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Romance's Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction
Romance's Rival argues that the central plot of the most important genre of the nineteenth century, the marriage plot novel, means something quite different from what we thought. In Victorian novels, women may marry for erotic desire--but they might, instead, insist on "familiar marriage," marrying trustworthy companions who can offer them socially rich lives and futures of meaningful work. Romance's Rival shows how familiar marriage expresses ideas of female subjectivity dating back through the seventeenth century, while romantic marriage felt like a new, risky idea.
Undertaking a major rereading of the rise-of-the-novel tradition, from Richardson through the twentieth century, Talia Schaffer rethinks what the novel meant if one tracks familiar-marriage virtues. This alternative perspective offers new readings of major texts (Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Trollope) but it also foregrounds women's popular fiction (Yonge, Oliphant, Craik, Broughton). Offering a feminist perspective that reads the marriage plot from the woman's point of view, Schaffer inquires why a female character might legitimately wish to marry for something other than passion. For the past half-century, scholars have valorized desire, individuality, and autonomy in the way we read novels; Romance's Rival asks us to look at the other side, to validate the yearning for work, family, company, or social power as legitimate reasons for women's marital choices in Victorian fiction.
Comprehensive in its knowledge of several generations of scholarship on the novel, Romance's Rival convinces us to re-examine assumptions about the nature and function of marriage and the role of the novel in helping us not simply imagine marriage but also process changing ideas about what it might look like and how it might serve people.
Undertaking a major rereading of the rise-of-the-novel tradition, from Richardson through the twentieth century, Talia Schaffer rethinks what the novel meant if one tracks familiar-marriage virtues. This alternative perspective offers new readings of major texts (Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Trollope) but it also foregrounds women's popular fiction (Yonge, Oliphant, Craik, Broughton). Offering a feminist perspective that reads the marriage plot from the woman's point of view, Schaffer inquires why a female character might legitimately wish to marry for something other than passion. For the past half-century, scholars have valorized desire, individuality, and autonomy in the way we read novels; Romance's Rival asks us to look at the other side, to validate the yearning for work, family, company, or social power as legitimate reasons for women's marital choices in Victorian fiction.
Comprehensive in its knowledge of several generations of scholarship on the novel, Romance's Rival convinces us to re-examine assumptions about the nature and function of marriage and the role of the novel in helping us not simply imagine marriage but also process changing ideas about what it might look like and how it might serve people.
- GenresNonfiction
352 pages, Hardcover
First published February 2, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 31, 2016
This book will make you see classic favorites such as Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility in a whole new way.
February 28, 2025
why do victorian novelists love cousin marriage so much? this is the question that lead me to Romance's Rival. talia schaffer more than answered my question; she reveals a whole framework for comprehending the weird quirks of victorian ficton.
to sum up her thesis, the victorian era was a scary time for women as society transitioned from its kin- and land-based structure to modern capitalism in all its individualist horror (for women, esp. those of the middle class, who were locked out for the most part and put under the total rule of a stranger through marriage) and glory (for men, who, no longer tied to the land, could come and go and "make their own way"). under these conditions, marriage to someone familiar (a neighbour, esp. the local squire, or a cousin) or someone already enmeshed in a community (a disabled person or again, a squire like Mr. Darcy) is an appealing choice.
my summary does not do justice to schaffer's insightful analysis of many notable victorian works of fiction, so please, check out Romance's Rival. you'll never read austen or eliot or the brontes the same way again!
to sum up her thesis, the victorian era was a scary time for women as society transitioned from its kin- and land-based structure to modern capitalism in all its individualist horror (for women, esp. those of the middle class, who were locked out for the most part and put under the total rule of a stranger through marriage) and glory (for men, who, no longer tied to the land, could come and go and "make their own way"). under these conditions, marriage to someone familiar (a neighbour, esp. the local squire, or a cousin) or someone already enmeshed in a community (a disabled person or again, a squire like Mr. Darcy) is an appealing choice.
my summary does not do justice to schaffer's insightful analysis of many notable victorian works of fiction, so please, check out Romance's Rival. you'll never read austen or eliot or the brontes the same way again!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews