| The Victorian period was characterized by intense struggles over the economic and sexual roles of women, marked especially by the rise of companionate marriage. Although some historians have placed this development in the eighteenth century, I argue that the shift to an ideal of love and relative equality in marriage was ongoing and controversial for the Victorians. The cultural ferment over the changing nature of marriage was played out partly in arguments that employed a surprising parallel between prostitutes and wives who had married for money. Social critic W. R. Greg, for instance, bluntly stated in 1850 that "for one [prostitute] who...sells herself to a lover, then sell themselves to a husband." This dissertation explores the significance of Greg's analogy for middle-class Victorian culture, examining the intersection of love and economics in the cultural construction of marriage.;Legal reforms and broad shifts in cultural attitudes changed both marriage and prostitution. I examine both, with particular attention to the print culture of the middle class. The Introduction discusses the legal status of marriage and prostitution through the 1860s. In Chapters One, Two, and Three I provide readings of three canonical Victorian novels---Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit---that concentrate on how each novel compares prostitution and marriage in order to criticize the mercenary nature of contemporary marriage. Chapter Four turns to the proliferation of articles discussing and criticizing the economic nature of marriage in the mainstream periodical press of the 1860s. Chapter Five looks at Felicia Skene's Hidden Depths (1866), which condemns the double standard inherent in the difference between contemporary social attitudes toward prostitutes and the young men who patronized them, yet were considered eligible partners in mercenary marriages.;After the 1860s, the analogy between marriage and prostitution became less common, largely because attitudes toward marriage had shifted, so that companionate marriage unquestionably became both the ideal and the norm. Although the mercenary marriages that provoked analogies between prostitutes and wives did not disappear, they were less prevalent, and ceased to call for the strong censure implicit in comparisons with prostitution. |
