We may no longer agree with Montaigne, but it is clear that greater or lesser elements of pragmatism have generally played into marriage’s making. Marriage, as the adage goes, is too important a matter to be left to those getting married.
History in this area is tricky. Marriage is a social, institutional and legal form. As for love, it falls into that area of subjectivity where, even when diaries or letters exist, we cannot be certain that our readings are weighted in the way of their authors’. After all, we find the emotions even of near and dear ones opaque, never mind our own. So unearthing the value they may have held in past times is inevitably a contested matter. Then, too, no one template fits all classes or even proximate geographical locations in any given period.
Fictional sources are sometimes our best guides, although, as already seen, they carry an element of wish, and shape daydreams as much as reflecting the real and invoking temporal paradigms of right conduct. Such fictions, together with religious and philosophical ideas, pedagogical texts and prescriptions for living, percolate through society, often moving downwards from a dominant group and being reinflected in the process. With the growth of schooling and literacy, they have circulated more widely through education, as well as in guidebooks and love and marriage manuals. In our own times of mass media and instant communication, these ruling ideas can also instil untenable notions of perfection: standards of ‘rightness’ that induce anxiety and make reality ever harder to bear. So the briefest dip into some of the different forms of love and marriage that history has given us may prove salutary.
In primitive societies marriage takes many shapes, few of them the intimate pair-bonding of modern conjugality. Different rules of sexual exclusiveness and propriety as well as responsibility for children pertain, while complex kinship systems govern who one may or may not marry. Amongst the upper-caste East Indian Nayar studied by Kathleen Gough, for instance, matrilineal descent prevails. Once a girl is ritually betrothed by the tying of a gold ornament, the ‘tali’, to a boy of her kin’s chosen group, she is free at puberty to take on sexual relationships with others. Any resulting children are raised by the matrilineal household. Her main obligation to her ‘husband’ is to perform appropriate burial rites.
The work of anthropologists makes it clear that marriage is a political and institutional form, one forged by group alliances, rather than by the individuals involved. Marriage codes, in turn, shape the structure of the society and its arrangements for domestic life. That said, marriage itself seems to be universal. Amongst the Trobriand Islanders, Malinowski writes, there were no unmarried men of mature age, except undeniable idiots, incurable invalids, widowers and albinos. In societies where labour is shared, a union is necessary, the closer to puberty the better; a bachelor is only half a human being. Working children are necessary to the welfare of the kinship group. Love here is hardly the question.
From Antiquity to the Reformation
Greek literature and myth supply us with an assortment of marriages and grand passions which embody the extremes of emotion that play through ordinary mortals. Hera and Zeus, the leading Olympian couple, are ever at war and ever united in a marriage from which he strays wildly and she exacts the occasional jealous vengeance. Wily Odysseus wanders for nineteen years before returning to ever courted and ever faithful Penelope, who tests his identity by referring to their marriage bed, which only he would know was immovably constructed around a tree. They lie in it companionably and recount the events of the years. Dazzling Helen, abducted from her husband Menelaus by Paris, launches the Trojan Wars, while adulterous Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon on his return from battle, in part because he has sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to obtain favourable winds for his ships. She, in turn, will be murdered by her own son. When Jason abandons Medea for a new wife, she kills their children.
All this gives us a sense of the fierce loves and hates which may form the emotional substratum of marriage, but have little immediate bearing on the place of the institution in Greek life.
