Marriage and Violence : : The Early Modern Legacy / / Frances E. Dolan.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn Press eBook Package Complete Collection
• VerfasserIn: Dolan, Frances E.,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2010]; ©2008
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (248 p.) :; 1 illus.

Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what-or who-must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? We have inherited a model of marriage so flawed, Frances E. Dolan contends, that its logical consequence is conflict.Dolan ranges over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice literature, sensational accounts of "true crime," and late twentieth-century marriage manuals and films about battered women who kill their abusers. She reads the inevitable Taming of the Shrew against William Byrd's diary of life on his Virginia plantation, Noel Coward's Private Lives, and Barbara Ehrenreich's assessment in Nickel and Dimed of the relationship between marriage and housework. She traces the connections between Phillippa Gregory's best-selling novel The Other Boleyn Girl and documents about Anne Boleyn's fatal marriage and her daughter Elizabeth I's much-debated virginity. By contrasting depictions of marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and our own time, she shows that the early modern apprehension of marriage as an economy of scarcity continues to haunt the present in the form of a conceptual structure that can accommodate only one fully developed person. When two fractious individuals assert their conflicting wills, resolution can be achieved only when one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other.In an era when marriage remains hotly contested, this book draws our attention to one of the histories that bears on the present, a history in which marriage promises both intimate connection and fierce conflict, both companionship and competition.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- INTRODUCTION Benjamin Franklin's Enlightened Medicine -- PART I. THE COLONIST AND MEDICINE -- 1. Poor Richard's Medicine -- 2. In Praise of Exercise -- 3. The Smallpox Wars -- 4. The Citizen and the Hospital -- 5. Electricity and the Palsies -- 6. Electricity, Mental Disorders, and a Modest Proposal -- PART II. MEDICINE IN GREAT BRITAIN -- 7. Friends and Medical Connections -- 8. Scotland and the First American Medical School -- 9. Colds, the Weather, and the Invisible World -- 10. Fresh Air and Good Health -- 11. The Perils of Lead -- PART III. LE DOCTEUR IN FRANCE -- 12. French Medicine and Health Imperatives -- 13. The Folly of Mesmerism -- 14. From Music Therapy to the Music of Madness -- PART IV. OLD AGE, ILLNESSES, AND THE DOCTOR'S DEATH -- 15. Bifocals and the Aging Inventor -- 16. Skin and "Scurf " -- 17. The Gout as Your Friend? -- 18. A Debilitating Stone -- 19. The Limits of Medicine -- Epilogue: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter One: One Flesh, Two Heads: Debating the Biblical Blueprint for Marriage in the Seventeenth and Twentieth Centuries -- Chapter Two: Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the Legacy of Coverture -- Chapter Three: Fighting for the Breeches, Sharing the Rod: Spouses, Servants, and the Struggle for Equality -- Chapter Four: How a Maiden Keeps Her Head: Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, and the Perils of Marriage -- Afterword -- Notes -- Index -- Acknowledgments