Courting justice: Marriage, law, and the American novel, 1890--1925

This dissertation relocates William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser within the legal revolution that enveloped their society and marked their fiction. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wave of new laws profoundly changed marriage while making its mutability startlingly visible. Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser shared a commitment to marriage as a public institution crucial to social stability, and their novels were centrally concerned with its ongoing transformation. Combining literary analysis with a close investigation of case law and legislation, this project explores these writers' dramatic and sustained engagement with the terms and processes of marriage law. It argues that the novels under consideration not only entered into widely publicized legal controversies, they also self-consciously reflected on the relationship between literary stories and legal formulations. They indicted certain representations of marriage for perpetuating legally inscribed hierarchies of race, gender, and even class. These novels sought to re-imagine marriage in ways that would maintain the institution's public role while making it more responsive to previously disenfranchised groups.; Chapter One traces the social, cultural, and biographical forces that converged to make marriage law such a pressing concern for the writers under study. Chapter Two analyzes the way in which Howells's investigation of interracial marriage in An Imperative Duty (1891) challenges the epistemological foundation of both anti-miscegenation law and the sentimental miscegenation plot. Chapter Three examines how two of Wharton's novels, The House of Mirth (1905) and The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), together explore a fundamental change in the legal structure of marriage and its paradoxical implications for women. Chapter Four considers sham marriage in Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt (1911) in the context of a concurrent debate about the potential links between common law marriage and marital fraud. Finally, the dissertation concludes that the novels under consideration worked in concert with contemporaneous legal writings to create a sustainable vision of marriage during a time of social crisis.