Finding happiness: interfaith marriage in British literature, 1745-1836

Abstract

This dissertation examines narrative representations of interfaith marriage in British texts from the 1740s to the 1830s. I argue that these texts employ different interfaith marriage configurations to explore conflicting ideas about the conditions under which happiness can and should arise. Rather than debating precisely what happiness is, the texts consider where happiness is found. To do this, they use a social formation that goes essentially nameless in the period: the term interfaith marriage and synonyms such as mixed marriage are almost never used by the texts themselves, despite the fact that a critical mass of narratives features spouses or potential spouses that belong to different faiths. The namelessness of the phenomenon suggests that the texts are less interested in the happiness of interfaith marriage per se than they are in using these formations to stake out positions on other issues relating to happiness. Catholic-Protestant marriage narratives are concerned with the relationship between private happiness and public order; Jewish-Christian marriage narratives explore the relationships between wealth, social stability, and happiness; Muslim-Christian marriage narratives look at the links between happiness and monogamy; and Hindu-Christian marriage narratives address conflicting ideas about happiness and intimacy. These four pairings provide the structure around which the dissertation's chapters are organized, and each chapter offers groups of texts as evidence. While all of the texts discussed here are narratives, their genres vary: the chapters offer a mix of novels, short stories, plays, narrative poems, and nonfiction. Some of the texts, such as Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, are well known, while others, such as Eliza Norton's Alcon Malanzore, are considerably more obscure. The number and variety of texts that tackle the interfaith marriage narrative formation reveal the extent to which happiness as a concept was and remains overdetermined, contested, and in flux.