Anghraine

Rambling about family relationships based on my research for my PhD exams (16th- to 18th-century British literature):

One of the things that came up in my reading for my exams was, inevitably, ~the rise of the companionate marriage~. The usual framing is often over-simplistic and very heterocentric; people sometimes talk as if there was no concept of marriage involving romantic ties (sometimes even exclusive romantic ties!) until the 17th/18th century or something.

That said, IMO there’s something to it, at least in England. As someone who had mostly done research in the 18th and earlier 19th centuries, 16th-century takes on marriage often sound like they come from Earth 2. Over time, there’s more and more emphasis on the ties of marriage, companionship, and parenthood in cultural discourse, with other family relationships increasingly subordinated to those, even while ideas from earlier periods about the importance of those other family relationships persisted in some ways.

Like, there was a lot of talk about how brothers were supposed to care for the interests of their siblings, especially their unmarried sisters, but there’s also a lot of talk about how that was increasingly not happening, and how the ties between brothers and sisters were becoming less important and less reliable as a "net" for unmarried women.

Men increasingly resented their sisters for taking resources that would otherwise go to their wives and children, or simply denied them meaningful resources altogether in favor of focusing on their own wives/children. It was a really well-established dynamic by the time that Wollstonecraft wrote about it in Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Austen in Sense and Sensibility.

One of the things that S&S highlights is that John and Fanny Dashwood’s son does not need the resources that are denied to John’s sisters. He already has a comfortable separate inheritance. John prioritizes Fanny and Harry over his sisters both because of his character and because doing so had become very culturally normalized by then.

By the 20th century (at least in the UK and US), people prioritizing their spouses and children over their siblings or other connections was and is often going to seem "well, of course they would." But the degree to which that is the case is really influenced by cultural norms and expectations. Going back to Austen (surprise), she has an intriguing passage about it that speaks to the shifts in how the sibling tie was seen and experienced:

An advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. Too often, alas! it is so.—Fraternal love, sometimes almost every thing, is at others worse than nothing.

I don’t even have siblings (sort of surrogate siblings, but not people I was actually brought up with), but I do find the evolution and melancholy over this really interesting. And I do think that a lot of the, hmm, enthusiasm over the rise of the “companionate marriage” tends to ignore the cost of it.

Tagged: #i am pretty sure this is why austen keeps returning to darcy's sense of responsibility and deep affection for his sister #and why elizabeth thinks his way of talking about georgiana should have told her about his character #i've seen people be like 'just bc you care about your own family members doesn't mean you're a good person wtf' about that #but it was a big deal at the time! #wickham brings it up as something that people in general praise darcy for too #obviously this was of really immediate concern for austen herself #but plenty of people write about it over the years #and it's just ... idk #complicated

[ETA 5/28/2024: this is actually extremely relevant to my dissertation and something I was literally just writing about today!]

Honestly … associating Annabella Milbanke’s disastrous marriage to Byron with her opinion of P&P/Darcy is gross as fuck and I immediately lose respect for anyone who does it.

Tagged: #i've come across it multiple times and aghhhh #it's obviously a terrible take on austen but it's also so victim-blamey and ... ugh

I’m halfway through the current monster essay and the temptation to just say “I’m a doctoral student, not a historian!” is very strong.

Tagged: #me: *earnestly talking about how literary depictions and historical practice are very distinct things* #in general but also in this specific instance #...i think #but i don't know because I AM NOT A HISTORIAN

An anon said:

there's a story on bbc today about the discovery of a set of diaries by a yorkshire farmer around 1810 discussing homosexuality in an apparently accepting and more-balanced-than-expected way - does that attitude surprise or confirm your own thoughts on this time period? and since i've mostly seen pop media coverage, have you seen discussion of this diary or analysis of it in your field that you'd be willing to share? :)

I responded:

I haven’t! But my interests/studies have kept moving earlier and earlier, so 1810 is pretty late for what I’m doing now (I specialized in the 18th & 19th for my MA, but I’m working in the 17th and 18th for my PhD).

That said, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. IMO we often think of the past as a) something completely foreign or b) basically like here and now, only less ‘enlightened.’ And I think we have to resist that secondary impulse to flatten the often profound differences in place and time and culture. At the same time, it’s important to understand that … people are going to be people.

Because of that, there’s always going to be a considerable degree of variation in attitudes and not just a singular model of What People Thought Back Then. So it seems perfectly probable that some people would have ideas that sit pretty well with us, even though it’s not anything like the majority. You can find that wrt just about any issue in any period.

It is easy to find virulent and pervasive homophobia in the later 18th century, which I gather persisted beyond that time, so I wouldn’t be inclined to see the farmer as representative of the period per se. But it might show that there was a greater diversity in opinions and perspectives than what we often project onto the past.