Helena Michie: Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal

Just as a cynic might have thought that there could not be much else to say about Victorian sexuality and marriage – the site of much recent scholarly interest – along comes a little book to prove the cynic wrong. Helena Michie’s latest offering, with its very evocative title, leaves one feeling that previous investigators of the subject left out the most interesting part: the transformative moment between the single and the married state, between a cultural expectation of sexual abstinence and an equally powerful one of physical and emotional intimacy – the honeymoon or wedding journey.

Victorian Honeymoons aims to provide a full and nuanced account of a ritual that became, by the mid-nineteenth century, an important part of the landscape of British marriage. Drawing on archival sources and on fictional representations of honeymooning couples, Michie explores what she calls the honeymoon’s “cultural work of transformation” (p. xv): its fusion, if successful, of two individuals, often deeply attached to their birth families and with little experience of the opposite sex, into a “conjugal unit” that would henceforth constitute the newly created husband and wife’s primary source of social and emotional identification.

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