How We Ended Up With Such Vile Ideas About Marriage

By Josey Vogels, My Messy Bedroom. Posted March 5, 2009.

A professor of English at the University of California at Davis, Fran Dolan's latest book, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy explores how history has shaped modern ideas of marriage, and more specifically, the idea that in marriage, two become one. Because of course, the big problem with this view of marriage is that more often then not, it also results in the question: which one of you do you become? 

Josey Vogels: How has history specifically shaped our current model of coupledom and marriage?

Fran Dolan: The very particular circumstances of 16th and 17th century (or "early modern") English culture, which is then transported to Colonial America -- and Canada -- through English books, laws, and customs created a (usually unacknowledged) legacy that still shapes how we describe what it means to be in a couple. I am particularly interested in three sources of this idea that two become one: The Biblical figuration of marriage as the fusion of two persons into one flesh; the idea under common law that husband and wife achieve "unity of person," an idea that was always a legal fiction and has been superceded in law yet survives in the common practice of a wife taking her husband's last name; and the popular question of "who wears the pants in the family," a question that is still sometimes asked but that has its roots in a long tradition of imagining that if partners are equals then they are also combatants in a "battle of the sexes" and that this battle can only be avoided or resolved if the couple comes to an agreement about who should wear the pants and have the final say.

JV: How does this idea negatively affect our relationships?

FD: I don't assume that everyone's relationship plays out as a fight to the finish between two combatants. But I do think that this "early modern legacy" limits how we can imagine and describe, and therefore experience, relationships in a range of ways. It creeps in through expressions like "hen-pecked" and "whipped" and through the assumption that one person's career is more important and the other is the "trailing spouse;" that one person's desire or pleasure is more important than the other's; that one person should make the decisions or "call the shots;" that one can't survive a break up (or bereavement) because s/he is partial or incomplete.

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