Left Center Left

I don’t think I was alone among book club members in feeling that Marriage, An Intimate History didn’t live up to expectations. The biggest overarching problem with the book is its sophomoric writing: paragraphs typically run three sentences long, cheesy pop music quotes are meant as illustration, chapters are arranged chronologically rather than conceptually, and the vast scope of research comes across as a litany of numbing details. The truism of academic-crossover publishing is that writing for a general educated audience need not entail dumbing down your work, but Coontz’s book is, frankly, dumbed down.

There is a smart thesis lurking underneath, however, if you have the inclination to find it. I liked the book’s general argument, that in the 19th and 20th century, marriage transformed from a practical, economic arrangement to a cultural form, both ideal and real, of two soulmates combined into a synthetic union through romantic love. Once this transformation took place, other social, economic and kinship functions that marriage previously held began to dissolve, leading to a paradoxical situation we have today where on the one hand marriage as an institution seems beleaguered (lots of pre-and non-marital cohabitation, high divorce rates, etc.) but on the other hand those in marriages are more probably likely to find psychological satisfaction than, say, a century and a half ago.

This transformation was superstructural to material shifts in Western societies. I’m not sure the following points Coontz makes were entirely new, but I certainly hadn’t given them much thought:

• The move from a landed agricultural economy to wage labor was responsible both for the transformation of marriage and the discursive distinction of a female domestic sphere. This, more than anything, explains why the romantic-match couple emerges first in Europe and North America.
• Looser kinship relations had more long-run importance in opening up gender equality in Europe than the specific property and legal rights, which lagged behind other regions of the World.

With these materialist historical arguments I had some questions: When does culture drive change (as in Coontz’s citation of the impact of church law)? Why does Coontz assume a transhistorical love that’s ignored or repressed in previous times? When do cultural forms like art and literature illustrate underlying historical shifts and when do they need to be read on their own terms. I about choked on my muffin when I saw her use Moby Dick (!) as proof that male friendships in the 19th century weren’t sexual.

I don’t expect a book on a subject as broad as marriage to answer all the questions. But Coontz seems a little uncurious about the big ones.

Next time book club is reading Jeffrey Stone’s Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from The Sedition Act of 1798 to The War on Terrorism.