The Marriage Plot, Again: A Feedback Loop

Abstract: The bigamy plot—the courtship's evil twin—involves characters marrying, then marrying again, a phenomenon rife across Victorian novels. This repetition creates redundancy, both in terms of spouses and, from an informatic perspective, reinforcing the marriage plot's importance. In contrast to a regulated feedback loop that generates stasis, the bigamy plot accumulates more of the same, emphasizing the ongoing centrality of marriage plots in the Victorian novel. This essay argues that this redundancy within the bigamy plot mirrors the emerging imperial information systems and realist aesthetics of the time. With the rise of data management systems like censuses and registries, both literature and empire wrestled with representing individuals both as unique entities and as interchangeable units. Through a reading of the proliferation of records in Jane Eyre (1848), this essay demonstrates how bigamy and its imperial records emerge as a way to understand the struggle for representation, a brief moment in which personhood is extended across the system while also being retracted.