In a lot of literature and our society, marriage is seen and viewed as a happy thing, a sign of love and togetherness that will last for a long while. But in many of the novels that we've read in class this year, the portrayals of marriage given are anything but positive. With the exceptions of The Mezzanine (on account of it being more focused on staplers) and The Metamorphosis (on account of its main character being a cockroach, and thus unable to marry), marriage plays important roles in the novels that we've read.
In Mrs. Dalloway, The Sun Also Rises, and The Wide Sargasso Sea, we see marriage happen not so much out of love but as a move for status or money. And in all these cases, we see rather unhappy endings or results. Rather than going off into the sunset, deep in love, we see Clarissa Dalloway ponder suicide as a good thing, by ending an unhappy life on one's own, and on their own terms. Brett fails to find true love, having already gone through two unhappy marriages for money and possibly going into a third with Mike Campbell, instead settling for quick flings and failed attempts at love, as seen with Romero. Antoinette is renamed Bertha Mason, goes crazy, and spends the rest of her days in the attic of her husband's England home, where he rarely resides.
In The Stranger, while marriage does not play as large of a role, we see Meursault treat the concept of marriage as fairly light and not so serious. While he is attracted to Marie, there is no real deep attachment, stating that either married or not, it makes no difference to him. This trivializes the concept of marriage, seen as an important and proper step in many societies, and undoubtedly in the society of Meursault.
Not only are these not just positive outlooks on marriage, they're actually nightmarish results of what can, and in these cases, did go extremely wrong with marriage. It's interesting to pick up on this trend throughout the novels we read. I'm not sure if it was done intentionally or not as part of the class curriculum, representative of general 20th century literature or not, but it's been a trend that I've picked up on recently, and has really fascinated me, and wondered if it might fascinate others as well.
Jacob
You bring up an interesting point that has also been at the back of my mind. While we are studying the 20th century, an era which many viewed as groundbreaking and the start of the modern era, the concepts of marriage are far from ideal. However, I feel like all the authors knew exactly what they were doing, and were providing an example of what people should avoid. It is quite possible that the novels were criticizing antiquated concepts, all providing sad/ambiguous endings to emphasize their points.
ReplyDeleteWhile the views on marriage in most of the novels we've read haven't been that positive, I believe that the one expressed in Wide Sargasso Sea is much more negative than the others. In this novel, marriage seems to be something that is solely for social purposes, and we never see really any form of love between the characters. In the other books where social marriages are common, they at least turn out reasonable well, and there's usually at least some character outside the marriage that is loved by one of the people in it, which is completely absent in this book.
ReplyDeleteWhen you refer to "a lot of literature" that treats marriage as the "happy ending" of a plot, you could be describing the nineteenth-century novel (as well as the comedies of Shakespeare). I didn't intentionally pick books with unhappy marriages or romantic relationships at the core, although you're right that 20th-century fiction is full of them. In part, this might be a reaction against the formulaic marriage-happy-ending 19th-century convention. _Jane Eyre_ is an example of this convention: that novel has a happy ending, as Jane and Rochester can finally be together, with him duly humbled, and Bertha conveniently out of the way. But Rhys, in characteristic 20th-century style (all of her 1920s and 30s novels are paradigms of unhappy hetero couples and threesomes), takes this old plot and complicates it--the marriage is the crisis that sets her plot in motion, with arson/suicide as the only way *out* of the marriage that's more like imprisonment. We could certainly read this as a denunciation of Bronte's "happy ending," which requires us to sweep Bertha's whole story aside as insignificant.
ReplyDeleteI think the fact that a negative perception of marriage throughout these books is a good things to point out. Almost every book dealt with some pretty dark themes (severe struggles for love and relationships, suicide, etc.), and there are many themes that the novels have in common with each other. Unrequited love, for example, was a staple in Wide Sargasso Sea and Mrs. Dalloway, and led to a lot of tension between many of the main characters.
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