The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage by Laura E. Thomason

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage by Laura E. Thomason Kathryn R. King Laura E. Thomason. The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2014. Pp. ix + 205. $80. The critic who undertakes to write on the risks and dangers to women of marriage in the eighteenth century is challenged to cut a new path through trampled terrain. The topic obsessed men and women throughout the eighteenth century and has attracted near obsessive attention since Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977). Find her own way, however, Ms. Thomason does. She devotes a chapter each to six mostly upper-class women whom she dubs “marital revisionists”: Dorothy Osborne, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Chapone, Mary Delany, Sarah Scott, and Eliza Haywood (the latter an odd figure in this company). She concentrates on rhetorical analysis of their correspondence (real-life and fictional) and favors texts more likely to be passed over elsewhere. We get a detailed treatment of Scott’s 1772 novel The Test of Filial Duty, for example, not Millenium Hall; Haywood’s late conduct manuals, not Betsy Thoughtless. This study, then, directs attention to relatively underdiscussed texts. Another merit is that it draws on the increasingly sophisticated understandings of the familiar letter as a genre (or almost-genre) developed by scholars in recent years in such works as Clare Brant’s Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (2006). Ms. Thomason is especially [End Page 96] attentive to the way letter-writing allowed for female verbal agency and self-fashioning. She takes as a starting point the notion that in a “letter a woman could not only create a specific version of herself but also dictate the terms of her relationship with her correspondent,” an approach especially productive with respect to the actual familiar letters written by Osborne, Montagu, Chapone, and Delany, and mimicked in Thomason’s analysis by professional writers, such as Scott and Haywood. Despite all the talk, then and now, about the oppressive centrality of marriage in women’s lives and the author’s own repeated insistence on women’s “near-mandatory participation in a restrictive marriage system,” it is wonderful to confront the actual variety of living arrangements devised by genteel women, sometimes within and sometimes on the outermost edges of matrimony. Matrimony in the eighteenth century emerges here as surprisingly plastic. Delany remarried for love at forty-three after an extended, self-chosen, and happy widowhood; Montagu contrived to enjoy an extended and apparently amicable long-distance marriage that accommodated her passion for travel and a bisexual Venetian object of desire; Osborne arguably took the lead in the epistolary courtship of her future husband, Sir William Temple; after the shadowy Mr. Haywood vanished, Eliza Haywood remained single by choice (or so we surmise) for the latter decades of her life, thriving as a professional writer who may have lived companionably with a male working partner. The possibilities for women to reinvent themselves and their matrimonial arrangements were greater than is sometimes imagined, at least for linguistically adept women comfortably positioned on the social scale. The study convincingly demonstrates that women drew on the rhetorical power of the familiar letter not only to reduce the risks of matrimonial entrapment but also, more intriguingly, to nudge their own conjugal relationships in the direction of what today we would call egalitarian friendships. Love and desire were considered highly suspect in the middle to upper reaches of social life, we are usefully reminded. Even women disinclined to model themselves on conduct-book ideals were skeptical of the power of love to bring happiness, never mind the tendency of the romances and novels that supposedly shaped their emotional lives. The new ideal among thoughtful women, in Ms. Thomason’s telling of the story, was something more complicated and elusive: marriage based not so much on love as on a cross-gender friendship that entailed rational companionship, shared interests, and, less persuasively, “gender equality.” The anachronism of a “fundamentally egalitarian” matrimonial union notwithstanding, the discussion certainly makes good on the claim that “the so-called rise of companionacy was not as smooth as scholars of...