Marriage acts: The eighteenth-century critique of contract

My dissertation, "Marriage Acts: The Eighteenth-Century Critique of Contract," is concerned with literary interventions into the debate over matrimonial law reform between the repeal of the Civil Marriage Act in 1660 and the Marriage Act of 1753, Not only was this debate a central preoccupation of legal theorists and parliamentary reformers, it influenced and was influenced by contemporary literary texts that took marriage as their subject. I argue that works by such writers as Behn, Vanbrugh, Defoe, Richardson and Shebbeare are fully comprehensible only within the context of this debate: they serve as discursive precedents both for the Marriage Act itself, and for the diverse social and legal reforms produced by that legislation.; Critics have argued that eighteenth-century social thought is characterized by a commitment to contractual individualism and to a contractual model of the public sphere. The Marriage Act, in this account, is a retrograde and nostalgic reversion to feudalism and paternalism amidst the triumph of freedom of contract. The legislation was profoundly anti-contractarian: after 1753 Parliament had the power to annul any consensual agreements made in violation of state-mandated ceremonial formalities, But I consider this to be a sign of the legislation's modernity rather than its obsolescence. In chapter discussions of the above writers I show how arguments for matrimonial law reform were increasingly linked with arguments for greater state involvement in the private sphere: arguments in favor of census taking, public health and safety legislation, unemployment insurance, state orphanages, a poor wage. It was contract ideology's emphasis upon the sacredness of the nuclear family and the inviolability of the private sphere that reformers understood to be truly retrograde, and to produce not only domestic crimes like rape and spousal abuse, but disruptions of public safety generally.; Defoe and Richardson are particularly uncomfortable with liberal consent theory--with the idea that one person's consent might absolve another of responsibility for his actions. In their work they attempt to articulate a more expansive version of legal liability that would function as an alternative to contract law and a contract-based public policy. Given that these two writers are considered paradigmatic contractarians, and novels such as Clarissa and Roxana held up as representative of a broader, uniformly contractarian cultural logic, the critique of contract I point to in those texts demands that we revise our critical understanding of them, and of the literary history they are supposed to exemplify.