| When Ivanhoe weds the insipid Rowena, who can forget the alluring Rebecca whose hand he relinquishes in the interest of national reconciliation? And how many avid admirers of the immortal Natty Bumppo have read with chagrin his story of unrequited love? For the first time in the Leatherstocking series, the faithful guide loses his way: "Ah's me, Mabel! I have indeed been on a false trail since we met." Like Rebecca, Pathfinder gets left out of the picture, and with his lament, he sums up the challenge to the marriage plot that pervades nineteenth-century novels concerned with the problem of imperialism on native soil.; While recent work on the rise of the novel stresses the consolidation effected by the traditional sentimental marriage, I took at novels where this model fails to apply. In literatures of emerging nations with a conflicted relationship to England, I argue, marital plots and subplots challenge conventional allegories of national reconciliation. Examining four novels that illuminate how the poetics of the marriage plot operate under the pressures of imperialism, I suggest that the problems posed by geographical expansion make for messy marriage plots, ones that push at the seams of the Bildungsroman and its compulsion to sew up conflict.; This dissertation contributes to evolving understandings of the nineteenth-century novel and its development not only because it complicates existing readings of the marriage plot, but also because it places a new emphasis on the importance of looking at North Atlantic literature as an interconnected field that is defined by the problem of divided nationalisms. I argue that distinct poetic affinities exist among nineteenth-century British and American novels concerned with the effects of imperialist expansion on native soil. Approaching genre as a mode of poetics that performs cultural work, I offer the unresolved marriage plot as a construct that addresses normalizing notions of liberty and citizenship in the context of expanding national borders and internally divided nationalities. |
