The Unharmonious Matrimony In Dickens’s Four Major Novels

As marriage was presented as the goal of every British girl and thecornerstone of British society, the social and individual conflictssupposing to be dissolved by marriage were often highlighted by thoseunhappy marriages in Victorian novels. If we concentrate on the storiesof marriage, we would get a more detailed understanding of theculture that bred such distressing stories and often sounded the alarmover the institution.My sense of the Victorian novel and the Victorian periodconcerned with the institution of divorce has finally fixed my focus onDickens as a case study. Although Dickens is frequently considered as apropagator of nineteenth-century domesticity, I notice that Dickensgives the unharmonious marriage a surprisingly high degree of visibility.While it contains few actual divorces, in this paper I argue with Ian Wattsassertion that the realist novel is centered on courtship and marriageand examine the domination of unhappy marriages in Dickens’s novels.By reading Dickens’s works alongside legislative changes, including theMarriage Act of1836and the Divorce Act of1857, I consider how eagerthe reform of the laws about marriages represented in Dickens’s writingand finally try to make a brief summary of the progress for Dickens’streatment of the troubled wedlock plot in accordance with thelegislative development of the matrimonial laws.Both of the troubled wedlock plot and the traditional courtshipplot are necessary, and both plots read each other and contribute toour notions of marriage, as well as our sense of patriarchy. Although thewomen who manage to escape their unharmonious marriage tend towind up in other patriarchal institution. The fact that their return to afather-figure is of their own choosing is crucial, and it points to both thevictory and the limitation of these narratives of disrupted matrimony.