Marriage and Violence

The Early Modern Legacy

Frances E. Dolan

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780812201772
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what—or who—must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? We have inherited a model of marriage so flawed, Frances E. Dolan contends, that its logical consequence is conflict.Dolan ranges over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice literature, sensational accounts of "true crime, " and late twentieth-century marriage manuals and films about battered women who kill their abusers. She reads the inevitable Taming of the Shrew against William Byrd's diary of life on his Virginia plantation, Noel Coward's Private Lives, and Barbara Ehrenreich's assessment in Nickel and Dimed of the relationship between marriage and housework. She traces the connections between Phillippa Gregory's best-selling novel The Other Boleyn Girl and documents about Anne Boleyn's fatal marriage and her daughter Elizabeth I's much-debated virginity. By contrasting depictions of marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and our own time, she shows that the early modern apprehension of marriage as an economy of scarcity continues to haunt the present in the form of a conceptual structure that can accommodate only one fully developed person. When two fractious individuals assert their conflicting wills, resolution can be achieved only when one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other.In an era when marriage remains hotly contested, this book draws our attention to one of the histories that bears on the present, a history in which marriage promises both intimate connection and fierce conflict, both companionship and competition.

Chapter One

One Flesh, Two Heads: Debating the Biblical Blueprint for Marriage in the Seventeenth and Twentieth Centuries

Writing in the early seventeenth century, William Perkins explains that a couple, whether husband and wife, parent and child, or master and servant, “is that whereby two persons standing in mutuall relation to each other, are combined together as it were in one. And of these two the one is alwaies higher, and beareth rule, the other is lower, and yeeldeth subjection.”¹ This definition seems internally contradictory—how can two combine into one, even “as it were,” if one remains higher? At first, it might also seem outmoded. Surely it has been supplanted by a definition like the one that Justice William J. Brennan offered in 1971: “The marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional makeup.”² Yet despite or even because of its contradictions, Perkins’s definition remains current, especially among those who ground their definitions of the couple and of marriage on the creation accounts in Genesis. There, many continue to find a powerful idealization of marriage as an all-encompassing union through which husband and wife become one flesh. While this fusion is supposed to transcend any differences between the two spouses, at least in the raptures of conjugal congress, the differences between the individuals involved bedevil conceptions of the couple. Two become one, we are told, but only by means of compromise, friction, and loss. Since equality is understood as encouraging battles of the will, only a hierarchy, according to which one submits to the other, can resolve conflicts so that the occasional or apparent achievement of union becomes possible.

Just as Perkins argues that of the two who become one “one is always higher,” scripturally informed marriage instruction, in the early modern period and today, often proposes “male headship” as the solution to the inevitable conflicts that arise in marriage. These twin tenets of the “biblical blueprint for marriage” can seem contradictory: husband and wife are spiritual equals united in love, at the same time that the husband is the wife’s superior and she his subordinate.³ St. Paul, for instance, advises that husband and wife should become one flesh, and that men should love their wives as their own bodies, but also that the husband should be the head of this corporate body (Eph. 5: 22-33). Yet these formulations are contradictory only if one assumes that love requires equality. Many writers I will discuss here assume the opposite. In their view, equality promotes conflict and yields a monstrously two-headed or headless conjugal body. In contrast, hierarchy is thought to assure stability, thereby enhancing love. In turn, love ameliorates the differences in status widely viewed as essential, because marriage is expected to serve as an analogy to the relationship of Christ to his Church and because all human relations are assumed to require hierarchy.⁴

For decades, historians have debated the relationship between these two models of marriage, often described as the hierarchical or patriarchal versus the companionate or mutual models. They have also debated how these models and their interrelationship have changed over time. In an influential but controversial thesis, Lawrence Stone argues that, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, companionate marriage emerged as a largely new ideal among higher status people and then trickled down the social scale, eventually being exported to the colonies. Stone argues for a gradual shift from one model to the other in the course of the early modern period.⁵ Stone’s book taught a broad audience that marriage had a history, drew attention to the relationship between hierarchy and mutuality on which I focus in this chapter, animated ongoing interdisciplinary debate, and set the terms of that debate.

