Companionate Marriage Research Articles

‘Clan’ and ‘Family’: Transformations of Sociality among the Wampar, Papua New Guinea

Changes in what anthropologists understand “clan” to refer to, and the social relations that many sociologists think of as constituting a “nuclear family” are at the centre of this article. It is based on ethnography among Wampar speakers in north-eastern Papua New Guinea (PNG). Among the Wampar, different, sometimes conflicting, transitions relevant to the emergence of the family as an accentuated social entity can be observed; yet all are a result of Christianisation and the local effects of capitalism. Nominally patrilineal clans (sagaseg), after a period when they seemed to have a somewhat diminished social significance, are again crucial social units: a result of the government’s requirement that statutory Incorporated Land Groups (ILGs) form the sole legal basis of compensation for land use. At the same time, there has been an increasing emphasis on the nuclear family, which, along with the aspiration for modern lifestyles (and their associated consumption patterns) and education for children, has reconfigured the gendered division of labour. Ideals of companionate marriage and values specific to the nuclear family have become much more critical to social practices. In some families, traditional notions of descent have lost importance to such an extent that some young people are no longer aware of their sagaseg membership. Wampar men and women discuss these conflicting tendencies and argue about the different values that ground them. Which argument prevails often depends on the specific position of the person confronting them.

Marriage Practice in Contemporary Nepal

Marriage is one of the oldest universal micro social institutions which are established by human society as an essential social structure for gaining more benefit in the social and functioning aspects. It provides the legal rights of regular sexual intercourse, producing of the offspring socially, religiously and legally. It is one of the ways to transfer an inheritance of the property in our societies. This belief is influenced by Hinduism which regards marriage as the important custom or sacrament. Although, the perception and practices of marriage is not universally accepted which varies across societies and culture, i.e., cross cousin marriage practices are common among Gurung, Magar and Tamang ethnic groups. Levirate marriage can be found in Tamang ethnic group which is not acceptable in another caste. Arrange marriage is one of the most popular form and also practices of marriage in contemporary Nepal whereas child marriage, capture marriage and forced marriage has been already prohibited by law. Experimental marriage, Group marriage and Companionate marriage are not existed. Most of the people have been hearing and conducting the marriage but the proper acceptable definition is not found till date. It is no doubt that marriage is an inevitable social institution but the practice may be different in different places. Main objectives of this article are briefly highlighting the various thought and forms of marriages which have practiced in different caste and place of Nepal by using primary and secondary sources.

Beauty Standards in Egypt

AbstractThe creation of a hybrid beauty in the cartoon sphere and in advertising intersected with popular and consumer culture at a moment when women’s roles in the public sphere were changing. Politically the nation was at a crossroads: the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936 removed most impediments toward Egyptian independence; however, British troops remained in the Suez Canal zone. With respect to economic history, multinationals were expanding in Egypt, while an emerging bourgeoisie worked to establish local industries. With World War II came economic crisis: inflation, profiteering, black markets, rising inequality, and the return of British troops to strategic locations around the country. This article argues that the hybrid beauty represents the push and pull between women’s emerging roles in public spaces and traditional values, imperialism versus authenticity, local industry competing against multinationals, and a negotiation of new roles for husbands and wives in companionate marriage.

‘We treat each other as equal partners’ the understanding of companionate marriage in postwar Poland

ABSTRACT This paper aims to describe a model of companionate marriage developed in postwar Poland. It traces the evolution of ideas around marriage and gender roles from the interwar to the postwar period. The paper focuses on popular understandings of gender and marriage, and takes advantage of a collection of original personal narratives written in the 1960s. A comparison between memoirs written by authors married in the interwar and postwar period reveals that understandings of gender roles and relations between husband and wife changed. The postwar period saw the emergence of a new ideal of marriage, based on sharing and equality. To describe this new model, the author draws on the concept of companionate marriage. The paper discusses the features of companionship in postwar state-socialist Poland, in order to connect the debate on marital relations under state socialism to broader discussion on the modernization of marriage in postwar Europe.

