Claire Langhamer. The English in Love

In this important monograph, Claire Langhamer joins the coterie of historians who contribute to the history of emotions by providing a close study of a particular emotion: love. As Langhamer explains, she wants to show the ways that “[l]ove has a history” (p. 4). She makes use of a wide range of primary sources including newspapers and magazines, television programs and popular films, and scholarly and popular books, though the foundation of the book rests with materials from the Mass Observation Archive. Langhamer focuses on how the English made sense of love and marriage between 1920 and 1970, a period she considers the “golden age of marriage” (p. 4). Ultimately, Langhamer creates a social history of how the English understood the interaction of heterosexual love and commitment during that 50-year span. According to Langhamer, the twentieth century saw a number of significant shifts in how the English saw love and marriage. Increasingly, people stressed the pleasurable aspects of marriage, but the growing importance of pleasure put new stresses on the institution. Instead of seeing marriage in terms of contracts, social roles, or economic demands, people began to value romantic love and sexual satisfaction and began to see marriage as a way to contain the destabilizing effects of desire. However, as Langhamer shows, the binding of love to marriage created an inherently unstable foundation. The failure to achieve happiness, sexual satisfaction, or love could demand the dissolution of a marriage. In effect, the centrality of love to a meaningful life demanded divorce reform and remarriage. Her boldest claim, therefore, is that the new demands on marriage caused its implosion rather than the conventional narrative that posits that youth culture, anti-establishment ideologies, or feminism brought about marriage's supposed demise.

Aesthetics · Art · Falling in love · Happiness · Institution · Pleasure · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Remarriage · Romance · Social science · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies