Marriage and Violence
The Early Modern Legacy

Frances E. Dolan

244 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus.
Cloth 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4075-7 | $47.50s | £31.00 | Add to shopping cart
Paper Aug 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2082-7 | $22.50s | 15.00 | Add to shopping cart

"We're lucky Frances E. Dolan . . . steeped herself in the history, brought along a philosopher's antennae for blunt contradiction, and produced Marriage and Violence. Oh, how the quality of debate on same-sex marriage would improve if activists on the subject, candidates, and officials sat down to read it! Maybe it can be tossed out, like a bouquet, anywhere such players meet."—Carlin Romano, The Chronicle Review

"A sophisticated, erudite discussion of the tensions between egalitarian and hierarchical principles in the Anglo-American ideal of marriage. Dolan provocatively argues that these tensions illustrate important continuities between seventeenth- and twenty-first-century marital models and have created recurring dilemmas in our theory and practice of marriage."—Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage

"Why does marriage so often lead to violence? In her timely and important new book, Frances Dolan identifies the culprit: an 'economy of scarcity' that modern marriage inherits from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Powerfully argued and wonderfully well documented, Marriage and Violence provides a rare example of how historical scholarship can illuminate the present."—Richard Helgerson, University of California, Santa Barbara

"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

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? In Marriage and Violence, Frances E. Dolan reveals the contradiction that lies at the very heart of modern marriage. We have inherited from early modern England a model of marriage so flawed, she 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.

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.

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