Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity by Kathy Alexis (review)

Reviewed by: Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity by Kathy Alexis Doreen Thierauf Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel, and Sexual Modernity Kathy Alexis Psomiades; pp. 256. Oxford UP, 2023. 85 cloth. Kathy alexis Psomiades's Primitive Marriage explores how Victorian anthropology's theories of the development of sexual relations as organized structures, including marital and kinship systems as well as sexual practices and rituals, inspired generic changes in the Victorian novel's marriage plot. Anthropologists such as Henry Maine, Edward Tylor, and John McLennan—the latter of whose 1865 work, Primitive Marriage, inspired Psomiades's title—developed and refined a stagist theory of marriage, simultaneously "an ideological structure, a plot form, and a template, " which, adopted by Victorian novelists, allowed novels published after the mid-1860s to "thematize their own theory-making power" (9). Psomiades dubs these texts "post-anthropological novels" (19) —that is, texts "deeply engaged in the Victorian anthropological project of using sex to tell what time it is"—to signal their fundamental difference from earlier domestic plots and their ambitions to theorize sexual modernity narratively (42). In her introduction, Psomiades lays out various nineteenth-century anthropological theories of marriage and kinship, among them McLennan's, the most prominent one. In his text, McLennan imagined human sociality as beginning in a chaotic stage dominated by female capture and rape (and without conceptualizations of kinship or prohibitions against incest), which, passing through a series of untenable stages marked by female infanticide, polyandry, and matrilineality ends in nineteenth-century patriarchal monogamy, humanity's civilizational zenith. Psomiades's thesis is that such anthropological theories, culturally dominant during the late-Victorian period, in denaturalizing and de-universalizing human pair-bonding, endowed marriage with historical agency and temporalized sexuality as part of an evolutionary historical model, relegating non-normative kinship and marital forms to a racialized, "primitive" past. Victorian anthropology thus sexualized classical liberal political and social theory, rendering its objects—violence, consent, and choice—in homologous fashion as sexual violence, sexual consent, and sexual object choice. It ultimately produced a theory of contemporary liberal modernity that is, Psomiades reminds readers, a theory of our present (8). The book's chapters are organized around some of the period's major disciplinary concepts—political economy's property, political philosophy's contract/consent, and religious study's myth—to trace how anthropology "converted the modernity stories about them into sexual modernity stories, " with a historically shifting female subject at their centre (10). Psomiades's first chapter focuses on Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds (1871). Building on the longstanding scholarly insight that Trollope's fictional universe overlays economic and erotic forms of property and exchange, End Page 321 Psomiades, cross-reading between Maine, McLennan, and Trollope, suggests that Trollope's novel theorizes primitive marriage's temporalization. Referring to earlier texts, William Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868), for comparison, Psomiades shows how Trollope, borrowing Thackeray's "bad girl" heroine and Collins's sensational plot elements, reworks gender as adhering to a modern culture of contract rather than an older, status-based one. Lucinda Roanoke emerges as a "mad, " murderous, and radical figure associated with McLennan's matrilineal stage, "temporarily and generically dislocated from a modernity of exchange" (66). Chapter 2, organized around the sexual contract, is a long analysis of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), capped off by a shorter reading of Margaret Oliphant's Phoebe, Junior (1876) and supported by insights from Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology (1876) to trace the disintegration of traditional domestic fiction in the 1870s. Eliot, attempting to theorize a future-proof nationalism based on consent, voluntary association, and a socially beneficial blending of self-interest and altruism, sexualizes these terms in Daniel Deronda. This involves a shift away from thinking about reproduction toward formulating "the psychosexual bonds" between men and women and between men and men to achieve a fraternal, rather than an exhausted patriarchal, nation (108). Marriage is thus not a metaphor for the nation but the nation's "founding gesture" (109). In so theorizing the modern state, with its eponymous hero the facilitator of liberal futurity, Daniel Deronda, too, leaves behind an out-of. . .