Domestic counterplots: Representations of marriage in eighteenth-century British literature

“Domestic Counterplots: Representations of Marriage in Eighteenth-Century British Literature,” deals with satirists and novelists of the long eighteenth century, focusing on the largely negative depictions of domestic life that appear in their work. Scholars of the period often claim that its authors univocally celebrate the new companionate marriage ideal; they also assume that satire and the novel evolved independently, as two separate types of literary artifact. A brief reading of the seminal seventeenth-century satirist, Samuel Butler, and his successors, Swift and Pope, reveal an unacknowledged body of early anti-marriage satire that represents courtship and matrimony in negative terms. These works offer a complex treatment of wedlock's social contrivances and its ambiguous effects on the human imagination and register grave reservations about an institution increasingly enshrined as the single path to bliss. The satiric characters portrayed by these writers—the vain coquette, the deluded lover, the fortune hunter, the self-satisfied wife—later become general types. By mid-century the sense that amorous activity was both integral and conducive to madness becomes a staple of British literature. It is especially prevalent in the writing of Samuel Johnson, who depicts marital inequity and interrogates the ideal of lifelong, sanctioned erotic partnership. Versed as they were in satire, late eighteenth-century female novelists hardly wrote in deference to the mandates of conduct books. Novelists like Frances Burney and Jane Austen refine marriage satire through specific literary techniques: manipulations of point of view, free indirect discourse, narrative omissions, indeterminate endings, and parodic doublings of characters. Their work registers social protest against the legal constraints placed on eighteenth-century women's lives, almost all of which originated in or were ratified by the institution of marriage, and many of which had grown more severe in the wake of Hardwicke's 1753 Marriage Act.