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 Brontës, 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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Preface Chapter 1: Theorizing Victorian Marriage Chapter 2: Historicizing Marriage, Developing the Marriage Plot Chapter 3: Neighbor Marriage: Loving the Squire Chapter 4: Cousin Marriage: Reading on the Contrary Chapter 5: Disability Marriage: Communities of Care in the Victorian Novel Chapter 6: Vocational Marriage, or, Why Marriage Doesn't Work Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Talia Schaffer is Professor of English at Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England.

Review :
"For literary scholars interested in the Victorian marriage plot and cultural studies scholars interested in the nineteenth-century attitudes toward romance, domesticity, and woman's place in society, Talia Schaffer's Romance's Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction is essential reading. Well-written, wide-ranging, sensitive to Victorian preoccupations, and constructed around illuminating paradigms illustrated with examples from important canonical and noncanonical texts, this study is a standout among the good examinations of Victorian marriage to have appeared in recent years." --Victorian Studies "Schaffer's book recovers the kinds of familiar marriage that play a key role in nineteenth-century fiction but have largely been ignored by modern readers...In this book, Schaffer's intellectual excavations give pleasure by enabling us to see the marriage plot in a revolutionary new way." --Elsie B. Michie, Review 19 "Schaffer's creative analysis of British romance novels plots reveals the anxiety and ambivalence many women felt about the emergence of love as the primary motive for marriage. This engrossing book reminds us that there were several historical alternatives to our contemporary ideas about love, desire, and sexuality." --Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage "Romance's Rival joins Sharon Marcus's Between Women and Mary Jean Corbett's Family Likeness in offering a radical new reading of the nineteenth-century marriage plot. Schaffer's approach revolutionizes critical understandings of the novel and grants fiction the power to challenge and rewrite anthropological accounts of marriage and even Foucault's repressive hypothesis." --Elsie B. Michie, author of The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James "Romance's Rival directs our eyes to a feature of Victorian fiction that has always been in plain sight but remarkably hard to see: the structural importance of marriages that prioritize social, not sexual, relations. Schaffer's fast-paced and engaging study de-emphasizes erotic desire to deliver a surprisingly racy read, provocatively unsettling our understanding of some of the best-loved novels in the canon." --Catherine Robson, author of Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem "A brilliantly argued analysis, Romance's Rival reveals a major lacuna in the dominant understanding of domestic fiction by tracing the rise and fall of alternatives to romance. In this elegant, insightful study, Talia Schaffer effectively reconceives the relation between the history of marriage and marriage fiction, drawing on both celebrated and obscure examples in an original and comprehensive fashion." --Mary Jean Corbett, author of Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf "In the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century marriage plots we all thought we knew so well, Talia Schaffer has discovered a surprisingly formidable rival to the rebellious impulses of romantic love: the communitarian urges of familiar affection. While exploring the dynamic interactions of these two drives in the novels, she takes us on a fascinating tour of the changing and competing modes of subjectivity, desire, and individual agency." --Catherine Gallagher, author of The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel "The subject matter of this impeccably researched, clearly written work is so compelling that the book will interest readers outside as well as inside the academy. The book will definitely influence how this reviewer teaches some of her favorite novels in the future. Essential."--Choice