In Defense of Matrimony
KAPP, ISA
In Defense of Matrimony The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation By Midge Decier Coward McCann & Geoghegan. 188 pp. $5.95. Marriages and Infidelities By Joyce Carol...
...The typical marriage counselor, according to a New York Times Magazine article, today has a degree in the behavioral sciences...
...With an author who motivates her heroine, on an ordinary June morning (in "Scenes of Passion and Despair"), to dream of driving an ice pick into the chest of the man she loves or to envision that her skin will come loose and detach itself from her skull, our sense of a coherent universe is woefully imperiled...
...She will be calling upon him for a kind of support and protection that naturally includes the elements of economic security and even, if need be, outright physical defense, but that beyond these serves far more importantly to hedge her spirit around with the fixed borders of care and love within which this spirit might expand and reach its full growth...
...If there are not enough of these virtues to go around, the least the rest of us can do is remember that we went into marriage eager to join that small and susceptible community that permits us to brandish the world's most complacent "we...
...This is frankly old-fashioned and not far from the view of Hermann Keyserling, the German philosopher and man of letters who wrote in The Book of Marriage (1926) that the "special consciousness of unity is the immediate creation of the marriage relation...
...Especially unusual in our present contentious atmosphere is the unashamed tribute she pays to the beneficence of marriage for women...
...In the offices of marriage counselors, once warmed by the sanguine light of ethics, psychology is now employed to peer into the grim problems of what is called "interrelating," and clients are urged via tape recorders, computer print-outs, even toy trains, to testify to the corrosive truth...
...In one of the sad stories from her latest collection, Marriages and Infidelities, a married woman goes to see her lover in a rickety farmhouse along a bumpy, desolate river...
...provoking her husband to take a modest poke at her in front of the thunderstruck baby sitter so she can declaim "I am tired of all these brutal beatings"and settling down to sheer adoration of "a man so marvelous that every other woman must surely covet him...
...Maybe, as Havelock Ellis says in the essay, "Love as an Art," "our ancient ascetic traditions often make us blind to the meaning of pleasure...
...In Tolstoy's novel...
...But today we are too serious and too sophisticated to be that wise...
...In an area where everyone is an expert, we have actually been persuaded to ignore our personal knowledge and experience, and confine ourselves to the fashionable Liberation-ist attack on marriage as a social institution...
...Literally speaking, this charge only fits such bizarre groups as the Redstockings and WITCH, and feminists who ask (like Una Stannard in Woman in Sexist Society) for the freedom "not to be sexy...
...Thus we continue to talk of the way most of us elect to spend the largest part of our lives in grudging terms like "working at it," compromise and maturity...
...To be fair to Miss Oates, she devises no artificial boundary between marriage and the rest of life...
...Perhaps we need frivolity to save us...
...From Kate Millet's Sexual Politics to more recent tracts like Open Marriage and Marriage is Hell, the topic is treated not primarily as a condition to be appreciated, understood or even disconcerted by, but as a provocation guaranteed to make nasty sparks fly...
...But there remains one mysterious thing about marriage: However great a privilege it may seem, it does not want us to be constant in our gratitude...
...Can't you see I'm in the middle of the bechamel sauce...
...to know our own minds...
...The relaxed and confusing borders of sexual morality, for example, force each woman into a much keener scrutiny of her own feelings: "She had been deprived of a large measure of her accustomed power over men, the power in clear conscience to withhold from them a sexual victory . . . ; and she had in exchange been granted an unprecedented power over herself, the power in equally clear conscience to concede to her own wishes...
...On each issue—housework (represented in the Movement as mindless and demeaning), the sexual revolution (seen as creating new opportunities for women to be treated as sexual objects), marriage (conceived as a legal arrangement to perpetuate the exploitation of women by men), and motherhood (regarded as fraught with pain and difficulty)Miss Decter reformulates the argument to show that it is not social limitations the radical feminist resents, but the strain imposed by the tremendous range of choices the modern woman has acquired...
...497 pp...
...responding to friendly questions when company is expected "with a tight-lipped 'Leave me alone...
