Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature ed. by Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie

Abstract

Reviewed by: Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature ed. by Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie Sarah Gates Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie, eds. Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Columbia: Ohio State UP, 2018. Pp. i – 269. Correction: The first line of this review should read "Jill Galvan..." It mistakenly went to print as "Julie Galvan". The online version has been updated. Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie articulate an ambitious goal for the widely ranging and innovative essays in this collection: nothing less than "to prompt a rethinking of this literary historical period, and, in turn, of long-nineteenth-century studies as such" (2). One might be hard put to identify a vehicle more suited to such rethinking than marriage, so long assumed to be the domestic foundation of a modern civilized society and provider of the central organizing plot of such a society's narratives about itself. And indeed, reading the essays, one feels windows and doors opening, fresh winds blowing through a venerable but somewhat musty edifice. The collection is divided into three parts, "The Forming and Transforming of the Marriage Plot," "Marital and Other Loyalties: Cultural Contexts for the Marriage Plot" and "Beyond Coupling: Queer, Communal, Tertiary." An Afterword by Mary Jean Corbett about marriage as symbol (via Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse) suggests ways its "representativeness" can continue to supply "multiple meanings in different historical moments" (236, 237). The chapters in Part I focus on the earliest and latest decades of the nineteenth century, examining the marriage plot in negotiation with Romanticism, Darwinism and anthropology. Ian Duncan opens this section with readings of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Scott's Waverly and Staël's Corinne, or Italy. While Wilhelm Meister illustrates the "drive toward an unrealized horizon of universality" of the German Bildungsroman (24), Waverly illustrates the English "plot of national formation" (25). Corinne, he demonstrates, "challenge[s]" both these Bildung forms by making the artist-hero a woman whose marriage plot "betray[s]" her Bildung (17). Duncan concludes with a brief reading of Daniel Deronda, which includes a "viable synthesis of Bildung, marriage, and national destiny" in Daniel's story and a "vehement protest against this solution" by Daniel's actress mother (34). Elisha Cohn and Kathy Psomiades examine how authors respond to Darwin's Descent of Man (1871) and Edward Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), respectively. In her reading of Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm and Caird's The Daughters of Danaus, Cohn explores the tension between the characters, who expound "the renovation of women's powers of choice in explicitly evolutionary terms," and the plots of the novels, whose "deep structure" does not necessarily coincide with their arguments or choices (38). The "long evolutionary view" instead "disentangle[s] plottedness from the act of choosing" because plot dilutes the power of [End Page 272] any individual choice (36). Psomiades, looking not at New Woman novels but at the late-century male writers' "turn to romance" (56, n. 6), brings to light a "new plot" that appears in the wake of the anthropological study of myth (57). The "Goddess plot," which "means the sexual union of goddess and […] mortal or part-mortal lover," becomes the marriage plot's "other and double" (57), turning the latter into "a late attenuated version of itself" (59). After discussions of Haggard's She and Frazer's The Golden Bough, Psomiades turns to a smart analysis of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which "works by holding mythic and realist plots side by side" (72): Tess and Alec inhabit simultaneously the roles of "Victim and Tyrant" and "Goddess and Doomed Mortal Lover" (74). The four chapters of Part II contextualize the marriage plot within the social institutions of politics (Lauren Goodlad), women's education (Kelly Hager), criminal law (Marlene Tromp) and empire (Sukanya Banerjee). Like Ian Duncan, Goodlad addresses the tensions between Bildung and marriage, individualism and civic responsibility, as those tensions are dramatized in Felix Holt, a novel that "strives to imagine collective civic life beyond the dominant individualism of its time" and in the Danish television series Borgen (103). Because the series features a "charismatic leader who can unify an entire...