| Marriages with large age differences form an important narrative frame in nineteenth-century British literature. Although these marriages play with normative codes of sexual propriety and gender identity, they find legitimacy and acceptance through their allegiances to literary, social, and legal conventions and thus prove a important vehicle for both disruptive and conservative forces.; This study examines the literature of the nineteenth century that engages the theme of an older husband and a younger wife---what I call the theme of the January-May marriage. The focus of my study spans the long nineteenth century, from Elizabeth Inchbald's 1791 A Simple Story to Bernard Shaw's 1898 Mrs. Warren's Profession, covering some of the most canonical works of the period such as Byron's Don Juan , Dickens's David Copperfield, and Eliot's Middlemarch, as well as lesser known texts like Browning's Pippa Passes, Geraldine Ensor Jewsbury's Zoe, and Trollope's An Old Man's Love. While this project includes works from a variety of genres, evaluates marriages with varied age differences, and discusses the works of authors who wrote from assorted gender, economic, sexual and historical perspectives, the dissertation offers nuanced readings of how intergenerational marriages negotiate exchanges between gender and power.; January-May marriages have thus far served as pat examples of women's victimization and oppression within a patriarchal society. My query moves the sexual "deviancy" of child-loving into the culturally sanctified and seemingly normative marriage union and expands notions of childhood, sometimes reading the babyish younger wife as the child and sometimes the infantilized older husband. The January-May theme may appear to be grounded in a fundamentally heterosexual rubric, but my work theorizes a complex relationship between age and gender that rejects such conventional restrictions on identity. This project finds that literary January-May marriages respond to peculiarly nineteenth-century anxieties regarding gender roles and, organized into thematic chapters, the dissertation analyzes the theme as parody, as incest, as aesthetics, as horror, as economics, and as love. |
