1 - Intimacies of Domestic Life: Love and Marriage

Summary

IN THIS CHAPTER I explore how the notion of nature's dualities, developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), influenced concepts of marriage; it also delineates views of love and marriage in domestic fiction. In the center are the social and emotional dimensions of domestic life around 1800, where everyday relationships, their underlying value systems, and their behaviors are negotiated. We note the discursive creation of the new Liebesehe (marriage based on love) described by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann and the fading of arranged marriages in the educated middle class. In the Liebesehe, wives were tasked with transforming a fleeting erotic attraction—celebrated in fiction, such as Goethe's Leiden des jungen Werther—into the stability of marriage. Yet in the examined texts we see a wide range of visions for marriage: some embrace the vibrant cultural discourse of love, celebrating love as the foundation of marriage; others adhere to more pragmatic and sober views of marriage as tender friendship, Seelengemeinschaft, mutual support, and a mode of social integration into the larger community. Overall, what Arlie Russel Hochschild in a different context has termed “emotion work”—the management of one's own feelings and the work done to express them in a manner that enhances social relationships—is performed by wives, who are tasked with socializing intimacy by generating and tending to the emotional bonds with their husbands.

By the end of the eighteenth century, religion no longer occupied the central place in life and social structures had become more complex, less predictable, and less transparent; stratified society organized by estates transformed into a functionally differentiated society, and individuals sought new forms of constancy. The Liebesehe—one of the foundational pillars of domesticity—was one way to provide stability for the bourgeoisndividual. Love provided a new way of orienting oneself within a cosmos increasingly more devoid of the security of a firm belief system. Thus personal happiness in the here and now gained in importance and became the aspirational social norm and cultural value, and the supreme path to self-realization.