Other historians swiftly challenged Stone’s claim that the companionate model was largely new, pointing to its existence in scriptural, humanist, and Catholic traditions before the Reformation.⁶ Although work on marriage and the family is so prolific and varied that it is impossible to survey comprehensively, one can perceive a compromise emerging between the extremes of Stone’s argument for dramatic change and his critics’ emphasis on unbroken continuity. Keith Wrightson, for instance, examines both “enduring structures” and “uneven processes of change.”⁷ David Cressy casts his history of Birth, Marriage, and Death in Early Modern England as a study of “transactions and engagements, including collisions and misunderstandings, between various sectors of post-reformation society.”⁸ Pamela Brown, Bernard Capp, Heather Dubrow, Anthony Fletcher, Laura Gowing, Mary Beth Rose, and Alison Wall examine the durability of gender hierarchy and patriarchal systems as well as the contradictions within early modern gender ideologies and the possibilities for resistance to them in practice.⁹ From different angles and with different goals, Rebecca Bach, Fletcher, and Valerie Traub work to disaggregate the assumed nexus of companionship, heterosexuality, and romantic love so often assigned to the “new” post-Reformation marriage.¹⁰ I, too, examine this nexus, focusing on how it was crafted in the early modern period and how it persists today.

I operate on the assumption that a model of loving companionship between spouses did not replace a harsher and more primitive hierarchical model at any particular historical moment. Male headship is, as we will see, avidly if defensively embraced by some groups today; thus, this is not a simple story of one model supplanting another definitively. The transition that some historians locate in the early modern period and others place earlier or later is not yet complete. Instead, the balance between the two models seems to shift from period to period, place to place, social group to social group. Like most other social changes, shifting attitudes toward marriage trickled down and swelled up and rippled out; change unfolded in dispersed, sporadic, and uneven ways.¹¹ As in Genesis itself, the two models of marriage tend to coexist (as uneasily as spouses) in the same head, heart, or household. Surrendering a developmental model of change makes it possible to abandon the project of dating a transition that has not yet occurred so as to focus on the continuing conflict between coexisting models.

This chapter begins with the contradictions that fracture the scriptural foundation for marital advice. I then discuss Protestant advice printed in the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries followed by that printed in England and colonial America in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In both periods, I argue, marriage advice attributes conflict to a wife’s claims to social equality and/or a husband’s failures of leadership and proposes male headship as the solution to this conflict. Yet, as often as not, I argue, the reassertion of male dominance operates as a cover story for more complex distributions of power within marriage. This coverstory disguises but cannot resolve the conflict between a wife’s claims to spiritual equality, on which writers in both periods agree, and the gender difference and hierarchy they insist are crucial to the biblical blueprint for marriage. Through a detailed examination of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century marriage advice, I elaborate on the persistent dilemma of reconciling spiritual equality and social hierarchy, the erotic melding into one flesh and the tension between two potential heads of this shared body. In the last section of the chapter, I look at three early modern women writers, Lady Eleanor Davies Douglas, Anne Wentworth, and Abigail Bailey, who assert their unmediated relationship to God as a strategy to justify their independence from their husbands. As I show, these women employ fantasies of their husbands’ deaths to facilitate their assertions of themselves as separate and worthy, rather than headless fragments. These murderous fantasies are born out of the contradictions built into biblical blueprints for marriage.

My central evidence in this chapter comes from two parallel bodies of Protestant marriage advice, eerie in their similarity, one printed in England in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries then transported to the colonies; the other printed in America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While we can’t be sure how widely read the early modern texts were, an extraordinary number of works were printed on the subject of marriage and family life and some particularly popular titles went into many editions—even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, Christian titles on marriage and the family are best sellers but tend to fall short of, say, the New York Times best-seller short list. In both periods under discussion here, ministers figure prominently among the writers, extending their ministry by expanding, codifying, and broadly disseminating their preaching through manuals of advice.

