A Treatise on Marriage

All over the world and “In India there is no greater event in a family than a wedding, dramatically evoking every possible social obligation, kinship bond, traditional value, impassioned sentiment, and economic resource.” (Source: U.S. Library of Congress) Simone de Beauvoir states, “Marriage today still retains, for the most part, this traditional form…There are still important social strata in which no other vista opens before her…Even when she is more emancipated, she is led to prefer marriage to a career because of the economic advantages held by men…who she hopes will make a quicker or greater success than she could.” (450) Beauvoir declares, “To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man.” (Beauvoir, 1983) Diana Meyers charges, “Deeming women emotional and unprincipled, these thinkers advocated confining women to the domestic sphere where their vices could be neutralized, even transformed into virtues, in the role of submissive wife and nurturant mother.” Virginia Woolf in her essay Professions for Women highlights her own inability to express female passion and expressions of female body because of social taboos and central idealogies of womanhood. (Woolf, 1942). Jane Tompkins too expresses the same embarrassment in expressing her feelings in her writings in Me and My Shadow. (Tompkins, 1996). Comments Wilcox “Once she had been ‘trimmed’ and ‘garnished’ for the marriage market, a young woman continued to be expected to remain silent in marriage.” (Wilcox, 2007).

Woman was never deemed complete without marriage. Diana Meyers observes, “…Simone de Beauvoir's trenchant observation, “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other,” sums up why the self is such an important issue for feminism. To be the Other is to be the non-subject, the non-person, the non-agent—in short, the mere body. In law, in customary practice, and in cultural stereotypes, women’s selfhood has been systematically subordinated, diminished, and belittled, when it has not been outright denied.” (Meyers, Stanford) In her quest for acceptance, woman sprints blindly towards marriage. Love becomes the casualty in the melee for pipping the post. Both men and women settle on devotion to marriage, instead of devotion to each other in a bid to maintain the status quo. Consequently, import of marriage as a social institution has never diminished. As centuries have passed, woman is parceled from father to husband. She is always in a state of flux, grooming herself for marriage spawning a vast industry by itself for match- makers, go-betweens, on-line marriage bureaus, reality shows, on-line dating, friends and relatives, to pitch in and help the hapless girl and boy get married. Her education too is centered on marriage-grooming. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg observes, “These school years ordinarily marked a girl's first separation from home. They served to wean the daughter from her home, to train her in the essential social graces, and, ultimately, to help introduce her into the marriage market.” Nancy Armstrong ironically suggests, “In order to make otherwise undistinguished young women desirable to men of better social position, conduct books and works of instruction for women…as those that such men should want in a wife.” (Armstrong, 1996) Nobody tells a man that he has to get married. If he is single he is eligible bachelor and if she is single she is on the shelf. He is complacent in the knowledge that he is a good catch in the marriage race because he is “he” and not “she”  

Greeks were virulently misogynistic. Romans allowed women more freedom. Aristotle reduced them to mere incubators. St. Thomas consistently assumed that a woman is her husband’s property. (67) The medieval era projected sex even within marriage as sin; because of the original sin of Eve, and accordingly all women to be punished throughout their lives. Katherine M. Rogers’ The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature discusses why men become misogynists. She stresses that men are in dread of women becoming their masters if freed from their constraints. “If femininity is equated with sexuality and sexuality with sin, woman is naturally seen as a degraded being whose only hope of salvation is through suppressing herself as much as her frailty permits." (22) Rogers quoted from The Saturday Review, August 28, 1920: “[It] is man’s last stand against the subversion of his rights of virility by a tyranny which, unless we are much mistaken, will prove to be at once humiliating and dangerous. Humiliating, because it is the submission of the superior to the inferior sex. Dangerous, because, if it be pushed beyond a certain point, it will be overthrown by an appeal to physical force.” (217) H.L. Mencken, a confirmed misogynist, claims that: Men destroy themselves trying to satisfy the (financial) needs of women. Marriage is slavery with man the slave. (Rogers, 1966)

