‘For Better or Worse’: Attitudes toward Marriage in Literature ed. by Evelyn Hinz (review)

138 LEITERS IN CANADA 1986 modern myth was intimately linked to the ancient ones and to the epic dimensions of 2ola's artistic imagination. (HENRY H. WEINBERG) Evelyn Hinz, editor. 'For Better or Worse': Attitudes toward Marriage in Literature. Introduction by Coral Lansbury Mosaic, University of Manitob. Press 1985. xvti, 282. $20.95, $14.95 paper It is a truth universally acknowledged that the marriage plot (in both its literary and personal senses) has long served creative writers. The marriage plot (in its social sense) has also long been served by creative writers, including those resistant to its ideology - as feminist critics have more recently pointed out in discussing, for instance, the power of the doublesuitor convention in fiction. Nineteen critics discuss this intersection of the social and the literary in 'For Better or Worse':Attitudes toward Marriage in Literature. Not surprisingly, the feminist awareness of marriage as a patriarchal design informs most of the articles, at least superficially. Having just coedited The Native in Literature, a collection growing outof the proceedings of a conference, I can attest to the dual challenge of comprehensiveness and unity posed by such undertakings. 'For Better or Worse: originally published as two consecutive issues of the journal Mosaic (and with the Notes on Contributors still, oddly, placed after each of the two parts rather than together at the end), meets at least the first of these challenges fairly well. Chronologically organized and predictably dominated by modern and contemporary fiction (including novelists of several nations, races, and sexual orientations, and works of popular as well as of high culture), the collection also contains individual articles on Chaucer, Shakespeare, seventeenth-century writers, Milton, the Victorians , George Meredith, Ibsen and his successors, and Kate Chopin. The sophistication of the analysis and of the implied audience varies. Introductory overview is more justified when placing Elena Quiroga's Algo pasa en la calle, a novel on divorce in Franco's Spain, in its historical and legal context (Phyllis Zatlin) or surveying Barbara Pym's entire oeuvre for its female types and attitudes towards singleness (Robert j. Graham), than when cursorily summarizing attitudes towards marriage in the better-known works of Henry james, Thomas Hardy, and Ford Madox Ford (Peter Buitenhuis). One might argue that the non-specialist would benefit from jan de Bruyn's overview of misogyny in the early seventeenth century and of subsequent rational arguments for more equitable values, although much of this is not new (and I was inclined not so much to deplore the excoriations as to speculate hopefully on what female irrepressibility might have been provoking them). Similarly, the large and only partially explored field of science fiction invites surveys of alternative models of the gamos (to use Patricia Monk's less emotionally and HUMANITIES 139 culturally freighted term for marriage), but we need more than plot summaries and a simple taxonomy of conservative and radical writers. By contrast, 'For Better or Worse' also includes such specialized articles as Stephen Watt's detailed psychoanalytic examination of three conflicting neurotic trends in George Meredith's sonnet sequence Modern Love. Several individual articles in the collection are of particular interest. Anne Parten uses the motifof male adultery - eitherextreme test of worth in a wife or argument for equality - as a comparative measure of conservatism in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Making good use of interviews and unpublished letters, Nora Foster Stovel analyses theatre and nature imagery depicting Margaret Drabble's self-deluded heroine's introduction to maternal - and, to a much lesser extent, sexual - passion in The Garrick Year. Lorna Irvine discusses thematic and stylistic subversiveness in Sylvia Fraser's Pandora, and Robert G. Collins posits the casual, debt-free homosexual encounter as a redemptive ritual for the 'post-marital man' of John Cheever's later fiction. (Collins apparently wrote his article before the independent corroboration given by Susan Cheever's memoir of her father.) Joseph Allen Boone begins by summarizing familiar work on the conflict between new attitudes towards marriage and the conventional form of Victorian fiction, but makes an original contribution in detailing the structural innovations of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (by comparison with William Dean Howells's closed fictional form). Similarly, Ruth Nadelhaft...