ABSTRACT
The domestic ideal of sound marriages and stable families provided a potent symbol of hierarchical order and authority that extended into nineteenth-century fiction as well; insofar as it reflected the social hegemony, the novel in particular adopted marriage as its central thematic concern and organizing device. The novelistic representation of romantic marriage as “the ultimate signifier of personal and social well-being” and the stabilizing formal structures of linearity and closure which characterize marriage plots encode and reinforce a cultural ideal. In evaluating the significance of divorce as a trope in the marriage plot, it is appropriate to recall that divorce has had a broader function in American socio-political history than simply a legal remedy for failed marriages. For the American man, the competing claims of republican and domestic ideologies posed little problem in the decision to divorce. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
