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Prose

Notes 1832 she wrote in a letter to Francis Place from her native Norwich, “I wish I were in London,
. . . I want to be doing something with the pen, since no other means of action in politics are
in a woman’s power.”
• Martineau’s politics included a thoroughgoing attention to women. It was an essential part
of her blend of radicalism, and it had emerged well before her declaration to Place a month
before her thirtieth birthday in 1832 that she must act with her pen, as that was the only
access to politics a woman had. Her feminist politics was to continue strong throughout her
life. Sensitive to her own womanhood and the limitations it imposed on her, the entry to
feminism for many a woman through several feminist generations, Martineau gradually
turned this personal sensitivity to social ends until the rights of women and advocacy of
women’s causes became one of her lifelong major efforts. The first piece she ever published—
at age nineteen—was on women: “Female Writers of Practical Divinity.”
• “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it
brings. Even if we loved some one else better than—than those we were married to, it would
be of no use”—poor Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her language
brokenly—”I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness
in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear—but it murders our marriage—and then the
marriage stays with us like a murder—and everything else is gone. And then our husband—
if he loved and trusted us, and we have not helped him, but made a curse in his life—”
• Her conception of marriage may have been affected by that presented by Feuerbach in his
Essence of Christianity. In words translated into English by herself, Feuerbach says, “that
alone is a religious marriage which is a true marriage, which corresponds to the essence of
marriage—love.”
• This marriage presents one of the curious ethical problems of literature. In this case approval
and condemnation are alike difficult. Her own teaching condemns it; her own life approves
it. We could wish it had not been, for the sake of what is purest and best; and yet it is not
difficult to see that its effects were in many ways beneficial to her. That it was ethically
wrong there is no doubt. That it was condemned by her own teaching is so plain as to cause
doubt about how she could herself approve it.

22.6 Key-Words

1. Didactic fictional : Inclined to teach or moralise excessively.
2. Euphemistically : Affected, metaphorical, mild.
22.7 Review Questions

1. Briefly examine the life of Martineau
2. Discuss the views of Martineau on Marriage
Answers: Self-Assessment

1. (i)(c) (ii)(b) (iii)(b) (iv)(a)
22.8 Further Readings

1. Martineau, Harriet, ‘On Marriage’ 1838. Quotidian. Ed. Patrick Madden. 12th
Feb., 2007.

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