A

MARRIAGE

---

The marriage contract occupied the minds and hearts of writers and readers in the nineteenth century. It signaled the newly conceived possibilities of the Republic and of the political alliances to be formed among families and factions. As Nancy Cott has argued in Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, marriage represented religious, civil, and political investments in sexual and gender identities and in the social control of the new populace. Marriage became a way to define the population—both citizens and aliens—in terms of monogamy and voluntary union or consent, with "marriage and the form of government mirroring each other" (p. 10). Moreover, the doctrine of coverture governed the legal relation between men and women, wherein women would surrender their legal status to husbands, who were full citizens. Women could exercise influence in marriage but had no legal power, could not vote, and in many states could not own property. (Married Women's Property Acts were in place by the 1860s.)

LITERARY CRITICISMS OF MARRIAGE

Women's resistance to coverture, and indeed to the stifling influences of patriarchal control, helped to shape much of the literature of this period. Such poems as "The Dying Wife" (1834), "The Bride" (1837), and Fanny Gage's "The Maniac Wife" (1866) describe in stark terms the miserable conditions for women under the control of willful husbands in what one critic describes as "voluntary incarceration" (Bennett, pp. 122–123). Emily Dickinson (1830–1866) compares marriage to submission:

I'm "wife"—I've finished that—

That other state—

I'm czar—I'm "Woman" now—

It's safer so.

Marriage is ostensibly "safer" because it affords women some measure of protection. One of the cleverest indictments of marriage is in a coded letter, "Atkinson's Casket," in an 1832 magazine, which reveals the author's real views of marriage if one reads every other line of the letter:

I tell you my dear

husband is one of the most amiable of men,

I have been married seven weeks, and

have never found the least reason to

repent the day that joined us, my husband is

in person and manners far from resembling

ugly, crass, old, disagreeable, and jealous

monsters, who think by confining to secure

(Lanser, pp. 679–680)

Such reading between the lines represents the overt censoring and covert repression of women's critical voices.

Rebecca Rush's (1779–c. 1850) 1812 novel Kelroy gives readers a glimpse into the expectations for white women's marriages. Rush's plot characterizes marriages in the early Republic insofar as her characters are pitted against each other in terms of political alliances. The widowed mother of two girls, Mrs. Hammond wants to marry them off into wealthy families, thereby securing her future and, incidentally, theirs. Mrs. Hammond and her accomplice Mr. Marney believe in filial obedience (influenced by Federalist policy) and want to arrange the daughters' marriages based on calculated self-interest. The first daughter, Lucy, marries into British aristocracy, but it is a loveless union, and Lucy is a coldhearted mother. The sentimentalists, represented in the novel by the second daughter Emily and her lover, the impoverished poet Kelroy, assert the Jeffersonian value of sincerity and affiliation through love, not rational self-advancement. The mother foils the marriage but not without breaking her daughter's heart and ruining her own reputation. Thus, in Rush's world, the Federalist version of marriage and obedience cannot coexist with the newer generation's Jeffersonian model of consent and individual self-control. Thus, the seduction plot, which heretofore fueled myriad novels—most famously, Hannah Webster Foster's (1759–1840) The Coquette (1797) and Susanna Rowson's (1762–1824) Charlotte Temple (1794)—disappeared, while the new conflict between political models of affiliation informed courtship and marriage plots.

New, more sentimental models of marriage began to appear in novels and plays, but even these were no less politicized as a form of union. Catharine Maria Sedgwick's (1789–1867) Hope Leslie (1827) features intermarriage between a white woman taken captive as a child and an Indian man, as does Lydia Maria Child's (1802–1880) Hobomok (1824). Both Sedgwick and Child, as well as James Fenimore Cooper, used marriage as a way to test cultural politics of citizenship: Could whites intermarry with Native Americans and preserve a sense of cultural superiority? Did cultural superiority matter in a potentially hybrid culture?

Walt Whitman (1819–1992) later represented just such a marriage in "Song of Myself": "I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl" (1881 edition, l. 185). As a preoccupation among the middle and upper classes, marriage signifies not just class standing but also racial superiority, as the legal rights of marriage were restricted solely to whites until African Americans were granted, after emancipation, the right to wed. As Ann duCille writes, African Americans desired the "coupling convention" that had been denied to enslaved blacks. Indeed, marriage in African American culture was politicized from the very beginning. Slaveholders' failure to recognize marriages between slaves tested the Christian notion of marriage, although the assumed sexual licentiousness of the slaves was seen as much as a threat to the nation as were Mormonism and divorces.

