Most analyses of modernity assume that marriage is socially atavistic, that is to say, that it exists despite modernity. Thus, feminists might theorize that women continue to marry because the promises of modern liberatory fields of subjectivity and economic agency have not been kept, or because marriage's structures remain hidden by ideology. One argument attributes marriage's persistence to its derivation from male exchange of women and a system of private property; marriage continues to exist because it is interarticulated with capitalism. In other conceptions of the relationship between heterosexual marriage and modernity, marriage provides, both ideologically and materially, an alternative to or refuge from the unrelenting alienation and economic pressure of industrial modernity.

Modernist literary criticism generally characterizes the whole complex of narrative structures and styles organized around institutional marriage as something that modernism eschews. Sentimental style is the most obvious of this collection of elements; though its excesses may be exchanged for those of “écriture feminine,” these are nonetheless imagined to run counter to a marriage plot, with its teleological, conventional, calculable and realistic social infrastructures.