Though there may have been instances when citizen marriages were sparked by passion–and indeed Greek literature here and there expresses a wish for love in marriage–scholars largely agree that ‘the purpose of marriage was to engender and rear legitimate children… rather than to gratify the emotional needs of either husband or wife’. Athens was ‘a society which denied the validity of love as the basis for a happily married life’. As the orator Apollodorus (c. 180–120 BC) is often quoted as saying, the citizen Athenian had recourse to three types of women: a wife for producing children and looking after his household; a concubine for catering to his daily needs; and hetaerae, or prostitutes, for pleasure. Yet the state encouraged contractual marriage and enforced monogamy. In Athens under Pericles, single men were excluded from taking on certain major public positions, while the legislator Solon considered making marriage compulsory. For the Stoics, marrying and having children was a moral duty for any man who respected the divine will. Homosexuality was sanctioned, may indeed have often been the site of passionate love, was certainly sung of by the philosophers as the place of, or path to, an idealized love, yet childless men were derided. A man married in his thirties, his bride was usually in her teens, and would have been chosen by his father.
Under the Roman Empire, men and women had near-equal legal and property rights in marriage. These were arranged by parents, were monogamous, and were entered into during the late teens: either without a ceremony, the couple having lived together for a year; with a more formal ceremony in front of witnesses; or, for the rich, with an elaborate wedding in front of a priest and ten witnesses. Divorce was by mutual agreement and easy to arrange: equivalent ceremonies were held. Concubinage was common and homosexuality acceptable, while sexuality in marriage, many agree, was targeted at procreation rather than pleasure. St Jerome quotes a lost text by the philosopher Seneca, tutor to Nero, as saying: ‘Nothing is more impure than to love one’s wife as if she were a mistress… men should appear before their wife not as lovers, but as husbands.’
For the Hebrews, if the Bible is to be believed, marriage, the union of man and wife, is a primary duty. No sooner does Eve’s creation take place than we are told: ‘Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh’ (Genesis 2: 24). A nomadic people for whom children not only constitute the continuation of the family line but also provide labour, the Hebrews were bound by the imperative to ‘go forth and multiply’. They were also bound by an injunction to obedience, first to God and then to his representative on earth, the father. This is a patriarchal culture.
But while the father’s command may trump all others in importance, the Bible in its very first pages also presents a model for disobedience: parents, it seems, must needs be left, injunctions challenged, laws broken, knowledge–which is also knowledge of ‘the other’ and sexual knowledge–sought. Tempted to eat from the forbidden tree of knowledge, Eve transgresses, soon to be followed by Adam. This sets in train that inevitable move away from the first parent in which husband and wife ‘cleave’ to one another through the travails of life outside a paradise forever lost and forever pursued. Precarious site of disobedience, marriage, for the Hebrews, is nonetheless both benefit and blessing: ‘Whoso findeth a wife, findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord’ (Proverbs 18: 22).
Love and attraction also had a place in ancient Hebrew unions, even if fathers usually did the choosing of mates and obedience to their will was enjoined. Nor did love’s path run smooth. Paternal law governs the institution of marriage. Love, as Auden noted, ‘we can’t compel or fly’. Law and love have thus ever been at odds. Abraham’s grandson Jacob–he who masqueraded as a ‘hairy’ man like Esau, his elder brother, in order to dupe his blind father Isaac into blessing him–is the first person in the Bible to be described as a lover. (Desiring is already present in its pages: Abraham’s wife, Sarah, unable to conceive for long years, ‘desires’ a son.) When Jaco
b is ready to find a wife, he is sent east to Syria by his mother Rebecca, who recognizes the present danger of fraternal retribution from Esau. Her brother, Laban, has an estate there. Laban has two daughters: Leah, the elder, and Rachel, her younger sister. ‘Leah was tender-eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well-favoured. And Jacob loved Rachel’ (Genesis 29: 17–18).
Jacob works for Laban for seven years to win Rachel–though, since he loves her, they seem ‘but a few days’. This labour constitutes a bride price, which marks a legal betrothal. But Laban cheats Jacob, in a mirroring of the way in which Jacob cheated his own father, Isaac. In the darkness of the wedding night, it is Leah Jacob beds with. Laban has substituted one daughter for another. In law and custom, Laban points out, the elder daughter must be the first to wed. Jacob has to labour for another seven years to win his beloved Rachel, while poor Leah pines. If labouring, overcoming odds, is the lover’s task, labouring to produce children is the beloved’s. Leah and Rachel compete with each other in conceiving the desired sons, to Rachel’s detriment and everyone’s unhappiness. In an early version of assisted reproduction, Rachel enjoins her servant’s help in the task of procreation: Bilhah acts as her surrogate in Jacob’s bed, and gives birth to two sons, before Rachel at last produces Joseph.
