Left to the freedom of her choice: Depictions of the marriage market in the British courtship novel, 1750--1790

My dissertation argues that eighteenth-century British courtship novels participated in a cultural debate about young women's capacity to act independently of the patriarchal family. The emerging marriage market became a cultural index for the increase in female agency because it offered upper-class daughters unprecedented freedom to interact with strangers and make decisions for themselves. I advance and revise previous historical and literary interpretations of the marriage market by demonstrating that male novelists in particular associated it with exogamy, the definition of which I expand to denote the rupture through marriage of class boundaries as well as kinship ties. I reach this conclusion by identifying two gendered paradigms of experience that scrutinize female protagonists' rational capacity. In analyzing these paradigms I identify several plot conventions, including what I term punitive subplots and surrogate families. I contend that novelists use these conventions to implicitly argue that attempts by women to transgress class boundaries and to bypass parental consent only prove the necessity of these strictures. Novels also demonstrate that daughters' decisions about marriage were believed to affect England's economic and political destinies.