Marriage plot is a term used, often in academic circles, to categorize a storyline that recurs in novels most prominently and more recently in films. Until the expansion of the definition of marriage to include

same-sex couple A same-sex relationship is a romantic or sexual relationship between people of the same sex. ''Same-sex marriage'' refers to the institutionalized recognition of such relationships in the form of a marriage Marriage, also called ma ...

s, this plot centered exclusively on the courtship rituals between a man and a woman and the obstacles that faced the potential couple on its way to the nuptial payoff. The marriage plot became a popular source of entertainment in the 18th and 19th centuries with the rise of the

middle class The middle class refers to a class of people in the middle of a social hierarchy, often defined by occupation, income, education, or social status. The term has historically been associated with modernity, capitalism and political debate. C ...

novel. The foremost practitioners of the form include some of the more illustrious names in English letters, among them

Samuel Richardson Samuel Richardson (baptised 19 August 1689 – 4 July 1761) was an English writer and printer known for three epistolary novels: '' Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded'' (1740), '' Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady'' (1748) and '' The Histo ...

Jane Austen Jane Austen ( ; 16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for #List of works, her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment on the English landed gentry at the end of the 18th century ...

George Eliot Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrot ...

and the Brontë sisters.

Use in novels

Post-1980 deconstructionist criticism has highlighted how the plot was a profitable publishing and ideological production that served to ensure the ascendancy of the

. The marriage plot was the liberal age's reformulation of the

medieval romance As a literary genre, the chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the noble courts of high medieval and early modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a chivalric ...

, which excluded all but aristocratic ladies and their chivalrous knights from its epics of love. The marriage plot promises to liberate romance by making it available to greater sections of society: the middle class and to some extent, the

working class The working class is a subset of employees who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts, whose exact membership varies from definition to definition. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most c ...

es, who are relegated to

comic relief Comic Relief is a British charity, founded in 1986 by the comedy scriptwriter Richard Curtis and comedian Sir Lenny Henry in response to the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia. The concept of Comic Relief was to get British comedians to make t ...

in 16th- and 17th-century theater, suddenly become serious moral subjects. Today, few doubt the ennobling qualities of love, but giving that nobility of soul to anyone but nobles was an innovation to be found foundationally in the marriage plot, perhaps pioneered by Richardson's '' Pamela'', wherein a lowly but virtuous maid is raised beyond her birth through her insistent

chastity Chastity, also known as purity, is a virtue related to temperance. Someone who is ''chaste'' refrains from sexual activity that is considered immoral or from any sexual activity, according to their state of life. In some contexts, for exampl ...

and her subsequent marriage to the lordly Mr. B.

Use in film

Film, which supplanted the novel as the most popular narrative form in the 20th century, did not abandon this innovation of the novel. Rather, the marriage plot has enjoyed a continued efflorescence, visible to this day in the popular film form known as the "

romantic comedy Romantic comedy (also known as romcom or rom-com) is a sub-genre of comedy and Romance novel, romance fiction, focusing on lighthearted, humorous plot lines centered on romantic ideas, such as how true love is able to surmount all obstacles. Ro ...

". At its most formulaic, critics have asserted, the conventions of the marriage plot, with the cathartic closure that its marriage ending delivers to its believers, ultimately renounces politics and engagement in the world in favor of privacy and domestic bliss. We may see this, for instance, in the film '' You've Got Mail'', which resolves the political opposition between mega-bookstore boss

Tom Hanks Thomas Jeffrey Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is an American actor and filmmaker. Known for both his comedic and dramatic roles, he is one of the most popular and recognizable film stars worldwide, and is regarded as an American cultural icon. Ha ...

and bookshop-around-the-corner owner,

Meg Ryan Margaret Mary Emily Anne Hyra (born November 19, 1961), known by her stage name Meg Ryan, is an American actress. Known for her leading roles as quirky, charismatic women since the late 1980s, Ryan is particularly recognized for her work in ...

, by uniting its lead characters in a union that effaces the unequal distribution of capital that originally put them at odds.

References

*Shaffer, Julie A. “The Ideological Intervention of Ambiguities in the Marriage Plot: Who Fails Marianne in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility?” ''A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin.'' Eds. Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 128–51. *"Foiling the Marriage Plot", Review of Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction, Joseph Allen Boone, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 1. (Autumn, 1990), pp. 111–114
(Source: membership required)

Use in novels

Use in film

References

See also