{"title":"Queer temporality in Victorian love and marriage poems","authors":"Pearl Chaozon Bauer, S. Kersh","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2022.2057150","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The pressures of performing a happy married life become a macabre enactment. The two keep the “ghost” of marital unhappiness from their guests and Meredith names this dance of effrontery “Hiding the Skeleton.” Suggesting their game is a kind of social contagion, and hinting at its wide prevalence, the speaker exposes the ludicrousness of the couple’s interactions, sardonically enquiring, “Went the feast ever cheerfuller?” (line 2). The “game” or performance, in which the husband and the wife play, is strictly monitored by those in attendance. Meredith’s first-person speaker (the voice of the husband, in this sonnet) takes sarcastic glee in their superb demonstration. The sonnet concludes with the revelation that “Love” and “marriage” are long-dead corpses only revived by their game:","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2022.2057150","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The pressures of performing a happy married life become a macabre enactment. The two keep the “ghost” of marital unhappiness from their guests and Meredith names this dance of effrontery “Hiding the Skeleton.” Suggesting their game is a kind of social contagion, and hinting at its wide prevalence, the speaker exposes the ludicrousness of the couple’s interactions, sardonically enquiring, “Went the feast ever cheerfuller?” (line 2). The “game” or performance, in which the husband and the wife play, is strictly monitored by those in attendance. Meredith’s first-person speaker (the voice of the husband, in this sonnet) takes sarcastic glee in their superb demonstration. The sonnet concludes with the revelation that “Love” and “marriage” are long-dead corpses only revived by their game:
期刊介绍：
Nineteenth-Century Contexts is committed to interdisciplinary recuperations of “new” nineteenth centuries and their relation to contemporary geopolitical developments. The journal challenges traditional modes of categorizing the nineteenth century by forging innovative contextualizations across a wide spectrum of nineteenth century experience and the critical disciplines that examine it. Articles not only integrate theories and methods of various fields of inquiry — art, history, musicology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, social history, economics, popular culture studies, and the history of science, among others.
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