The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage by Laura E. Thomason (review)

Laura E. Thomason’s title comes from Mary Delany, who used the term in a letter to her sister in 1733. Delany, a young widow, had cause to consider marriage a trap: as a mere girl she had agreed to marry a man of sixty in an economic arrangement to benefit her family. Delany’s story epitomizes the dilemma Thomason examines in selected writings of Dorothy Osborne, Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Chapone, Delany herself, Sarah Scott, and Eliza Haywood. How did genteel women reconcile the instruction to obey family—“filial obedience” in Hester Chapone’s letters to Samuel Richardson; “filial duty” in Sarah Scott’s novel, The Test of Filial Duty (1772)—with the exploitation of women in mercenary marriage? Delany, who found her husband “ugly and disagreeable,” thought of herself as having been sacrificed. It is not clear, however, that with hindsight she would have acted differently. By agreeing to the marriage, she pleased her family, and after enduring seven years she emerged financially independent—though not as wealthy as she had hoped because her husband had failed to sign his will. She also pleased herself: her behaviour was morally impeccable according to the value system of her class. Her experience gave her moral authority.

Thomason’s careful examination of the rhetorical stratagems of her subjects leads to a conclusion she does not herself spell out. Class not gender, rank not sex, is the real driver behind these elaborate attempts to find ways of making sense of intolerable circumstances. The question of female agency was at the heart of the matter and passion an obvious danger; but, while few writers dared show a female protagonist bent on agency and swept by passion, readers responded with pleasure to the spectacle of the virtuous Clarissa in Richardson’s novel hounded by her family to marry the vile Solmes and pursued by the libertine Lovelace. Moral strength, as shown by Clarissa, as practised by women, was one way to redefine marriage.

The fictional challenge that drew such moral strength from Clarissa was offered as a reflection of social practices. Real women engaged in debates about Clarissa because Richardson dramatized matters that concerned them in their lives. Arguably, however, “filial obedience” was the theme Chapone (then Mulso) took up because it was the least threatening way a young woman, a “little spitfire” (80), could make her voice heard. She addressed herself directly to Richardson. Like Delany, she was anxious to behave well. Chapone would go on to make a successful career out of telling other young women how to behave well within the constraints of a social order that discouraged female agency.

The letter, as Thomason tells us several times, was considered particularly suited to genteel women and functioned as both a personal and public form of writing. The most famous letter writer considered here, Mary Wortley Montagu, whose prose dazzles and crackles with wit, avoided the arranged marriage her father had negotiated and eloped with a husband she chose for herself. She was the most outspoken against marriage in general. She lived apart from her husband for many years before following a younger man to the Continent (not “across the Atlantic” [58] as here). Oddly, Thomason concludes that we cannot know much of what Montagu thought about marriage because she “rarely gives her opinion of her own situation” (58). Yet a poem of 1712, which Thomason quotes, seems unambiguous: “I know the fate of those by Interest wed, / Doom’d to the Curse of a vexatious Bed, / Days without Peace, and Nights without Desire.” And, as Thomason points out, Montagu “condemns nearly every marriage that she describes in her letters to friends” (60). Can we draw conclusions from such writings? Do we really not know, or are we not listening?

Thomason’s study raises interesting questions about how we read and interpret printed sources, including letters. It offers a...