Comedy Goes Novel: Of the Inception of the Theatrical Marriage Plot in the Eighteenth-century Novel

Abstract

An intriguing phenomenon can be observed between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth: the extensive use of the marriage plot in mainstream British novels. Jane Austen is probably the name that comes to mind when thinking about the marriage finale as the point in which diegetic closure and narrative structure neatly converge. Looking back to the second half of the eighteenth century might yield a different angle on the story, however. Although Austen takes the marriage finale to its peak by resorting to it seriously and ironically at the same time, the inception of the marriage plot in the novel can be traced back to the second half of the century. Stage comedy had adopted the marriage plot as a tacit norm since at least the Restoration. By the eighteenth century, it was so widespread as to warrant mockery. This article teases the hypothesis that it was the flourishing of the novel, fostered by the relative decay in theatrical innovation at a time when the theatre was the favourite literary medium for widespread instruction and entertainment, that promoted the introduction of the marriage plot into the novel.