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.
Read more about this topic: Marriage Plot
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)