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

Of the four chapters that Jones dedicates to individual novels, chapters 2–5, only one offers a sustained examination of a novel published in the eighteenth century: Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (chapter 2). In subsequent chapters, she is on to Austen's Persuasion (chapter 3); Trollope's He Knew He Was Right (chapter 4); and three by Margaret Oliphant: Phoebe Junior, Hester, and Kirsteen (chapter 5). While Persuasion (1818) is fair game in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Kirsteen, published in 1889, is not. To be sure, other novels figure in Consensual Fictions, even a handful of additional titles from the eighteenth century, though references to them tend to be brief or in passing. While Jones readily concedes that her selection of novels does not provide "a complete history of the novel"–-far from it, in fact–-she justifies her choices as "exemplary," which is to say, they "articulate some of the major discourses of married love" (21). Through this discursive framework, Jones perhaps intimates that not even the long eighteenth century is long enough. But the better explanation is that her abiding interest lies, as the preponderance of her literary evidence confirms, in the nineteenth-century novel because it was then that long-standing contentions about what women want and are allowed to have in their marriages arguably reached a terminal point in the history of liberalism.

Of course, marriage or the more broadly conceived domestic nexus is not new to students of the period. At least it should not be. Like its real-life counterpart, marriage in the novel has produced its share of heat and argument among involved parties. And whether conceived spatially or functionally, the conjugal state almost always invites questions about volatile matters: gender roles, sexual identity, cultural practices of one sort or another, domestic hierarchies–-the list goes on–-and without fail runs the gauntlet of social and population historians, who at times have not got along that well with one another. But whoever said marriage was easy? Through Locke, Jones injects contract theory and liberalism into the mix and is keen to trace how "an emergent 'structure of feeling'–-a fundamental way of conceptualizing one's place in and relation to the world–-within collective belief" (4) unfolds in the novel. This genre, as she proposes, is best suited to the task of engagement because, as if it were a shell-shocked patient, it exhibits a "repetition compulsion": "novel after novel attempted to anticipate and resolve the possibilities and problems associated with this new ethic" of "marriage for love" (7). Mere repetition, however, does not explain all. Jones goes on to urge that "although the novel as a genre is only one kind of text among a plethora of others that bear witness to the rise of married love and its ideological consequences, in many ways its narratives present the fullest and most complex testimony to this development" (67). Among this "plethora of others," she enlists the conduct book into service, but distances it from the novel for its want of "prioritiz[ing] the rights of parents or children with respect [to] the marriage choice" (106). In Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), Christopher Flint argues exactly the opposite: "that the single most effective means for the period's complex theorizing about family relations was prose fiction, largely because of its flexible incorporation of other discourses such as conduct books, philosophical treatises, and demographic studies" (10).

In shaping liberalism or, as applied, "contractual subjectivity" (consensual married love), Jones keeps one eye on the nineteenth century with its wave of reformist legislation, but appropriately situates the origins of contract theory in Locke, trusting his belief that no contract has validity if it enjoins one party to slavery. In the process, Jones is acutely aware of the feminist critique of liberalism–-that it is androcentric and thus inherently flawed–-and...