Marriage

I depend on the great web aggregator Arts and Letters Daily to bring me a stream of interesting articles I might not otherwise find on my own. Since I have been thinking about love and marriage lately, I found reading Carlin Romano's review in The Chronicle of Higher Education of Frances E. Dolan's book Marriage and Violence to be exceptionally stimulating.

Dolan's thesis is that the concept of "marriage" as we have inherited it is a conceptual muddle, and that each of the competing models of marriage -- companionate, hierarachical, fusionary -- is not only incompatible with the others but rife with internal contradictions of its own. I clearly need to read this book, because it will help validate my lifelong inability to make any sense of this institution that is held to be central to our culture. I haven't been able to decipher it intellectually, and I haven't been able to successfully embody the concept in my own life -- not that I'm alone in that.

Scepticism about marriage is hardly new; readers of literature from any era or region are well familiar with it. Literature is full of successful courtships but boasts very few described successful marriages. Most fully described marriages in literature are quite troubled. This could be because there is no real story in happiness, but I don't really think that's it.

Women novelists are, not surprisingly, often quite perspicacious on this subject. There is a wonderful analysis in Valerie Boyd's magnificent Zora Neale Hurston biography Wrapped in Rainbows of Hurston's attitudes toward couplehood in Their Eyes Were Watching God :

Marriage, Hurston seems to say, is a deadly proposition: someone has to give up his or her life.

(Note Romano's comment that "In Dolan's view, marriage rests on an 'economy of scarcity' in regard to rights and privileges 'in which there is only room for one full person. ' ")

Hurston's own marriages were odd and unsuccessful; her non-marital relationships perhaps more rewarding, but still "irregular." That describes George Eliot's life to a tee, as well (and Eliot was pulling it off under even less favorable circumstances, in the midst of Victorian England). Eliot in her work is scarcely an enthusiastic proponent of any conventionally fulfilling view of marriage; she would shock James Dobson (if he was capable of reading her) as much as she shocked her contemporaries. Take this famous passage from Middlemarch, as Dorothea Brooke is discovering that she may have badly mis-judged her marriage to Mr. Casaubon:

...in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight--that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

Note that in three sentences, the fastidious writer Eliot passes through three metaphors ("delightful stores," "door-sill," "marital voyage"). I take this as a tiny but telling indication of the extent to which this subject elevates Eliot's usually checked emotions.