Unions in Crisis: British and American Marriage Anxiety and Nation-Building in Art and Novels, 1666-1847

Abstract

This dissertation traces proto-feminist themes and relates them to nascent British and American national identities through examples of failed marriages depicted in transatlantic art and novels from 1666 to 1847. In order to underline the pervasiveness of failed marriage plots as subversive, proto-feminist arguments for women¿s rights to education, paid work, autonomy, equal inheritance, and companionate marriage, each chapter offers novels featuring different types of failed marriages. Each chapter also pairs close readings of these novels with a different kind of aesthetic representation. From viewing gender-bending and self-fashioning in the frontispieces of Margaret Cavendish¿s and Aphra Behn¿s novels to comparing William Hogarth¿s narrative prints alongside Moll Flanders , to analyzing the importance of sublime emotions, taste, and art therapy for heroine and author-artists like Charlotte Bront¿ and Jane Eyre, each chapter uses interdisciplinary art history and literary studies to emphasize emerging proto-feminist sympathies. The chapters also offer examples of failed marriages for women of different socioeconomic backgrounds, social positions, and ethnicities, and each chapter is taken from a different liminal or threshold period of history, which marked often large-scale and permanent changes for women¿s rights and agency. Through the catalysts of failed unions like false or unequal marriage, elopement, seduction, coercion, assault, rape, incest, and bigamy, the female characters in these works offer examples of gender-bending, wit, resourcefulness, modesty, morality, and social power, which negated both their typical assignation as ¿ruined¿ or ¿fallen¿ women and the negative examples inspired by conduct manuals to press female readers into normative marriage. Instead, their failed relationships pushed these female characters out of the domestic sphere and into the wide world (or even into other worlds) as they traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, their countries, or social boundaries to step into their own powerful and sympathetic proto-feminist identities.