Even before the debate about slavery ended, bondage was an important way of representing marriage. In "The Great Lawsuit" (1843), later expanded into Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) indicates the rhetorical connection between chattel slavery and marital enslavement:

It is not surprising that it should be the AntiSlavery party that pleads for woman, when we consider merely that she does not hold property on equal terms with men; so that, if a husband dies without a will, the wife, instead of stepping at once into his place as head of the family, inherits only a part of his fortune, as if she were a child, or ward only, not an equal partner. (P. 1627)

Instead of the "ravishing harmony" that Fuller desires between married men and women, women are denied equity.

Perhaps no novelist put the situation as well as did Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton, 1822–1891) in Ruth Hall (1855), a best-seller that dramatizes the plight of a mother left destitute when her childlike husband dies and leaves her to the mercy of his parents and her own unsympathetic brother. Ruth Hall saves herself by writing columns filled with common sense and humor about the plight of womanhood. In 1871 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) focused on the same theme—the impossibility of being a "silent partner" in a marriage—insofar as both of her heroines refuse marriage proposals (middle-class and working-class versions) in favor of embracing benevolent practices. Fern and Phelps, among many others, raise the question of whether marriage was a companionate or an economic union, whether it is more fully realized on spiritual, psychological, and social terms, or whether its true implications result from an economic or commercial union. One of Phelps's later novels, The Story of Avis (1877), chronicles how a demanding marriage and husband doom a woman's ambition as an artist. Like her mother, a novelist of the same name, in "The Angel over the Right Shoulder" (1852), the daughter pits women's duties against her desires. By the end of the century, marriage advice and manual writers would proclaim with not a little irony that marriage was to be endured, not celebrated. In 1886 one such manual—How to Be Happy Though Married, Being a Handbook to Marriage, written by "A Graduate in the University of Matrimony"—addresses itself "to those brave men and women who have ventured, or who intend to venture, into that state which is a blessing to a few, a curse to many, and a great uncertainty to all" and is dedicated to "their courage" (acknowledgment page) in attempting such unions. The age of innocence—blessed unions and political marriages—was indeed over.

ANXIETIES ABOUT MARRIAGE IN THE WORK OF HAWTHORNE AND MELVILLE

Perhaps the most famous novel in nineteenth-century American literature is the story of a marriage gone wrong and the disastrous consequences, Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804–1864) The Scarlet Letter (1850). Its focus on adultery puts it in company with Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. These novels take as their defining position that the way marriages fail reveals not only the deepest psychological implications of characters but also the dominant cultural anxieties of their milieux. The Scarlet Letter is so well known that it may be summarized briefly. A man uses his position as doctor to marry a younger, vulnerable woman, but when she has grounds to presume that he is dead, she turns to her minister for sexual comfort. Leslie Fiedler argues that the wilderness scene in which Hester Prynne enjoins the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's sympathy actually replicates an earlier scene that the reader never gets to see: her original seduction of the cleric. Whether the novel is considered a marriage novel or not, it displays one side of Hawthorne's vision of marriage as an institution. The novel could not have the potency it has had for generations unless it also expressed a deeply held American sense of marriage as a profoundly viable civic institution, one that can give stature to even the furthest outcasts from American society.

In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne explores several dimensions by which American history is shaped by the pursuit of happy marriages. When Matthew Maule sees Alice Pyncheon and assumes that the class differences that keep her from him can never be surmounted, he joins her intolerant father in a shared policy of domestic devastation. His curse on the Pyncheons is the resentment of a marriage that cannot be, whereas the novel closes with a vision of a happier union once the class barriers have been rendered insubstantial. The Blithedale Romance (1852), on the other hand, treats marriage as secondary to the cultivation of intimacy and by doing so helps to secure the life of intense personal relations as the American social value that will ultimately surpass marriage as a defining cultural good. Miles Coverdale's contorted tale of his own bachelorhood is a prototype for the bachelor fictions that predominated in the 1850s: his desperate protest of love for Priscilla, hollow as many readers have found it, testifies both to his incomprehension of the proceedings and to his equally helpless vision of romantic, heterosexual love as the adequate counterbalance to the social ills the novel has chronicled.

