Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy by Frances E. Dolan (review)

REVIEWS 279 reimagined, Davis asks her readers to consider “the now” and how it is constituted in its conceptualization (and periodization) of the past. SOS BAGRAMYAN, English, Indiana University Frances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press 2008) 235 pp. Frances E. Dolan’s Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy is an ambitious book that centers around the relationship between the early modern and the modern, and the continuities that have endured through time, in spite of all those that have not. Dolan embarks on a journey that attempts to assess what is the source of our contradictory ideas about marriage, in which “husband and wife both are and are not construed as equals,” and what assumptions this imposes , enables, or sanctions between spouses (100). By contrasting the early modern period with the twentieth and early twenty-first century, Dolan intends to expose and disrupt the continuities that exist between them, emphasizing how the early modern English construction of marriage still shapes how we conceptualize it in the U.S. today. For example, she highlights the current debate on same-sex marriage, linking those that oppose it to the early modern legacy and its resistance to a move towards equality (20). To bridge these two distant settings the book underlines the enduring influence of the Reformation on America tracing it from the colonies up to the present, and to support this somewhat controversial focus on continuities it also includes a defense of what Dolan terms a presentist historicism approach. This approach, as she explains, attempts to “denaturalize present arrangements by uncovering their roots in the past ... [dwelling] on the connections between present and past so as to estrange the present rather than domesticate the past” (17). Certainly, there are many possible pitfalls to this practice, not the least of which is incurring in anachronisms and generalizations, yet Dolan masterfully treads this perilous path by carefully anchoring her observations on historical research and in-depth textual analysis, thus providing an insightful juxtaposition between these two periods. From the onset, Dolan identifies three dominant models of marriage which she argues were inherited from early modern England (1550–1700): marriage as hierarchy, as fusion, and as contract (2). Through a meticulous comparison, she goes on to expose the inherent contradictions that each model presents, while revealing their conceptual similarity—an underlying economy of scarcity that promotes hierarchy, mistrust of equality, and violence. At the heart of Dolan ’s argument are the notions that “marriage is an economy of scarcity in which there is only room for one full person” (3), and that by logical extension this generates a conflict which can only be resolved when one spouse “absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other” (4). Consequently, the legacy of marriage inherited from the early modern period is conceived as a violent battle for survival , where only one can achieve selfhood and the other must be exterminated, providing a new interpretation of the often romanticized notion that marriage transforms two into one. The term violence, however, is not limited to the physical realm, but rather pertains to how the language and modes used to depict marriage, and the very process that is marriage, can enact yet another kind of violence. The three figures of marriage that according to Dolan endeavor unsuccess- REVIEWS 280 fully to finesse the contradictions that exists in the above mentioned models are: the impossible biblically inspired ideal of marriage as the creation of “one flesh” where the husband represents the head; the common law fiction of coverture where two become one legal agent through the husband’s subsumption of the wife into himself; and the comic tradition (plays, jokes, ballads), which although it imagines spouses as both separate and equal, represent this equality as a source of struggle for mastery (3). An analysis of each is provided throughout the four chapters that make up this brief but insightful book. The first chapter is dedicated to a comparison between sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Puritan marital advice and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century American evangelical literature, which coincide in portraying marriage as a fusion of two into “one flesh,” among other somewhat disturbing similarities...