...Of course,' Dolly interposed quickly, as though saying what she had more than once thought, 'else it would not be forgiveness...
...Here she shifts the debate quite sternly from the self-indulgence of ideological protest to the demands of morality...
...I don't know him at all...
...But the pleasure principle may be more edifying than the principle of accommodation because it can propel us to an exact and exacting knowledge of what it is in others that beguiles or enlivens us...
...Miss Oates is particularly successful with bleak landscapes where the isolation is real rather than superimposed by her own peculiar slant on human relations...
...and that she is by nature inclined to be funny...
...We see only its possibilities for evil and not its mightiness for good...
...In any case, a jaunty argument for the condition, if not the institution, of marriage is Yes, Married by Judith Viorst, who earlier tipped her hand by titling her most quoted poem "Married Is Better...
...and I often see 22year-olds steering with formidable aplomb among their expanding sexual options...
...Whether our reasons are paltry or existential, they are mainly indifferent to society and intended to advance our own cause...
...Thousands of the Movement's camp followers are not planning to give up sex or marriage but trying to gain attention the easy way...
...I think she profits from not being one of those proud spirits who can establish a clear dichotomy between love and amity, and rage against the domestication of the passions by marriage...
...Her style is like an 18th-century drawing room, formal enough to give us the feeling of participation in a significant ceremony, and roomy enough for us to lean back and measure others' positions against our own...
...These same words are used by the widow of a famous poet recollecting her husband in "The Sacred Marriage," and once again by the girl in "By the River," who unaccountably leaves her husband and child in the country to take a lover in the city, and then goes back home only to be killed by her father, without a world of explanation by anyone...
...and, most incorrigibly of all, because we needed somebody to love us come rain come shine...
...Pleasure is more likely to bring husbands and wives (and, for that matter, friends) together than deliberate attempts at sacrifice or "interrelating...
...In most quarters on the American scene, in plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, movies like Diary of a Mad Housewife, and in the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, we are taught that the real opportunities in marriage are for mutual demoralization and desertion...
...Perhaps the most controversial aspect of this book is its slightly shocking thesis, embodied in the title, that the free-spoken ladies of the Movement want not liberty or equality but chastity, a relief from the diverse obligations of sex and womanhood...
...No one is equal to marriage or to life, and there is no communication all the way down the line?that is much the burden of thought in Marriages and Infidelities, though to compensate, the book offers a vast waterfall of sensory impressions...
...Reviewed by Isa Kapp In ideas, as in love, people who are hard to arouse are more likely to respond to something that is disagreeable, an insult or a gesture of violence, than to something benign...
...The tone of the debate is borrowed from the radical wing of the Women's Liberation Movement, and die terms?oppression, rights, contracts, roles?are those of political discord...
...We simply drift, in her eerie lens, like the weeds and mallows near some lonely marshscattered, a bit poetic, unconnected with any conscious purpose, and utterly at the disposal of winds and happenstance...
...Be that as it may, Miss Decter unquestionably defines women's difficulties more accurately than do the Liberation advocates, and in correcting their logic hardly ever stoops to malice...
...And to judge by most current discussions of marriage, there is a high incidence of intellectual frigidity in American life...
...Her compassion may be somewhat over—extended: Most women I know, far from exhibiting any anxieties, seem to derive from their selection of clothes, household gadgets and even part-time jobs a considerable fund of complacency...
...In The New Chastity, Midge Decter throws into this organized clamor a fine polemical trenchancy, first reconstructing with somewhat grueling fidelity the whole sprawling edifice of Liberation grievances, then proceeding with magisterial confidence to assail it...
...Viorst is more at home in the rumpled mise en scene of married life than in romantic places...
...Not being modern, Tolstoy could tell us without fanfare that the secret of love and marriage lies partly in simplicity, in giving way to large bursts of good feeling...
...What we see in the spinster type or sexually active bachelor, he went so far as to say, "is essentially a psychic manifestation...
