In the eighteenth century, when the definition of marriage was shifting from one based on an hierarchical model to one based on notions of love and mutuality, marital life came under a more intense cultural scrutiny. This led to paradoxical forms of representation of marriage as simultaneously ideal and unlivable. Chris Roulston analyzes how, as representations of married life increased, they challenged the traditional courtship model, offering narratives based on repetition rather than progression. Beginning with English and French marital advice literature, which appropriated novelistic conventions at the same time that it cautioned readers about the dangers of novel reading, she looks at representations of ideal marriages in Pamela II and The New Heloise. Moving on from these ideal domestic spaces, bourgeois marriage is then problematized by the discourse of empire in Sir George Ellison and Letters of Mistress Henley, by troublesome wives in works by Richardson and Samuel de Constant, and by abusive husbands in works by Haywood, Edgeworth, Genlis and Restif de la Bretonne. Finally, the alternative marriage narrative, in which the adultery motif is incorporated into the marriage itself, redefines the function of heteronormativity. In exploring the theoretical issues that arise during this transitional period for married life and the marriage plot, Roulston expands the debates around the evolution of the modern couple.

Recent archival research has focussed on the material conditions of marriage in eighteenth-century France, providing new insight into the social and judicial contexts of marital violence. Mary Trouille builds on these findings to write the first book on spousal abuse during this period. Through close examination of a wide range of texts, Trouille shows how lawyers and novelists adopted each other's rhetorical strategies to present competing versions of the truth. Male voices - those of husbands, lawyers, editors, and moralists - are analysed in accounts of separation cases presented in Des Essarts's influential Causes célèbres, in moral and legal treatises, and in legal briefs by well-known lawyers of the period. Female voices, both real and imagined, are explored through court testimony and novels based on actual events by Sade, Genlis, and Rétif de la Bretonne. By bringing the traditionally private matter of spousal abuse into the public arena, these texts had a significant impact on public opinion and served as an impetus for legal reform in the early years of the French Revolution. Trouille's interdisciplinary study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of attitudes towards women in eighteenth-century society, and provides a historical context for debates about domestic violence that are very much alive today.

Drawing on a wide range of English and French fiction and advice literature, this study analyzes the problems of representation that emerge in light of the changing definition of marriage from one of hierarchy to companionship in the eighteenth century. Ranging from representations of ideal domesticity to the problems of intimacy and marital discontent, Roulston explores the paradox of the modern marriage as both utopian and unlivable, and expands the debate around its evolution.

This book examines the intersections between the ways that marriage was represented in eighteenth-century writing and art, experienced in society, and regulated by law. The interdisciplinary and comparative essays explore the marital experience beyond the ‘matrimonial barrier’ to encompass representations of married life including issues of spousal abuse, parenting, incest, infidelity and the period after the end of marriage, to include annulment, widowhood and divorce. The chapters range from these focuses on legal and social histories of marriage to treatments of marriage in eighteenth-century periodicals, to depictions of married couples and families in eighteenth-century art, to parallels in French literature and diaries, to representations of violence and marriage in Gothic novels, and to surveys of same-sex partnerships. The volume is aimed towards students and scholars working in the long eighteenth century, gender studies, women’s writing, publishing history, and art and legal historians.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the gateway between the medieval world and the modern, centuries when the western societies moved from an age governed principally by religion and superstition to an age directed principally by reason and understanding. Although the worlds of science and philosophy took giant strides away from the medieval view of the world, attitudes to women did not change from those that had pertained for centuries. Girls were largely barred from education - only around 14% of women could read and write by 1700 - and the few educated women were not permitted to enter the professions. As a result women, especially if single, were employed in menial jobs or were forced into a life of petty crime. Many survived by entering the 'oldest profession in the world'. The social turbulence of the first half of the seventeenth century afforded women new opportunities and new religious freedoms and women were attracted into the many new sects where they were afforded a voice in preaching and teaching. In a time of unprecedented and unbridled political discussion, many better educated women saw no reason why they should not enter the debate and began to voice their opinions alongside those of men, publishing their own books and pamphlets. These new and unprecedented liberties thus gained by women were perceived as a threat by the leaders of society, and thus arose an unlikely masculine alliance against the new feminine assertions, across all sections of society from Puritan preachers to court judges, from husbands to court rakes. This reaction often found expression in the violent and brutal treatment of women who were seen to have stepped out of line, whether legally, socially or domestically. Often beaten and abused at home by husbands exercising their legal right, they were whipped, branded, exiled and burnt alive by the courts, from which their sex had no recourse to protection, justice or restitution. Many of the most brutal forms of punishment were reserved exclusively for women, and even where the same, they were more savagely applied than would be the case for similar crimes committed by men. This work records the many kinds of violent physical and verbal abuse perpetrated against women in Britain and her colonies, both domestically and under the law, during two centuries when huge strides in human knowledge and civilisation were being made in every other sphere of human activity, but social and legal attitudes to women and their punishment remained firmly embedded in the medieval.

In this innovative study, the author carves out a new field, a sociology of literature in which he offers insightful commentary about the nexus of literature and society. Calling on history, sociology, and psychology as well as literature as points of reference, Allan Pasco examines the conceptual shift in the ideal of love in eighteenth-century France. Pasco explores the radical, though gradual, changes that occurred during the Enlightenment with respect to how the emotion of love was viewed. Earlier, love had been subordinate to the demands of family, king, and deity; passion was dangerous, and to be avoided. But over time, individual happiness became the "greatest good," and passion the measure of love. Authors as diverse as Marivaux, Marmontel, Rousseau, Baculard d'Arnaud, Pigault-Lebrun and Madame de Staël make it clear that the ideal of rapturous love did not live up to its billing: it did not last, and it brought destructive fantasies, an epidemic of disease, the "scourge" of divorce, and considerable anguish. Still, as Pasco points out, passion became and remained the ideal, and the Romantics were left to plumb its nature.

The resurgence of marriage as a transnational institution, same-sex or otherwise, draws upon as much as it departs from enlightenment ideologies of sex, gender, and sexuality which this collection aims to investigate, interrogate, and conceptualize anew. Coming to terms with heteronormativity is imperative for appreciating the literature and culture of the eighteenth century writ large, as well as the myriad imaginaries of sex and sexuality that the period bequeaths to the present. This collection foregrounds British, European, and, to a lesser extent, transatlantic heteronormativities in order to pose vital if vexing questions about the degree of continuity subsisting between heteronormativities of the past and present, questions compounded by the aura of transhistoricity lying at the heart of heteronormativity as an ideology. Contributors attend to the fissures and failures of heteronormativity even as they stress the resilience of its hegemony: reconfiguring our sense of how gender and sexuality came to be mapped onto space; how public and private spheres were carved up, or gendered and sexual bodies socially sanctioned; and finally how literary traditions, scholarly criticisms, and pedagogical practices have served to buttress or contest the legacy of heteronormativity.