Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France Aurora Wolfgang (bio) Chris Roulston. Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2010. xii+240pp. US $99.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-6839-8. Most eighteenth-century novelists considered married life a topic unworthy of narration because of its stasis and perceived tedium, devoid of climactic narrative energy. Few eighteenth-century novels engage the new bourgeois model of companionate marriage advocated in the advice literature of the day. Chris Roulston seeks to demonstrate how some English and French novels actually did attempt to go beyond the seduction plot in order to engage the topic of marital life. She argues that the topic challenged authors to find new, less climax-driven forms of narrative, and concomitantly forced the marriage narrative into the old novelistic patterns of “conflict, disruption, and reconciliation,” thus interjecting instability into the depiction of the institution charged with societal permanence (6). Roulston asks whether the novel served to [End Page 383] bolster the institution of the bourgeois marriage or helped to destabilize it; her analyses clearly point to the latter. In her first chapter, “Advice Literature and the Meaning of Marriage,” Roulston examines the changing definition of marriage. While advice literature generally upheld the traditional values of the institution, it is nonetheless difficult to distinguish a clear chronological development of social attitudes towards marriage over the century. This is due, in part, Roulston argues, to the tendency of publishers to reprint or plagiarize the same material. Roulston seeks to bring out important debates surrounding eighteenth-century marriage by drawing on a wide array of critics. She addresses the move from wifely obedience to spousal mutuality; the relationship between the private and public space of the home; the debates around divorce; the male fear of effeminacy within the home; the shift from a passionate relationship to an amicable one in marriage; and general anxieties about shifting gender roles. Ultimately, Roulston finds that both the English and French, even with their differing emphases on the sentimental and sexual aspects of marriage, began to engage the topic of marital life in all its messy complexities in the eighteenth century. In chapter 2, “Accounting for Marriage,” Roulston examines two idealized representations of marriage—Samuel Richardson’s Pamela 2 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The New Heloise—to explore how the novel attempts to persuade readers of the advantages of matrimony in a narrative that lacks the momentum of the seduction plot since these novels “tell a story that has no endpoint” (57). Both novels promote a bourgeois ideal of marriage that depicts the virtuous wife as the moral compass of the family who, Roulston adds, bears the burden of rendering the marital narrative worthwhile within its daily repetitiveness and stability. Both fictional heroines exist within an “ideal of accountability” in which they must perform their exemplariness as wives; Pamela displays her virtue to justify Mr B’s unconventional choice of her, and Julie must redirect the passion of her past indiscretion with St Preux to embrace the political ideal of a stable, orderly, and productive married life. Paradoxically, the claim to personal fulfillment in these ideal fictional marriages for women is belied by the heroines’ ultimate discontent as they sacrifice their individual subjectivities to a social institution. In chapter 3, “Marriage and the Colonial Imagination,” Roulston builds on the critical insights of Felicity Nussbaum, Lisa Moore, Rachel Bowlby, Anne McClintock, and others, to examine how the marriage narratives of Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison and Isabelle de Charrière’s Letters of Mistress Henley incorporate the imagined threat of colonial empire (as the exotic other) to the circumscribed domestic spaces at home increasingly charged with embodying national identity. These colonial lands, she argues, “both enable and destabilize domestic ideology, and ... affect the process of narration” (96). While the colonial “other” posed an external threat to the notion of marriage, in chapter 4 it [End Page 384] is the disruptive wife who may undermine the stability of the bourgeois family. Roulston analyzes the figures of rebellious or destructive wives in Samuel Constant’s Le Mari sentimental, Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of...