Hawthorne's short stories also play out the duality of marriage, not to mention Hawthorne's ambivalences, which the novels portray. On the one hand, Hawthorne creates a series of bachelor protagonists who find marriage suffocating. Such characters might be typified in "Wakefield" (1835), in which the protagonist abandons his wife for twenty years, living around the corner from her and observing her during his absence. In large part, this story functions as Hawthorne's critique of encroaching urbanism and the soulless anonymity of city life. That dominant reading, however, ought not overshadow the implicit critique of marriage as the primary source of consolation in an increasingly alienated culture. On the other hand, Hawthorne creates another series of protagonists for whom the prospect of marriage is potentially redemptive. One such character is Owen Warland in "The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844), who pits his craft in service of this ideal. Beyond such artist figures, however, are the better-known malevolent villains like Aylmer of "The Birth-mark" (1843), who in the name of searching for the perfect wife systematically goes about destroying the very human woman who loves him. Perhaps Hawthorne's best-known short story, "Young Goodman Brown" (1835), circulates these anxieties about marriage in the protagonist's vision of his wife's imagined infidelity with the devil and his attendant loss of his aptly named wife, Faith.

Nina Baym's famous formulation of "melodramas of beset manhood" best captures the sense of fear and anxiety nineteenth-century male characters (and some writers) felt about the stifling dynamics of middle-class marriage. Herman Melville's (1819–1891) famous diptych of 1855, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," gave the lie to the number of sentimental portrayals of national monogamy, for his bachelors prefer their own company and his maids are servants to their millwork. Melville's bachelors call wives and children "twinges of their consciences" likely to give men "anxious thoughts" (p. 2361). Then again, there's Pierre (1852), Melville's novel about a man engaged to one woman but passionate about his half sister, one of the many nineteenth-century plots verging on incest, such as E. D. E. N. Southworth's 1869 novel, The Fatal Marriage.

IDEALIZATION AND COMPLICATIONS

Hawthorne's and Melville's writings notwithstanding, marriage was promoted as a civic ideal, serving as a social glue: Marmee in Louisa May Alcott's (1832–1888) Little Women (1868–1869) professes marriage as the highest ideal and noblest goal for women: after Mr. March leaves for the war, Marmee declares that she "gave my best to the country I love, and kept my tears till he was gone. Why should I complain, when we both have merely done our duty, and will surely be the happier for it in the end?" (p. 103). Such "maternal pedagogy," as Elizabeth Freeman calls it, was to prepare her girls for submission to the greater power of "national manhood" and provide a buffer against capitalist and commercial interests (p. 41). Conduct literature and advice books were popular, providing young men and women with codes for proper married living. The debate about marriage rested on the assumptions about companionate affiliation versus economic partnership.

By the 1850s, "free-love" communities were on the rise, and the argument for sexual emancipation took many forms. "Complex marriages" occurred at Oneida, Putney, and Wallingford because they secured the notion that every member would be married to everyone else (Freeman, p. 107). In fact, the founder of the Oneida Community, John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886), argued that sexual activity could be distinct from reproduction. The Shakers prevented marriage altogether since they found it to encourage privatization (Freeman, p. 129). One of the most out-spoken voices against sexual repression was Angela Fiducia Tilton Heywood (1840–1935), who spoke out for her imprisoned husband, Ezra Hervey Heywood (1829–1893), in their newspaper, the Word. Angela Heywood argued for free expression between husband and wife: "Animals rise on the back, mount from behind; the arrival of human intelligence appears in face to face meeting, coition front-wise. . . . In creative sex-power resides the central matter-of-fact of social endeavor. It is insipid falsehood for woman to pretend to man that the sex-fact is not as much to her, as it is to him." The Heywoods advanced provocative arguments for women's equal sex expression in marriage.

Nevertheless, many women writers argued for the protective benefits for women in sentimental affiliation, whereas others lamented women's lack of power in marital relations. Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1811–1896) Pink and White Tyranny (1871) satirized women's sex power in marriage. The novel details the disastrous marriage of John Seymour, a country businessman, to a frothy young woman, Lillie Ellis, whose career as a belle started when she was eight and who "used to sell her kisses through the slats of the fence for papers of candy, and thus early acquired the idea that her charms were a capital to be employed in trading for the good things of life" (p. 46). Thoroughly steeped in American materialism, Lillie rejects her husband's benevolence and idealism for fashionable life. Throughout the novel, she employs her sex power—flirting and kissing and crying—to undermine his plans of moral uplift for her. Such fashionable training in womanhood, Stowe argues, destroys the sacredness of married life. Stowe comments on the situation of marriage in America: "We have heard much talk, of late, concerning the husband's ownership of the wife. But, dear ladies, is that any more pronounced a fact than every wife's ownership of her husband?—an ownership so intense and pervading that it may be said to be the controlling nerve of womanhood" (p. 66). Lillie Ellis, like Louisa May Alcott's Jean Muir from Behind a Mask (1866) and later Edith Wharton's Lily Bart from The House of Mirth (1905), uses sex power to arrange for an advantageous marriage.

