Connubial Fictions

Abstract

Connubial Fictions explores law and marriage in the United States as seen through the lens of American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The literature explored begins chronologically with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy, published in 1892, and spans to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, the last being Jack, published in 2020. In between, the chapters collectively engage many novels, plays, short stories, and a memoir, including Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), James Allen McPherson’s “Hue and Cry” (1968) and “Elbow Room” (1975), Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man (1974), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991), Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (2003), and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015). The topics explored range widely: the true ownership of a marriage, how investments involved in a marriage compare to investments in a business, how the denial of marriage rights affected same-sex couples, how marriage rights changed queer aesthetics, the prospects for truth in marriage, the constraints and possibilities for immigrant marriages, how procreation norms affect childless marriages, the challenges of interracial intimacy and marriage, the paucity of modern literature depicting interracial marriages, the nature of separations before no-fault divorce, the divorce revolution and the best interests of children of divorce, and the problem of equality and alimony.