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Hierogamy versus Wedlock: Types of Marriage Plots and Their Relationship to Genres of Prose Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Evelyn J. Hinz
Evelyn J. Hinz*
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg
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Abstract

Because we conventionally think of marriage in social and moral terms, we tend to regard it as a subject practically indigenous to the novel. Hence a work like Wuthering Heights poses problems for the traditional genre critic, since while this work is concerned with marriage its conventions are not those of the novel. The usual tactic is to call Brontë's work a “romance,” but marriage is not compatible with the “romance” as the term is usually defined. It is thus important to recognize that there are two types of marriage plots in prose fiction: one indigenous to the novel, that might be called “wedlock”; another, indigenous to works like Wuthering Heights, that may be called “hierogamy.” Thus, works like Wuthering Heights should not be classified as “displaced novels” but as examples of an autonomous genre which for the present might be designated “mythic narrative.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 5 , October 1976 , pp. 900 - 913
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 Lawrence D. H., Women in Love (New York: Viking, 1960), p. 1.

2 Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (New York: Knopf, 1968), p. 181. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Penguin, 1963), p. 61.

3 Austen Jane, Pride and Prejudice (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 51. In his introduction to this edition Tony Tanner writes: Jane Austen “shows us energy and reason coming together, not so much as a reconciliation of opposites, but as a marriage of complementaries. She makes it seem as if it is possible for playfulness and regulation—energy and boundaries—to be united in fruitful harmony, without the one being sacrificed to the other. Since to stress one at the expense of the other can either way mean loss, both to the self and to society, the picture of achieved congruence between them offered in Pride and Prejudice is of unfading relevance” (p. 46).

4 “I have said nothing about Wuthering Heights because that astonishing work seems to me a kind of sport.” wrote Leavis; Brontë “broke completely, and in the most challenging way, both with the Scott tradition that imposed on the novelist a romantic resolution of his themes, and with the tradition coming down from the eighteenth century that demanded a plane-mirror reflection of the surface of ‘real’ life.” See The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1963), p. 27.

5 Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957). p. 304.

6 Brontë Emily, Wuthering Heights (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1931), pp. 65, 104, 172.

7 Austen Jane, Emma (Boston: Houghton, 1957), p. 381. Lionel Trilling, in his introduction to this edition, describes the theme of the novel as a movement from self-love to intelligent love (pp. v-xxiv).

8 The Longest Journey (London: Edward Arnold, 1947), p. 206.

9 Portrait of a Lady (New York: Scribners, 1908), ii, 18.

10 The Golden Bowl (London: Macmillan, 1923), p. 4.

11 Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1959), p. 51.

12 Landlocked (New York: NAL, 1970), pp. 93, 95.

13 Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1959), p. vii.

14 Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (New York: Harcourt, 1956). Haggard, She and King Solomon's Mines (New York: Random, 1957), p. 3.

15 The Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1961), p. 463.

16 Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inguiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946). Dickey, Deliverance (New York: Dell, 1971), p. 151.

17 The holiness of the marriage manifests itself in the meaning of Stern's surname, Star, just as his first name directs attention to D. H. Lawrence's John Thomas.

18 Apuleius, The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass, a new translation by Robert Graves (New York: Farrar, 1951), p. 100.

19 “It is to women that the sacred marriage with the Divine Bridegroom is a functional necessity; men do not require to be united with a divine bride to fulfill their functions. But every religion, from the most primitive to the highest, is pervaded with the idea that union with a god, a hieros gamos, . . . is a necessity to every woman.” Robert Briffaut, The Mothers, cited by M. Esther Harding in Woman's Mysteries: A Psychological Interpretation of the Feminine Principle as Portrayed in Myth, Story and Dreams (New York: Bantam, 1973), p. 110, n. 2.

20 Return of the Native (London: Macmillan, 1928), pp. 3–4.

21 “To the people who hold these beliefs it follows that as pregnancy does not depend on any human act of intercourse the woman herself is no way responsible. If she becomes pregnant it is the moon's doing and has no relation to sexuality.” M. Esther Harding, Woman's Mysteries, p. 25.

22 Lady Chatterley's Lover (New York: Grove, 1962), pp. 348, 374.

23 Surfacing (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972), p. 161.

24 Hemingway Ernest, For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: Scribners, 1940), p. 379. For a comprehensive discussion of the mythic dimensions of this work, see the essay by John J. Teunissen, “Jordan's Last Stand: For Whom the Bell Tolls as Mythic Narrative,” forthcoming in Dalhousie Review and originally read to the Association of Canadian Univ. Teachers of English, Univ. of Toronto, May 1974.

25 Otto Walter F., Dionysus, Myth and Cult, trans., introd. Robert Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1965), p. 65.

26 This essay is based upon a paper read at a joint session of the Association of Canadian Univ. Teachers of English and the Humanities Association of Canada, Univ. of Toronto, 30 May 1974. For financial assistance which enabled me to research and complete this study I am indebted to the Killam Foundation, whose funds are administered by the Canada Council.