‘No Escape to be Had’: Divorce and Divorce Law Reform in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel

Abstract

This thesis examines the ways in which the indissolubility of marriage and lack of facility of divorce was an issue that nineteenth-century English canonical novelists explored in their literary work, with a consideration of how these authors engaged with the quest for reform of divorce and matrimonial law, both prior to and after 1857 when the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act, one of the most comprehensive and significant reforms of the archaic system governing the marital relationship in England was enacted.
Setting out the unique and peculiar history governing the law of marriage, separation, and divorce in England, from the Reformation onwards, this thesis begins with a consideration of arguments first advanced by John Milton in his political treatises on the subject of divorce, in which he advocated for facility of divorce, termed the ‘needful’ divorce, to relieve marital incompatibility. This thesis then goes on to demonstrate how this ideological argument for marital liberalism and facility of divorce was developed in Paradise Lost. Examining the way in which the themes of Paradise Lost, particularly those that derive from Milton’s political position relating to divorce and his notion of a companionate marriage are represented in the novel of the nineteenth century, this thesis contextualizes the importance of the nineteenth-century novel as a locus advocating for divorce law reform in England, particularly where there has been an irretrievable breakdown of the marriage, or where the marriage has been undermined by the incompatibility of the parties to the marriage. In doing so, this thesis contains a consideration of the implications of marriage for women pursuant to the common law doctrine of coverture, whereby a woman’s legal identity was subsumed into that of her husband, while examining the way in which the issue of married women’s property rights became entwined with that of divorce and matrimonial causes.
Selected literature of Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens is considered, alongside the biographical imperatives deriving from each author’s individual experience of transgressive, fracturing, or failed marital, romantic, or interpersonal relationships, contextualising each author’s literary output by reference to the legal, political, and social developments in relation to the law of divorce and matrimonial causes at the time that they were writing. Demonstrating how each of these authors voiced an implied or overt criticism of the near absolute indissolubility of marriage through the use of Miltonic imagery in his political treatises on divorce, particularly Milton’s likening of a failed marriage to the torture of Mezentius, where a living person was roped to a dead body, it explains how a criticism of the prevailing law of divorce in England was embedded within the body of their work.
This thesis argues that it is through these depictions of inharmonious unions, compelled relationships, fractured families, and miserable marriages that a criticism of the laws of divorce in England can be found, concluding that the nineteenth-century novel did become a locus advocating not only for reform of divorce law generally so that divorce would be made more accessible, but also for the Miltonic needful divorce, which would allow divorce for the sole ground of the incompatibility of the husband and the wife.