Marriage Plot - Use in Novels

Use in Novels

Post-1980 deconstructionist criticism has highlighted how the plot was a profitable publishing and ideological production that served to ensure the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. The marriage plot was the liberal age's reformulation of the medieval romance, which excluded all but aristocratic ladies and their chivalrous knights from its epics of love. The marriage plot promises to liberate romance by making it available to greater sections of society: the bourgeoisie and to some extent, the working classes, who are relegated to comic relief in 16th- and 17th-century theater, suddenly become serious moral subjects. Today, few doubt the ennobling qualities of love, but giving that nobility of soul to anyone but nobles was an innovation to be found foundationally in the marriage plot, perhaps pioneered by Richardson's Pamela, wherein a lowly but virtuous maid is raised beyond her birth through her insistent chastity and her subsequent marriage to the lordly Mr. B.