Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The great disinheritance
- 2 Fathers and daughters
- 3 Sister-right and the bonds of consanguinity
- 4 Brotherly love in life and literature
- 5 Privatized marriage and property relations
- 6 Sexualized marriage and property in the person
- 7 Farming fiction: Arthur Young and the problem of representation
- 8 The importance of aunts
- 9 Family feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Sexualized marriage and property in the person
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The great disinheritance
- 2 Fathers and daughters
- 3 Sister-right and the bonds of consanguinity
- 4 Brotherly love in life and literature
- 5 Privatized marriage and property relations
- 6 Sexualized marriage and property in the person
- 7 Farming fiction: Arthur Young and the problem of representation
- 8 The importance of aunts
- 9 Family feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I was ever of opinion that the honest man who married and brought up a large family did more service than he who continued single and only talked of population.
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), p. 1.There is also a love of Natural Relations, different from the rest, which grows up with us insensibly, from our infancy. And the mutual love of Marriage is distinct from all the rest; and therefore when People are call'd upon to love, they are call'd upon to pay that Affection that is peculiar to the Relation they stand in to such a Party.
William Fleetwood, The Relative Duties of Parents and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants (1705), pp. 297–8.It is a stock-jobbing age, every thing has its price; marriage is traffic throughout; as most of us bargain to be husbands, so some of us bargain to be cuckolds; and he would be as much laughed at, who preferred his love to his interest, at this end of the town, as he who preferred his honesty to his interest at the other.
Henry Fielding, The Modern Husband (1731), Act 2 Scene 6 (Complete Works, vol. X, p. 35).In traditional societies, kinship and sexuality are mutually constitutive. The sexual behavior of young adults determines who will be kin to whom in the next generation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Novel RelationsThe Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818, pp. 236 - 287Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004