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Feminism, fiction and contract theory: Trollope's 'He Knew He Was Right.'
Criticism, Summer, 1994 by Wendy Jones
Thus the appeal to the principle of contract, which was seen as asserting female subjectivity in the face of its legal denial, pervades the discourse of women's rights throughout the nineteenth century. Activists repeatedly point out that marriage laws violate the allegedly contractual nature of marriage. In 1825 (early on in the struggle), William Thompson derided the contradiction in the phrase "marriage contract": "Each man yokes a woman to his establishment and calls it a contract. Audacious falsehood! A contract! Where are any of the attributes of contracts ... to be found in this transaction? ... Can even both the parties, man and woman, by agreement alter the terms as to the indissolubility and inequality, of this pretended contract?(10)" In 1855, Caroline Norton, urging the reform of the common law, similarly argued that marriage laws fail to evince the contractual logic that the wedding ceremony purports: "As her husband, he has a right to all that is hers; as his wife, she has no right to anything that is his. As her husband, he may divorce her (if truth or false swearing can do it): as his wife, the utmost "divorce" she could obtain, is permission to reside alone, --married to his name." Marriage is a contract, a "civil bond," for the husband, but not for the wife, for whom it is an "indissoluble sacrament."(11) And in 1869, on he eve of the passage of the
first Married Women's Property Act, John Stuart Mill observed that although "the most frequent case of voluntary association, next to marriage, is partnership in business," marriage laws do not follow the laws of contract. "If the law dealt with other contracts as it does with marriage, it would ordain that one partner should administer the common business as if it were his private concern" and "that the others should have only delegated powers."(12)
If married love provided a framework for articulating marriage as a contractual ideal, then conversely, a contractual ideal enabled feminists to associate women's rights with marital happiness: "the highest possible union" between husband and wife is intrinsically a corollary of contract.(13) Of course, an ideal of marital love could be used to support conservative interests as well. Lord Penzance, who led the opposition to married women's property rights in the House of Lords, speculated that if a married woman could own property and was therefore able to participate in business, a man might be startled by the information that his wife had determined to set up a rival shop in his neighbourhood" or "still more startled at hearing that she had entered into partnership with her cousin, who need not be a woman."(14) But feminists disputed the logic of such claims, arguing that if love is by definition freely given, then domestic relations, founded on and sustained by love, ought to be voluntary rather than coerced: only then, as William Thompson notes, will marriage provide the "delights" of "esteem, of reiendship, of intellectual and sympathetic intercourse."(15) Similarly, Cobbe argues that oppressive laws for women are in fact incompatible with wifely love and devotion. If men believe "that a woman's whole life and being, her soul, body, time, property, thought, and care ought to be given to her husband" and that "nothing short of such absorption in him and his interests makes her a true wife," then denying women their rights undermines rather than furthers this goal:
