"Marry for Love, an Heroick Action, which makes a mighty noise in the World, partly because of its rarity, and partly in regard of its extravagancy"
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“Marry for Love” lands here like a sly dare, not a Valentine. Astell frames romantic marriage as “an Heroick Action” precisely to expose how upside-down her society’s incentives are: in a world where marriage is primarily an economic contract and a woman’s legal identity dissolves into her husband’s, choosing love isn’t sweet or natural. It’s reckless, even borderline theatrical. The phrase “makes a mighty noise” is social audio: gossip, scandal, moralizing. Love isn’t private; it’s a public disturbance.
Her brilliance is in the double-engine of praise and poison. “Heroick” flatters the ideal while quietly indicting the system that makes basic affection a form of bravery. Then she punctures it with the reasons for its “noise”: “rarity” and “extravagancy.” Rarity implies a market logic; love is a scarce commodity because the institution is designed to optimize property and lineage, not intimacy. “Extravagancy” isn’t just “too much feeling.” It signals a violation of prudent management, the kind of irrational spending that men of the period accused women of - except here the expenditure is a life.
Context matters: Astell is writing into early modern debates about women’s education and marriage, when “choice” for women was cramped by economics, law, and reputation. The line reads like a feminist pressure test: if love is truly the reason we tell ourselves people marry, why does it function like an exception, a spectacle, a risky stunt? Astell’s subtext is brutal: the romance story is society’s alibi, not its operating system.
Her brilliance is in the double-engine of praise and poison. “Heroick” flatters the ideal while quietly indicting the system that makes basic affection a form of bravery. Then she punctures it with the reasons for its “noise”: “rarity” and “extravagancy.” Rarity implies a market logic; love is a scarce commodity because the institution is designed to optimize property and lineage, not intimacy. “Extravagancy” isn’t just “too much feeling.” It signals a violation of prudent management, the kind of irrational spending that men of the period accused women of - except here the expenditure is a life.
Context matters: Astell is writing into early modern debates about women’s education and marriage, when “choice” for women was cramped by economics, law, and reputation. The line reads like a feminist pressure test: if love is truly the reason we tell ourselves people marry, why does it function like an exception, a spectacle, a risky stunt? Astell’s subtext is brutal: the romance story is society’s alibi, not its operating system.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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