Marriage, Property, and Women in 19th-Century English Literature

Introduction: Marriage and National Identity in Victorian England

To a certain extent, England owes its national identity in the modern period to issues of marriage. It was over marriage policy that Henry VIII broke with Rome and established his own church in the sixteenth century, and the Church of England's denial of sacramental status to marriage led to a large-scale literary attempt — whose results are evident in works as disparate as Spenser's "Epithalamion" and Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing — to find a cultural meaning for marriage when its religious meaning had been radically redefined. By the nineteenth century, however, the religious debate over marriage had largely been subsumed by a legal one, with extensive parliamentary wrangling over the status of married women's property rights. Cultural efforts had refocused on the status of women. Through an examination of several key works — by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Annie Besant, and Robert Browning — this essay argues that the nineteenth-century critique of marriage was largely focused on ideas of property and objectification.

Besant's Feminist Critique: Wives as Legal Property

For something resembling a feminist analysis of marriage from the actual period in question, we may readily turn to Annie Besant's 1878 tract Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be: A Plea for Reform. Besant's remarkable career — which began as a feminist agitator and ended as an otherworldly disciple of Madame Blavatsky — has somewhat overshadowed this early work. A close reading of Besant's arguments shows that she is mainly concerned with the legal status of women as property. It is worth noting that Friedrich Engels, a more obviously Marxist resident of England at the time, would offer a similar critique only years later in his 1884 Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

Besant's work is concerned with elucidating the way in which wives are regarded as property. She notes the religious origin of the concept, writing that "in the old Hebrew books [...] the wife is regarded as the property of her husband" (Besant 5), and suggests an anthropological dimension as well by claiming that "amongst many semi-barbarous nations the wives are still bought" (Besant 6). Overall, however, Besant's argument focuses on the state of actual laws in Victorian England, arguing that "by marriage a woman loses her legal existence… the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage" (Besant 8). This is traced back to the religious notion that husband and wife are "one flesh," but it is — as Shanley notes — an accurate assessment of the state of English law at the time, which was still heavily influenced by "the notion that a husband in some manner owned his wife's affection and sexual services, that she was his property, but a wife did not have a similar legal claim on her husband" (Shanley 24).

Browning's 'My Last Duchess': Objectification and Control

These basic notions are perfectly evident in one of the best-known Victorian poems, Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess." It is worth noting that Browning had experienced many of the Victorian contradictions of marriage firsthand: his courtship of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, arguably the best-known female poet of the day, had to be conducted in secret for fear of her father's disapproval, and eventually resulted in elopement, exile, and Elizabeth's complete estrangement from her family. It was, however, the difference in economic status between the two that was found objectionable.

In Browning's poem, the title itself — "My Last Duchess" — is perfectly ambiguous: it refers either to the Duke of Ferrara's first wife or to the portrait of his first wife that hangs in his art gallery. The chilling revelation of the verse monologue is that the Duke's complete control over the portrait is intended to compensate for a certain lack of control he had over the actual wife, whom he eventually had killed. The Duke tells his guest that "none puts by / the curtain I have drawn for you, but I" (Browning 9–10), demonstrating that access to the late wife's portrait is entirely controlled by the husband. It is the poem's conclusion, however, that makes this logic most chilling:

…Will't please you rise? We'll meet / The company below, then. I repeat, / The Count your master's known munificence / Is ample warrant that no just pretence / Of mine for dowry will be disallowed; / Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed / At starting, is my object… (Browning 47–53)

We learn at the poem's conclusion that the reason for this display of the late wife — and the ambiguous admission of having murdered her — is that the Duke is entertaining an envoy to contract a new marriage with the daughter of a Count. As a result, Fra Pandolf's portrait of the last duchess is being revealed not only as a cautionary tale for the future bride, but also as a perfectly objectified component of the imminent dowry negotiation. Indeed, Browning's use of the word "object" at line 53 carries an uncomfortable double meaning.

Conclusion

However, it is worth noting the implicit paradox expressed here in the notion of a married woman's "oppressive liberty." Dorothea Brooke marries sufficiently well that she is not condemned to a life of constant domestic drudgery for Casaubon — instead, she finds herself without anything to do, and this "freedom" from labor is precisely what is most oppressive. In some sense, then, Eliot's analysis of the problems of marriage is subsidiary to a larger point about women's social role and even educational status — an issue that preoccupied Victorians in works ranging from the serious, such as Tennyson's The Princess, to the satirical, in Gilbert and Sullivan's travesty of Tennyson, Princess Ida. Taken together, the works examined here — Besant's legal polemic, Browning's dramatic monologue, Austen's social novel, and Eliot's expansive study of provincial life — reveal that the nineteenth-century critique of marriage was inseparable from a broader reckoning with women's place in English society.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Web. Accessed 20 April 2014.

Besant, Annie. Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, and As It Should Be: A Plea for Reform. New York: Butts, 1878. Print.

Browning, Robert. "My Last Duchess." 1842. Web. Accessed 20 April 2014.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. 1874. Web. Accessed 20 April 2014.

Foster, Shirley. Victorian Women's Fiction: Marriage, Freedom and the Individual. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1985. Print.

Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Print.