Evolutionary Love and Companionate Marriage in Jane Austen's Novel Pride and Prejudice

In the novel Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen has selected the basic unit of human relationship, the family. In the family we have several forms of relationships. The most fundamental relationship is there in terms of love and marriage which form the basic theme of the novel Pride and Prejudice. In the research paper, love has been analyzed as an evolutionary process. It is the logic of love that unfolds the characteristics of its main characters. Their love has been brought out from the usual shadow of emotionalism and sentimentality. It has been put under the direct control of their ratiocination. And that is the peculiarity of Austen's treatment of love. The characters have passed through various stages of love so that, ultimately, they reach the final stage of passionate love, shorn of their pride and prejudice. From there they move to marriage which I have called the companionate marriage. When they enter matrimony, they enter it as pure companions moving together, hand in hand, in their life. It is not the marriage as established and defined by the early nineteenth century society. Austen's lovers do not abjure the society, yet they do not accept this society's concept of marriage completely. As they have shaped their love, so they will shape their marriage.

Transnational Intimacies and the Construction of the New Nation

This article examines love as a facet of nation building in constructions of modern womanhood and national identity in the 1950s and 1960s. In Tunisia and France, romantic love was evoked to define an urban, middle-class modernity in which the gender norms implicit in companionate marriage signaled a break with the past. These ideals were represented in fiction and women’s magazines and elaborated in the novel genre of the advice column. Yet this celebration was interrupted by concern about “mixed marriage” and the rise of anti-immigrant discrimination targeting North Africans in France. Referring to race or religion, debates about interracial marriage in Tunisia and the sexual stereotyping of North African men in France reveal the continuity of colonialism’s racial legacies upon postcolonial states. The idealization of marital choice as a testament to individual and national modernity was destabilized by transnational intimacies revealing the limits of the nation-state’s liberatory promise to women.

Transnational Intimacies and the Construction of the New Nation

Abstract This article examines love as a facet of nation building in constructions of modern womanhood and national identity in the 1950s and 1960s. In Tunisia and France, romantic love was evoked to define an urban, middle-class modernity in which the gender norms implicit in companionate marriage signaled a break with the past. These ideals were represented in fiction and women's magazines and elaborated in the novel genre of the advice column. Yet this celebration was interrupted by concern about “mixed marriage” and the rise of anti-immigrant discrimination targeting North Africans in France. Referring to race or religion, debates about interracial marriage in Tunisia and the sexual stereotyping of North African men in France reveal the continuity of colonialism's racial legacies upon postcolonial states. The idealization of marital choice as a testament to individual and national modernity was destabilized by transnational intimacies revealing the limits of the nation-state's liberatory promise to women.

Critical geographies of love and loss: Relational responses to the death of a spouse in Senegal

Marriage practices in the Majority world may differ considerably from dominant cultural ideals in the Minority world of ‘romantic love’ and ‘companionate marriage’ based on monogamous relationships. Similarly, mourning in the ‘Rest’ of the world often diverges from assumptions within Anglophone bereavement studies of a ‘grieving journey’. This paper provides a gendered, spatial, relational analysis of responses to the death of a spouse in Senegal, based on in-depth interviews with Serer women and men in rural and urban communities. A heightened sense of relationality with the deceased surrounded widows' bodies, with permeable boundaries that needed to be contained and “purified” through widowhood-mourning practices in order to restore social cohesion. For men, the space of the home was transformed, sometimes unbearably, by the loss of a wife and mother due to their central role in home-making practices, transforming men's relational being. ‘Embodied relationality’, alongside material constraints, also shaped perspectives on remarriage. The paper reveals the diverse material, embodied, spatial, and often explicitly gendered, ways that the effects of the death of a spouse may be manifested in the experience of the living person and draws attention to the permeable embodied boundaries of ‘relational being’ that encompass the living and the dead.

