My dissertation explores literary responses to the role marriage legislation played in shaping nineteenth-century Englishness. I argue that mariage plots written in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars address legal crises of national self-definition as crises revolving around the married woman's status. As England grew into the largest global power, the English wife's contradictory position at once at the center of the nation (as its reproductive core and preserver of tradition) and at its margins (as legally non-existent by virtue of being a woman and married) acquired, I suggest, a new national significance both in the law and in the novel. While conservative legislators strove to preserve the legal status quo by keeping the wife as a national boundary-marker, the plots I analyze—written by authors whose views are frequently perceived as nationalist and therefore the reason for their canonization—embraced the foreign and the cosmopolitan in ways that complicated the traditional alignment of the gendered, the marital, and the national, while foregrounding the fluidity of Englishness itself. Choosing partners whom mariage laws mark as un-English, the heroines of these texts unsettle the legally sanctioned centrality of married women to the specific foundations of English national life. The traditionally threatening figure of a foreign or cosmopolitan male helps remove the legally created gender divide on which English nationalism rested and repositions the woman more favorably within a more positively cosmopolitan nation.

As a study that demonstrates how the legal regulation of marriage helped constitute the English nation in the post-Waterloo era, the dissertation particularly queries the myth that Protestant preference for marriage over celibacy and a uniquely English celebration of romantic wedlock or "companionate marriage" set England apart from other nations. It shows that both the literary canon and the legal history problematize, and often fail to uphold, the sense of English uniqueness and superiority that the special attributes of the English institution of marriage were often said to reinforce.