Plotting Bigamy: Marital Surplus in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
February 28, 2025
Work-in-Progress Seminar
Start time: 12:00 p.m.
End time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: Valentine House, Room 201 (920 W. Franklin St)
Description
The crime of bigamy—in its essence a problem of too much marriage—holds a curious role in the history of marriage and divorce in England. Before the 1857 Divorce Act rendered divorce marginally more affordable and available to those outside of the moneyed elite, bigamy was one of the few marital crimes outside of adultery that one might use to pursue divorce proceedings against a wayward spouse. Bigamy also, however, often went unprosecuted, especially among the lower classes, where issues of property were of less concern; given the prohibitively expensive nature of divorce proceedings for most people, a consensual act of bigamy offered the clearest path forward for many who wanted to leave earlier marriages behind without the expense and hassle of a lawsuit. Bigamy, then, was both a crime and a panacea, as well as—according to scholar Erica Harth—the impetus for the passing of Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, so much better known to eighteenth-century scholars as primarily invested in parental consent rather than the legal issues arising from bigamous union.
In this talk, Dr. Gevlin will offer a brief history of bigamy in England that recenters it as a major legal issue of the eighteenth century, as well as a crucial element of the eighteenth-century novel's much-studied "marriage plot." Up until now, scholars of Victorian fiction have claimed the bigamy plot as a major component of the sensation novels of the 1860s and ‘70s, tracing the roots of these bigamy plots back to Jane Eyre (1847). Bigamy plots go much further back in the novel’s history, however, and are used to a range of narrative ends. Here, Dr. Gevlin will pair two examples of earlier bigamy plots: Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) and the anonymously-published The Woman of Colour (1808). Unlike their Victorian counterparts, these novels feature male bigamists whose bigamous crimes are accidental, shifting the emotional focus of the novels’ conclusions away from the expected marital bliss to the tragic outcomes of the sentimental heroes. Through an attention to male sympathy rather than criminal villainy, this particular iteration of the eighteenth-century bigamy plot therefore garners readerly compassion for men’s marital, as well as sexual, transgressions—compassion that worked to naturalize the sexual double-standard in the developing form of the novel and the culture that consumed it.
About the Speaker
Rachel Gevlin is a Teaching Assistant Professor of English as well as Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She specializes in the literature and culture of England’s long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on the history of the novel, women writers, and legal histories of marriage and divorce. Her current book project, Divorcing the Rake: Male Restraint and the Development of the Novel, examines the intersection of marital breakdown in eighteenth-century fiction with evolving attitudes toward men’s pre- and extra-marital sex in novels from Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison to the works of Jane Austen. In this project, she argues that novels from the 1750s through the early nineteenth century presented narratives of naturalized sexual difference that reinforced gendered biases inherent in divorce laws, promoting compassionate responses to men’s sexual transgressions both before and during marriage that were not afforded to women.