Flanking Romantic Marriage

Eric Walker’s Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen After War (2009) is a worthy contribution to the growing discourse on a radicalized Jane Austen. He argues convincingly that Austen’s novels privilege marriage as a cultural institution with which to reckon but not necessarily to celebrate or to denigrate as a cultural practice. But even more provocative is his contention that we have thus far underestimated William Wordsworth’s contributions to nineteenth-century marriage discourse. When one thinks about major writers of the Romantic era who are relevant to such discourse, Wordsworth does not come immediately to mind. Walker transforms Wordsworth from a poet generally supposed to be indifferent to or silent about the cultural phenomenon and practice of marriage to one deeply preoccupied with the forms of mutuality that we associate with marriage and more widely with the intimate pair. Furthermore, Walker is studying an often-overlooked body of Wordsworth’s writing—that produced after 1815. Through careful archival research, Walker deepens our understanding of poems and manuscripts that are rarely considered elsewhere. Ultimately, he makes a case for the significance of Wordsworth’s poetry to the discourse of Romantic marriage that is comparable to and complementary to the study of Austen’s novels. The case this book makes for the value of Wordsworth’s contributions to the discourse of marriage is persuasive, and constitutes, in this reviewer’s opinion, a major critical feat.

Walker situates his work firmly and productively within the tradition of Stanley Cavell’s philosophical work on marriage. Also constituting critical grounds for Walker’s work are William Galperin’s The Historical Austen (2003) and D. A. Miller’s Jane Austen, or, the Secret of Style (2003). Together and in their distinct ways, Miller and Galperin have taught us to read radicality into the most common cultural practices. As Walker carefully lays out, one key practice that manifests as a quintessence of “the common,” both within and without Austen, is the institution of marriage. In line with Galperin and Miller, Walker sets out to theorize marriage in ways that deepen our knowledge at the formal and stylistic levels as well as at the material and cultural levels such that these aspects are mutually illuminating rather than in conflict. Walker’s methodology is at work from the beginning when he meditates on that rare occasion in Wordsworth’s poetry that is overtly about marriage: his celebration of what he calls “spousal verse” in the preface to The Excursion (1814). Walker uses this occasion to argue that Wordsworth’s spiritualization of the union of poet and nature has occluded a more complex and materially based exploration of marriage in his writing, which this study will redress. Throughout the book, Walker’s intensive close readings facilitate his desire to move beyond that spiritualized poetics of marriage.

Walker begins by analyzing the terms of Romantic-era marriage discourse within what he calls a “polemics of radical culture” that prioritizes the straightforward celebration of marriage on the one hand, what Walker calls epithalamic discourse, and its damnation on the other, what he calls anti-conjugal discourse. In short, marriage discourse comprises both a pro-marriage and anti-marriage dichotomy. To illustrate this dichotomized structure, Walker personifies Romantic-era marriage discourse as an unhappy couple. As the lush cover image of his book suggests, Walker takes inspiration from a whimsical map entitled “A New Map of the Land of Matrimony” published by Anna Letitia Aiken two years before her marriage of 1774. It includes in its geography such locales as “Ocean of Love,” “Land of Matrimony,” “Rocks of Jealousy,” “Henpeck Bay,” “Gulph of Reproach,” and “Settlement Island.” Aiken’s map illustrates the central purpose of Walker’s study, which is to question how and where it is possible to access non-marriage discourse or even non-normative marriage discourse within the confines of a culture defined by this seemingly all-encompassing polemic. The metaphor of the map serves Walker’s purpose very well, which might be described as establishing “the...