Space and the Representation of Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Advice Literature

Abstract

The eighteenth century is particularly rich period for analyzing relationship between gender and social space. On one hand, this era marks beginnings of modern urban society, with its coffeehouses, its salons, and emergence of newspaper and print culture. Over course of century, there developed democracy of intellect, and general culture of civility, in which genteel women were key participants.1 On other hand, alongside this increasingly urban and public culture, advice literature on married life working hard to erect firm boundaries between public and private and to construct domestic space that sealed off from public sphere.2Jurgen Habermas has analyzed distinction between public and private in dialectical terms, arguing that construction of civil society in which public opinion could function democratically depended on simultaneous construction of an autonomous private subject nurtured within bourgeois family, an institution that was scene of psychological emancipation that corresponded to political-economic one.3 While Habermas also acknowledges that bourgeois family's image of itself as emancipated functioned as fictional construction, since the family not exempted from constraint to which bourgeois society like all societies before it subject,4 it is fictional construction of models of intimacy within advice literature-its sustained impulse to shape and mold experience of married couple in terms of Utopian private sphere-that interests us here.As definition of marriage undergoing an important paradigmatic shift-from seventeenth-century conception of marriage based on model of sovereign and subject to one based on mutuality and companionship-the distinction between public and private becoming more critical. As Michael McKeon has argued in relation to Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), rather than being conceptualized in terms of state, marriage now being defined in terms of the reconciliation of love and marriage, reconception of marriage as public ceremony that is taken primarily to confirm prior and private fact of love.5 This new privileging of category of private desire as condition for public ceremony of marriage made marriage kind of testing ground for changing relationship between two spheres.In light of distinction between spheres, Mark Wigley has argued that at least from Renaissance onwards institution of marriage has been conceived of as fundamentally spatial rather than temporal: Marriage is reason for building house. The house appears to make space for institution. But marriage is already spatial. It cannot be thought outside house that is its condition of possibility before its space.6 For Wigley, all buildings are engaged in a sexuality of space, so that spaces literally produce effect of gender.7 While house has perhaps always been defining space of marriage, in eighteenth century physical space of home taking on new significance, in terms of what John E. Crowley has called the architectural enhancement of domesticity;8 not only there considerable increase in consumer spending that enabled development of new consumer-oriented relationship to domestic sphere, but this also led to new emphasis on idea of material comfort within home.9In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The New Heloise (1761), for example, architecture of comfort is privileged over grandiose quality of aristocratic buildings. Upon visiting Clarens, Saint-Preux writes to Milord Edward:[I]t is no longer house made to be seen, but to be lived in. [The masters of this house] have walled up long rows of rooms to change doors that were awkwardly situated, they have divided rooms that were too large so as to have lodgings better laid out. They have replaced old-fashioned and sumptuous pieces of furniture with simple and convenient ones. …