...Still, it would be a mistake to fault Miss Decter's book by treating it too literally, because what she is doing, as in her remarkable essay "The Liberated Woman" from her first collection, is reviving an attractive literary genre: intellectual portraiture, the study of that subtle coalescence of disposition, reasoning, and borrowed cultural finery that determines why certain people adopt certain points of view...
...Miss Decter, on the contrary, is as Olympian as Alistair Cooke guiding us through the congested plots of romantic novels on educational television...
...Although Miss Decter evidently believes that the good life, like good prose style, comes hard-earned, she actually registers an enormous empathy toward her own gender in its present "nearly overwhelming state of uncertainty...
...Yet I would not advise taking every image at face value...
...it demands, even in the midst of contentment, the bracing touch of asperity...
...Even the embattled faces on the talk shows engage their adversaries in a combative and personal way that more resembles a preamble to sex than an escape from it...
...I am, in fact, convinced that just as men have it in them to be gallant in their dealings with women, women have it in them to be humbugs in their dealings with men...
...Indeed, judging by the abusive vocabulary of Women's Liberation, the desolating universe of current literature, or the mechanistic psychology of marriage counseling, one would scarcely believe that most of us in the Western world marry voluntarily and out of selfish optimism...
...152 pp...
...The single remark concealing a sting implies that Gloria Steinem's slim chances to do political writing stem more from herself than from society, and it is discreetly relegated to a footnote...
...Mrs...
...what mixture of tension and relaxation, for instance, makes us attentive enough for continuing sexual affinity...
...Our writers are not the only ones who assume that diving deep into the ocean of marriage will disclose neither pearls nor corals, but something on the order of a giant squid...
...If one forgives it must be completely...
...it is in fact much more the want of a spiritual reality, which marriage creates, than the lack of erotic and generative experience...
...A healthy instinct for enjoyment enables us to avoid the fate of those winded and discouraged partners we see who have married their peers in class or education but not where it counts emotionally, in energy, pace, or agility of imagination...
...Anno Karen-ina advises her sister-in-law, Dolly, who is weeping over her spouse's infidelity, to forgive it as if it had never been at all...
...Viorst is not at all intellectual, but very smart...
...Mary McCarthy achieved something of the sort in "Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man" and "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt," though in her case the reader always imagined that objectivity was diluted by some lingering sense of personal slight or triumph...
...Yes, Married: A Saga of Love and Complaint By Judith Viorst Saturday Review Press...
...If there is no way, as Keyserling observed, to transmit instinct, we can at least encourage it and not forsake it at the moment of choice, in some unnecessary capitulation to common sense...
...Marriages and Infidelities By Joyce Carol Oates Vanguard...
...in exchange she will hold him at the center of all her spiritual reaching, make his concerns her own and of at least equal importance with her own...
...I would guess that this predisposition both in authors and in therapists to make us face up to the heel, the snob, the wastrel in ourselves, to define our behavior through psychology's star word, "destructive," is the result of an exaggerated concentration on some of our minor delinquencies toward each other...
...There is no interruption in her agreeably disorderly imagination between rushing one of her sons to the Poison Clinic...
...They exaggerate these frictions precisely because the last thing in their minds is the existence of the opposite possibility in marriage—pleasure...
...that she uses honesty as a wile, turning all her foibles into plaintive charms...
...Today it is not stylish to admit that society and the individual may at times have common interests, and that a socially encouraged "institution" may do more for our private necessity than anything we could invent for ourselves...
...From the first disingenuous admission that in her husband's opinion she does "a lot of berserk distorting," to the last poignant outcry that he slips into the kitchen to add gratuitous spices to her cooking while smugly assuring her "You will thank me in the end," it is obvious that she is, anachronistically, a happy wife...
...to share our moments of pomp and circumstance with a kindred spirit...
...When it comes to the selection of a mate, some of us lead, by luck or intuition, a charmed life...
...Her lover wants to know if her husband still makes love to her, and she answers, "I don't know...
...It helps, no doubt, that Mrs...
...7.95...
...She stared at the wild grey water and its shapelessness...
...If, that is, she could know what they were...
Vol. 55 • December 1972 • No. 24