Like all desert peoples, the Hebrews sanctioned polygamy, though monogamy gradually became the favoured marital form. Islamic law continues to permit a husband to have up to four wives at a time, if he can distribute time and money equally amongst them. Though the early Hebrews frowned upon divorce, it was permissible–though for the woman, only if the husband agreed. Amongst Islamic peoples, divorce can be initiated by either party: according to scholars, divorce rates during the medieval Islamic world and in the Ottoman Empire were far higher than they are in the Middle East today.
Christianity introduced a radical new note into the Western history of marriage. Love was elevated into an ideal, an emotion targeted, in its highest form, at God and his only begotten son. Christ also ‘loved’ his followers, who found salvation both in loving him and in being loved. This redemptive form of love has no earthly parallels in the Gospels in the love between man and woman, though its tropes have long affected earthly unions. Sacred love gradually migrated into the sanctified union of couples in marriage: all other love was marked as profane.
The early Christians valued celibacy above all states. Women, as Eve’s inheritors, become the unclean agents of original sin, their flesh a temptation to be denied. The primary marriage between Mary and Joseph is not consummated until after the miraculous birth of Jesus, who himself remains the exemplar of chastity. Mary, as the incarnation of motherhood, exhibits the wifely virtues of sweetness and obedience, and an iconic purity–despite the oft-forgotten fact that she bore Joseph some six children. As Paul states, ‘It is good for a man not to touch a woman’, but to avoid the sin of fornication ‘let every man have his own wife… for it is better to marry than to burn’ (I Corinthians 7: 1, 2, 9).
Since not everyone could equal St Paul in asceticism, sexuality was tolerated by the early Church hierarchy, but for the purposes of procreation only. Adultery as well as divorce and remarriage were prohibited. The highest ideal remained chastity: ‘He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife’ (I Corinthians 7: 33–4). In the same vein, virginity was valued above the marital state. Paul does give marriage a spiritual value by comparing it to the union of Christ with his Church, thereby leaving the way open for later more positive interpretations of the married state. But Christianity had to move a long way from the early Church Fathers to arrive at a statement like Samuel Johnson’s to his biographer, Boswell, in an increasingly secular eighteenth century: ‘Marriage is the best state for a man in general; and every man is a worse man, in proportion as he is unfit for the married state.’
How much impact ascetic Christian ideals had on everyday mores varied, of course, during the Church’s long history and across geographical locations and social strata. Up until the Reformation in northern Europe and a little longer in the Catholic countries, nunneries, monasteries and the priesthood had not only a moral, but also a practical social agenda. They provided the landed classes with vocational establishments for ‘excess’ sons and daughters whom family wealth couldn’t sustain. In countries where primogeniture didn’t hold, younger sons’ entry into the priesthood also allowed property to move undivided from generation to generation.
If Christian love was often tough love, its underlying forms of adoration and abjection, along with the difficulties put in the path to salvation, achieved or requited only through the magic of grace, were nonetheless mimicked and internalized in secular patterns of courtship. Indeed, the patterns of courtly and romantic love were deeply influenced by the redemptive Christian paradigm, as was the value placed on women’s chastity and virginity. Women’s purity and obedience are paramount because they ensure the legitimacy of the paternal line. In traditional societies, women’s purity also takes on symbolic weight and stands in for her husband’s and brothers’, a doubling still evident today in instances of so-called honour killings.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1392, offers a revealing picture of the sexual and marital habits of everyday life. These hardly always conform to the normative aspirations of Church dogma. The Wife of Bath has had five marriages all at the church door, the first at the age of twelve, rather than the single marriage prescribed by the Church. Weren’t human beings made both for duty and procreation? she asks in self-defence, all the while singing the beauty of sexual parts and telling us that marriage is an economic and sexual union, whose secret to happiness lies in the wife’s dominion over her husband. The Wife of Bath may or may not have been altogether typical, but her tale does indicate that everyday practice was far more unruly than the religious prescriptions laid down. Then, too, the status of ‘widow’ brought many more benefits than that of ‘wife’, since widows had both legal and financial rights which wives, as their husband’s dependants, did not.
