Book description
Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But
what-or who-must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? We
have inherited a model of marriage so flawed, Frances E. Dolan
contends, that its logical consequence is conflict.
Dolan ranges over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan
advice literature, sensational accounts of "true crime," and
late twentieth-century marriage manuals and films about battered women
who kill their abusers. She reads the inevitable Taming of the
Shrew against William Byrd's diary of life on his Virginia
plantation, Noel Coward's Private Lives, and Barbara
Ehrenreich's assessment in Nickel and Dimed of the relationship
between marriage and housework. She traces the connections between
Phillippa Gregory's best-selling novel The Other Boleyn Girl
and documents about Anne Boleyn's fatal marriage and her daughter
Elizabeth I's much-debated virginity. By contrasting depictions of
marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and our own time,
she shows that the early modern apprehension of marriage as an economy
of scarcity continues to haunt the present in the form of a conceptual
structure that can accommodate only one fully developed person. When
two fractious individuals assert their conflicting wills, resolution
can be achieved only when one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or
eliminates the other.
In an era when marriage remains hotly contested, this book draws
our attention to one of the histories that bears on the present, a
history in which marriage promises both intimate connection and fierce
conflict, both companionship and competition.
"Marriage and Violence is an original, timely, and
compelling study of the impact of early modern English discourses
about marriage on contemporary understandings of marital violence.
Arguing that when marriage explodes into violence we can see the past
haunting the present, Dolan both presents a radically new history of
marriage and provides us with some new conceptual tools for rethinking
present marital ideologies."-Valerie Traub, University of Michigan
Frances E. Dolan is Professor of English at the University of
California, Davis. Among her books are Dangerous Familiars:
Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700 and Whores of
Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture.
