The Marriage Book (5 page)

After the obeisance to the ancestral tablet and we had fallen upon our knees before thine Honourable Parent, I then saw for the first time the face of my husband. Dost thou remember when first thou raised my veil and looked long into my eyes? I was thinking, “Will he find me beautiful?” and in fear I could look but for a moment, then my eyes fell and I would not raise them to thine again. But in that moment I saw that thou wert tall and beautiful, that thine eyes were truly almond, that thy skin was clear and thy teeth like pearls. I was secretly glad within my heart, because I have known of brides who, when they saw their husbands for the first time, wished to scream in terror, as they were old or ugly. I thought to myself that I could be happy with this tall, strong young man if I found favour in his sight, and I said a little prayer to Kwan-yin. Because she has answered that prayer, each day I place a candle at her feet to show my gratitude.

EERO SAARINEN

LETTER TO ALINE BERNSTEIN SAARINEN, 1954

Aline Bernstein Louchheim was an art critic for the
New York Times
when she interviewed the architect and designer Eero Saarinen (1910–1961) about the splash he had made with his General Motors center in Michigan. By all accounts—including Saarinen’s, below—they fell hard. It would be the second marriage for both of them.

Saarinen would go on to design the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the TWA terminal in New York, dozens of other buildings, and iconic furniture; Aline remained a successful author and, later, art critic on the
Today Show
and head of NBC’s Paris news bureau.

GROUCHO MARX

MEMOIRS OF A MANGY LOVER
, 1963

Most famous of the famed Marx Brothers, Groucho Marx (1890–1977) was not only a stage, screen, radio, and television performer but also a determined author who published more than half a dozen books. The excerpt below is from his second autobiography and appeared in the chapter titled “On Polygamy (And How to Attain It).”

What attracted him to her? Her eyes? Her legs? Was it something mysteriously feminine about her that no other girl seemed to possess? She is young, cute, and romantic and her speech is fairly intelligent. As they get to know each other more intimately (I mean in a nice way, of course), they both discover that they are ecstatically happy when together and miserable when apart. And then, oh happy day, if she is smart enough not to spring her mother on him too unexpectedly, they will get married.

No matter how many married couples they know, some unhappy, some happy, it seems inconceivable that anything could ever mar the joy they presently find in each other. I am sure that if they ever had any doubts or misgivings about their future happiness, neither wild horses nor her father could drag them to the altar.

It is well known that young love is a temporary form of insanity and that the only cure for it is instant marriage.

ARMISTEAD MAUPIN

TALES OF THE CITY
, 1978

Tales of the City
was the first in a series of nine novels by the American author Armistead Maupin (1944–). The books are set in a San Francisco apartment house and feature memorably eccentric characters, including the landlady, Anna Madrigal, who recollects for a tenant this piece of advice.

The ellipses are the author’s.

Mona . . . Lots of things are more binding than sex. They last longer too. When I was . . . little, my mother once told me that if a married couple puts a penny in a pot for every time they make love in the first year, and takes a penny out every time after that, they’ll never get all the pennies out of the pot.

C

CHILDREN

AUGUST STRINDBERG

GETTING MARRIED
, 1884

Swedish author August Strindberg (1849–1912) was exceptionally prolific and versatile over a span of three decades, writing plays, novels, short stories, histories, poems, and essays, many of them forging a path into modern theater and even modern thought. Yet Strindberg encountered severe controversy with only one of these works—a collection of short stories about marriage, for which he was tried (though eventually acquitted) on charges of blasphemy.

Though much of his work before and after was considered deeply misogynistic,
Getting Married
was marginally less an attack on women than it was a comment on society’s roles for both sexes.

Since marriage, which is a human institution invented for purely practical purposes, is so frail and so full of stumbling-blocks, how is it that so many marriages hold together? They do so because both partners have one interest in common, the thing for which nature has always intended marriage, namely children. Man is in a state of perpetual conflict with nature, in which he is perpetually being vanquished. Take two lovers who want to live together, partly in order to enjoy themselves, partly for the sake of being in each other’s company. They regard any talk of possible children as an insult. Long before a child arrives they discover that their bliss is not so heavenly after all, and their relationship becomes stale. Then a child is born. Everything is new
again and now, for the first time, their relationship is beautiful, for the ugly egoism of the duet has vanished. A marriage without children is a sad affair, and is not a marriage at all. . . . Children are what holds a marriage together.

