Eric C. Walker. Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen After War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8047-6092-8. Price: US $60.00

“When peace breaks out, the stakes of marriage top up spectacularly” (8), or so claims Eric C. Walker in Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism, a densely argued book that takes repetition as both a central trope for marriage and a key principle of its own structure. In Walker’s analysis, the end of England’s long war with France, which had suspended the rhythms of ordinary life, precipitated the enforcement of “the cultural command that marriage and peace march down the postwar aisle hand in hand” (83). For then as now, as he adduces through brief remarks on the so-called marriage equality movement, “marriage is the default human condition, the norm against which all else is a deviation” (19); after war, he argues, that norm reasserts itself with a vengeance. Whether you are for it, against it, or — in one of the book’s key terms — indifferent to it, marriage rules, figuring and actualizing the daily round that war interrupts. Moving back and forth between careful readings of Austen’s fiction, in which “the end of war” constitutes a dividing line between her earlier and later works, and Wordsworth’s post-Waterloo poetry, where he tracks “the unremarked turn to marriage” (10) in a set of mainly neglected poems as well as the C-stage Prelude of 1819, Walker demonstrates that each writer wages “a pervasively ironic contest with conjugality” (7), characterized by “a rhetoric of indifference that simultaneously represents and resists the narrowing of the promise of human freedom to the conjugal” (10). If marriage wins the battle, that is, it does so at a price. For marriage not only follows war in Walker’s account, but to achieve its triumph, marriage culture also wages a metaphorical war of its own, with its casualties littered across the Romantic landscape. The happy couple entering into wedlock requires “the death of all others” so that each partner to union may “disappear into the reciprocity of a single other” (18); thus actual and fictional “siblings must be shipped out to clear the way for the marriage settlement” (10) so that “in Wordsworth’s writing, the same diction, figures, and tropes work now sororally, now spousally” (126) as the sister-friend Dorothy gradually gives way to the wife-friend Mary. So, too, “as marriage increases, friendship decreases” in the normative conjugal dispensation: thus “[t]he birth of Mrs. Weston requires the death of Miss Taylor” (159). And not just from Emma Woodhouse’s point of view: “compulsory conjugality” (152) constitutes “a drawing together that is simultaneously a drawing apart … not unlike a form of death” (57) for those within the couple as for those outside it. Within this framework, marriage looks a lot like war by other means. Although, absent statistical or demographic evidence, Walker’s broad assertion regarding the triumph of marriage “after war” may appear a bit speculative, it makes a good deal of intuitive sense. His argument about “the empire of marriage” mines a vein worked most thoroughly by Ruth Perry’s Novel Relations (2004), which traces the supplanting of consanguinity by conjugality from the mid-eighteenth century to its Austenian Waterloo in Persuasion. Walker is, however, far less interested than Perry in the historical and economic dynamics that produced that shift or the gendered asymmetries between unequal partners to marriage that her work traces in some detail. Implicitly writing if not against than at a measured distance from materialist and historicist accounts, Walker’s touchstone figures for theorizing Romantic-era marriage, in Chapter 2, are Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Cavell. Although he also differs from Perry on some particulars — for example, in rightly insisting on the persistence of Mrs. Smith at Persuasion’s …