Western unions
The changing idea of marriage through the centuries, from reproductive factory through love nest
I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage
By Susan Squire
Bloomsbury, 258 pp., $25.99
There's certainly much to be contrary about when it comes to marriage. Gleaning from recent headlines alone, you've got gay marriage in California, the marriage of prepubescent girls to middle-aged men in Yemen, the perilous state of Madonna's marriage, and the five-times-married-and-fives-times-widowed Ohio woman who has been charged with killing one husband and is now suspected of offing the rest. But Susan Squire has no interest in such contemporary controversies: Her new book, "I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage," ends with a chapter on the idyllic marriage of theologian Martin Luther and his ward, Katy, a former nun whom Luther helped to get out of her convent.
This denouement may sound as gossipy as the potential nuptials of Brad and Angelina, but Squire largely eschews the actual marriages of real people as she tells "a story about the idea of marriage in the West." She traces this idea from the Stone Age to the Reformation, arguing that marriage operated first in the service of procreation, then as a spiritual "lust-containment facility," before finally - and here we get to Luther - becoming the love match we know and love today.
Though it's hard to see what's so contrary about this fairly familiar narrative, Squire is certainly contrarian with regard to contemporary historical trends. In an era of microhistories, social histories, alternative histories, and women's, ethnic, and postcolonial histories, Squire turns, without apology, to the Dead White Guys of Western Civ 101. After a brief fling with anthropologists and prehistory, she gets down with the Bible (Old Testament and New), the Greeks (Solon, Xenophon, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Plutarch), the Romans (
What do all these Dead White Guys have to say? Well, women are a big problem that can be solved only through marriage, but then they turn marriage itself into a problem. Marriage emerged, Squire argues in a prologue with strikingly few footnotes, when early humans realized that sex causes conception, which in turn caused men to realize that in order to claim their children, they needed to control their women.
Procreation remains at the heart of Squire's story throughout (as, by extension, do heterosexuality and the potential - often inevitable - duplicity of women). However, after dominating BCE Near Eastern and Western marriage, procreation was superseded in theoretical import, during the first dozen or so centuries of Christianity, by the spiritual ideals of celibacy and chastity. Celibacy, chastity, and marriage? The argument sometimes gets a little confusing, but basically marriage lets you have sex, procreate, and - if you have sex only for procreation, and avoid positions proscribed by the Church - remain as spiritually pure as possible.
As the medieval period came to an end, the church began to lose its influence, due in large part to corruption and the plague, as Squire explains in a rare but fascinating detour from texts and treatises. A new ideal arose to dominate the Renaissance: courtly love, promulgated at first by an aristocracy increasingly uninterested in church control, and eventually transformed into a middle-class movement by Luther.
Squire guides us breezily through this narrative, deftly - if sometimes speculatively - explicating her Dead White Guys, and paying special attention (as well she should) to their basically unceasing misogyny. Perhaps her analysis devotes too little attention to economics, which was a dominant force in marriage till well into the 19th century, but her story is one of ideas, not real people and their practical necessities.
Squire ends with Luther because, she claims, we "know what happens after that." Today, when it comes to marriage, "love is the expectation. Romantic, companionate, erotic, intellectual, emotional, physical, hopefully - delusionally - all at once and all at the same time." Acknowledging the fundamentally mythic nature of her story, Squire observes on the book's last page: "No surprise that divorce is common."
I would suggest, however, that, despite the negativity of its title, "I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage" offers us reason to hope - and reason not to stop at Luther. If Squire makes it clear that, throughout history, marriage has been a means to control women and their offspring, she also shows the history of marriage to be one of repeated change and transformation. In other words, while her discussion assumes heterosexuality as the fundamental condition of marriage, it also suggests that marriage is fundamentally malleable.
For those of us in Massachusetts and, at least for now, California, this is a valuable insight into an institution that has recently been transformed yet again. Indeed, if an institution based initially upon control - of women, children, lust - can become, at least in the ideal, a vehicle of parity, who knows what else might be transformed.
Rebecca Steinitz is a writer, editor, and consultant who lives in Arlington. 