Educating Liberty: Democracy and Aristocracy in J. S. Mill’s Political Thought, by Chris Barker, John Stuart Mill on History: Human Nature, Progress, and the Stationary State, by Jay M. Eisenberg

Reviewed by: Educating Liberty: Democracy and Aristocracy in J. S. Mill's Political Thought by Chris Barker, and: John Stuart Mill on History: Human Nature, Progress, and the Stationary State by Jay M. Eisenberg Bruce Kinzer (bio) Educating Liberty: Democracy and Aristocracy in J. S. Mill's Political Thought, by Chris Barker; pp. viii + 267. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2018, $105.00. John Stuart Mill on History: Human Nature, Progress, and the Stationary State, by Jay M. Eisenberg; pp. xxi + 223. Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books, 2018, $95.00. However various the interpretations of John Stuart Mill's thought may be, commentators agree that he aimed to promote what John M. Robson's classic 1968 study of Mill's social and political thought called The Improvement of Mankind. Moreover, a consensus exists that the improvement Mill had in mind was principally intellectual and moral rather than material in character. The chief source of disagreement concerns the means by which Mill sought to bring about the ends he had in view and the organization of the society he considered best fitted to give expression to these ends. Scholars such as Maurice Cowling, Shirley Letwin, Joseph Hamburger, and Linda Raeder detect a massive strain of intellectual elitism and moral authoritarianism in Mill's thought. They assert that Mill wished to supplant Christianity with a non-theological religion rooted in the authority of social science—see, for example, Raeder's John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity (2002). This new orthodoxy would be defined, promulgated, and sustained by an intellectual elite. Mill, on this view, valued liberty not for its own sake but as the [End Page 132] instrument for enabling superior individuals to reach a consensus on the norms and beliefs that should govern the social order. Most scholars reject this assessment, arguing that Mill's abiding commitment to individual self-development embraced the common run of human beings in societies that had attained a certain level of civilization (Victorian England, for example). Acknowledging his concern to preserve the sway of those with superior abilities, knowledge, and expertise, they contend that Mill saw such influence as contributing to individual growth writ large. Chris Barker's Educating Liberty: Democracy and Aristocracy in J. S. Mill's Political Thought makes a significant contribution to the latter (predominant) school of Mill studies. He does this by bringing together strands of Mill's thought that he believes best illustrate Mill's educative mission, whose object was to foster "mental independence" (2). The achievement of this end, in Barker's account, required spousal equality within the household, a large dose of cooperative labor relations between workers and owners/managers, a proper understanding of the important yet circumscribed role to be played by social scientists in the shaping of political judgment, a representative political order capable of reconciling the need for both elite competence and mass participation, and the propagation of a democratic civil religion directed at promoting a social unity compatible with individual agency. Each of these matters receives a distinct chapter, the first two being dedicated to substantiating Barker's claim that Mill considers "women's liberation from legal disabilities and the end of class-based separation of workers and owners/managers" as "the most transformative changes in society" (83). Regarding women's emancipation, Barker concentrates on Mill's ideal of companionate marriage and effectively draws out the connections between this ideal and his conception of the household as "a school of liberty" (40). While deeply impressed by the force of Mill's case, Barker recognizes its limitations. Like others who have examined Mill's writings on sexual equality, Barker concedes that "Mill's distinction between the genders certainly reads as a faulty generalization from too few examples" (42). Barker also furnishes a careful and highly sensitive reading of Mill's hankering for the creation of a cooperative marketplace and the links between this aspiration and his focus on mental independence and moral improvement. Here too (and this can be said of all the issues he tackles), Barker perceptively identifies problems in Mill's argument, especially as they pertain to the demonstrated preferences of workers themselves. The problems notwithstanding, Barker finds...

