The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage by Laura E. Thomason (review)

Laura E. Thomason echoes artist and writer Mary Delany in her title, illuminating “the apprehension with which genteel women of the eighteenth century viewed marriage” (p. 1). In six chapters, Thomason covers a great deal of historical ground (1650-1750) and genres (personal correspondence, early novels, and periodicals), yet the thrust of the study is deceptively simple: women saw marriage as potentially leading to freedom or to metaphorical imprisonment. Thomason revises Lawrence Stone’s assertion that marital choice was “a position already conceded” (qtd. p. 3), suggesting instead that “the so-called rise of companionacy was not … smooth” and demurring “women writers … were suspicious of companionacy as an unreachable ideal or as an abstract concept too easily and problematically conflated with romantic love” (pp. 3, 4).

One of the strengths of The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage is in the unveiling of its subjects; Thomason introduces us to Delany, Dorothy Osborne, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Chapone, Sarah Scott, and Eliza Haywood. If Montagu, Chapone, and Haywood are already established canonically, Delany, Scott, and Osborne have a more limited audience. Painting in broad strokes, Thomason makes an important case for these writers’ relevance, a standard technique in pioneering studies. What Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar did for nineteenth-century women novelists and Anne Mellor for Romantic women writers, Thomason does for their predecessors. Future scholarly studies will offer more subtle analyses of these subjects.

Thomason’s style is clear and accessible, and she is well versed in the eighteenth century, its scholarly context, and feminist reception studies. Women, Thomason points out, were in an impossible position as “the standards of duty and modesty required that [they] control and restrict their behavior in courtship even as the legally and religiously mandated presence of love in marriage required them to feel affection for and attachment to their husbands” (p. 7). Thomason claims, however, that writing “allowed these women to define their identities as individuals and as wives, to lay out and test the boundaries of more egalitarian relationships, and to criticize the traditional marriage system as their culture had defined it” (p. 1). If such an insight does not sound terribly revolutionary, that may be because it is not; marriage as a vexed act encapsulating freedom of expression and cultural submission is a fairly conventional way of seeing the institution. Nevertheless, Thomason offers us a new historical context for this surprisingly complex and still relevant system.

Chapter one analyzes Osborne’s letters to her future husband, showcasing her intelligence, class privilege, and “efforts to create an egalitarian marriage” (p. 19). These points and the insight that Osborne “implicitly makes the successful exercise of her reason synonymous with a total surrender of agency” beg further attention, as does the second chapter on Montagu who “used the contradictions between ideal female roles and her rhetorically created selves to further her ends—first, avoiding an unwanted marriage, then criticizing others’ mercenary matches, and finally condemning marriage in general” (pp. 30, 43). Thomason could have gone into more detail analyzing how Montagu carefully negotiates desirability and middle-class morality and discusses the institution with her friend Philippa Mundy: “Marriage was so important to these young women that they invented a shorthand way of describing their marriage prospects: ‘paradise meant being married to a man one loved, Hell to a man one detested, and Limbo or Purgatory to a man one merely tolerated’” (p. 54). Here, Thomason could have taken a cue from Montagu’s humor.

Thomason devotes the third chapter to Chapone’s letters to Samuel Richardson, in which she evokes a filial “relationship to cajole and flatter him into accepting her ideas about marital equality and marital choice” and “presents herself … as a dutiful, virtuous living Clarissa in need of his correction and improvement” (pp. 15, 72). This insight recalls Catherine Gallagher and Judith Pascoe’s scholarly attention to women writers’ manipulation of their public...