Novel Marriage

You may have noticed I have written a bit on the subject of marriage as it is portrayed in 19th Century novels, and how those notions continue to influence us. Here is Ian Watt on contrasting conceptions of marriage in different literary traditions: Gradually, however, the code of romantic love began to accomodate itself to religious, social and psychological reality, notably to marriage and the family. This process seems to have occurred particularly in England, and the new ideology which eventually came into being there does much to explain both the rise of the novel and the distinctive difference between the English and French traditions in fiction. Denis de Rougement, in his study of the development of romantic love, writes of the French novel that 'to judge by its literature, adultery would seem to be one of the most characteristic occupations of Western man.' Not so in England, where the break with the originally adulterous character of courtly love was so complete that George Moore was almost justified in claiming to have 'invented adultery, which didn't exist in the English novel till I began writing.'