Heterosexual Plots and Ill Narratives in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Heterosexual Plots and Ill Narratives in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice Hannah Chaskin (bio) Angry at Fitzwilliam Darcy for his role in disrupting her sister's courtship, Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice (1813) looks on his alleged intended with a sarcastic bite in her voice: "I like her appearance. … She looks sickly and cross.—Yes, she will do for him very well. She will make him a proper wife."1 The "sickly and cross" woman is Anne de Bourgh, cousin of Darcy and daughter of the overbearing Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In the context of Pride and Prejudice's primary marriage plot, Anne is Elizabeth's most direct structural foil: both are imagined as potential future wives for Darcy. Yet Anne is not a real obstacle to Elizabeth's ultimate success; she exists in the narrative primarily to delineate the difference between the marriage of interest (in which Darcy marries Anne to consolidate his wealth) and the companionate marriage, or marriage for love (in which Darcy and Elizabeth enter into a partnership based on mutual esteem and compatible personalities). The novel's critique of aristocratic greed and the marriage of interest is figured through Anne's under-defined illness; her elitism and her illness are conflated, as though "sickly" and "cross" are synonymous. This essay concerns the roles of sickness and health in the construction of Pride and Prejudice's heterosexual marriage plot. My title pays homage to Marilyn Farwell's work of queer feminist narratology, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives, in which Farwell argues that normative narrative [End Page 313] structure "encode[s] heterosexuality … in its very mechanics."2 I will suggest that the mechanics of Austen's most influential marriage plot operate by deploying an idealized femininity that is essentially healthy and by defining ill femininity as narratively unviable. We are generally accustomed to a gendered ideology that understands dependency, passivity, and femininity to be interlocking terms that are set against self-sufficiency, agency, and masculinity. It is not, therefore, surprising that a propensity towards illness has often been conceived of as a feminine trait. Symptoms of specific illnesses, like consumption, intersect with norms of feminine beauty, and sentimental literature often represents acute or fatal illness in the wake of trauma as indicative of feminine virtue.3 However, by the end of the eighteenth century, feminist critiques of sentimental femininity were becoming prevalent, and these critiques were often framed in terms of illness and illness's effect on companionate heterosexuality. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, indicted a system of sentimental education designed to keep upper-class white women weak, beautiful, and essentially ill. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft argues that due to "inattention to health during infancy … dependence of body naturally produces dependence of mind; and how can she be a good wife or mother, the greater part of whose time is employed to guard against or endure sickliness?"4 Wollstonecraft and Austen are often cast as political foils, but Pride and Prejudice manifests Vindication's pathologizing strategy to critique sentimental, aristocratic femininity, with the result that it paints healthy and resilient femininity as essential to the companionate marriage plot. All of Austen's novels are invested in exploring the lines between health and illness, and between illness and character flaw.5 I focus on Pride and Prejudice in this essay because the relationship between the healthy heroine and the ill foil is so stark and so central to the plot itself and because it is perhaps the most influential of Austen's novels, insofar as it provided both plot and character types that have become ubiquitous in Anglo-American culture. If we accept that Pride and Prejudice has had an outsized role in the replication of what we now call the romantic comedy, the fact that Austen understood narrative structure through the lens of health and illness matters. While Austen's novels do not evince uncomplicated relationships to their own marriage plots, it is the narrative and characterological structures—often flattened out or simplified—that have made their way through the centuries in many forms. These structures have impacted our modern assumptions about the role of health and wellness in happy...

A Father's Perspective on Bridewealth in the Making of the Transnational Papua New Guinean Household

ABSTRACTThat people value ‘people’ over ‘things’ is argued often by anthropologists, but how people value specific forms and qualities of relations as they do in the example of bridewealth is less so. I explore the perspective of Papua New Guinean‐born fathers in Australia as they advocate innovations in bridewealth traditions and thereby enable daughters to marry for love, cultivate a companionate marriage, and create a Papua New Guinean household. Past generations gauged the worth of traditional bridewealth by the quantity and distribution of items given and the number of exogamous clan connections forged as an index of past and future relations between clans. The current generation judges the value of even alternate forms of bridewealth for making new possibilities for those who share in it. If bridewealth enables the transnational household to emerge as the unit of decision making that replaces the clan, then innovations in bridewealth support, rather than undermine, a new normativity of companionate marriage that empowers that much wider net of kin. Drawing on a theory of value as the importance of social action towards the goal of the new normativity of the transnational household, I show how choosing a spouse is cultivated by women's fathers who refuse bridewealth, as often as it is by their husbands who provide new forms of wealth at marriage.

