1 - Reading honeymoons

Summary

If, as Leo Tolstoy famously suggested, narrative interest inheres only in unhappy marriages, this might help to explain why the most famous honeymoon stories are stories about failure. One could come up with a canon of honeymoon narratives, real and fictional, all of which end in disaster. In the realm of fiction, perhaps the place to begin is with the shortest honeymoon: Victor Frankenstein's abortive trip to Évian, where his bride, Elizabeth Lavenza, is murdered and probably raped by the monster as Victor ponders the Alpine scenery that was to become so central to Victorian ideals of the wedding journey. The richly realistic honeymoon in George Eliot's Middlemarch is also, in conventional terms, a failure, as the newly married Dorothea Casaubon is found weeping in her hotel room by the young man who will later become her second husband. The honeymoons in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Daniel Deronda share elements of what I will be calling the honeymoon gothic: apparitions, spectral and otherwise, of other women and illegitimate sexual pasts; haunted jewels and symbolic caskets that in Tess become literal coffins; sleepwalking and female hysteria. The record of real-life stories is hardly more inspiring. The most famous story, with which we will have much to do, is the 1848 honeymoon of John and Effie Gray Ruskin, the subject of a variety of books, scholarly articles, and, most recently, a play.