Finding Happiness: Interfaith Marriage in British Literature, 1745-1836 a DISSERTATION SUBMITTED to the FACULTY of UNIVERSITY O
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Finding Happiness: Interfaith Marriage in British Literature, 1745-1836 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Heather McNeff IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Brian Goldberg, Adviser July 2013 © Heather McNeff 2013 i Acknowledgements My deepest thanks go to my advisor, Brian Goldberg, whose guidance and support made the completion of this dissertation possible. I am also extremely grateful to my committee members: Rebecca Krug, Michael Hancher, and Anna Clark. Their thoughts and suggestions made this experience a richer one. Ellen Messer-Davidow, Pamela Leszczynski, and Mary Barfield have given me opportunities to explore new arenas; I appreciate their openness and patience. During these years in graduate school, my parents have been amazingly understanding, and my friends, especially Eric, Libby, Kara, Pat, Jenni, Katie, Michael, Beth, Siira, Mike, Lindsay, Kate, Judith, and Elaine, have been a constant source of joy. ii To the UUs iii Abstract This dissertation examines narrative representations of interfaith marriage in British texts from the 1740s to the 1830s. I argue that these texts employ different interfaith marriage configurations to explore conflicting ideas about the conditions under which happiness can and should arise. Rather than debating precisely what happiness is, the texts consider where happiness is found. To do this, they use a social formation that goes essentially nameless in the period: the term interfaith marriage and synonyms such as mixed marriage are almost never used by the texts themselves, despite the fact that a critical mass of narratives features spouses or potential spouses that belong to different faiths. The namelessness of the phenomenon suggests that the texts are less interested in the happiness of interfaith marriage per se than they are in using these formations to stake out positions on other issues relating to happiness. Catholic-Protestant marriage narratives are concerned with the relationship between private happiness and public order; Jewish- Christian marriage narratives explore the relationships between wealth, social stability, and happiness; Muslim-Christian marriage narratives look at the links between happiness and monogamy; and Hindu-Christian marriage narratives address conflicting ideas about happiness and intimacy. These four pairings provide the structure around which the dissertation’s chapters are organized, and each chapter offers groups of texts as evidence. While all of the texts discussed here are narratives, their genres vary: the chapters offer a mix of novels, short stories, plays, narrative poems, and nonfiction. Some of the texts, such as Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, are well known, while others, such as Eliza Norton’s Alcon Malanzore, are considerably more obscure. The number and variety of texts that iv tackle the interfaith marriage narrative formation reveal the extent to which happiness as a concept was and remains overdetermined, contested, and in flux. v Table of Contents Introduction……………..…………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: Catholic-Protestant Marriages………………………………………………. 20 Chapter 2: Jewish-Christian Marriages…………………………………………………. 50 Chapter 3: Muslim-Christian Marriages…………………………………………………77 Chapter 4: Hindu-Christian Marriages………………………………………………….105 Coda……..……………………………………………………………………………...136 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………….....142 1 Introduction In his book about intellectual and social developments in the long eighteenth century, Roy Porter observes that “the Enlightenment . translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’” (22). Other scholars agree that the eighteenth century was preoccupied with the idea of happiness (B. Norton 1; Soni 2). But what did happiness mean? In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke defines happiness as pleasure: “Happiness, then, in its full extent, is the utmost pleasure we are capable of . ; and the lowest degree of what can be called happiness is so much ease from all pain, and so much present pleasure, as without which any one cannot be content” (210). Alexander Pope relies on similar ideas in his Essay on Man when he sets out potential meanings of happiness: “Happiness! our being’s end and aim / Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! Whate’er thy name” (4.1). Later in the same poem, however, Pope invokes an older definition of happiness, one derived from classical thought: “Virtue alone is Happiness below” (4.310). Most scholars concur that the definition of happiness shifted sometime around the eighteenth century, moving from happiness as virtuous living to happiness as subjective well-being, which consisted of “some combination of pleasure and life satisfaction” (Martin 21-22). The present study is less concerned with the question of what happiness meant and more concerned with the question of where happiness could be found. Porter points toward this approach when he frames the pressing Enlightenment-era question not as “What is happiness?” but as “How can I be happy?” The urgency of determining under which circumstances happiness could be found comes through, among other places, in 2 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry. Pope asks of happiness in the Essay on Man: “Where grows?—where grows it not?” (4.13). Writing seventy years later, William Wordsworth highlights the challenge of locating happiness, referring in The Prelude to “the world / Of all of us, the place in which, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all” (10.725-27). Philosophical and autobiographical poems were not the exclusive venues for inquiries into the location of happiness; narrative provided a crucial space in which to theorize about the circumstances where happiness could flourish. In this dissertation, I focus on a specific type of narrative: the interfaith marriage narrative. It is worth noting at the outset that the phrase interfaith marriage is not used by the texts under consideration here; neither are synonyms such as mixed marriage.1 Instead, the texts tend to employ longer descriptions that name the religion of one or both parties. For example, in Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington, a novel about Jewish-Christian marriage, the first-person narrator asks: “And can a Jewess marry a Christian? And should a Christian marry a Jewess?” (195). The Protestant first-person narrator of Walter Scott’s Rob Roy reports, “my father . was not a little startled at the idea of my marrying a Roman Catholic” (452), and the father himself says to the narrator, “I little thought a son of mine . should go to a French convent for a spouse” (452). Writing of Muslim-Christian marriage in her Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu describes “a Christian woman of quality who made it her choice to live with a Turkish husband” 1 Google’s Ngram Viewer, a database search tool, produces almost no uses of the phrase interfaith marriage in GoogleBooks’s corpus of English-language texts from the period 1745-1836. Similar searches with the phrases mixed marriage and mixt marriage turn up only a very small number of texts, most of which are concerned with Quakers. 3 (136). A more inflammatory description of Muslim-Christian marriage is used by one of the characters from Scott’s The Talisman: “I call it foul dishonor, that I, the descendant of a Christian princess, should become of free-will the head of a harem of heathen concubines” (294). The potential Hindu-Christian marriage in Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary goes unnamed, for reasons explained at length by the narrator, who uses free indirect discourse to report on the thoughts of the titular Christian character: [B]y the doctrines of their respective religions, by the laws and customs of their respective countries, they could never be united by those venerated and holy ties which regulate and cement the finest bonds of humanity, and which obtain from mankind, in all regions of the earth, respect and sanction, as being founded in one of the great moral laws of nature’s own eternal code. No Brahmin priest could consecrate a union, sacrilegious according to his habits of thinking and believing. No Christian minister could bless an alliance formed upon the violation of vows solemnly pledged before the altar of the Christian’s God. (181) The essential namelessness of the interfaith marriage phenomenon in narratives from the 1745-1836 period suggests that the texts were less interested in interfaith marriage per se than in using interfaith marriage formations to stake out positions on other issues, particularly positions relating to happiness. The period that I scrutinize—1745 to 1836—begins with the first year of the last major Jacobite uprising, a serious political threat from a Catholic pretender to the Protestant throne, and ends with the year that civil (that is, non-religious) marriage 4 became legal in Britain. I have chosen dates of historical rather than strictly literary significance because literary texts are embedded in larger histories, both political and personal, and literature and history affect each other reciprocally. As historian Gabrielle Spiegel writes, “texts both mirror and generate social realities, are constituted by and constitute the social and discursive formations which they may sustain, resist, contest, or seek to transform, depending on the case at hand” (198). Literary scholars of marriage and religion take similar stances. Ruth Perry notes that rates of marriage and novel production increased together during the late