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  • The Marriage Paradox: Modernist Novels and the Cultural Imperative to Marry
  • Elizabeth F. Evans
Pines, Davida. The Marriage Paradox: Modernist Novels and the Cultural Imperative to Marry. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006. 158pp. $59.95.

“The marriage paradox,” as Davida Pines describes it, is that even as the institution of marriage is critiqued, undermined, or subverted, it is inevitably reinforced. Whereas Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Joseph Boone, Carolyn Heilbrun, Ann duCille, and others, read modernist novels as disrupting the traditional narrative of courtship and betrothal, Pines wants us to recognize that “The marriage plot is inescapable” (1). In chapters on Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, and Virginia Woolf, Pines analyzes the strategies by which modernist novels, in spite of their insistent critiques of the marital relationship and the social pressure to marry, reinforce marriage as a norm.

Pines finds a paradigmatic example in James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which condemns the social pressure on women to marry and indicates the unhappy consequences if Isabel’s marriage to Osmond. But it concludes by upholding marriage as the only viable option for the young Pansy, so long as she finds the right spouse. “Despite offering a clear critique of the restrictive aspects of marriage and the marriage plot,” the novel becomes instead a critique of not choosing an appropriate mate (15).

The most compelling chapters devote substantial attention to the legal and social contexts of the novels under consideration, a methodology effectively established by the introduction’s survey of marriage law reforms in the mid-to late-nineteenth century. Chapter two locates Ford’s The Good Soldier and Parade’s End in debates about divorce taking place in Britain in the early twentieth century, in which the issue at stake was whether making divorce more accessible would weaken or strengthen the institution of marriage. Pines finds that both sides affirm matrimony; not only did opponents of facilitating divorce privilege the institution over the experiences of individual couples, but those who argued in support of easier divorce ironically did so in the name of ideal marriage (each unhappily married person would then be free to commence a happy marriage). Pines interestingly observes that the obverse is also true: while divorce advocates claimed that not all unhappy marriages could be repaired, those who argued against easing restrictions on divorce, “betrayed a belief in marriage’s natural dissolubility” (34). But she does not take the opportunity to explain why we should not instead read both sides in the divorce debate as exposing the problems of marriage. This repeated emphasis on how marriage is ultimately upheld, in spite of critique, carries over to Ford’s life and work: “Just as the breakdown of Ford’s own love relationships only strengthened his belief in marriage, so too do his novels reinforce the institution even as they depict marriage as invariably faithless” (34). More stirring is Pines’s astute correlation between the marriage debates and Ford’s novels. The Good Soldier, “however ironically, encourage[s] a relaxation of marital standards, an acceptance of a certain amount of deceit within the relationship” (50) and Parade’s End shows ideal marriage to paradoxically “depend on the ability [End Page 270] to divorce: marriage must be dissoluble if better, truer matches are to follow from strained, unhappy ones” (53).

The other chapter to explicitly couple its close reading with historical contexts is chapter four on Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. By considering these novels’ representation of marriage in light of the impact of slavery, particularly the denial of the right of slaves to marry, Pines illuminates a shift in representations of marriage by black women writers. Immediately after slavery, there was an emphasis on the public gains of marriage: “marrying, like voting, demonstrated newly won freedom, citizenship, and equality; marriage confirmed and showcased black civility and morality within a racist society” (76). In the early twentieth-century the emphasis shifted to the private and potentially restrictive aspects of marriage. Nonetheless, Pines argues, “When the modernist novels of black women writers imply that the problem with marriage can be solved by...

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