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My dissertation analyzes how these novels, through sentence- and narrative-level repetition, both use and break the sequence of "restrictive sexual-marital ideology" (Boone 10) to create alternative scenarios for women protagonists. In reiterating the non-traditional lives these characters lead, the repetitions critique marriage conventions, offering options other than conventional marriage plots. My project begins with what can be read as courtship plots, HERmione and Orlando, then moves to a courtship- and wedlock-plot hybrid, The Glimpses of the Moon, and ends with the only one of the four novels that involves a wedlock plot from beginning to end, Unpunished. The epilogue considers Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), which subverts the marriage-plot tradition without exploding the restrictive ending, exposing through repetition the confinement of marriage and the marriage plot.

Although three of the four novels depict protagonists who marry, none saves the marriage for the ending of the novel, nor are the protagonists denied autonomy---or a story---once married. Instead, these plots repeat with difference the rigid marriage-plot tradition, reworking narrative conventions of courtship and marriage. By re-positioning marriage in the narrative sequence and making the marriage plot not climactic, these novels offer women characters stories beyond their nuptial vows.