...the century, there developed a democracy of the intellect, and a general culture of civility, in which genteel women were key participants. (1) On the other hand, alongside this increasingly urban and public culture, advice literature on married life was working hard to erect firm boundaries between public and private and to construct a domestic space that was sealed off from the public sphere. (2)

Jurgen Habermas has analyzed the distinction between public and private in dialectical terms, arguing that the construction of a civil society in which public opinion could function democratically depended on the simultaneous construction of an autonomous private subject nurtured within the bourgeois family, an institution that "was the scene of a psychological emancipation that corresponded to the political-economic one." (3) While Habermas also acknowledges that the bourgeois family's image of itself as emancipated functioned as a fictional construction, since "the family was not exempted from the constraint to which bourgeois society like all societies before it was subject," (4) it is the fictional construction of models of intimacy within advice literature--its sustained impulse to shape and mold the experience of the married couple in terms of a utopian private sphere--that interests us here.

As the definition of marriage was undergoing an important paradigmatic shift--from the seventeenth-century conception of marriage based on the model of sovereign and subject to one based on mutuality and companionship--the distinction between public and private was becoming more critical. As Michael McKeon has argued in relation to Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), rather than being conceptualized in terms of the state, marriage was now being defined in terms of "the reconciliation of love and marriage, the reconception of marriage as a public ceremony that is taken primarily to confirm the prior and private fact of love." (5) This new privileging of the category of private desire as the condition for the public ceremony of marriage made marriage a kind of testing ground for the changing relationship between the two spheres.

In light of the distinction between the spheres, Mark Wigley has argued that at least from the Renaissance onwards the institution of marriage has been conceived of as fundamentally spatial rather than temporal: "Marriage is the reason for building a house. The house appears to make a space for the institution. But marriage is already spatial. It cannot be thought outside the house that is its condition of possibility before its space." (6) For Wigley, all buildings are engaged in "a sexuality of space," so that "spaces literally produce the effect of gender." (7) While the house has perhaps always been the defining space of marriage, in the eighteenth century the physical space of the home was taking on a new significance, in terms of what John E. Crowley has called "the architectural enhancement of domesticity"; (8) not only was there a considerable increase in consumer spending that enabled the development of a new consumer-oriented relationship to the domestic sphere, but this also led to a new emphasis on the idea of material comfort within the home. (9)

In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The New Heloise (1761), for example, the architecture of comfort is privileged over the grandiose quality of aristocratic buildings. Upon visiting Clarens, Saint-Preux writes to Milord Edward:

[I]t is no longer a house made to be seen, but to be lived in. [The masters of this house] have walled up long rows of rooms to change doors that were awkwardly situated, they have divided rooms that were too large so as to have lodgings better laid out. They have replaced old-fashioned and sumptuous pieces of furniture with simple and convenient ones. Everything here is agreeable and cheerful; everything bespeaks plenty and elegance, nothing reeks of wealth and luxury. (10)

Here, comfort and convenience point to a moral as well as an architectural transformation, as Clarens is also housing the newly married couple of Wolmar and Julie. As Rousseau's novel reveals, architecture played a key role in the ways in which marriage and domestic space were being rethought. (11)

This essay will analyze the extent to which, over the course of the eighteenth century, advice literature "privatized" the married subject through, for example, its metaphorical use of the architecture of the home, and to what extent it troubled these domestic boundaries. (12) In other words, did it have a coherent vision of what this new private married subject should look like, and did it provide an effective template for the transformed relations between husband and wife? For Nancy Armstrong, there is a spatializing of domestic relations along gendered lines that is reinforced by the political and novelistic discourses of the period. Armstrong analyzes how gendered bourgeois social spaces were formed with the beginnings of capitalism and the separation of public and private spheres. For Armstrong, the psychology ascribed to femaleness and its dissociation from public considerations such as birth and status, were crucial to the construction of modern bourgeois subjectivity, so that the domestic woman, rather than the political man, became the template for "the modern individual." (13) Spatial categories therefore form a central, if implicit, dimension of Armstrong's analysis, in that it was the woman's inscription within domestic space--and the accompanying literature defining these inscriptions--that produced a redefinition of sociosexual and economic relations.

Although much advice literature of the period would seem to confirm Armstrong's interpretation, Amanda Vickery in her more recent analysis of genteel women in the North of England, questions contemporary theorists' reliance on the public/private distinction, arguing that over the course of the eighteenth century, not only were women involved in the public social sphere to an unprecedented degree, but also that the house itself was not "in any simple sense a private, domestic sphere." (14) This would suggest that print culture, and advice literature in particular, was not so much reflecting material reality as attempting either to create an alternative, idealized domestic realm, or concomitantly to offer an anxious response to the available opportunities for eighteenth-century women.

While eighteenth-century advice literature on marriage made liberal use of the space of the house to erect its ideological parameters, it was sending out a complex code of messages in terms of the relationship between inside and outside, female and male, and private and public. Through a closer analysis of the rhetorical strategies of advice literature on marriage, we will see that there was a range of ways of thinking about the emerging bourgeois space of marriage, a range that reflected the complexities of trying to redefine the meaning of the institution. (15)

Advice literature is defined here in its broadest sense: in the emerging print culture of the eighteenth century, fictional narratives could often have a didactic intent, while conduct literature frequently used fictional models to convey a particular moral message. Different forms of writing on marriage were connected through their use of spatial imagery, their interest in boundary formation, and the resulting tensions to which this gave rise. Through representative examples of published sermons, conduct books, periodicals, and short stories published in journals, we can begin to see the construction of a new ideology of domesticity and a concomitant destabilization of this ideology. Even as the definition of marriage was...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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