PATENT MEDICINE ADVERTISEMENT

ATCHISON DAILY GLOBE
, 1896

Ah, Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription. Just a few of the dozen ingredients in this supposed elixir of female health, motherhood, and marital happiness were cinnamon, digitalis, opium, and alcohol. The appeal of being “truly married” was just one of many factors luring Americans to spend (according to a 1905 article in
Collier’s
) an estimated $75 million a year on patent medicines.

A childless marriage cannot be a happy one. A healthy baby is the real jewel for which the wedding ring is only the setting. There is no place in Nature’s economy for a childless marriage. Wedded couples that are childless are never truly married. A baby is the tie that binds. The baby is the pledge that makes husband and wife one in nature and in fact, and that teaches mutual self-sacrifice and sympathy. Thousands of couples are childless because of the wife’s neglect of her health as a woman. Too few women fully appreciate the importance of keeping healthy and vigorous the organs upon which motherhood is dependent. As a consequence, they are weak where they should be strong, and motherhood is either an impossibility or a torturesome and dangerous ordeal. This is easily remedied.

The most wonderful medicine for women is Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription.

OLD JOKE

Sadie and Moishe go to see a lawyer.

“What can I do for you, folks?”

Moishe: “We want a divorce.”

“Well, this is very odd. I mean, um, how old are you folks?”

“I’m ninety-three,” Moishe says. “Wife’s ninety-one. We’ve been married sixty-seven years.”

“And you mean to tell me, after sixty-seven years of marriage, at your ages, you want a divorce?? Why now??”

“We wanted to wait ’til the kids were dead.”

HENRY JAMES

WHAT MAISIE KNEW
, 1897

In one of the most innovative of his twenty novels, Henry James (1843–1916) tells the story of a young girl who is the object of a custody battle between her obstinate parents, Ida and Beale Farange. After a judge rules that Maisie must live six months at a time with each parent, a distant relation offers to take her for the mother’s half, arguing that the arrangement will offer the child at least some freedom from her parents’ poisonous assessments of each other.

Told almost exclusively from Maisie’s point of view, the novel prefigured some of the next century’s stream-of-consciousness fiction and even its New Journalism.

Had [Maisie’s parents] not produced an impression . . . that some movement should be started or some benelovent person should come forward? A good lady came indeed a step or two. She was distantly related to Mrs. Farange, to whom she proposed that, having children and nurseries wound up and going, she should be allowed to take home the bone of contention, and, by working it into her system, relieve at least one of her parents. This would make every time for Maisie, after her inevitable six months with Beale, much more of a change.

“More of a change?” Ida cried. “Won’t it be enough of a change for her to come from that low brute to the person in the world who detests him most.”

“No, because you detest him so much that you’ll always talk to her about him. You’ll keep him before her by perpetually abusing him.”

Mrs. Farange stared. “Pray, then, am I to do nothing to counteract his villainous abuse of
me
?”

The good lady, for a moment, made no reply. Her silence was a grim judgment of the whole point of view. “Poor little monkey!” she at last exclaimed, and the words were an epitaph for the tomb of Maisie’s childhood. She was abandoned to her fate. What was clear to any spectator was that the only link binding her to either parent was this lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed. They had wanted her, not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other. She should serve their anger and seal their revenge, for husband and wife had been alike crippled by the heavy hand of justice, which, in the last resort, met on neither side their indignant claim to get, as they called it, everything.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
, 1927

To the Lighthouse
is considered a modernist masterpiece and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) a pioneer in stream-of-consciousness writing. The novel, set in Scotland and marked by scarce action and dense thought, takes place on two days, set a decade apart, in the life of the Ramsay family. Critics and biographers agree that Woolf began the novel as a study of her own problematic family. Like Woolf, the character of Lily Briscoe is an aspiring artist and determined observer. Like Woolf, too, she is childless.

So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball. That is what Mrs Ramsay tried to tell me the other night, she thought. For she was wearing a green shawl, and they were standing close together watching Prue and Jasper throwing catches. And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again and they became, as they met them, Mr and Mrs Ramsay watching the children throwing catches.

JOAN WILLIAMS

“ARE CHILDREN NECESSARY TO A SUCCESSFUL MARRIAGE?,” 1932

For most of recorded history, marriage was the social contract that created and protected the family unit. So the question posed by this
Times of India
headline was no doubt intended to be provocative, and dozens of readers’ letters followed, representing both sides of the argument.