violently subordinating others. Dolan then turns to marriages of our own day, in which unequal gender roles may be expressed not through explicit subordination but through the gendering of domestic chores. Once servants provided an outlet for early modern marital violence; now, for the privileged, cleaning and child-care services ameliorate the tension caused by differential gender roles in marriage.In her fifth chapter, Dolan shows that early modern scholarship can find in historical fiction more than a cringe-inducing penchant for anachronism. Why are modern readers fascinated by fictionalized versions of the life and loves of Henry VIII’s wives and lovers and his daughter, Queen Elizabeth? Dolan answers that these representations of early modern marriage allow us to express anxiety about marriage’s inequality and potential violence while displacing it onto a safely exoticized past and the archaic politics of monarchical government. In these novels, the iconic queens of the sixteenth century, whether “doomed” or virginal, rightly fear marriage; but Philippa Gregory offers her heroines a release from the marital logic of scarcity if they abandon their political ambitions and marry for love away from the court. Thus, fictionalized Tudor marriage represents for contemporary readers an extreme of inequality and danger but also reassures us that even Tudor marriages could be transformed into delightful plenitude through a sacrifice on the woman’s part.Marriage and Violence is a valuable contribution to our thinking about critical methods that helps to move early modern literary scholarship beyond the familiar horizons of New Historicism. Moreover, by drawing our attention to the sources of modern marriage, Dolan’s book turns us toward self-examination. Rather than reducing early modern England to a mere reflection of the present, the mirror Dolan turns on the present shows us that our own visage is marked by a cultural past whose legacy we have not fully acknowledged. Notes 1.Ewan Fernie, “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism,” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 169–84; Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 110, Number 1August 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/666538 Views: 336Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.