Consensual Fictions: Women, Liberalism and the English Novel (review)

In this study of liberalism and gender in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, Wendy Jones traces the emergence of a moral injunction to marry for love rather than for interest, a development she links to the liberal conception of contractual subjectivity defined by John Locke in the late 1600s. She argues that when women were granted a role in choosing a husband, they were also granted a germinal form of autonomy with ultimately revolutionary consequences. The study is strongest as a set of literary readings, wherein Jones shows how themes of marriage, desire, and female agency were engaged by four novelists: Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, and Margaret Oliphant. Jones makes more tentative claims at the conceptual level, suggesting that the historical emergence of female contractual subjectivity laid the foundation for modern feminism and can provide historical grounding for theoretical debates today.

The ascendancy of marriage for love after 1700 reflects, for Jones, a middle-class supplanting of aristocratic or upper-class norms. The point is not that Britons en masse altered their views about marriage but rather that a specifically middle-class view of marriage came to the fore in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jones emphasizes the novel's function in perpetuating bourgeois cultural norms. But a book-length study also needs a tension to explore, and for Jones that tension is an abiding contest between two middle-class ideas of marriage: one whereby patriarchal authority survives and defines women as subordinate, and another whereby a consensual view of legitimation finally invests women with a potentially revolutionary agency. In her readings, Jones most often sees novels as attempting a reconciliation in which the ideal marriage can be imagined as a companionate and consensual attachment that also ensures the husband's role as lord and master.

In the eighteenth century, says Jones, the principal middle-class concern as regards love and marriage was unbridled passion, which threatened to render possible such calamities as marrying down. Novelists therefore represented women distinguishing between bad choices and good ones, decadent passion and virtuous love. In the nineteenth century, novelists added to these concerns a middle-class anxiety about excesses of materialism. The Victorian novel perpetuates an ideal of married love as virtuous, but it tends to posit such love "in contradistinction to a commercial rather than an aristocratic ethos" (6). This neat historical sketch suggests Jones's zeal for linearity and comfort with categories such as "middle-class." But for this reader, at least, the effect is not reductive. In fact, Jones's main effort is to show how novelists parsed love into several different registers, such as passionate, sentimental, companionate, and decadent.

In her chapter on Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), Jones reads the usual business of marriage in the light of structural dilemmas affecting male and female characters alike. Sir Charles must emerge as a paragon of virtue even though he is in love with two women. His sister Charlotte plays out another contradiction located in her status as female: Charlotte is detached and passionless in her marriage, which allows Richardson to represent women as safely acting with volition, but she is also passionate in an impossible direction—toward her own brother—which allows Richardson to preserve a stereotype of women as fundamentally passion-driven while neutralizing the likely disruptions to follow on that supposed fact. Jones's chapter on Persuasion (1817) shows how Austen accomplishes a kind of literary criticality through the multiplot novel form and through subtleties of direct and indirect free discourse. Like Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Sense and Sensibility (1811), Persuasion sets two terms in opposition in order to elevate one term as superior in virtue. In Persuasion the terms are love (allied with feeling, sympathy) and duty (allied with a classically liberal concern for rationally comprehended rights and obligations). The collision of these terms is typical for novels in which daughters are enjoined by parents to...