Gilbert vocalizes the situation of earlier women being discouraged from reading and writing, deeming it to be men’s activities. Women’s entire life centered on serving men. Hence, they did not need education. “From Eve, Minerva, Sophia and Galatea onward, after all, patriarchal mythology defines women as created by, from, and for men, the children of male brains, ribs, and ingenuity.” (Gilbert,1986) The first major feminist struggle in the nineteenth century was for a married woman’s right to her own property and income, since at that time a husband was legally entitled to all his wife owned and anything she might earn.” (210) Betty Friedan in her pioneering book The Feminine Mystique comments, “The old prejudices - women are animals, less than human, unable to think like men, born merely to breed and serve men - were not so easily dispelled by the crusading feminists, by science and education, and by the democratic spirit after all. They merely reappeared in the forties, in Freudian disguise. The feminine mystique derived its power from Freudian thought; for it was an idea born of Freud, which led women, and those who studied them, to misinterpret their mothers’ frustrations, and their fathers’ and brothers’ and husbands’ resentments and inadequacies, and their own emotions and possible choices in life.” (Friedan, 1963).

Judith Lowder Newton in Power and The “Woman’s Sphere” analyzes, “…decline in women’s economic activity and the recognized value of their work was linked with a decline in their status as well…unpaid domestic work lost visibility…” (Newton, 1996).Nirmala Prakash concludes, “The contradictory attitudes expressed about women in classical texts persist in contemporary society. On the one hand, they are regarded as the highest embodiment of purity and power - a symbol of religiousness and spirituality, on the other; they are viewed essentially as weak and dependent creatures requiring constant guidance and protection. While girls are also considered necessary, the birth of a boy has been considered more desirable.” (Prakash).

The marriage landscape everywhere is now slowly and perceptibly changing. The change is pronounced in western countries and glaringly obvious in urban India. The rural India seems to be caught up in a time wrap with women being exploited in the marriage market as before. What has wrought this change in the modern Indian women? It could be education, employment, economic independence, different cultural exposure, and increase in self-worth; any or all of the above factors. Woolf’s essay Professions for Women describes Angel in the house symbolizing domestic bliss, “…that selfless, sacrificial woman in the nineteenth century whose sole purpose in life was to soothe, to flatter, and to comfort the male half of the world’s population.” Gilbert and Gubar assert, “She must confront precursors who are almost exclusively male, and therefore significantly different from her…they attempt to enclose her in definitions of her person and her potential which, by reducing her to extreme stereotypes (angel, monster) drastically conflict with her sense of self-that is, of her subjectivity, her autonomy, her creativity.(48). What is discernable today is the New Woman who has distanced herself from Woolf’s angel in the house transforming into Gilbert and Guber’s mad woman in the attic when suppressed. She is poised, senescent and bolstered by the support of her friends. She is not alone and helpless anymore. She finds strength and support in friendship which nurtures her marriage. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg comments on, “The female friendship of the nineteenth century, the long-lived intimate, loving friendship…ranged from the supportive love of sisters, through the enthusiasms of adolescent girls, to sensual avowals of love by mature women. It was a world in which men made but a but a shadowy appearance…Young girls helped each other overcome homesickness and endure the crises of adolescence. They gossiped about beaux, incorporated each other into their own kinship systems, and attended and gave teas and balls together. Married life, too, was structured about a host of female rituals…supervised by mothers, sisters, and loving friends… structured around elaborated unisexed rituals. (Rosenberg, 1975)

Meanwhile, marriage has not gone out of fashion nor demand for it has diminished. It has become a bond of comfort and not a band of necessity. A New Woman, before she is ready to marry tries to know the guy well to test their compatibility. Both are equal partners with love blossoming before or after marriage between them. There is no hesitation in dissolving the marriage when either love or commitment is found lacking. Marriageable age of both boys and girls has gone up. They are knowledgeable about love and sex and then settle down to marry. Because of different set of rules for boys and girls and the patriarchal censure on unchaste girls, the marriageable girls still look and act demure. Most of the younger male generation is satisfied if the girl is faithful after marriage, while not poking into her unnecessary past. Then again this change has come over the Indian milieu in the recent past. While western culture exhibited tolerance and acceptance of woman’s sexuality, the Indian mindset is slowly grinding towards that goal. More and more girls are being educated, encouraged to work, allowed to stay alone, their social life accepted and their decisions trusted by their parents.

Works cited:

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Beauvoir de Simon. The Second Sex. trans. H.M.Parshley. Penguin, 1983. 450  .

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