Mary Astell, "Some Reflections on Marriage" (1700)

Genre: an essay.

Characters: "men" and "women" in general, as Astell represents her C17 understanding of their genders' attributes and beliefs.

Summary: Happy marriages are few, she asserts, because the way the institution operates in her England, money (income) is the primary qualifiation for most of them, with no thought for emotional compatibility, and poverty resulting from a "love match" renders the other sort miserable.  Men who marry for love are irregular, by definition, especially if they admire their spouses for wit, a term she criticizes as having fallen into being "bitter and ill-natured raillery" (2282) rather than "true wit," "such a sprightliness of imagination, such a reach and turn of thought, so properly expressed, as strikes and pleases a judicious taste" (2282).  She dismisses intense passion as unstable and no good grounds for a long-term relationship.

Women's lack of choice in marriage especially irritates Astell.  Men who flatter them with praise while seeking their favor make them foolish (cf. Astrophil).  Women who can't find a husband are thought incompetent and no man can imagine himself not worthy of being any woman's suitor.   Learned women are mocked by the world at large, whereas men not uncommonly waste their time in pursuit of their lusts.  Women who sacrifice themselves to submission to a man are heroic in their self-control and in their service to God and mankind, but if they thought about it more carefully, they probably would not do it.  Hence, the number of women who marry in haste.

Issues and Research Sources:

1. Note that Astell's argument combines a report of attitudes that she hears all London reporting (e.g., "this, you'll say, is more spiritual" on 2282) and things she originally says in response.  Taken all together, what picture of marriage in the late 17th century does this give us, and how might it be connected to Milton's views of marriage in the Adam and Eve sections of Paradise Lost?
2. Unlike Hutchinson or Halkett, but like Amelia Lanyer of two generations before her, Astell publishes what she writes, but not under her own name.  Her choice of pseudonym, "A Lover of Her Sex," reveals what we would now probably call her "gender" and her political stance, but what is missing from this authorial persona and how does this particular kind of "mask" enable Astell to function as a personal essayist in a literary culture almost entirely dominated by men?  What advantages and disadvantages do these women probably encounter when entering into this previously all male world of published literature?  Do you see signs of her intended audience's probable responses already incorporated into her prose?  Why would it be unlikely for a woman like Lanyer or Astell to write an epic?  (Remember Aphra Behn is coming--she writes plays for a living under her own name, and publishes an autobiographical travel book of her adventures in the New World.  Things are changing.)
3. Astell's education clearly has given her a robust and commanding prose style.  Compare her sentences with those of Dryden when we get to him.  How do you see the language changing between 1600 and 1700?  Especially note that her sentences still tend to be long, compound complex constructions, but try to count how many times you lose your way and must reread when compared the prose of the Norton introduction, for instance.  Does our training in modern prose constructions predispose us to find Astell "smoother" than Dryden, or are her sentences deliberately more challenging in their construction?  Think about artful sentences as deft riddles, yielding their solutions only to some effort on the readers' part.  Comparison with Anglo-Saxon sentences, and with H.P. Grice's "Maxims" for ordinary communication, might give you a useful set of measuring sticks for measuring Astell's sentence style.
4. Are any of Astell's assumptions about men perplexing, or even apparently wrong when applied to men you know?   What would you expect to be the case about social relations in C17 England if she is a perfectly accurate reporter of what she sees?
5. Her critique of wit can be found in Dryden's criticism, also.  To go to the Dryden web page to compare, click here.   For a historical discussion of the development of comedy as a genre, click here. What are the roots of this transformation of "wit" from one of the human senses (Five Wits in Everyman) to clever speech (Hoby/Castiglioini) to rapid, irritating, absurd comparisons (see Congreve, "Witwoud")?  Check the OED definitions of wit to track this important word's transformation, and consult the subplot scenes in Dr. Faustus andin Kent's Railing upon Oswald for some illustrations of earlier forms of "wit."  What happens when the linguistic practices of the underworld become current among the cultural elite, and where do you see this happening in American culture?
6. Astell's essay can help us understand the social condition of her contemporaries, like Dorothy Osborne, whose elder brother delayed her courtship by Sir William Temple by proposing a series of suitors he deemed eligible mainly because of their wealth.  To read some of Osborne's letters to Temple, click here.  The Osborne selections were cut when the Norton editors revised the 6th edition, but if you would like to read some discussion questions about them, click here.  The Osborne letters were cut in the same edition which added several women's poems and a drama--what does this tell you about current critical attitudes toward the "letter" as a literary form vs. poems and drama?  If letters are a primary genre in which women communicated their thoughts in the period before women could earn a living as published authors (conventionally, "B.B." or "Before Behn"), what does the loss of status of the letter mean for the direction of scholarly research in English literature?
7. Other sites which offer scholarly editions of previously unpublished works by women who wrote during the Renaissance, Restoration, and 18th century include Anniina Jokinen's Luminarium web site on Astell, the Brown University Women Writers Project, the Emory Women Writers Resource Project at Emory University's Lewis H. Beck Center.  The Brown site has an exceptionally large text base of edited Renaissance women writers, and the Emory site's strength is its unedited (as in previously unpublished) texts.  These are being used as part of Emory's graduate program to teach editing practices.  To see Professor Sheila Cavanagh's very well-explained set of instructions for how a scholarly edition is prepared, and a well-equipped set of scholarly tools (paper and online), click here.

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