Comparing Marriage in Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, She Stoops to Conquer and Moll Flanders

Marriage is supposed to be the unity of two people as partners in an equal relationship. Yet, in the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale, they demonstrate that marriage is an inevitable battle for power and dominance. The Wife of Bath expresses the pain of marriage and that women are the leaders. Whereas, the Clerk believes that women should be obedient to men in a relationship. Despite the two contrasting opinions, both tales are an epitome of the respective points of view.

Ever since the beginning of time, love has played an enormous role among humans. Everyone feels a need to love and to be loved. Some attempt to fill this yearning with activities and possessions that will not satisfy – with activities in which they should not participate and possessions they should not own. In Andrew Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” the speaker encounters an emotion some would call love but fits better under the designation of lust for a woman. In contrast, the speaker of Robert Herrick’s poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” urges virgins to marry, to make a lasting commitment in which love plays a

When examining both Robert Browning’s, My Last Duchess, and Charlotte Mew’s, The Farmers Bride, the reader witnesses the poems positions of marriage in the natural world. Within both works, it is quite evident how each relationship is vastly different from the modern world, yet parallel it at the same time. Whether it be: the interactions between the two people or the conditions of the marriage, it is made more than apparent that both can be applied to modern conceptualizations of marriage.

Marriage has always been a convoluted subject to every era of time, especially when wealth is brought into the equation of it. During the Romantic Era, the state of marriage illustrated women’s continued inequality in society. For instance, women lacked legal equality once they entered marriage due to coverture, which is the condition of a woman during her married life, when she is under the law of being the authority of and protection of her husband. This basically entails that once a woman marries, she is property of her husband. In later decades, women would make great strides to gain legal recognition. However, during the late eighteenth century, Romantic feminists voiced more practical concerns rather than that of law (Feldman 280). Before the nation could acknowledge women as equals, husbands must first accept their wives as true partners in marriage. This was considered not only logical, but practical. Feminists located one of the sources of inequality within women’s own behavior and the methods they employed to gain husbands. Women had been taught to use beauty and love to attract husbands, but beauty and love are only temporary states. These states do not establish a solid foundation for a lasting marriage. As illustrated in Jane Austen’s novel Emma, a successful marriage is founded upon the match between two personalities, and not upon looks.

The medieval literary genre of romance deals, according to Cooper, with the “subject-matter concerning love or chivalry, or both.” (10) In Romances love and marriage, two matters often associated with each other, are treated as two entirely separate things. In Eliduc by Marie de France and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, marriage is not done out of love, and keeping chivalric codes and promises is paramount, even if it complicates extramarital affairs.

By the mid nineteenth century, couples started to consider sentimental adoration essential for marriage and construct their unions in light of friendship. The time 's fiction every now and again drew on adoration topics, while articles, expositions, and open discourses focused on common appreciation, correspondence, and sentiment as elements of good relational unions. Youthful seeking couples picked their own particular accomplices, and their letters concentrated on sentiment as opposed to on the down to earth

Varied Views on Love and Marriage Hanwen Wang The Christian notion of gender relations has a profound influence on Christian Europe. It can be best demonstrated by people’s views on love and marriage during different periods of time. Both Gregory and Marie have their own views on love and marriage that represents the cultural background in their societies. Although the views on love and marriage in The History of the Franks and Lais are both derived from The Bible, they are different among each other mainly in the acceptance of polygamy.

On page 2 paragraph 5, it starts off with the following sentences, "And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often, she had not. What did it matter!" Why marry someone in which you did not love? A small amount of affection will not last you the years of marriage that they are bound to. It is society, which includes the parents of the women during this the 19th century, that installed this mentality in these women that they must be married in order to have a source of life. They depended on these men to provide for them, and became completely dependent on the men they

It is especially significant that she was concerned with love being pure during a period in which marriage was a social contract meant to increase or maintain wealth or status. The emphasis on love demonstrates how both the troubadours and the trobairitz embraced the concept of courtly

In this paper I will compare the approach to marriage in the works “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer and “The Flea” by John Donne; in both cases it is a means to an end: in the first the old woman wants to get “the thing that most of all Women desire” and in the second the lover seeks “How little which his lover (thou) deniest him (me)” and uses an allusion to marriage to achieve this.

marriage. The idea of romantic marriages was born in the 18th century during the Enlightenment

During the nineteenth century, most marriages were purely based on statues and rank of the two who were to marry. For most marriage, the goal was to get as high up on the social rank; the best way that people thought to do this was through marriage. If there was someone who chose to marry for love and disregarded the social norms about marrying up in rank, they were looked at as happy but impulsive. For woman in particular, marriage was something that could either make or break their life. This why Elizabeth’s fear of becoming a spinster at twenty-nine was so significant. Marriage was everything for people back in the times of Persuasion.

Mary Poovey’s “The True English Style” is an easy to follow analysis of the themes and philosophical difference between marriage and love, particularly in the regency era, from Jane Austen’s novel Emma. Immediately Poovey states her thesis which does away with a presentism reading and discuss social/moral issues in the era of Jane Austen also known as the regency era.

The modern concept of love owes a great deal to the Humanist tradition of the Renaissance. The humanists focused on perfection and exaltation of this life as opposed to the afterlife. In Tristan and Iseult the seeds of Renaissance love are present in the Middle Ages. To the modern eye, it is a mystery how the period of the Middle Ages produced the seeds of the diametrically opposite Renaissance. Yet it is necessary to understand this transformation if one is to fully comprehend the forces that helped produce the modern consciousness. Courtly Love is a transitional concept that emerged in the Middle Ages. It is transitional because it emerged early and acknowledges God as the creator of love,

Moll and Mary recognize marriage is a way for economic profit; however, their rationale drawing to them to this conclusion is different. After Moll’s nurse dies, Moll is forced to be independent for