The Victorians, as Kathy Alexis Psomiades demonstrates in Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity, not only “made sex contractual” but also made “contract sexual” (89). In this book, Psomiades offers a much-needed reexamination of Michel Foucault's claims that sexuality organized modernity by presenting the trajectory of Victorian anthropology as a mediation of the marriage plot. Victorian anthropology increasingly placed sexual choice at the core of political organization. In mid-nineteenth-century Britain—a context in which fictional form was a major channel of ideas—marriage was beginning to be understood anthropologically and historically. Anthropology served less to manage anxiety about sex—a familiar framing of Victorian scientific narratives—than to denaturalize it. Victorian anthropology increasingly temporalized traditional marriage and family structures, which now looked culturally and biologically contingent, while making contemporary women's sexuality an engine of modernization. This book, drawing its title from anthropologist John McLennan's Primitive Marriage (1865), demonstrates that if the nineteenth-century novel was already “all about feminine choice, … and how these choices defined bourgeois women as worthy subjects,” “anthropology magnified this choice” (78) as the origin of liberal political organization. This newly central understanding of sexual desire allowed theorists of political life to reframe collective belonging as the development of voluntary association and consent out of a more “primitive,” rapacious era of violent capture.
Psomiades presents anthropology's logic as pivoting on sexual difference rather than racial otherness, a framing that centers around post-Matrimonial Causes Act, post-Reform Bill questions about the status of women as economic, political, desiring agents, which seemed to precipitate anthropology's investment in “the archaic nature of heterosexuality” (41): Psomiades argues, “in a culture of gender-neutral contractual actors, married women stand out as those whom archaic laws imprison in the past” (56). This recognition reignited interest in gothic and sensational plots now pressed into (somewhat) realist service, from The Eustace Diamonds (1871), The Moonstone (1867), Daniel Deronda (1876), Phoebe Junior (1876), and Portrait of a Lady (1881) to She (1886) and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1890/1), all novels in which modernity appears unevenly distributed across narrative time and character systems.
While other scholars have demonstrated Victorian fiction writers’ engagement with the formal and conceptual resources of anthropology, or have read Victorian writing as presaging psychoanalytical framings of inward experience as connected to the collective fate of our species, Psomiades carefully tracks a dialogue about consent's history that developed between fiction and anthropology, and leads readers through multidisciplinary debates about human cultural change, evolving decade by decade in the second half of the nineteenth century. In making a contribution to the literature and science field, where the Charles Darwin of Origin of Species predominates, she offers a much more nuanced picture of a proto-sexological line of British thought that includes The Descent of Man, which is less commonly accounted for. Psomiades thoroughly showcases the literary structure of anthropology, in which Victorian marriage becomes the telos of anthropological accounts of human development which often evoked fictive social groups; anthropologists including Henry Maine, McLennan, Edward Tylor, and James Fraser—along with Herbert Spencer and Darwin—tell what Psomiades terms “modernity stories” (10) that theorize and require women's desire in order to explain human cultural development, as if adhering to the already recognizable tropes of the Victorian novel's marriage plot. However for Maine, patriarchal power is the origin of the social, for McLennan and others who followed, there was a time before patriarchal culture, a claim that demands we observe the Victorians’ growing awareness of the contingency of their own sexual mores even as Victorian marriage was cast as history's telos.
While reading anthropology's marriage plots, Psomiades also nuances the anthropological imagination of Victorian novels, shedding remarkable light on how a trajectory of novels concerned with jewels, knives, and the traffic in women also constituted a theory of sexuality by probing consent as widening the gap between sexuality and reproduction. The novels largely represent the failure of modernity to emerge completely from a prehistoric tyranny, especially for women. The need as the century went by to be able to account more directly for sexual choice in fiction put pressure on literary form and disrupted the very possibility of marriage plots which depend on choice and consent. Chapter 1 reads The Eustace Diamonds as an anthropological update of Vanity Fair and The Moonstone, in which women's economic agency remains in excess of sexual agency. Chapter 2 offers an extremely convincing reading of Daniel Deronda alongside Herbert Spencer's sociology that refuses the commonly held idea that Eliot transmutes political and social questions into sexual ones; while the two authors are commonly paired, Psomiades convincingly shows that Eliot's working through of the relationship between sexual choice and national identity—arising from self-interest and yet yielding a collective identity—reflects debates in anthropology more than any other discourse and brilliantly explains the deadlock Gwendolen faces at the novel's end. Chapter 3 further nuances the rising idea of consent by showing how Portrait of a Lady and The Heavenly Twins (1893) reflect Darwin's presentation of sexual taste as the origin of aesthetics. The fourth chapter considers the “Goddess plot” in late-century novels like She and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which grapple much more explicitly with the rift between the possibilities of sexual desire and the pragmatics of reproduction. The striking and efficient account of the latter novel's engagement with James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890) makes especially forceful use of anthropology's historicization of sex as a part of an uneven late-Victorian modernity. As Psomiades ultimately argues, “The mythic plot erases the features of choice, consent, agency that mark the realist marriage plot” and produces extremes of violence: “the lever that lies at the root of all things human can, apparently, kill you” (186).
The fit between the anthropological theories and the novels here is so compelling as to emphasize how fully the characters themselves index what their authors understood as stages of cultural evolution. This approach, then, showcases how little novels ultimately push back against anthropology's conflation of women's agency with biology. Without explicitly highlighting this consequence, Primitive Marriage problematizes characterological interiority, like recent work by Megan Ward, S. Pearl Brilmyer, and others that takes novels seriously as theories of character and action. Characters come to animate what evolved, over the course of the century, into increasingly deterministic positions on sexual choice as the crux of the modern, a movement with the potential to diminish the existential and psychological texture of narrative—its interest what it feels like to experience the erasure of the choice one thought one had. Even while contending against the teleological impulses of their theories, Primitive Marriage shows, Victorian thinkers and writers align against the lived experiences of the troubled women they imagined. If nonconsensual capture was ostensibly a thing of the historical past, representational capture remained all too present.
