Was There an Eighteenth-Century Marriage Plot?

This article suggests that literary criticism of the eighteenth-century novel should dispense with the concept of the marriage plot as an explanatory device for the myriad ways courtship, marriage, and heterosexuality are explored and problematized in the period’s fiction. Criticism of recent decades has established a profound diversity of attitudes toward and commentaries on marriage in novels of the period, such that gathering them under “marriage plot” can obscure the entropy and resistant potential of discourses on marriage. Perhaps marriage was not being plotted so much as questioned, disassembled, even dismissed. Instead of projecting the order of Victorian marriage backwards, eighteenth-century literary historians should be challenged to account for the literary activity around marriage with more precision and less certainty, much as the eighteenth century itself discussed the institution.