Marriage plot

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Marriage plot is a term used, often in academic circles, to categorize a

Use in novels

Post-1980 deconstructionist criticism has highlighted how the plot was a profitable publishing and ideological production that served to ensure the ascendancy of the

Film, which supplanted the novel as the most popular narrative form in the 20th century, did not abandon this innovation of the novel. Rather, the marriage plot has enjoyed a continued efflorescence, visible to this day in the popular film form known as the "romantic comedy". At its most formulaic, critics have asserted, the conventions of the marriage plot, with the cathartic closure that its marriage ending delivers to its believers, ultimately renounces politics and engagement in the world in favor of privacy and domestic bliss. We may see this, for instance, in the film You've Got Mail, which resolves the political opposition between mega-bookstore boss Tom Hanks and bookshop-around-the-corner owner, Meg Ryan, by uniting its lead characters in a union that effaces the unequal distribution of capital that originally put them at odds.

References

• Shaffer, Julie A. “The Ideological Intervention of Ambiguities in the Marriage Plot: Who Fails Marianne in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility?” A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin. Eds. Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 128–51.
• "Foiling the Marriage Plot", Review of Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction, Joseph Allen Boone, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 1. (Autumn, 1990), pp. 111–114. (Source: membership required)

See also

• The Marriage Plot, a 2011 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides.