The Marriage Paradox: Modernist Novels and the Cultural Imperative to Marry (review)

"The marriage plot is inescapable," Davida Pines begins by announcing. To those of us, such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Joseph Boone, and Anne de Cille, who have described modernist novels as offering hostility, resistance, and alternatives to marriage, Pines responds that we have insufficiently acknowledged not just the sturdiness of the institution but modernist fiction's complicity in shoring it up. Chapters devoted to works by Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, and Virginia Woolf each analyze apparently disruptive experiments that only ratify the marital impulse. "While the novels I examine offer a relentless critique of the marriage relationship and of the social imperative to marry," Pines says, "the works paradoxically reinforce the marital norm" (3).

Thus, though Portrait of a Lady exposes the forces that compel women to marry, it nevertheless leaves marriage as the sole vehicle for fulfillment of personal desire: "the marriage plot offers," the chapter concludes, "the only way out" (32). Likewise, in spite of relentless ironies and ambiguities revolving around "the discourse of marital failure" (46) in The Good Soldier and Parade's End, "the institution itself remains in place" (54). The attempt of Ursula and Birkin in Women in Love to "transcend marriage" through sexual experimentation "only reinforces its societal hold" (75). Modernist novels by black women writers, such as Quicksand and Their Eyes Were Watching God, "unwittingly reinforce the very institution they intend to critique" (78), because, like Portrait of a Lady, they rely on romantic paradigms of self-fulfillment. And for all the energy that Between the Acts puts towards distinguishing nature from culture, "the novel effectively naturalizes marriage" (96), suggesting a "heterosexual imperative" at the heart of "the cultural construction of the marriage plot" (113).

One reason why these novels never shatter the institutional norm is that they are, like much modernist art, resolutely individualist in their priorities. Pines's critique of this emphasis reaches its greatest intensity midway through her chapter on Larsen and Hurston: "As I have argued throughout the book . . . focusing on individuals rather than societal scripts, couples rather than the institution itself, inevitably leads to a reproduction of the status quo" (80). The Marriage Paradox has the feeling of a self-fulfilling prophecy not just in its repeated and dispiriting recognition of such capitulations but also in its own fascination with couples and their personal crises. While Pines includes intermittent references to Victorian and early twentieth-century legal and cultural debates about marriage and divorce, most of the book's energy is focused on intense readings within the marriage plots themselves. Concluding the James chapter with her insistence that marriage is "the only way out" for Isabel and Pansy, Pines cleverly tempts us to ask "'Out' of what?," in order to make us accept the answer "Marriage" and thus to accept her notion of a "paradox." But one can still wish that the chapter had said more about the economic and cultural constraints surrounding marriage that bind the female characters and the realist plot. Though Pines faults the modernist novel for thinking too small, for focusing on individuals rather than the institution, she neglects opportunities to think about structures larger than marriage and especially about why novels and characters seem so insistently drawn to it.

An implicit answer is suggested by the very fine chapter on Woolf and then by the smart, expansive conclusion. Pines persuasively reads the treatment of marriage in Between the Acts in relation to the advent of the Second World War; that approach necessarily reminds one that earlier chapters had focused on the First World War novels by Ford and Lawrence and that her Larsen-Hurston chapter had underscored the vulnerability of African-American families before and after emancipation: "While slaves might fall in love, that love was meaningless, nonexistent, under the law. Without legal sanction, families simply disappeared" (80). What most of Pines's chosen novels have in common, then, is...