Adölasan Annelerin Doğum Sonu Cinsel Yaşam Kalitesi: Kesitsel Bir Çalışma

Objective: This study was planned to review adolescent mothers’ sex life quality for the time till 12th month postpartum. Methods: This is a descriptive study that was composed of 60 adolescent mothers who met the criteria and appealed to a family health center in Turkey's southeast region between 15.01.2018-15.06.2018. Inquiry form and Sex Life Quality Scale-Female (SLQS-F) that determine the socio-demographic attributes of participants were used as the data collection tool. Results: Age average of adolescent mothers was found as 18.50±0.74. With reference to another findings, there is a statistically significant relationship (p<0.05) between marriage age and sex life quality; smoking affects sex life quality adversely; sex life quality of companionate marriages is higher ( p<0.05) in comparison with arranged marriages; mode of delivery affects the sex life quality; sex life quality of adolescents who experience vaginal delivery is lower in comparison with adolescents who prefer cesarean. Sex life quality of adolescents was found as ultra low. Conclusion : Sex life quality in adolescent mothers was found as pretty low.

Period of Marriage and Genetic Similarity in Height between Spouses in the United States over the 20th Century.

Social norms regarding who marries whom have changed dramatically in the United States across the 20th century. These changes may influence the level of genetic similarity between spouses. This study investigates whether genetic similarity in height between husband and wife was influenced by a historical transition in spouse selection criteria. The great transition from the companionate marriage to the individualized marriage occurred in the 1960s. In the companionate marriage, husband and wife chose each other as companions, and the emphasis was on playing marital roles well: husbands being good breadwinners and wives being good homemakers. In the individualized marriage, the emphasis switched to individual feelings, and as a result, when choosing their partners people tended to pay less attention to height, suggesting a smaller genetic correlation for height between spouses. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we found that the genetic correlation for height declined substantially in the individualized marriage. We conducted a number of analyses to test for the confounding effects of cohort and age and to address population stratification, selection issues, and genetic relatedness between spouses. Evidence suggests that the effect of this transition is robust.

Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops To Conquer: The Stakes of Shame and the Prospects of Politeness

Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops To Conquer:The Stakes of Shame and the Prospects of Politeness James Phillips At least as far as its central couple is concerned, She Stoops to Conquer: Or, The Mistakes of a Night (1773) is a celebration of bourgeois marriage. It celebrates it without being able to represent it. And that should be enough to put us on our guard. The play ends with the proclamation of a wedding the following day when Charles Marlow is to take as his wife the woman he previously considers unmarriageable because she appears to him, alternately, the focus of too great a reverence and the mere quarry of a passing and socially inconsequential passion.1 Oliver Goldsmith's comedy, like Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser (1845) (the opera we have in place of his projected dramatization of Luther's wedding), is an object lesson in learning to see a bourgeois wife. If she is to take on the aspect of a marriageable woman, Kate Hardcastle has to position herself at the intersection—has to create for herself this intersection—of the two class-bound fields of vision in which Marlow surveys women. She ultimately reconciles in him the polite gentleman and the shameless rake by making him see in her a person to respect as well as a body to desire.2 Their marriage might therefore pass for proof in miniature of the bourgeoisie's self-ascribed capacity to sublate the antithesis between culture and nature, insofar as Kate brings about in Marlow both a civility that is neither hypocritical nor listless and a natural simplicity that is neither brutish nor unworldly, although the curtain drops before that is put to the test. Goldsmith's coyness on this point suggests that his interest lies not so much in realizing this ideal of bourgeois marriage (Kate's bickering parents, the one married couple to appear on stage, are hardly candidates for its instantiation) than in tracking how, as a goal and endpoint, it overtaxes and confounds his characters. If the play's conclusion appears to buy into this myth of the bourgeoisie's endemic talents for companionate marriage, the preceding scenes not only decline to make light of the legwork needed to render a bourgeois wife visible, they even magnify it. Certainly it is from the ideal's non-realized condition that [End Page 999] Goldsmith derives his preferred comic effects. Instead of deflating the self-mythologizing of the bourgeoisie, he goes along with its attempts to define itself, in flattering contradistinction from other classes and estates, in terms of the virtues of a humane sociability rather than in terms of the sober realities of economic power and political status. To be exact, he does not so much go along with these attempts as he heads toward them, only then to beg off in the face of diminishing comic returns (a happy couple's happiness is rarely something that it knows how to share). Goldsmith is prepared to accompany Marlow in his one-night crash course for companionate marriage, but no further. James Evans is accordingly connecting dots that Goldsmith himself does not join up when he writes: "In She Stoops to Conquer Goldsmith imagines an alternative to extreme masculinities, a median between them."3 Although Goldsmith demonstrates at length the unfitness for companionate marriage of the extremes of masculinity, he at most invites his audiences to imagine for themselves the median between them rather than offering up a fully delineated alternative. As James Kim concedes in a recent article, Goldsmith never quite settles for one configuration of male gender practices.4 The play similarly does not linger to give substance to a conception of woman as person. The omission lends itself to multiple readings. T. G. A. Nelson cites a sequel to She Stoops to Conquer by the Edwardian dramatist St. John Hankin in which the couple's afterlife sees Marlow assert his old sexual preference and insist that Kate wear an apron and thereby renounce her difference from a type.5 The pessimism of Hankin's continuation dwells on the unreal complexion of the Hardcastle-Marlow marriage, yet the comedy's happy ending is expressive of a...

