Abstract
What accounts for the endurance of forced marriage (kahwin paksa) narratives in Malaysian public culture? How does one explain the ways popular fascination with forced marriage relate to assumptions about heteronormative institutions and practices? In a society where most who enter into marriages do so based on individual choice, the enduring popularity of forced marriage as a melodramatic trope in fictional love stories suggests an ambivalence about modernity and egalitarianism. This ambivalence is further excavated by illuminating the intertextual engagement by readers, publishers and booksellers of Malay romantic fiction with a mediated discourse on intimacy and cultural practices. This article finds that forced marriage in the intimate publics of Malay romance is delivered as a kind of melodramatic mode, a storytelling strategy to solve practical problems of experience. Intertextual narratives of pain and struggle cast light on ‘redha’ (submission to God’s will) and ‘sabar’ (patience), emotional virtues that are mobilised during personal hardship and the challenge of maintaining successful marital relations. I argue that ‘redha’ and ‘sabar’ serve as important linchpins for the reproduction of heteronormative institutions and wifely obedience (taat). This article also demonstrates the ways texts are interwoven in the narratives about gender roles, intimacy, and marital success (or lack thereof) and how they relate to the modes of romantic melodrama.
Highlights
Putting Forced Marriage in PerspectiveOn the shelves of bookshops across the country and prime time evening television screens are fables told and retold about women trapped in unwanted marriages to handsome but cruel men
Female readers of romantic fiction in Malaysia who show enthusiasm and preference for tales of forced marriage during a time when most women choose to enter companionate love marriages suggests a curious scenario that implicates the trajectory of marriage and modernity
Melodramatic narratives of forced marriage offer a cultural space for working through difficult emotions related to marital problems and domestic demands
Summary
On the shelves of bookshops across the country and prime time evening television screens are fables told and retold about women trapped in unwanted marriages to handsome but cruel men. Malay literature and popular fiction, survey responses, and interviews, this article shows that their interest in stories about forced marriage is both social and literary, demonstrating the productive intertwinement of texts and emotion. Its close association with melodrama (Gledhill 1992) lends itself well to the well-received film and television adaptations What does it mean for romantic stories of forced marriage and sexual violence to be so popular among women today? This article is structured as follows; with a section that briefly outlines the methods used to carry out this study, followed by a discussion on wifely obedience in Islam and the emergence of emotions as the vocabulary for recourse, and a case study on the portrayal of forced marriage in contemporary Malay romance and the interweaving of redha and sabar as emotional virtues within fictional and personal narratives
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