Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what-or who-must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? We have inherited a model of marriage so flawed, Frances E. Dolan contends, that its logical consequence is conflict.
Dolan ranges over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice literature, sensational accounts of "true crime," and late twentieth-century marriage manuals and films about battered women who kill their abusers. She reads the inevitable Taming of the Shrew against William Byrd's diary of life on his Virginia plantation, Noel Coward's Private Lives, and Barbara Ehrenreich's assessment in Nickel and Dimed of the relationship between marriage and housework. She traces the connections between Phillippa Gregory's best-selling novel The Other Boleyn Girl and documents about Anne Boleyn's fatal marriage and her daughter Elizabeth I's much-debated virginity. By contrasting depictions of marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and our own time, she shows that the early modern apprehension of marriage as an economy of scarcity continues to haunt the present in the form of a conceptual structure that can accommodate only one fully developed person. When two fractious individuals assert their conflicting wills, resolution can be achieved only when one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other.
In an era when marriage remains hotly contested, this book draws our attention to one of the histories that bears on the present, a history in which marriage promises both intimate connection and fierce conflict, both companionship and competition.
Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what-or who-must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? We have inherited a model of marriage so flawed, Frances E. Dolan contends, that its logical consequence is conflict.
Dolan ranges over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice literature, sensational accounts of "true crime," and late twentieth-century marriage manuals and films about battered women who kill their abusers. She reads the inevitable Taming of the Shrew against William Byrd's diary of life on his Virginia plantation, Noel Coward's Private Lives, and Barbara Ehrenreich's assessment in Nickel and Dimed of the relationship between marriage and housework. She traces the connections between Phillippa Gregory's best-selling novel The Other Boleyn Girl and documents about Anne Boleyn's fatal marriage and her daughter Elizabeth I's much-debated virginity. By contrasting depictions of marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and our own time, she shows that the early modern apprehension of marriage as an economy of scarcity continues to haunt the present in the form of a conceptual structure that can accommodate only one fully developed person. When two fractious individuals assert their conflicting wills, resolution can be achieved only when one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other.
In an era when marriage remains hotly contested, this book draws our attention to one of the histories that bears on the present, a history in which marriage promises both intimate connection and fierce conflict, both companionship and competition.
Introduction
Chapter One. One Flesh, Two Heads: Debating the Biblical Blueprint
for Marriage in the Seventeenth and Twentieth Centuries.
Chapter Two. Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the Legacy of
Coverture
Chapter Three. Fighting for the Breeches, Sharing the Rod: Spouses,
Servants, and the Struggle for Equality
Chapter Four. How a Maiden Keeps Her Head: Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth
I, and the Perils of Marriage
Afterword
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what—or who—must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? Dolan reveals the contradiction that lies at the very heart of modern marriage. We have inherited from early modern England a model of marriage, she contends, so flawed that its logical consequence is conflict.
Frances E. Dolan is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Among her books are Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700 and Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture.
"[Frances E. Dolan] steeped herself in the history [of marriage],
brought along a philosopher's antennae for blunt contradiction, and
produced Marriage and Violence. Oh, how the quality of debate on
same-sex marriage would improve if activists on the subject,
candidates, and officials sat down to read it! Maybe it can be
tossed out, like a bouquet, anywhere such players meet."—Chronicle
Review
"A sophisticated, erudite discussion of the tensions between
egalitarian and hierarchical principles in the Anglo-American ideal
of marriage. Dolan provocatively argues that these tensions
illustrate important continuities between seventeenth- and
twenty-first-century marital models and have created recurring
dilemmas in our theory and practice of marriage."—Stephanie Coontz,
author of Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How
Love Conquered Marriage
"Why does marriage so often lead to violence? In her timely and
important new book, Frances Dolan identifies the culprit: an
'economy of scarcity' that modern marriage inherits from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Powerfully argued and
wonderfully well documented, Marriage and Violence provides a rare
example of how historical scholarship can illuminate the
present."—Richard Helgerson
"Marriage and Violence is an original, timely, and compelling study
of the impact of early modern English discourses about marriage on
contemporary understandings of marital violence. Arguing that when
marriage explodes into violence we can see the past haunting the
present, Dolan both presents a radically new history of marriage
and provides us with some new conceptual tools for rethinking
present marital ideologies."—Valerie Traub, University of
Michigan
"In this brilliant analysis of the contradictory but persistent
model of marriage that continues to haunt modern versions of the
institution . . . Dolan supports her wide-ranging and provocative
claims with scholarship that is impressively comprehensive and
meticulously detailed. . . . A book of value not only to historians
but also to twenty-first-century individuals interested in
rethinking the institution of marriage and the gender dynamics
within it."—Citation for Honorable Mention in the 2009 Society for
the Study of Early Modern Women Book Award competition
"Frances Dolan's marvellously polemical book explores the
conceptual underpinnings of marriage. . . . Her bracing attack on
the structure of marriage is intended to provoke debate in order to
find new ways of thinking about the marital relationship. It will
surely do that and, in a world which sees the persistence of
marital violence every day in its most brutal form, such
questioning is to be applauded."—English Historical Review
"Well researched and based on a rigorous, prolonged comparison
between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice
literature and late twentieth-century American evangelical books of
marital counsel. . . . The book is a splendid read."—Journal for
the Study of Marriage and Spirituality
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