Naomi Seidman

The Marriage Plot

Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

For nineteenth-century Eastern European Jews, modernization entailed the abandonment of arranged marriage in favor of the "love match." Romantic novels taught Jewish readers the rules of romance and the choreography of courtship. But because these new conceptions of romance were rooted in the Christian and chivalric traditions, the Jewish embrace of "the love religion" was always partial. In The Marriage Plot, Naomi Seidman considers the evolution of Jewish love and marriage though the literature that provided Jews with a sentimental education, highlighting a persistent ambivalence in the Jewish adoption of European romantic ideologies. Nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature tempered romantic love with the claims of family and community, and treated the rules of gender complementarity as comedic fodder. Twentieth-century Jewish writers turned back to tradition, finding pleasures in matchmaking, intergenerational ties, and sexual segregation. In the modern Jewish voices of Sigmund Freud, Erica Jong, Philip Roth, and Tony Kushner, the Jewish heretical challenge to the European romantic sublime has become the central sexual ideology of our time.

---

Hinweis: Dieser Artikel kann nur an eine deutsche Lieferadresse ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 368
• Erscheinungstermin: 22. Juni 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 236mm x 154mm x 27mm
• Gewicht: 616g
• ISBN-13: 9780804798433
• ISBN-10: 0804798435
• Artikelnr.: 44383360

Autorenporträt

Naomi Seidman is Koret Professor of Jewish Culture at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (2006) and A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (1997).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Plotting Jewish Marriage
chapter abstract
The introduction describes the ways that East European Jews simultaneously
encountered European literary genres and new models of marriage, romance,
sexual practices and gender roles in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Because novels were so closely associated with romantic love, these had a
particular effect on their traditional but modernizing readers. The
introduction also distinguishes the approach of the book from other trends
in Jewish Studies, particularly Queer Studies approaches to the study of
Jewish gender.
1A Sentimental Education
chapter abstract
This chapter traces the nineteenth-century beginnings of modern Hebrew and
Yiddish romantic literature and its connection with emerging trends in
organizing marriage and sexuality in nineteenth-century East Europe. The
chapter analyzes the immense impression made by the first Hebrew novel,
Mapu's 1853 The Love of Zion, in the realm of Jewish sexuality, questioning
the power of literature to transform lives. The chapter ends by discussing
the debates that arose toward the end of the nineteenth century, which
focused on the mismatch between European literary conventions and Jewish
social realities, and on the question of what constitutes the particularity
of Jewish sex and marital arrangements.
2Matchmaking and Modernity
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the role of arranged marriage in Jewish literature
through the figure of the marriage broker, first as the enemy of true love
and then, in later works, as its enabler or even mystical embodiment.
Nineteenth-century memoirs decry the intrusions and deceptions of
matchmakers, and urge the replacement of arranged marriage with romantic
choice. While Jewish literature in some sense served as this
replacement-with the author "arranging" matches between characters-literary
works also rescued and even invented the matchmaker. In Sholem Aleichem's
Menachem Mendl, the matchmaker is given Yiddish literary voice, while in
Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrel, the matchmaker finds a place in modern
America, and Jewish American literature, as a recognizable "type," and a
figure of erotic fascination in his own right.
3Pride and Pedigree
chapter abstract
This chapter presents a genealogy of lineage in Jewish marriage, another
aspect of traditional marital negotiations derided in Haskalah polemic.
Pedigree finds a surprising afterlife even in those literary works that
champion erotic attraction in the construction of a marriage partnership.
At first performing the conservative-bourgeois function of maintaining
class boundaries in a post-traditional society that ostensibly espouses the
class-neutral ideology of romantic love, pedigree takes on a far wider
range of meanings in modern Jewish literature. Along with the mystical
eroticism that links romance with intergenerational ties, lineage has a
long afterlife in the realist novel, both narrating the generational
disruptions of modernity and serving as narrative cure. In the late
twentieth century, the literary tracing of lineage reemerges in Tony
Kushner's Angels in America, finding genealogical expression for even the
post-genealogical phenomenon of queer kinship in the era of AIDS.
4The Choreography of Courtship
chapter abstract
This chapter describes the role of literature in constructing a modern
Jewish ideology of heterosexual romance through its articulation of new
notions of romantic time, on the one hand, and gender complementarity, on
the other. While traditional marriages had collapsed the time between
puberty and marriage, attraction and consummation (while expanding the
historical perspective of a match by including ancestors in the
arrangements), the novel introduced new romantic temporalities in the
rhythms of sexual maturation, attraction, and (deliciously delayed)
consummation. These models of romance depended on strictly delineated
gender roles, which the novel served to map and inculcate.
Twentieth-century Jewish cultural productions form a counter-discourse to
the gender complementarity on which European romance rested, featuring
cross-dressed, anti-romantic heroines who resist and denaturalize European
gender conventions. And in Erica Jong, readers encountered a full-fledged
(Jewish) argument against the erotic tempos set out in literary romance.
5In-laws and Outlaws
chapter abstract
This chapter follows the process of "nuclearization," in which the move to
romantic, companionate marriage reduced the role of parents and extended
family in the construction of modern family. Reading Sholem Aleichem's
Tevye the Dairyman not through its usual focus-the move from arranged
marriage to romantic love-but rather through what this move entails-the end
of the system whereby marriage is produced by and produces broad kinship
networks, this chapter argues that the stories reproduce in submerged form
the traditional practices whereby a father-in-law chooses a groom for his
daughter. In the final section of the chapter, I explore the "aunt-niece"
relationship in Grace Paley's story "Goodbye and Good Luck," which presents
the persistence and cultural productivity of alternative models of kinship
at the margins of Jewish American literature and society.
6Sex and Segregation
chapter abstract
explores the structure of sexual segregation through its literary
expressions. Among the evils of traditional Jewish society denounced by the
Haskalah was the strictness of its sexual segregation, which left no room
for social interaction or erotic discovery between the sexes. In the
twentieth century, however, writers discovered erotic pleasures in what
earlier generations had seen as repressive social structures. S.Y. Agnon,
in "The Tale of the Scribe," Sholem Asch, in God of Vengeance, and Dvora
Baron, in "Fedke," stage love affairs within sexually segregated spaces,
while Singer's "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy" makes an explicit case for the
superiority of romances that proceed through the (homosocial and agonistic)
camaraderie of Torah learning over those conducted according to Western
conventions.
Afterword: After Marriage
chapter abstract
The epilogue, which touches on the work of Freud, Philip Roth, and Erica
Jong, argues that Jewish writers played a crucial role in the
twentieth-century desublimation of Eros, stripping the "erotic sublime" of
its mystification and grounding sexuality in the "natural" bodily realities
that characterize many varieties of Jewish sexual discourse. For the
sublime notion of the "soul mate," Freud, Roth and Jong suggest that sexual
partners are easily interchanged-an ideology that, in its "conservative"
form, also underpins arranged marriage. While Jewish sexual modernity
begins with the adoption of European literary conventions, by the end of
the twentieth century, modern Jewish culture had come to play a critical
role (in both senses) in European sexual discourse. In the sexual
ideologies expressed in twentieth-century Hebrew, Yiddish and Jewish
American literature, the modern religion of romantic love met first its
most profound challenge and ultimately its heretical overthrow.