Love, Honor, and Obedience: Fashionable Women and the Discourse of Marriage in the Early Eighteenth Century

Abstract

To speak plainly, I am very sorry for the forlorn state of Matrimony, which is as much ridicul'd by our Young Ladys as it us'd to be by young fellows; in short, both Sexes have found the Inconveniencys of it, and the Apellation of Rake is as genteel in a Woman as a Man of Quality…. You may Imagine we marry'd Women look very silly; we have nothing to excuse our selves but that twas done a great while ago and we were very young when we did it (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to the Countess of Mar).In this letter to her sister, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu expresses what was in the early eighteenth century a commonplace view of wedlock. Marriage, she writes, is such an object of mockery that even women have lost interest in it and married women like herself must “excuse” themselves for their unfashionable behavior. Obviously, Lady Mary's tone is light, but she expresses ideas that were being argued quite seriously in a variety of circles. Many of her contemporaries believed that marriage was deteriorating into a business contract. Rather than being respected as an institution ordained by God and necessary to social stability, the argument went, marriage was an object of mockery, used only as a cynical means of increasing wealth. Brides were being bought and sold with no regard for their future happiness or compatibility with their husbands. Most famously, perhaps, this notion was exploited in William Hogarth's series,Marriage à la Mode(1745), its very title embodying the idea that mercenary marriage was a new fashion.