Family Likeness

Literary scholar Mary Jean Corbett here challenges conventional readings of the exogamous marriage plot in nineteenth-century British fiction by focusing on ‘a cultural tendency toward forging relationships with familial and familiar figures’ (p. vii). In chapters dedicated to novels by Jane Austen, Harriet Martineau, Felicia Skene, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf, Corbett argues that the tendency of critics to see Victorian marriage as patriarchal, ruled by marital exogamy and the exchange of women, has blinded them to the ways in which Victorians understood family likeness, or affinity. In developing her argument, Corbett discusses sexual relationships that we would define as incestuous, including sexual relations between siblings or half-siblings and first-cousin marriage. She places such relationships within a broader range of cultural practices, including marriage with a deceased wife's sister and the tendency to define potential marriage partners as siblings. In this work she thus seeks to historicise the concept of incest by viewing it as an example of the ‘magnitude of the major cultural shifts in attitudes to sex and marriage within the family over the course of the nineteenth century’ (p. 4), while also elaborating a critical framework that does not start from the assumption that marriage meant ‘marrying out’. Instead, Corbett argues that ‘marrying within the family’ (p. 22) may have served as a form of female empowerment as well as a cultural practice intended to maintain boundaries of race and class. Corbett's project, then, is to interrogate the concept of incest as an analytical framework by examining how contemporaries articulated family and marital relationships. In so doing, she sees her work as participating in a larger critical project of re-thinking the Victorian family—so aptly demonstrated, for example, by Sharon Marcus in Between Women (2007; rev. ante, cxxiii [2008], 1572–4). Corbett also places her work within a modern-day political framework, arguing that greater awareness of the ‘fictiveness’ of the ‘hegemonic family/marriage norm’ (p. 203) may open up a space for re-imagining our own concepts of the family

Genealogy · Sister · Sociology · Wife · Anthropology · Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law