Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what - or who - must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? In "Marriage and Violence", Frances E. Dolan reveals the contradiction that lies at the very heart of modern marriage. We have inherited from early modern England a model of marriage, she contends, so flawed that its logical consequence is conflict.Dolan ranges from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice literature to late-twentieth-century discussions about how to defend battered women who kill their abusers; from the inevitable "Taming of the Shrew" to William Byrd's diary of life on his Virginia plantation and Noel Coward's "Private Lives". By contrasting depictions of marriage in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth centuries, she shows that the early modern apprehension of marriage as an economy of scarcity continues to haunt the present in the form of a conceptual structure that can accommodate only one fully developed person. When two fractious persons assert their conflicting wills, resolution can be achieved only when one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other.