Matchmaking As Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2016 Playing with Matches: Matchmaking as Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot Colleen Cusick The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1263 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] PLAYING WITH MATCHES: MATCHMAKING AS AUTHORSHIP IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MARRIAGE PLOT by COLLEEN CUSICK A dissertation submitted to the Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 ii © 2016 Colleen Cusick All Rights Reserved iii Playing with Matches: Matchmaking as Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot by Colleen Cusick This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _________________ ____________________________ Date Talia Schaffer Chair of Examining Committee _________________ ____________________________ Date Mario DiGangi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Rachel Brownstein Richard Kaye Caroline Reitz THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv ABSTRACT Playing with Matches: Matchmaking as Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot by Colleen Cusick Advisor: Talia Schaffer This dissertation examines the narrative treatment of matchmakers in British marriage plots across the nineteenth century. The matchmaker stands at the nexus of several simultaneous cultural negotiations underway in the period. In an era of increasing state control over marriage and the rising ideology of romantic marriage, the matchmaker represents the communal courtship practices of the past. As such, she offers both a threat to the emerging status quo and a reminder of the persistence of superseded cultural forms in the emerging modern marriage system. Simultaneously, she constitutes an image of female creativity and authority that speaks to concerns about the professionalization of novel-writing and the place of women writers within that profession. My argument joins recent critical attempts that challenge stable definitions of Victorian marriage; through my focus on the neglected figure of the matchmaker I reveal the essential resonances between these attempts to construct marital philosophies and the professional authorship of the marriage plots that espouse them. Victorian matchmakers shoulder outsized ideological freight in their often narratively marginalized positions, pointing to the competing doctrines of romantic fulfillment, personal liberty, domestic womanhood, and authorial prestige at play in the most prevalent genre of the Victorian era, the marriage plot. v Each of my chapters traces the interplay of gender and genre in narratives of matchmaking. The Introduction, while outlining the matchmaker’s historical background and marginalization in the nineteenth-century, presents a case study of Maria Edgeworth’s, Belinda (1801) that spells the central place British marriage occupies in defining national identity in an era of global dominance. Chapter One evaluates Jane Austen’s great novel of matchmaking, Emma (1816), as an act of careful social positioning, both of herself as author and of the matchmaker in the social world. In Chapter Two, I advance my reading of women’s writing through a study of texts by several early Victorian women writers of the 1840s and 1850s: Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839), Mrs. (Harriette Maria) Gordon Smythies’ The Matchmaker (1842), and the stories of Anna Maria (S.C) Hall, Ouida, and other anonymous writers for the periodical press. In each of these texts, matchmaking mothers comprise uneasy models for women’s literary work: they are both parallel figures for the ambitious authors themselves and questionable professionals in ideally anti-commercial realm of courtship. Chapters Three and Four study, in turn, two of the greatest male authors of the marriage plot, Anthony Trollope and Henry James. Trollope’s exploratory approach to matchmaking reflects his committed experiments with marriage plotting; his affectionate, yet ambivalent stance toward his female matchmakers echoes his conflicted relationship to his earliest literary model, his mother Frances Trollope. For James, the female matchmaker forms a through-line across his entire career, expressing his embattled engagement with the female literary forms within which he writes and against which he attempts to define himself as artist. vi Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have been written without the guidance of my advisor, Talia Schaffer. I thank her for years of generous encouragement, keen editing, and personal support. She is the model writer and teacher that all her students aspire to be. I also offer my gratitude to the members of my dissertation committee for their insight in developing this project through the years. Rachel Brownstein showed unflagging enthusiasm for this work since its earliest inception in her Byron seminar. Richard Kaye asked probing questions at opportune times. Caroline Reitz listened to early and unformed musings on the subject of matchmakers long before she became an essential participant in the committee. The Council for European Studies and the Mellon Foundation funded this work with a dissertation completion fellowship. The Graduate Center of the City University of New York invested in my scholarship from the beginning of my doctoral career with an Enhanced Chancellor’s Fellowship. I am grateful for the professional support of both institutions. A version of this dissertation’s fourth chapter appeared in Victorians: A Journal of Literature and Culture (Spring 2015). I thank the editors, particularly Deborah Denenholz Morse, for their suggestions and advice. The past and present members of Talia Schaffer’s dissertation group kept me motivated, inspired, challenged, and entertained. I extend my thanks to: Mia Chen, Christine Choi, Julie Fuller, Meechal Hoffman, Miciah Hussey, Taylor Kennamer, Lindsay Lehman, Rose O’Malley, John Rachmani, Erin Spampinato, Anastasia Valassis, and Livia Woods. Anne McCarthy and Kiran Mascarenhas provided peerless examples of vii scholarship and mentorship in our Long Nineteenth-Century Reading Group. With Heather Zuber and Diana Epelbaum I have shared highs and lows, scholarly and otherwise; my graduate career would be far poorer without their friendship. Raisa Rexer is a careful reader, a valiant cheerleader, a stellar academic, and a great friend. I’m so glad our paths crossed in the 19th and the 21st centuries. Over several decades, Theresa Clark and Katie Doolittle have engaged with me in endlessly long e- mail conversations that sustained my heart when I needed it most. I owe my family my most profound debt of thanks. Ellen Endick-Klein and Joyce Zeller-Endick each provided countless hours of free (and usually last-minute) childcare. I quite literally could never have finished this dissertation without their help. My sisters, Shannon, Casey, and Maura Cusick, have put up with my worst days and celebrated my best: I treasure the lifetime of friendship and four-part harmony we have shared. Bella Endick joined me at the beginning of my graduate career and provided the furriest and most canine encouragement possible. My parents, John and Jennifer Cusick, gave me library cards and trips to London, turned a blind eye to the flashlight and book under my pillow, and still send me handwritten letters about Victorian novelists in the news. For a childhood of wonder and an adulthood of faith, I thank them both. (And also, again, for hours of free childcare). Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to my children, Simon and Hattie, who have grown alongside this work throughout their lives, sweetening it with their miraculous small selves, and to Daniel Endick, who makes all my impossible wishes, even this one, come true. viii CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi 1. An Introduction to Literary Matchmaking 1 2. The Rule of Three: Austen, Byron, and Romantic Matchmaking 30 3. Matchmaking Mammas and Domestic Angels: Women Writing 86 Female Authority, 1830-1860 4. Match-Making or Match-Marring?: The Duality of the 146 Trollopian Matchmaker 5. Matcham is Symbolic: Unions of Money, Marriage, and Art 205 from Watch and Ward to The Wings of the Dove Bibliography 263 1 CHAPTER I. An Introduction to Literary Matchmaking Matchmaking is the primary action of the nineteenth-century novel. The courtship plot’s dominance throughout the century and the rows of paired characters, male and female, that fill the pages of practically every author of the period attest to the Victorian novel’s success as a marital facilitator: it is the rare nineteenth-century novel that does not contain a story of courtship somewhere in its many plots. Even when not preoccupied with arranging marriages between eligible parties, the novel still conducts itself with a matchmaker’s habits and techniques. Nineteenth-century novels classify and codify the character types and social systems in the worlds they describe; so do matchmakers, determining likes in order to partner them or evaluating differences in order to bring complementary ones into alignment1. Novels offer readers new images to consider,