Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748-1818 (review)

This is a genuinely interdisciplinary work, written by a literary scholar but drawing upon insights from history and anthropology. Ruth Perry argues that in the period between the publications of Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen there was a significant change both in actual family relationships and in their fictional representations. The meaning of the family shifted from one based on kin and lineage to one where the conjugal bond was all-important. Perry is not repeating the mistake of so many literary scholars by reproducing the now discredited theory of family development first advocated by the historian Lawrence Stone. She acknowledges that the family had long assumed a nuclear family structure but argues that the literature of the eighteenth century demonstrates changing loyalties, obligations, and, most important, psychological attachments that people felt toward their families. As a result of broader economic and social changes during the eighteenth century, the most significant familial ties and bonds shifted from those of consanguinity to conjugality, with the most profound consequences.

According to Perry, literature dramatized these changes, reflected the obsessions of the time, and helped readers to think about how to cope with the family problems that could arise. These included, first, "the great disinheritance"; the term Perry gives to the legal and psychological losses suffered by daughters within their families of birth. As the conjugal family assumed prominence, parents increasingly saw the place of daughters as temporary and potentially burdensome. The relationship between fathers and daughters became more problematic as legal devices such as strict settlement focused property and inheritance in the hands of sons. Novels of the period frequently reflect a nostalgic yearning for greater paternal responsibility and emotional engagement with daughters at the very time that father-daughter relationships were being reconfigured so that these obligations and attachments were being diminished. Second, the transformation of kinship led to an adjustment of sibling relationships. Sisters lost out as brothers gained materially from their "great disinheritance," but novels continued to portray an ideal brotherly role of generosity and protection. Third, as marriage became the key familial relationship, women's roles as wives and mothers were emphasized over those of daughters and sisters. Finally, and of most interest to the readers of this journal, Perry argues that these changes had an impact on ideas about sexual behavior. Once kin no longer had a strong grip over courtship and marriage there was a vacuum of advice and rules about sexual conduct that in the eighteenth century was filled with a wide range of visual and literary material for domestic consumption. This commercialization of sexuality, according to Perry, placed new controls upon female sexuality. Female sexuality became a commodity in which a woman's virginity and marital chastity had a price, to be bartered by fathers and husbands. This was a period during which it was believed that a woman's sexual honesty could only be guaranteed if she learned a new psychology of horror and disgust at the thought of loveless marriage or adulterous betrayal. Novels played a part in this sexual training process. They also evoked fears of sexual danger. As family ties were transformed, the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior were tested anew, and the problem of the incestuous relationship loomed large in the gothic novel.

Throughout this book Perry is careful to distinguish between fact and fiction, for example, admitting that our evidence of reported incidents of incest is sparse. Instead, Perry is interested in exploring the relationship between eighteenth-century society and the novels it produced, pondering what fiction can tell us about its concerns and problems. Her argument that historians have been mistaken to neglect sibling relationships because these were so important to contemporaries is convincing. It is also refreshing to see an examination of aunts as another familial role that has so often taken a backseat to marital and parent-child relationships in historical studies. The chapter on Arthur...