Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage

Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage

Thomason, Laura E.

Paperback

Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1611487056
ISBN13: 9781611487053
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: Aug 31 2015
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.70
Height: 1.10 Width: 5.20 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
Mary Delany's phrase the matrimonial trap illuminates the apprehension with which genteel women of the eighteenth century viewed marriage. These women were generally required to marry in order to secure their futures, yet hindered from freely choosing a husband. They faced marriage anxiously because they lacked the power either to avoid it or to define it for themselves. For some women, the written word became a means by which to exercise the power that they otherwise lacked. Through their writing, they made the inevitable acceptable while registering their dissatisfaction with their circumstances. Rhetoric, exercised both in public and in private, allowed these women to define their identities as individuals and as wives, to lay out and test the boundaries of more egalitarian spousal relationships, and to criticize the traditional marriage system as their culture had defined it.

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