In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3. Free, Black, and Married Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends While considering Mr. Walters’s marriage proposal, Esther Ellis, the heroine of Frank J. Webb’s 1857 novel of black Philadelphia, The Garies and Their Friends, sees one “great stumbling block.”1 It is not her lack of affection for her suitor. She loves him. The obstacle is his wealth. Like Nina, Esther turns to her brother for marital advice; but unlike Stowe’s white heroine, Esther makes her decisions herself. Esther decides not to marry the wealthy Mr. Walters because, she says, “everybody would say I married him for that.” But so what? “Then everybody would lie, as everybody very often does!” declares her brother, Charlie Ellis, dismissively.2 Esther is unconvinced by Charlie’s argument and sticks with her decision. When Charlie raises the subject of Esther’s marriage again, “Esther blushed and sighed, as she answered: ‘No, Charlie, that is all over for the present. I told him yesterday I could not think of marrying now, whilst we are all so unsettled. It grieved me to do it, Charlie, but I felt it was my duty.’”3 If this were an ordinary sentimental novel, we would expect Esther to wind up alone and unhappy, realizing her mistake too late. Esther’s decision would likely be considered a bad one, exemplifying the consequences of putting “duty” ahead of personal choice. Instead, Esther’s refusal indicates the prominent and powerful role that “public opinion,” not simply sentiment, plays in Webb’s novel.4 Unlike Esther, the novel’s title characters (the Garies) express their “contempt for public opinion” when they decide to marry “in direct opposition to the prejudices of society.” Their decision to reject public opinion and follow their hearts results in disaster. They become the first victims of a race riot that leaves the city in ruins. i-x_1-150_Chakk.indd 47 5/20/11 2:05 PM The Garies and Their Friends ends, like most sentimental novels, with a happy marriage, yet it is decidedly not an ordinary sentimental novel. Although marriages form a significant aspect of the novel’s plot, it is Esther’s decision not to marry the wealthy Walters that reveals how marriage works in the novel. If, as Cindy Weinstein persuasively argues, the purpose of marriage in most sentimental novels signals “an affirmation of the heroine’s ability to make a contract,”5 then Esther’s decision to follow “duty” rather than personal desire indicates certain limits to the black heroine’s ability to choose whom she will marry. In the two previous chapters, I have been arguing that the slave-marriage offered novelists like Brown and Stowe a way of imagining an ideal marriage: one that was not bound by the fetters of the law but rather by the tendrils of the heart. The Garies and Their Friends complicates the differences between the private and public aspects of marriage raised by the slave-marriage. While the slave-marriage may be—as Stowe suggests—a higher or more authentic form of marriage than a legal one, Webb’s novel forces us to confront the hard facts of marriage. However much we may want to believe that marriage constitutes a relation between two individuals who choose freely to be together for life, it is a relationship that, for better or for worse, includes an invisible third presence. The connection between public opinion and marriage with which Webb is preoccupied should come as no surprise since, as Stephanie Coontz argues in her popular account of marriage throughout the ages, only rarely in history “has love been seen as the main reason for getting married.”6 For most of history, marriage was thought to be too vital “an economic and political institution to be left entirely to the free choice of the two individuals involved, especially if they were going to base their decision on something as unreasoning and transitory as love.”7 What is unusual about The Garies and Their Friends, however, is that it presents public opinion and love as being two sides of the marriage coin—both are needed for a happy marriage. Whereas Brown’s and Stowe’s fictions take pains to present the distinction of the slave-marriage from a legal marriage, Webb’s novel aims to resolve the tension between the private and public aspects of marriage through its singular antebellum free black marriage plot. What is a free black marriage, and how does it...

Share