Family, Marriage and the State in Romanticism’s Other Genres

Abstract

According to Michael McKeon’s influential thesis, there existed in England since at least the early seventeenth century a relationship between the ‘state as family’ and ‘family as state’ (110). Such a relationship endured into the eighteenth century but seems to disappear in the Romantic period. However, it may only seem to disappear because of the overrepresentation of certain genres in the understanding of Romanticism that became predominant over the course of the twentieth century, and until recently has largely defined the movement, particularly in North American scholarship. The apparent omission of the domestic in characteristic genres occurs not only in British Romanticism but in German Romanticism as well. I examine ideas about domesticity in the Romantic period, in order to analyze conjugal metaphors at work in genres where one would not expect to find them. In contrast to some excellent recent studies on the role of marriage in novels of the Romantic period, such as those by Ruth Perry and Jennifer Golightly, this chapter focuses on three other kinds of texts — lectures, a philosophical poem, and a political poem — to illustrate some of the ways in which Romantic scholarship in the twentieth century came to restrict its generic preferences so drastically, and the implications of such exclusion.¹ I align this study of marriage and genre with an inquiry into the particular kind of relationship between family and state that emerges in the period to argue for its continued presence, buried in genres in which we might not think to look.