Academic literature on the topic 'Arranged marriage – Fiction'

This chapter traces the process of who arranged marriages and how they were planned, with particular attention to the role of parents and kin, kings and lords, and initiatives of the couples themselves. In the period under discussion, marital arrangements were made by parents, kin, and lords with minimal input from the couple. In fact, the legality of marriage was subject to parental consent, not the couple’s. In the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries evidence emerged that suggests a development in thinking amongst the laity and clergy about what established a valid union. In narrative sources, such as chronicles, hagiography, and fiction, demands of young men and women for self-determination with respect to marriage were recorded. There seems to have been a gendered aspect to these emerging voices with more women than men, mostly from elite or well-to-do backgrounds, demanding a say in the choice of marriage partner.

This chapter discusses sex and the married couple, beds and bedrooms, and love and affection. The chapter illustrates in a sense the enduring human experience of living in sexually satisfying relationships if couples were fortunate to have found compatible partners. Amongst the elites arranged marriages could result in disastrous unions, though they were probably exceptions rather than the rule. Once the couple were married the clergy became even more invisible than they were during the process of couples getting married. The evidence on sexual pleasure as compatible with happy marriages in fictional narratives seems in line with loving and affectionate married bonds. Admittedly, evidence of love and affection mostly surfaced in moments of crisis characterized by the threat of loss of the beloved husband or wife.

Abstract In Canada in 1996, an Indian man’s massacre of almost all of his ex-wife’s family in the British Columbia town of Kelowna was immediately misrepresented in the media as a fatal consequence of the Indian system of arranged marriages, so that the incident was portrayed as something other than family violence and as indicating an Indian cultural pathology. The Inda-Canadian community stepped in to correct this misrepresentation and argue that the perpetrator of violence was operating from within patriarchal ideologies common to most cultures, including those of the West. However, for the West, even feminist studies departments, Indian dowry culture continues to function as the vehicle for a Western imperialist epistemology of India as its Third World “other.” The Indian nation’s central meanings are deliberately and reductively quilted to the experiences of the Indian woman’s body to produce an India that is culturally retrogressive and, more particularly, to represent its culture in sexual metaphor as a masculinity that is always-already pathologically inadequate in its greed and brutal perversity and as always-already less than masculine. This discourse has entailed the West’s willful refusal to recognize Indian women’s response to the dowry system as intending subjects of resistance and also to misrecognize one aspect of Indian culture as the representative of the whole. This burden-the excessive meaning that the dowry system is made to bear as signifier-is also made possible by the West’s imaginary perception of the dowry system as present everywhere in India and in the self-same form; in actual fact, dowry practices occur in specific pockets of the country and involve different activities, sometimes generating meanings for women that are other than disempowerment. For instance, in some southern parts of India, as well as in the diaspora, women are given control over their dowry money, and it is not unheard of for them to use this money for additional education.