Home Types of source 18th-century Men and women compared
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Detail from The Wedding of Stephen Bechingham and Mary
Cox (1729) by William Hogarth. Source: Wikipedia. Click on the image to see an enlarged version.
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Courtship, marriage, and the relationship between the sexes
This area of vocabulary is one that might be thought to be of particular interest to women
writers, for at least two reasons:
- the importance of courtship and marriage to women in constructing their family and
social identities
- the fact that courtship and marriage are the characteristic subject matter of novels,
i.e. the literary genre in which women most frequently engaged, whether as writers or
readers.
EOED's reading of female-authored texts of the long eighteenth century has noted a number of
examples of vocabulary relating to this subject missed by the OED. These examples
often take the form of specialized senses of words which, in certain contexts, have a clear
specific application to the relationship between the sexes. In other instances, where a term
to do with love or marriage has been successfully identified and illustrated in
OED, female writers are not infrequently recorded as first users of the term. (As
with terms relating to needlework and housekeeping, it is difficlt to say which is more
likely: that women were indeed the first to use the terms concerned, or that the
lexicographers and readers were more inclined to identify the terms in female-authored
texts; see discussion on previous
page.)
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Detail from Marriage à-la-mode: 1. The Marriage
Settlement (1743) by William Hogarth. Source: Wikipedia. Click on the image to see an enlarged version.
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Clearly, courtship and marriage are important to both genders and it would be absurd to
contend that male writers did not use such terms. On the contrary, during the eighteenth
century (as well as most other periods), the economic and transactional dimension of
marriage was of particular concern to men, given that as heads of families, and owners of
family wealth, men usually took considerable interest in and responsibility for arranging
family alliances.
Often, then, terms used by women writers, which have a specific sexual or gender connotation
not picked up by OED, can be found in male writers too. The verb dispose,
for example, is used several times in Penelope Aubin's novels to mean 'dispose in marriage'.
This sense of the word is not recognized in OED. However it can easily be found in
male-authored texts as well: a swift search of ECCO turns up a prior instance in a play by
Thomas Southerne. Probably the sense was also current, whether in male or female authors,
earlier still (on the Aubin and Southerne examples see here).
As noted in our discussion of Aubin's use of the term, this sense of dispose also
turns up in Austen's Mansfield Park, and Austen's writing in particular contains a
number of comparable instances of specific courtship or marital senses either under-recorded
in OED or missed altogether:
- alliance ('union by marriage'): this definition is merged with others in
OED s.v. sense 1. Cf. Emma, I.15.132: 'I need not so totally despair of an
equal alliance, as to be addressing myself to Miss Smith!'
- attach ('attract the attachment of for the purposes of marriage'): this
specific sense is not identified in OED s.v. sense 7b, although the Dictionary
prints two Austen quotations illustrating it
- distinguish: cf. Mansfield Park, II.vii.238: 'Sir Thomas...could not
avoid perceiving in a grand and careless way that Mr. Crawford was somewhat distinguishing
his niece'. The marital implication is not recorded in OED.
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Detail from The Dance / The Happy Marriage VI: The Country
Dance (c. 1745) by William Hogarth. Source: Wikipedia.
Click on the image to see an enlarged version.
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By contrast, the first OED Additions volume - the collection of scattered revisions and
updatings of OED intermediate between OED2 and OED3 - did
identify, for the first time in the Dictionary's history, the courtship connotation of the
verb address, s.v. sense e: 'To pay one's addresses to (a woman); to woo, court'.
Here Austen furnished the second quoted example (after Sheridan's The Rivals,
1775): 'You may live eighteen years longer..without being addressed by a man of half Mr.
Crawford's estate' (Mansfield Park, III.i.19); cf. Phillipps 1970: 77-8.
Elsewhere, as indicated above, women's texts furnish the first quotations in OED
for terms related to this subject area: for example Seward is the first quoted example
for:
- that was: i.e. (as OED explains), 'phrase added when a married woman
is referred to by her maiden name': '1785 A. SEWARD Let. 31 Dec.
(1811) I. 97 Miss Jenny Harry that was, for she afterwards married'. Of the four quotations
for this usage, three are from female-authored texts (George Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio
Marsh), an unusually high proportion;
while Austen's novel Sense & Sensibility supplies the first examples for the
marital senses of both engagement and disengagement:
- '"If your engagement had been carried on for months and months..before he chose to
put an end to it.".."Engagement!" cried Marianne, "there has been no
engagement"' (Sense & Sensibility, II.vii.114 (1811) (quotation added to
OED by Burchfield in the twentieth century Supplement))
- 'She might wound Marianne still deeper by treating their disengagement..as an escape
from..evils' (Sense & Sensibility, II.vii.184 (quotation inserted OED1
and ascribed date of 1796))
These and other examples (e.g. connect, particularity,
preference) will be listed in full and treated in more detail in our Austen pages [presently under
construction**]. Examples of such vocabulary in other female writers, similarly neglected by
the OED, include:
- sub-marriage (a term found in a letter by Mary Wortley Montagu of 1716): 'it
would be a down right affront and publickly resented if you invited a Woman of Quality to
dinner without at the same time inviteing her 2 attendants of Lover and Husband...These sub
-marriages gennerally last 20 year together, and the Lady often commands the poor Lover's
estate even to the utter ruin of his family, thô they are as seldom begun by any
passion as other matches' (Halsband 1965: vol. 1, p. 271). Not recorded in OED, although
the entry for sub- (sense 5) does record many other whimsical examples of the
prefix, and the same Wortley Montagu letter is quoted for the term Belle-
Passions
and - possibly -
- the sex (used to refer to men rather than women): Wortley Montagu may be wittily
exploiting the normal signification of the term (i.e. referring to women) in a letter of 1709: 'If I [i.e.
the writer, Lady Mary W-M] am [in love], 'tis a perfect sin of ignorance, for I don't so
much as know the man's name: I have been studying these three hours, and cannot guess who
you mean. I passed the days of Nottingham races [at] Thorsby, without seeing or even wishing
to see one of the sex' (Halsband 1965: vol. 1, p. 10). [Can this interpretation be right? Surely it is women rather than men who would be a rare sight at the races?]
Other terms are recorded in the OED but with low eighteenth-century
documentation:
- enjoy (used of a man having sex, possibly non-consensual, with a woman): found
in Aubin; OED provides no
eighteenth-century quotations
- pre-engage (used in the passive to mean 'be previously or already engaged to be
married'): this term has recently been revised in OED3 but is under-quoted from the
eighteenth century; it, too, is found in Aubin.
Related areas of vocabulary: childbirth
Note also that OED has no eighteenth-century quotation for the phrase with
child ('pregnant') as used by Aubin (see here) and no doubt many other eighteenth-century writers. |
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 17 March 2010 )
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