“Sometimes a real one!”: mock marriage, performative utterances, and liberal politics in Antebellum City mysteries fiction

Abstract

This chapter argues that marriage has been a privileged means through which scholars analyze the cultural workings of nineteenth-century liberalism. It is however generally taken for a constative fact rather than the performative utterance par excellence. Analyzing marriage’s decidedly performative dimension in two works of city mysteries fiction, H.M. Rulison’s The Mock Marriage and George Foster’s New York by Gas-Light, this chapter identifies a critique of liberalism and its institutions on the grounds that, like all performative utterances, marriages are always haunted by the possibility of misfiring. While antebellum legal theorists’ and contemporary critics’ favorite example of the liberal state is the marriage contract, both of these authors stage a questionably legitimate marriage to interrogate the possibility of equity. Foster and Rulison thereby expose the liberal paradigm of marriage as a referential illusion, demonstrate liberalism’s performative underpinnings, and imagine equitable political action grounded in a democratic political theology rather than groundless performative utterances.