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Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality (review)

to divorce: marriage must be dissoluble if better, truer matches are to follow from strained, unhappy ones” (53). The other chapter to explicitly couple its close reading with historical contexts is chapter four on Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. By considering these novels’ representation of marriage in light of the impact of slavery, particularly the denial of the right of slaves to marry, Pines illuminates a shift in representations of marriage by black women writers. Immediately after slavery, there was an emphasis on the public gains of marriage: “marrying, like voting, demonstrated newly won freedom, citizenship, and equality; marriage confirmed and showcased black civility and morality within a racist society” (76). In the early twentieth-century the emphasis shifted to the private and potentially restrictive aspects of marriage. Nonetheless, Pines argues, “When the modernist novels of black women writers imply that the problem with marriage can be solved by the free expression of female desire, unconstrained by racial ideologies...the works unwittingly reinforce the very institution they intend to critique” (78). Each of the book’s five chapters is anchored in plot and character analysis that exposes how “the intent to critique the marriage imperative (the societal pressure for women, especially, to marry) and the marriage plot (the narrative of courtship and betrothal) results in the reinforcement of the same” (21). Like the marriage plot itself, this central thesis begins to feel inescapable, as Pines reiterates it in each novel discussed, though the diverse forms that this paradox takes enliven the analysis. A chapter on Women in Love argues that, though Lawrence celebrates sexual freedom that would seem to undermine heterosexual monogamy, the novel nonetheless bolsters the institution of marriage, because the characters choose to exercise sexual choices under the privacy and protection that marriage provides. A chapter on Woolf’s Between the Acts argues that while the novel begins with critiquing marriage as a sociallyconstructed institution, its closure reinstates marriage as natural and life-affirming. The Marriage Paradox offers a corrective to definitions of modernism that emphasize its disruptions of nineteenth-century literary and cultural traditions but neglect the ways that they reinstitute them. The importance of this study for how we live today is suggested in the introduction and fully developed in the book’s lucid and perceptive conclusion in which Pines discusses current debates about samesex marriage. While many who oppose changing marriage laws to allow same-sex unions argue that such changes would undermine the institution of marriage, Pines contends that the legitimization of same-sex marriage would affirm the marriage norm, increasing the pressure on single individuals to marry, and decreasing the pressure for legal benefits for non-married relationships. By revealing “how a critique of marriage can paradoxically contribute to a commitment to the institution” (120), Pines asks us to realize “how marriage gets reaffirmed when we aren’t looking, and even when we are” (128).