Parents in the 19th Century Romance Novel

The connection between romance novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the new importance in romantic love as a reason for young people to get married has given rise to a great deal of scholarship in the history of emotions. However, parental consent still played an important role in adolescent marital decisions, and research has not deeply examined the way in which novelists portrayed the impact of parents on their daughters’ lives and marital decisions. By examining five romance novels from the nineteenth century in which one or more parents play a critical, plot-relevant role in the romantic storyline of the heroine, this paper seeks to describe the ways in which parent-daughter emotional relationships shaped the romance novels’ narratives, and in turn, what this might tell us about the broader emotional climate of romantic and parent-child love in the nineteenth century.

Hi, my name is Elise Mertz, and I did the intensive URSP program with OSCAR this summer, doing research into how parents get portrayed in romance novels in the nineteenth century. I first got interested in this sort of project when I took a history of emotions class with Dr. Peter Stearns, who was my faculty mentor this summer, where we learned about the rise of romantic love as a reason to get married. It became much more important in the 1700s and 1800s to marry for love, instead of marrying for practical reasons and then having love grow out of the match, and novels from this time period also reflect that shift. There’s certainly a lot of famous novels from the 1700s and 1800s that deal with falling in love – Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and lots of other famous examples – and so I started wondering how these novels would portray parents, because a lot of research on parent-child relationships has focused on how parents have interacted with younger children.

In this time period, what that generally looked like was the “cult of motherhood,” which was the beginning of this notion that mothers were meant to be a very pure, self-sacrificial being that was only looking out for the well-being of their children and their husband and not really worrying about how that might impact themselves. And then fathers were generally seen to be the protectors and the providers. They were allowed to have an emotional role in the family. They were actually encouraged to, so they weren’t necessarily the stiff robotic figures that are stereotypically seen, but it was much less important than for mothers, and fathers were really much more focused on the practical aspects of their family’s well-being.

So when looking into how romance novels specifically portray it to try to learn more about how parents were meant to interact with their children once their children were older and starting to branch out into starting their own families and making their own decisions more, I found that a lot of novelists actually totally sidestepped the question and just made their characters orphans, or at least made the heroine’s mother dead, which is interesting in and of itself. But I did find five novels that have really interesting portrayals of parents and their daughters as their daughters are growing up and falling in love.

So what these novels revealed is that certainly the idea of the cult of motherhood and the practical, down-to-earth father continue once the children are older. Mothers are still supposed to be self-sacrificial and forgiving and loving, and fathers are still much more focused on material providing, and if they fail to provide materially for their children, that is seen in a very negative light. For example, Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice has not successfully taken care of the estate and made sure that his family will have money to survive after he dies, and that’s seen in a very negative light. On the other hand, in Lodore, the main character’s mother, even though she doesn’t really even raise her daughter in this story, she still chooses to sacrifice all of her money and social influence to get her daughter’s husband out of debtor’s prison even though she’s not close with her daughter, and this decision gives her so much peace and joy and is really seen as a very positive thing. And it does ultimately lead to a reconciliation between mother and daughter.

So overall, this time period definitely shows that those traditional mother-father roles that were established for younger children continue for older children, but there were still more intricacies as the children themselves figure out when they have to listen to their parents, when they can do their own thing. For example, elopements are almost never viewed positively. That’s when the children run away usually to Scotland to get married without parental permission. Those usually either end badly or at the very least they’re seen as sort of a scandal, like it’s brushed under the rug later. So the parent-child relationship is still certainly very important in children’s romantic decisions in this time period. And there’s a lot of opportunities for further research, looking at for example the impact of social class. All of the novels I looked at were from Britain, so it’d be interesting to see if America had similar trends. Looking at the parents of the groom, since all of these novels focused on brides. Like I said looking more at elopements. And then trying to find further primary sources that can corroborate some of this and expand it beyond literature. But I really enjoyed this project and I hope to continue research in this vein in the future, and if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them below.