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Marriage
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What is Marriage?

Marriage is one of the most examined institutions in Family Science, appearing in sociology, psychology, gender studies, and literature courses alike. Its academic interest lies in how it sits at the intersection of personal relationships and broader social structures — shaped by law, culture, religion, and economics simultaneously. Papers on this topic often engage with contested questions about what marriage is for, who it should include, and how it shapes individual development across the life course. Works like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Dryden's Marriage a la Mode provide literary windows into how expectations around marriage have evolved, while frameworks like Daniel Levinson's Stage Theory offer developmental lenses for understanding how marriage fits into adult life stages.

The papers archived here take a wide range of approaches. Argumentative and persuasive writing dominates, particularly around gay marriage, where writers construct policy-based and rights-based cases both for and against government recognition. Other papers take a practical angle, exploring what makes marriages succeed or fail, including the long-term effects of divorce on adult children. Comparative approaches appear in analyses of different marriage preparation programs, while literary and feminist analyses examine how marriage has functioned as a social institution that historically constrains women.

A strong essay on marriage needs a focused, debatable thesis rather than a broad survey of the topic. Evidence drawn from developmental psychology, sociological research, or close textual analysis tends to carry the most weight depending on the course context. The most common pitfall is conflating personal opinion with argument — especially on contested topics like same-sex marriage — without grounding claims in credible frameworks or evidence.

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Paper Undergraduate

Black Rain (1989): Memory, Denial, and Hiroshima's Legacy

War is always a collective historical event that survives in official government records and propaganda as well as mass media images and academic and popular writing. Of course, not all individual experiences can be captured by the collective memory, national consciousness and official interpretations of events, and in some cases governments and established elites attempt to censor and repress collective memory. With Hiroshima and Nagasaki, collective denial, cover ups and repression of public memories occurred for decades after the war, while many veterans who returned to Japan in 1945 were deeply dissatisfied by the official version of collective memory and sought to alter the national consciousness. In Black Rain, the family patriarch would also like to repress and deny the events of the recent past, but his niece and lover were so obviously victimized and damaged by the war that in the end he is simply unable to do so.

Essay Doctorate

Gender Oppression and Identity in The Edible Woman

Atwood illustrates the importance of adaptation and acquiescence to the dominant culture with regard to the decomposition of self-identity and the ability to retain personal choice. There is never goodness-of-fit between Marian's self-identity and the cultural and social roles that she is are required of her. Marian first loses her struggle and in the process loses her voice, her identity, and her direction—only by making an effigy of herself and consuming it is she able to bridge to a new composition of her old identity. She knows who she is even if she doesn't know quite where she wants to go. Marian figures out how to coexist in a world that will never let her be the person she is. The primary difference is that she has experienced the full thrust of the cultural violence that is the milieu in which she exists—and she knows the danger she creates for herself when she struggles against the current. The cost of not conforming is real and salient. The conscientization that Marian developed before her engagement to Peter is clouded, but the nebulous shapes have discernable form. The tyranny of consumerism and cultural dominance are no longer strangers to Marian—she can play the game on their field, if she must.

Research Paper Doctorate

Women's Education Rights: America, Britain, and Ireland

¶ … woman's rights were little recognized. As a creative source of human life, she was confined to the home as a wife and mother. Moreover, she was considered intellectually, emotionally and spiritually inferior to man…

Research Paper Doctorate

Feminist Themes in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801)

¶ … feminist implications of Maria Edgeworth's novel, Belinda. In many ways, Edgeworth's Belinda seems to flaunt the 19th century ideas about the proper behavior of women in society.

Research Paper Doctorate

Women, Marriage, and Freedom in 18th-Century Fiction

The institute of Marriage should be viewed as a consummation of love and not as a social contract which gives economic and social stability. Freedom is better sought in the confinements of love and marriage is better…

Research Paper Doctorate

Last of the Mohicans: Novel vs. 1992 Film Adaptation

Last of the Mohicans has been adapted to cinematic versions many times before, which speaks volumes about the enduring popularity of the book. There is something about the novel that continues to attract modern…

Research Paper Doctorate

The American National Character: Identity, Values, and Culture

America can almost be thought of as a massive experiment in culture. Here we have a nation inhabited almost entirely by immigrants; all with different languages, customs, beliefs, and appearances who are forced to…

Research Paper Doctorate

Sense and Sensibility: Themes, Class, and Social Values

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen's first published novel, is the story of the lives, loves, and dreams of two sisters. The plot of the story centers on the possibility that both sisters may have to put up with the…

Paper Doctorate

Unconditional Love and Jealousy in Shakespeare's Othello

This work uses textual evidence from Shakespeare's Othello to discuss the theme of unconditional love in the play.With the thesis that Desdemona achieved it and Othello did not.

Paper Undergraduate

Should Australia Have a Bill of Rights? A Critical Analysis

Australia is the last remaining Common Law country without a Bill or Rights or Human Rights Bill. It is important to note that the Australian variant of liberalism differs from the Anglo-American model in two important ways. First, the establishment of Australia as a series of British colonies under authoritarian governors and the absence of any political revolution has meant a lesser stress on the idea of individual rights versus the state. There has been no one in Australian history to shout 'Give me liberty or give me death', no real pressure to incorporate a Bill of Rights into our Constitution (Rowse, 1978).

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