Renegotiating the Sexual Contract: Fictions of Subversive Restraint 1810-1893 By Jennifer English BA(H) University of New Brunswick, Saint John 2003 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Graduate Academic Unit of English Supervisor: Sarah Maier, PhD, English Examining Board: Sandra Bell, PhD, English Donald Desserud, PhD, Political Science This thesis is accepted by the Dean of Graduate Studies THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK October 2007 © Jennifer English, 2007 Library and Archives BibliothSque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de l'6dition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre r&terence ISBN: 978-0-494-63769-2 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-63769-2 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non- support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1*1 Canada Dedication To my family, with love ii Abstract Feminist critics of nineteenth-century fiction have long cited marriage as the cultural institution that most systematically oppresses women. This thesis examines how the chaste heroine - as represented in the seduction plot, the wedlock plot, and the New Woman novel - challenges such readings of women's experience and illustrates the potential for the privileging of reason and chastity over passion to challenge an exchange- based marriage economy, to change the nature of the sexual contract, and to subvert the hierarchal nature of marriage. Because narrative responses to marriage evolve throughout the century, this study also traces the shift from the heroine's initial focus on courtship dynamics to a later emphasis on the reformation of marriage. Ultimately, I argue that while a heroine's reserve can effectively change the hierarchal nature of marriage, attempts to radically alter the institution of marriage itself surpass what can realistically be accommodated within the limits of either the seduction plot or the New Woman novel. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ABSTRACT iii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE Contextualizing Chastity 9 CHAPTER TWO "My marriage is to please myself alone": Subverting Seduction in Self-Control and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 36 CHAPTER THREE She "meant to lead": Gwendolen's Matrimonial Management in Daniel Deronda 65 CHAPTER FOUR "We are not the property of our husbands": Challenging the Conjugal Imperative in The Heavenly Twins 85 CONCLUSION 112 WORKS CONSULTED 117 CURRICULUM VITAE iv 1 Introduction Feminist critics of nineteenth-century fiction have long cited marriage as the cultural institution that most systematically oppresses women. Nancy Armstrong, for instance, in her work Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), contends that the traditional dynamic between husband and wife mimics that of a "master and [his] servant" (114). Similarly, Joseph Allen Boone, in his landmark study of courtship and marriage Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (1987), equates matrimony with "female self-diminishment" (12), and asserts that female agency and autonomy have conventionally been figured as "antithetical to marital destiny" (14). More recently, Wendy S. Jones explores in Consensual Fictions: Women, Liberalism, and the English Novel (2005) the connections between the "traditional, patriarchal" (7) marriage and "female subordination and self- effacement" (67). Although these critics differ considerably in both their theoretical frameworks and approaches, their diverse criticisms of marriage all stem from one specific, essential aspect of matrimony: the sexual contract. In her study The Sexual Contract (1988), Carole Pateman defines this all-important clause of the marriage agreement as a legal guarantee of male dominance that both "established] men's political rights over women" and "established] orderly access by men to women's bodies" (2). Without the legal right to regulate her own sexual activity, to object to her husband's sexual demands, or to assert ownership of her body, the existence of the sexual contract meant that a married woman amounted to little more than an "infinitely receptive body" (Boone 135). 2 The criticisms of Boone, Armstrong, and Thompson also derive from the very manner in which the conventional nineteenth-century marriage was contracted. In "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" (1975), feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin explores the status of women in a marriage system based on exchange. Rubin grounds her discussion in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, who asserts in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969) that "[t]he total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, and not as one of the partners" (qtd. in Rubin 174). Such a system, wherein the female's value is located in her status as a "sexual semi-object" (176) whose function is to be passed from one man - her father - to another - her future husband - as a "conduit" (174) or solidifier of the relationship between them, demands that "women are in no position to give themselves away" (175). This "asymmetric division of the sexes" (183) extends beyond a woman's lack of involvement in the choice of her husband; Rubin observes that '[ejxchange of women' is a shorthand for expressing that the social relations of a kinship system specify that men have certain rights in their female kin, and that women do not have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin. In this sense, the exchange of women is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have full rights to themselves. (176) In a system wherein "men have rights to women which women do not have in themselves" (183), dominion over the female body becomes the province of the male, 3 whether father or husband, and not the woman herself. Because a woman's body is figured as male property, female passivity and acquiescence to the choices of fathers and the sexual demands of husbands are essential components of the marriage economy: It would be in the interests of the smooth and continuous operation of such a system if the woman in question did not have too many ideas of her own about whom she might want to sleep with. From the standpoint of the system, the preferred female sexuality would be one which responded to the desire of others, rather than one which actively desired and sought a response. (182) Rubin asserts that ultimately, the marriage economy can be defined as a "system of relationships by which women become the prey of men" (158). While literary critics like Boone, Armstrong, and Jones illustrate how the conditions of the marriage agreement and an exchange-based marriage economy necessarily relegated women to a subordinate position within marriage - both in fiction and real life - Mary Wollstonecraft attributed the cause of marital oppression to social customs which raise young women to not only expect, but to embrace, their subjection. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft details the detrimental effects of a female education predicated upon the "false" (47) notion that "man was made to reason, woman to feel" (58). The result of such a system, wherein women are prepared only to "gratify the appetite of man" (33), to be "dependent" (35), and to "please" (43), is that women are encouraged not to think, but to become "slaves to their bodies, and glory in their subjection" (37): Women are everywhere, in this deplorable state; for, in order to preserve their innocence, as ignorance is courteously termed, truth is hidden from them, and they are made to assume an artificial character before their faculties have acquired any strength. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.