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“What Did You Mean?” The Language of Marriage in The Fatal Marriage and Family Doom
- The University of Tennessee Press
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“What Did You Mean?” The Language of Marriage in The Fatal Marriage and Family Doom Cindy Weinstein The problem of marriage in E. D. E. N. Southworth is intimately linked to the ambiguities of language. “What did you mean?”—a quotation taken from Southworth’s Maiden Widow—is a refrain that runs throughout many of Southworth’s novels in which marriage is a continual topic of conversation and confusion. To wit: “Oh! . . . What do you mean?” in The Missing Bride; “What do you mean by that?” in self-raised, or from the Depths; “What do you mean?” in The Mysterious Marriage; and “What—what do you mean?” or “What mean you?” in The fatal Marriage.1 Southworth’s young women are often in a chronic state of misunderstanding because the men who are wooing them frequently use language to conceal the truth. Sometimes, in the comic version of this problem, the suitors simply don’t know what they mean (they think they love someone, but they really don’t); sometimes their past is complicated (they have made a prior vow); and sometimes their intentions are ignoble (they want sex without marriage or they are already married). Southworth is particularly interested in exploring the consequences of linguistic ambiguity and outright deceit that lead up to and culminate in marriage, and what, if anything, women can do about it either before or after they say “I do.” By examining Southworth’s rendering of the marriage vow—who says it, who means it, where it is said—we can begin to understand her attempts to carve out a space where women are not simply the victims of their “I do’s” (a frequent theme of her novels) but subjects with an active role in shaping the meanings of those vows. Indeed, the status of a promise, pledge, or vow is very much on the minds of Southworth’s characters, one of whom asks quite bluntly, “Do you know the nature of a vow?” (MB, 502). Obviously, “the nature of a vow” is not automatically understood. Some characters think of it as having a status as binding as the law; others assume a vow spoken is not the same as a vow meant (“when I was 266 Cindy Weinstein promising, I made a mental reservation” [MB, 557]). In other words, Southworth represents the vow as a complicated speech act that contains within it a possible gap between the speaker’s intention and her utterance, a gap between the time the vow is uttered and the solemnizing of that vow, and the difference between a vow made in public and a vow kept private. These ambiguities more often than not favor the man, but in the case of The Missing Bride, for example, Miriam, the main character, marries in a private ceremony, though “she never would consent to be his own until their marriage could be proclaimed” (MB, 128). Having said “I do” does not mean she will. What, then does “I do” mean? My goal in this chapter is not to give a monolithic account of how marriage works (or does not) in Southworth’s oeuvre—that would be impossible given the number of novels she wrote and the variety of plots she devised—but rather to conduct a close reading of two particular novels that speak to each other about how best to solve the problem of marriage, a problem that has its roots in the instabilities of language. To this extent, my analysis intersects with Caroline Levander’s reading of The fatal Marriage, in which she argues that Southworth, and Melville in Pierre, “reimagine the role of women’s language in American culture and mount a powerful critique of the gender, linguistic, and sexual ideas of their middle-class audiences.”2 Whereas disembodiment is, for Levander, a site of female power and critique, I am more interested in how Southworth’s critique of marriage is worked out through a literal attention to the words people speak to one another, and what those words mean, might mean, and do not mean. The texts upon which I shall focus are The fatal Marriage (serialized under the title The Doom of Deville, or the Maiden’s vow) and the two-volume novel The family Doom and The Maiden Widow (serialized under the single title The Malediction; or the Widows of Widowville). The first is a cautionary tale about marriage entered into too quickly and the disastrous consequences that follow; the donnée of the second...