Continuity, Not Rupture: A New Vision for T-20 Studies American Literary History and the Turn Toward Modernity

Continuity, Not Rupture: A New Vision for T-20 Studies American Literary History and the Turn Toward Modernity

‘They think of a family only in their thirties’: gendered subfertility and emergent intimate modernities in India

AbstractRecent anthropological scholarship on marriage in South Asia has chronicled a shift towards companionate marriage, with ideals of companionate conjugality becoming central to middle‐class self‐representations. However, the role of child‐bearing and fertility within these marriages, as emerging life projects related to new family ideals, has not received much attention, even as literature on India has recorded extensive family concern with fertility. In this article, I focus on the endocrine disorder polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) – one of the leading causes of female infertility world‐wide – to examine emerging conceptions of fertility and intimate modernities among the urban middle class in India. I argue that a comparatively limited concern with fertility forms a part of this class's self‐representations and practices of distinction. Such attitudes to fertility, enabled by new orientations towards medical risk and ideals of companionate marriage, also function as markers of the emerging ‘modern’ subjectivity of this class.

Between Two Worlds: Chinese Immigrant Children and the Production of Knowledge in the Era of Chinese Exclusion

Between Two Worlds: Chinese Immigrant Children and the Production of Knowledge in the Era of Chinese Exclusion

