Marriage, Desire and Independence

Marriage is the central institution of the love plot in English fiction. From Austen to McEwan, novelists have used marriage — its promise, its reality, its failures — as the primary lens through which to examine love, desire, gender, and social power. This lesson examines how the set texts represent marriage across two centuries, tracing the evolving relationship between love, desire, and female autonomy.

---

The Marriage Plot

The marriage plot — the narrative pattern in which a novel's action drives toward marriage as its resolution — is the dominant structure of English fiction from Richardson to Austen to the Victorians. Understanding this convention is essential because the set texts both use and subvert it.

Marriage as Happy Ending

In the traditional marriage plot, marriage is the reward — the achievement of romantic love confirmed by social and legal union:

Persuasion ends with Anne and Wentworth's reunion and engagement. Austen presents this as a genuine triumph — the restoration of a love that was wrongly abandoned:

"All the privilege I claim for my own sex... is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone." (Persuasion, Chapter 23, Anne's dialogue)