The Longue Durée of Marriage
Chapter 2, “The Longue Durée of Marriage,” offers a formal explanation to the centrality of conjugal experience in the Victorian verse-novel, despite marriage’s representational challenge (as outlined by Kierkegaard in Either/Or). In Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House, the extended middle responsible for the poem’s length develops out of this difficulty. By using durational narrative to expand lyric forms of love poetry, Patmore had hoped to portray marriage’s duration without sacrificing the intensity of romantic ardor. But, as comparisons to Byron’s Don Juan suggest, the resultant compound proves unstable. This chapter uncovers the unsettling results of such extension by showing how the need for length introduces ideas of seriality, including the notion of a sequel to love in the afterlife through (potentially adulterous) marriage in heaven. A coda considers William Morris’s The Lovers of Gudrun, the longest and most novelistic tale from his immense Earthly Paradise.