The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Michael Parrish Lee

Reviewed by: The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Michael Parrish Lee Parama Roy (bio) The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Michael Parrish Lee; pp. x + 246. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, £79.99, $109.99. It has long been a truism that courtship and marriage constitute the very marrow of nineteenth-century British fiction; without the marriage plot, the realist novel may be said to have little plot at all. Theorists of the novel as disparate as Ian Watt and Nancy Armstrong have concurred with Whiggish historians of marriage such as Lawrence Stone in insisting on the emergence of companionate marriage and its valorization of individualism, self-determination, and erotic fulfilment within marriage as the defining characteristic of the realist novel. If the marriage plot corresponds with narrative or plot itself, its opposite is made up of scenes of eating, which Franco Moretti (among others) defines as the "perfect filler" (qtd. in Lee 4). Yet, if the marriage plot exemplifies "the power of desire to consolidate identity, motivate action, and drive narrative toward a resolution," it is attended and besieged by what Michael Parrish Lee in The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel denominates as a "food plot," which threatens to frustrate the narrative closure and future-oriented maturity that the former has as its goal (2). The food plot is one in which the inexorability of bodily hunger and eating functions as a powerful narrative principle, overcoming sexual desire as the engine of plot. In juxtaposing these two plots he takes his inspiration from Malthusian population theory, which famously posits the heterosexual instinct and the necessity of eating as the two irreconcilable hungers that govern human nature. Like Catherine Gallagher in The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (2006), Lee underscores Thomas Malthus's capacious understanding of (hetero)sexuality as encompassing intellectual and emotional and not just physical fulfilment, and existing on an equal footing with self-preservation. In this the political economist is, he suggests cannily, "almost . . . an early theorist of the marriage plot" (12). At the same time, Malthus also insists on the tragic result of heterosexual passion, which is "a never-ending need to eat" such that "the reproductive future threatens to devour itself" (12). Insofar as the nineteenth-century British novel assumes "a double form," oscillating between desire and appetite, Malthusian thought may be said to constitute the very grammar of novelistic narrative (3). Jane Austen's novels constitute for Lee the paradigm of the marriage plot, in which "heterosexual interiority . . . is defined against gustatory appetite" (22). Romantically viable protagonists establish themselves as such by holding bodily hunger in contempt relative to the consolations of emotional responsiveness and literary taste. Hence the [End Page 488] young Fanny Price's refusal of the consolation of gooseberry tart when she first arrives at Mansfield Park assures us of her fate as a heroine. In contrast, figures outside the circuit of reproductive sexuality—childless men like Mansfield Park's (1814) Dr. Grant, or widowers and spinsters like Emma's (1815) Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates—demonstrate an avid interest in food and eating that is entirely at odds with such refusal. In the Victorian novel, however, hunger becomes a more pressing matter, calling for a new kind of narrative attention to the travails of the hungry in an era of increasing scrutiny of the physical deprivations of the impoverished classes; it cannot be dismissed with the insouciance that belongs to the Austenian model. The narrative force of appetite features in the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, but of all the Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens comes closest to portraying "the need for food as the primal driving force of human nature" (80). Novels of the fin de siècle such as those by Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, produced in the crucible of evolutionary thought, underscore the sheer difficulty of maintaining an apartheid between marriage and food plots, and even of distinguishing between the two. And late-Victorian romances like those of Bram Stoker and H. G. Wells jettison the marital drive of the realist...

Postwork intimacy

ABSTRACTMarriage among senior citizens is often characterized by an increasing appeal to romantic love and companionship. Japanese retired men in Malaysia tried to transform their marital relations from unions based on a strict division of labor to bonds formed out of a romantic partnership. But the new marital intimacy had hidden costs for wives, as the gendered hierarchy continued to constitute the basic terms of what were considered valuable activities in their overseas retirement. Companionate relationships do not simply erase the previously meaningful hierarchy or gender roles. The forms and expressions of gendered hierarchy also shift as dependency and power may be re‐created in nonfinancial forms. The liberal rhetoric celebrated in the ideals of companionate marriage often masks the reproduction of these regulatory forms. [intimacy, gender, transnational retirement, companionate marriage, active aging, Malaysia, Japan]

Domestic Security: Defending the Evangelical Home in the Southern California Sunbelt

Historians have been eager to trace the roots of “family values” discourse as a political phenomenon linked to the rise of the Religious Right. But the sacralisation of the Christian family deserves attention in its own right as a cultural phenomenon. Southern California provides an obvious case study, as religious conservatism and a growing military‐industrial presence intersected there in the postwar era. A case study of this region also illumines larger trends, since the national experience and the Californian experience converged in this period. A popular set of 1950s advice booklets by Bible Institute of Los Angeles (Biola) Vice President William W. Orr provides crucial understanding of evangelical efforts to provide foolproof methods for enacting God’s design for family security. Evangelical visions of family order did occasionally represent real rifts with postwar mainstream culture. But more often, oppositional rhetoric served to symbolically preserve evangelicals’ distinctive identity even when cultural trends were largely consonant with their own. Their assumptions about gender, emphasis on sexual fulfilment within marriage, and guidelines on the roles of husbands and fathers, ostensibly grounded in timeless biblical principles, were deeply indebted to mainstream values of companionate marriage and affectionate parenting.