Marriage only very gradually came under the Church’s full legal aegis. Lawrence Stone, the great historian of marriage and divorce in England, points out that until the eighteenth century marriage was an engagement that ‘could be undertaken in a bewildering variety of ways’. Polygamy was widely practised, divorce a matter of consent, remarriage frequent, and cohabiting, or concubinage, widespread. Marriage was a private contract concerning property: it gave the woman some protection in case of the husband’s death or divorce. For those without property, the community acted as a monitor of the wedding contract and would instil in the partners a sense of what was largely approved or disapproved. Church ceremonies were for the rich.
If practices continued various, by the thirteenth century the Church had established itself fully enough to take over at least the rules governing marriage–‘to assert the principle of monogamous indissoluble marriage, to define and prohibit incest, to punish fornication and adultery, and to get bastards legally excluded from property inheritance’. Divorce was now prohibited, but annulments on a range of grounds were possible, though largely only available to the rich. The process of marrying could entail several stages. If propertied, the parents of the bride and groom would first enter into a contracted financial arrangement. A formal spousal–a kind of promissory note or engagement–took place before witnesses in which the couple made their vows to each other. This was considered to be a binding ‘marriage’ if the couple then consummated their relations, even if no church ceremony followed. If it did, banns were proclaimed three times, or a marriage licence obtained. Finally, the wedding was blessed in church and the mutual consent of both parties orally verified. Not until 1439 did the wedding ceremony itself become a sacrament in England–that is, a rite in which God was active and conferred his blessing or grace on the wedded couple. Only after the Reformation did the Cathol
ic Church insist on the presence of a priest for a marriage to be made valid.
Needless to say, not all marriages followed these various steps. Given Christianity’s focus on the individual, all that was fundamentally necessary for marriage was the free consent of bride and bridegroom–as long as the two were of sound mind and of age, which was twelve for a woman and fourteen for a man. This had the effect of liberating the young from parental authority: so-called secret marriages entered into without parental consent and purely by verbal contract in front of a witnessing priest or by licence abounded, since verbal consent by the parties alone was binding. Willing priests, for a fee, were not difficult to find: Shakespeare’s Romeo managed to find one easily enough; and despite the tightening of the Church regime in 1604 (which made banns essential and raised the age of consent to twenty-one), they continued to be. The great metaphysical poet of love and later Dean of St Paul’s, John Donne, in 1601 secretly married his beloved, Ann More, against the wishes of both her father and her uncle, Donne’s own patron. The marriage cost him (and the attending priest and witness) a stay in the Fleet Prison, as well as his post as chief secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton. It was not until eight years–and almost as many children–later that Ann’s father recognized the marriage and offered up her dowry.
The incidence of runaway couples who defied their parents to find an obliging parson rose through the late seventeenth and into the early eighteenth century: if Restoration comedy bears any relationship to the real, parsons could be as obliging as the proverbial French hotel receptionist. In George Farquhar’s The Stage Coach, Captain Basil talks of a parson who ‘first gave us his blessing, then lent us his bed’. ‘Common law’ marriages–a partnership by mutual agreement and for which no ceremony was necessary–were also plentiful: in America, certain states still recognized these until the 1970s, and some eleven still do so today. In England, common law unions were prohibited only by the Marriage Act of 1753, when the Church of England was put in charge of marriage.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 14