The Puzzling Case of the Deceased Wife's Sister: Nineteenth-Century England Deals with a Second-Chance Plot

Abstract

THE MIDLIFE, FOR ALL INTENTS and purposes a new division of the course, was slowly invented in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.' The former major divisions of and old were not eradicated (although they too were altered), but a category called life or began to collect images and attributes. Although there were neutral uses of the terms during this period, an unconscious cultural struggle began-and still continues-over the representation of the middle years. Would they partake more of youth or of age; or, rather, which qualities of youth or age, or both, would adhere? Would the new age be read as a decline or a progress narrative? The novel had a great role to play in this process, as it took as one of its implicit tasks the representation of the course and the stages of life. This essay, however, is not primarily concerned with novels but makes a case that a different form of fiction making-the Case of the Deceased Wife's Sister-contributed important attributions to the emerging concept of the middle years: to wit, the fictions inevitably contained in pamphlets, legal arguments, and religious tracts about this controversy. All vital, long-lived controversies require guesses and gossip about the participants (the characters in the social drama); invest them with attributes of gender, class, age, sexual disposition, moral qualities and temperaments; and of course bestow on them appropriate-including ageappropriate-rewards or punishments. Available stereotypes may feed these fictions, but the alignments of the controversy may deny some, reinforce or merge others, or produce quite new types and plots. In general, nineteenth-century attempts to alter or maintain the ideologies that supported marriage and the family produced new representations of young and mid adulthood. We can make this process visible now as part of the history of the middle years. To start with, the condition of matrimony-what occurred after the wedding ceremony-began to be more fully textualized and politicized. Texts that showed as continuing past the (first) wedding by the daring of that