The challenges marriage faced came not only in the domestic sphere but also in what were seen as threats to national stability. The crisis of Mormonism was focused on polygamy, which was criminalized in 1862, before slavery was outlawed. For instance, Maria Ward's 1855 best-seller, Female Life among the Mormons, detailed the "Sacrifices, Sorrows, and Sufferings" of a woman forced to go to Salt Lake City with her Mormon husband. Such sensational literature focused attention on anti-republicanism and on women's legal dependence in marriage (Merish, p. 165). In 1843 the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith (1805–1844) declared "Celestial marriage" a divine revelation and duty for Mormon men. Although its existence in the Mormon community was kept quiet until the 1850s, plural marriage provoked great debate, and approximately sixty anti-Mormon novels were published in the nineteenth century, denouncing the lust and sensuality of the Mormon "harem," a dangerous relation to the Eastern sheik and his collection of women. Mormonism galvanized many discussions about marriage and monogamy's legitimate relation to the nation, since plural marriage challenged the sanctity and order of the Christian home. Other novels, such as Metta Victoria Fuller Victor's Mormon Wives (1856), used sentimental rhetorical strategies to attack the defilers of Christian monogamy.

It was feared that both widespread miscegenation and Mormonism would produce an adverse effect on national morality. As DuCille argues in The Coupling Convention, the marriage plot and the novel structure were useful tools for African American writers to explore race, sexuality, and female subjectivity (p. 4). Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859) both make impassioned arguments for black women's "freedom to desire" and freedom from white patriarchal power. Marriage was also a test of black people's fitness for citizenship. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) expresses the ideal relationship between George Harris, an escaped slave, and his family; Harris claims that his identity—as a free man—is predicated on his relationship (often in terms of purchasing) his wife and child. (No such marital ownership occurs in Jacobs's or Wilson's stories.) As he explains to his wife Eliza, "Don't you know a slave can't be married? There is no law in this country for that; I can't hold you for my wife, if [the slaveholder] chooses to part us" (p. 82). After the Civil War, all men would be owners of their households, a wife and child theirs by right.

These debates occasioned a concomitant rise in divorces; more women than men sought an end to marriage. In turn, advocates marshaled for stricter control on marriage, including raising the age of consent and instituting eugenic requirements, all in an effort to promote "formal monogamy," as Cott puts it, and later to control reproduction of immigrants (p. 110). Fears of Catholicism and Jewish marriages also dominated reform movements because it was believed that these foreign alliances did not promote egalitarian marriages but tribalism and foreign allegiances. Adah Isaacs Menken (c. 1835–1868), the popular stage actress and author of Jewish poems and essays, for example, married six times. This gave opponents of immigrant marriage a case to pursue.

Marriage in the nineteenth century was the social barometer for the transition from bondage and cover-ture to contract relations. These contract negotiations had both domestic and national meanings: in the home, contract regulated the division of labor, whereas in the nation the contract between husband and wife was the moral register of American exceptionalism, progress, and privacy.

See also Bachelors and Spinsters; Courtship; Free Love; Ruth Hall; Sex Education

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. 1868–1869. New York: Modern Library, 1983.

Dickinson, Emily. "I'm 'wife'—I've finished that." In Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed., pp. 2503–2539. New York: Norton, 2003.

Fern, Fanny [Sarah Payson Willis Parton]. Ruth Hall. 1855. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Fuller, Margaret. "The Great Lawsuit." 1843. In Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed., pp. 1620–1654. New York: Norton, 2003.

A Graduate in the University of Matrimony. How to Be Happy Though Married, Being a Handbook to Marriage. New York: Scribners, 1886.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. 1852. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. 1851. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850. New York: Penguin Classics, 1986.

Heywood, Angela Fiducia Tilton. "Sex Service—Ethics of Trust." Word, October 1889.

Melville, Herman. "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids." 1855. In Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed., pp. 2355–2371. New York: Norton, 2003.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Silent Partner. 1871. New York: Feminist Press, 1983.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Story of Avis. 1877. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Rush, Rebecca. Kelroy. 1812. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Pink and White Tyranny: A Society Novel. 1871. New York: New American Library, 1988.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1852. New York: Penguin Books, 1981.

Whitman, Walt. "Song of Myself." In Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed., pp. 2147–2189. New York: Norton, 2003.

Secondary Works

Baym, Nina. "Melodramas of Beset Manhood." In Feminism and American Literary History: Essays. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Bennett, Paula Bernat. Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800–1900. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Cott, Nancy F. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

DuCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Freeman, Elizabeth. The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.

Lanser, Susan S. "Toward a Feminist Narratology." In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, pp. 674–693. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.

Stanley, Amy Dru. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Dale M. Bauer