Law like love: Marriage, law, and the modern novel

Many novels written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century present two distinct preoccupations: marriages in crisis, and the problematic authority of the narrative voice. Law Like Love: Marriage, Law, and the Modern Novel connects these phenomena to suggest that the redefinition of marriage is a central issue of literary Modernism. Looking first to nineteenth century reforms in marriage law, and in particular the Married Women\u27s Property Act of 1882, this dissertation posits that the British Parliament tried to resolve a stubborn contradiction between the equity and common law branches of jurisprudence by creating an artificial legal entity—the “corporate” married woman. Through this act married women were given a circumscribed set of property rights (analogous to business corporations) that were less than that of married men or even unmarried women; they thereby became quasi-citizens. This formulation was inherently unstable, and encouraged contemporary authors to seek new definitions of marriage and new forms of the novel. These authors looked to nascent scientific systems of knowledge—evolution, anthropology, sexology, and psychoanalysis—to ground their definitions, but their different reactions describe two divergent trends. Grant Allen (in the Woman Who Did) and H. G. Wells (in Marriage) saw science as justifying an essentialist marriage, and thereby presented characters though a strong narrator who embodied this construction. Readers were meant to identify with these characters and thereby absorb a particular marriage ideology and model of consciousness. These authors are contrasted with others who describe a Modernist trend, Thomas Hardy (in Jude the Obscure ) and D. H. Lawrence (in The Rainbow, as well as his prose work the “Study of Thomas Hardy”), whose doubts about the coherence and legibility of identity precluded such a purely didactic function of literature and the plastic model of identity on which it was based. The dissertation closes with a discussion of James Joyce\u27s Ulysses , which, employing a psychoanalytically fractured model of the self to unravel the premises of fictional characterization, performs the complicity of artificial identity and the law