“Marriages ought to be secret” - Queer Marriages of Convenience and the Exile Narrative

Aug 25, 2026

Uploaded by Patrick

The article examines how LGBTQ+ exile and migration narratives employ marriages of convenience to enable mobility and negotiate repression, often through non-romantic, non-sexual public fronts aimed at immigration or family appeasement. Focusing on childfree married women, it analyzes Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley Under Ground, showing how these plots organize alternative marital temporalities and challenge pronatalist, heteronormative assumptions. It further argues that the writers use this structure to undermine patriarchal genres, including modernist quest narratives and suspense/crime fiction.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages23

Reading Time58 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Exile, migration, and LGBTQ+ marriages of convenience

Pronatalism and heteronormative marriage

Marriage of convenience in two novels

Jane Bowles: Two Serious Ladies (1943)

Patricia Highsmith: Ripley Under Ground (1970)

Alternative temporality and genre critique

“Marriages ought to be secret”: Queer Marriages of Convenience and the Exile Narrative Ben Robbins ABSTRACT In histories of exile and migration, LGBTQ+ people have often entered marriages of convenience. Within these arrangements, a gay man and lesbian woman typically enter a marriage to expedite immigration processes or to placate conservative family members. Most commonly, these relationships do not produce children, and they consequently call into question the pronatalism that is often associated with heteronormative conceptions of marriage. This article explores the complex dynamics of these relationship structures through an analysis of childfree married women in the novels of two female queer exile writers: Jane Bowles and Patricia Highsmith. In Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies (1943), a US-American upper middle-class couple, Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield, journey to Panama, where Mrs. Copperfield begins an affair with a female sex worker called Pacifica and refuses to return to the United States with her husband. In Highsmith’s Ripley Under Ground (1970), the union between the US-American Tom Ripley and the French heiress Heloise Plisson provides a cover for Tom’s ambiguous sexuality, as well as his diverse criminal activities, and allows Heloise to enjoy a life of aimless pleasure. In both these novels, queer marriages of convenience permit transnational mobility within unions that are markedly non-procreative and thereby occupy non-future oriented temporalities. This article demonstrates how these writers used the alternative temporal organization of the marriage of convenience plot to undermine the conventional structures of patriarchal genres, including the modernist quest narrative and suspense or crime fiction. KEYWORDS Networks, queer literature, queer theory, transnational literature, modernism, crime fiction, romance fiction, temporality Marriages of convenience between LGBTQ+ people have been a recurring feature in histories of exile and migration. In these relationships, most frequently between a gay man and lesbian woman, a marriage is entered out of neither romantic nor sexual motivations, but in order to provide a public front that may allow for immigration orthe acquisition of citizenship with greater ease (Acosta 21–22) or to appease family members within repressive cultures (Acosta 22; Huang and Brouwer 140) .1 Generally speaking, these unions do not have a reproductive impetus, and they therefore challenge the pronatalist ideology that often accompanies heteronormative conceptions of marriage. Such arrangements were common in the exile communities of Europe and North Africa from the 1900s to the 1960s, which attracted queer British and North American writers escaping legal oppression in their native countries. Many gay men and lesbian women from these countries went into exile as a result of social and historical pressures, since to be homosexual in Great Britain or the US during this period was largely criminalized (Houlbrook 19–20; D’Emilio 14) . Consequently, in order to pursue same-gender encounters or relationships, queer people frequently felt forced to flee their native countries in favor of more permissive foreign locations, such as Paris or Tangier.2 The exile communities that developed in these diverse locations attracted many artists and writers, who made important contributions to lively international subcultures, and marriages of convenience between queer exile writers were a frequent phenomenon. Such unions enabled these figures to cross borders and resettle more readily in foreign environments by drawing on the diffuse queer international networks of which they were a part. However, queer exile writers not only engaged in alternative relationship structures, but they would explore these ambiguous marital dynamics in their fiction. This article will particularly focus on the presentation of childfree married women in the novels of two female queer exile writers: Jane Bowles and Patric

FAQs

What is the typical purpose of queer marriages of convenience in exile and migration histories?

They are often entered for practical reasons such as expediting immigration/citizenship or placating conservative family members, rather than for romantic or sexual motivations.

How do Two Serious Ladies and Ripley Under Ground portray queer marriages of convenience?

Bowles depicts a transnational marriage that enables an affair and refusal to return, while Highsmith uses a marital cover for ambiguous sexuality and criminal activity, allowing a life of aimless pleasure.

How does the article connect these marriages to temporality and genre conventions?

It argues that non-procreative marriage plots create non-future oriented temporalities that disrupt patriarchal structures found in modernist quest narratives and suspense/crime fiction.

Aug 25, 2026

Uploaded by Patrick