Consensual Fictions: Women, Liberalism, and the English Novel

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray teaches English literature at Brandon
University in Manitoba.

The societal shift from patriarchal-arranged marriages, which were based
on families’ social and economic advancement, to the personal choice
of a marriage partner based on love and mutual companionship originated
in the classical liberalism of political philosophers such as John
Locke, who argued that a civil society needs to be founded on a social
contract that is accepted by individuals through free will rather than
imposed by force. In Consensual Fictions, Jones argues that, while the
concept of consensual married love did not originate in 18th- and
19th-century novels, the emerging literary form was instrumental in
ratifying the social zeitgeist and exploring the conflicts in authority
and obligations that such a change in social policy entailed,
specifically in relation to the implications it held for the role of
women in English society. Jones examines the literary themes of the
virtues of married love and women’s proper place in society in the
novels of Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, and Margaret
Oliphant. If women were now not only permitted but even encouraged to
choose their future spouses, and mutual love and happiness were seen as
the foundation for Christian marriage, a woman’s subjugation to both
her father and husband began to be called into question. As Jones shows,
the novels of these four writers explore the many social and cultural
problems within a marriage relationship that arose from the new
“contractual subjectivity” that a woman accepted with her personal
choice of a spouse, and the authors suggest, through a variety of plots
and subplots, possible resolutions to the question of how changing
attitudes toward love and marriage affect how society thinks about men
and women.

As a woman challenged her father’s authority by choosing her own
husband, and through her choice of her future spouse based on love and
companionship showed herself to be capable of self-determination and an
equal in the marriage partnership, so the societal shift toward
consensual marriages provided an important staging ground for the
conceptualization of women’s political and social rights. Through her
exploration of the role played by early novels in establishing a
relationship between liberalism and women’s place in society, Jones
highlights the role that liberal contract theory played in the
development of feminism well into the 20th century.