|
|
|
REVIEWS
| Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis. By David R. Shumway (New York: New York University Press, 2003. xi plus 269 pp.).
|
| David Shumway, who is a professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, begins his study of modern relationships with theoretical grounding. Discourses provide the terms that people use to discuss their experience. In his introduction Shumway shows how the discussion of romantic love developed over the hundreds of years before the twentieth century. He speculates that some form of powerful desire between two individuals has transcultural characteristics, but by the middle ages in the West, "the discourse of romance had transformed passion from a pain that it was best to avoid into an experience to be sought." (15) The narrative form of romantic love always required an obstacle in the way of the lovers. Typically, the obstacle was the marriage of one of the lovers to someone else. |
1
|
|
Relying on historical work on the family, sexuality, courtship, and marriage Shumway shows that an important shift in the understanding and uses of romance appears in the late 18th and early 19th century. As property and alliance became less important motives for marriage, desire and choice came to predominate. Rather than an outlaw passion lurking on the outskirts of marriage, romance became the gatekeeper of marriage. Karen Lystra's work has shown that middle class women and men after 1830 took for granted that a lengthy, passionate courtship would lead to a love-match. Novels, the main carriers of the romantic discourse during the 19th century, dealt with courtship. Even though most of the popular works of American literature had to dispense with adulterous love as a plot device, obstacles of every other kind could prevent lovers from realizing their passion until the novel ended. But these novels of romance ended with marriage—they were never about marriage. |
. . . |
There are about 651 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
