Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer

Abstract

SCHAFFER, TALIA. Romance's Rival: Familiar Marriage in Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 352 pp. $65.00 hardcover. Romance s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Fiction is a meticulously researched, consummately assembled book that offers a revelatory argument about in era. Schaffer's thesis that an alternative model of marriage privileging trust, comradeship, practical needs, and larger organization coexisted with newly popular notion of marriage in nineteenth-century novel complicates an array of existing critical conceptions of especially those that have emphasized erotic desire, progressivism, or individualism (2-3). In demonstrating how familiar emerged as a literary convention both cope with changing ideas about and to work through different ways of thinking about a subject's future, Schaffer's book opens up new vistas for our understanding of and of female subjectivity in many novels she discusses and beyond (7-8). Not least among many delights of Romance's Rival are seamless structure of book and crystalline clarity of Schaffer's prose. Her style is everywhere engaging and book just as unfailingly engages, accounting at every turn for many discourses that have informed and are now meaningfully altered by her work. Seeking provide a larger historical context in which connect varied findings of previous scholarship on and novel. Schaffer situates her project among foundational studies of Stone, Watt, and Armstrong as well as amid more recent enlargements of field by Perry, Corbett, Davidoff, Ablow, Marcus, Hager, Michie, and McAleavey (26). Over course of this comprehensive book. Schaffer likewise intervenes in research on class, anthropology, disability, and women's work. Schaffer's first chapter defines familiar against its long-studied counterpart, romantic marriage, an approach mirrored by nineteenth-century fiction itself as Victorian plots very often stage a rivalry between a familiar and (7). Analyzing Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre as her principal introductory case study, Schaffer explains that her term refers in particular a female character's with someone familiar, such as a or extended family member (4). Although there are many, most significant distinction Schaffer formulates between and familiar is way in which latter enables a female character and agency in a network, rather than ensconcing her within the private conjugal dyad (4). The import of this claim is reflected in Schaffer's method of giving special attention four of main formulations of familiar marriage: neighbor cousin disabled and vocational marriage (8-9). As she goes on show in chapters three through six. each organized around one of these categories, these types of connubial arrangements allowed female characters secure, respectively, social empowerment. familial benefit, caretaking networks, or career access in ways that often foreclosed (9). Although she pinpoints her focus on texts written between 1850s-1870s, Schaffer's book provides an expansive view, detecting germination of familiar plot in both history and literary tradition from early modern period onward (15). Her second chapter examines an at first surprising composite of disparate texts--Romeo & Juliet, Clarissa, and Northanger Abbey--but as she traces the changing means of during two centuries preceding era. stressing cultural expectations and legal changes that gradually accumulated create these rival suitor types, her treatment of these works is illuminating and convincing (41-42). …