New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage by Melissa M. Adams-Campbell (review)

Melissa M. Adams-Campbell’s New World Courtships is an important contribution to the scholarship on women, marriage, and families in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, including the construction and contestation of the Anglo-American ideal of companionate marriage. The “comparative marriage plot,” Adams-Campbell argues, undermined the paradigm of what could or should constitute normative social relations by focusing on cultural differences in courtship and marriage practice. By presenting alternatives to companionate marriage, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novels examined in this volume explore the possibilities opened by the transatlantic encounter, destabilizing the connection between claims of anglophone women’s freedom in affection-based companionate marriage and British claims of nationalist superiority.

New World Courtships is admirably comparative in framework and approach as well as subject. Ranging from genre studies of eighteenth century protoethnographic “marriage-rite” compilations to cross-cultural romance narratives and postcolonial seduction plots, and from British Canada to revolutionary Haiti, Adams-Campbell convincingly illustrates the disruptive possibilities of the comparative “New World” marriage plot. The introductory note regarding the use of New World as a framework is well taken and underlines the major intervention of this work: that cross-cultural interaction in North American and Caribbean colonies opened a range of alternatives to companionate marriage in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century anglophone fiction and undermined monocultural assumptions of nationalist superiority. In doing so, Adams-Campbell widens the scope of feminist literary analysis of marriage narratives in dialogue with existing feminist scholarship on the novel’s use in shaping and promoting normative gender relations. Although Adams-Campbell allows that some of the novels considered in New World Courtships reinforce imperialist, racial, and gender hierarchies through their use of a comparative marriage plot, she convincingly shows that the comparative marriage plot opened fictional spaces in which to explore alternatives and ultimately question the normative British and American narrative of women’s advancement through marriage.

In contrast to the marriage plot, with its denouement in the heroine’s happy marriage or her death and its rhetorical connection to stadial advancement, the comparative marriage plot explores the possibilities raised by alternative marital relations to challenge Enlightenment-era claims that women’s progress was advanced by companionate marriage. Adams-Campbell at times overstates recent historians’ uncomplicated acceptance of marriage-and gender-based British claims to nationalist superiority, but nevertheless shows that comparative marriage plots unsettled the normative connection between marital and state relations. The analysis offered by New World Courtships also complicates our understanding of the use of the romance novel to propagate and maintain a gendered status quo, demonstrating a critical awareness of the restrictive narrative and sociopolitical options available to women in the canonical marriage plot.

Each chapter explores the comparative possibilities of a text or texts in detail, opening with a generic examination of courtship in marriage-rite compilations, stadial theory, and anglophone novels typified by the anonymous The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield (1767). The first chapter provides a solid foundation for the rest of the volume, both examining the intersections between comparative genres and making the case for “why marriage mattered then” (21). Adams-Campbell’s reading of The Female American makes an especially strong case for the unsettling possibilities raised by the comparative marriage plot novel, examining the biracial New England native Unca Eliza’s repeated rejection of British suitors as a critique of the supposed privileges of companionate marriage. This section offers a nuanced interpretation of the novel’s limitations in speaking to the lived experience of indigenous women. At the same time, it persuasively illustrates the critiques of and alternatives to companionate marriage raised in the novel, in contrast to contemporary marriage-rite compilations and stadial theory, which centered on proving the superiority of British gender roles and courtship rituals. Adams-Campbell juxtaposes Unca Eliza’s Robinsonade adventures before marriage with her unhappy happy ending and continued narrative work after marriage, arguing...