The Afterlife of Marriage in Contemporary and Historical Fiction

Abstract

This paper examines the persistence and transformation of the marriage plot from nineteenth-century realist fiction to twenty-first-century experimental literature. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism and theoretical frameworks from feminist, queer, and affect studies, the research employs a qualitative comparative method to analyze how marriage functions as both a narrative form and an emotional economy. Through close readings of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening alongside contemporary works such as Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, Sarah Manguso’s Liars, Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, and Miranda July’s All Fours, the study finds that contemporary “post-marriage” novels fragment and reconfigure the traditional plot to represent emotional labor, gendered fatigue, and the collapse of romantic closure. These texts inherit the structure of the classical marriage narrative only to dismantle it through recursive form and affective dissonance. The findings suggest that the marriage plot endures not because it resolves desire, but because it continues to express the contradictions of intimacy, care, and autonomy in modern life. By linking narrative structure to emotional economies, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on gendered labor and the affective afterlife of marriage in contemporary fiction.