It began
last Sunday, a warm summer’s evening deep in the English countryside, where the
whiff of money mingles with the sweet scent of new-mown hay and no immigrant
has ventured since the Norman invasion. The rural quietude was invaded by the
sound of a prop-driven aircraft performing an aerobatic display above the
fields, trailing smoke to draw the outline of a heart in the clear, dusking
sky. It had been commissioned to make a very public statement of one couple’s
love for each other on the occasion of their wedding party and it marked the
start of a week during which the custom and practice of marriage has dominated
my thoughts.
The next
evening I caught up with the film Wild
Tales (Spoiler Alerts!), a series of short stories, one of which is about a
big wedding party at which the bride discovers her husband’s recent infidelity.
She reacts immediately and without restraint, causing the guests a good deal of
discomfort - or entertainment, depending on their point of view. The havoc she
wreaks on the party is considerable but, in confronting her disillusion head-on
and at the beginning of the marriage, she may just have salvaged the
relationship. In contrast, the next film I saw, 45 Years, depicts the devastating effect on a wife who realises,
after 45 years of marriage, that she was second choice to the woman her husband
had always loved but had been unable to marry. In the first film there is hope
that the marriage might endure because the skeleton is out of the cupboard, in
the latter it is too late to make amends: both ask the question - what are
peoples’ expectations of marriage?
Why do
people get married? For a variety of reasons, I’m sure: one can only hope they
know which ones. The contract of marriage was conceived, originally, as a way
of keeping possession of property: it was an alliance, arranged so that land
and other assets would remain within a defined family structure - a system
which was useful for medieval landowners, who ensured that it was tightly
underwritten by laws (which they created) and sanctified by their clergy so as
to put the fear of God into dissenters. That love played any part in this
process is unlikely.
The next
film I saw, Gett, depicts a woman
locked into a loveless marriage and undertaking a ten-year long struggle in
religious courts to persuade her husband to grant her a divorce. The film is agonising
to watch and the message is clear: the institution of marriage is fundamental
to the maintenance of a strictly prescribed social structure. The wife’s
responsibility is to cook and procreate. Those who uphold this system have no interest
in allowing individual cases of human misery to undermine it.
All this
while I have been reading Colm Toibin’s novel Norah Webster which looks at the plight of a woman widowed in her
forties. It describes the way in which she copes with the loss of the husband
she loved and how she subsequently cares for the children. Living, as she does,
in the rural and very Catholic Ireland of the 1950s she has sympathy and
support - as long as she abides by the rules. Having finished it, I picked up a
novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Published in 1956, the first chapter introduces
us to a newly engaged couple, part of a wealthy London set. The novel is called
In the Long Term and, assuming this
refers to the marriage, I am very interested to see how it fares.
And this
evening I shall be at an actual wedding party where, whatever the hopes and
expectations of the bride and groom, I shall be content to feast on the buffet, knock back the booze and wish them well.