Why is marriage so important to Protestant writers in both periods? Just after the Reformation, the defense and promotion of marriage was one of the ways that ministers could assert the difference between Protestant and Catholic values and priorities; it was also a topic through which ministers, most of them married themselves, could forge an intimate connection to their parishioners’ lives and problems distinctly different from that possible for a celibate clergy (or so they claimed). The mass production of marriage advice, as I discuss it in this chapter, remains largely a Protestant phenomenon, written mostly by married ministers. In recent American politics, the linked projects of defending (heterosexual) marriage, prohibiting same-sex marriage, and restricting access to divorce prove that defining and defending marriage is central to the Christian right’s larger moral and political agenda. Today, there are certainly Catholics in the “Christian right.” In England in the century or so after the Reformation, such coalitions were rare. That the marriage advice I examine is largely a Protestant phenomenon, broadly conceived, suggests that the Reformation was a paradigm-shifting event not because it ushered in wholly new social arrangements or attitudes but because it produced such prolific and urgent defenses of what was also asserted to be traditional. It is still true that Christian writings on marriage claim to recover and reform values, not to invent them. In this emphasis, they seek to naturalize particular ways of imagining and figuring marriage, claiming that this is how God intends us to structure our intimate lives. Yet the proliferation of Christian marriage advice itself reveals that the model of marriage it promotes is not natural, not a given.

The abundant Christian literature on marriage and the family available today seeks to persuade couples to marry and to help them survive their conflicts in order to avoid divorce. It operates on the assumption that, as one popular guide puts it, “becoming married is for most people a process rather than a single event,” and that people need guidance through that process.¹² Early modern conduct literature similarly works to guide readers through the process of marriage: persuading readers to marry yet also warning them about the inevitable problems they will face in marriage. Both bodies of advice strive to offset the disappointment they attribute to unreasonable expectations, expectations they suggest have recently changed or inflated. As William Whately warns in his grimly pessimistic A Care-Cloth: or a Treatise of the Cumbers and Troubles of Marriage: Intended to Advise Them That May, to Shun Them; That May Not, Well and Patiently to Beare Them (1624), “none doe meete with more crosses in marriage, or beare their crosses more untowardly, then those that most dreame of finding it a very Paradise.”¹³ Many historians agree that such dreams were increasingly invested in marriage from the early modern period onward. Writers in both periods advise readers on how to fulfill some of their expectations, while resisting cultural pressure to expect too much from marriage.

For both periods, it is unclear exactly how to categorize the writers’ confessional identities. Are they Puritans or dissenters in the early modern period? To read the new Dictionary of National Biography entries on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers is to learn in detail the widely varied doctrinal and political views, and consequently careers, of those grouped together as “Church of England clergymen.” In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, are the ministers who publish their marital advice fundamentalists, evangelicals, or Christians? I often use the word “Christian,” as these writers themselves do, to indicate a large, nondenominational group. The strategic use of that term works to obscure important doctrinal differences within Christianity and Protestantism so as to secure an enormous readership, market, and voting bloc. In my own usage, it works as a reminder that this is a large, amorphous group rather than a fringe one.

However we might name them, these writers present themselves as morally authoritative but as culturally marginal, fighting to reform and reclaim the cultural center. “Christian” defenders of marriage identify “secular humanism” as the galvanizing threat that provokes staunch defenses of “traditional” arrangements; they privilege male headship as “one of the most defining and differentiating features of couples subscribing to a conservative Christian worldview.”¹⁴ Ministers writing in the century or so after the Reformation most often argue against Catholic or pre-Reformation assumptions that celibacy is superior to marriage. In both periods, the groups on which I focus present themselves as responding to a crisis they have not caused but must try to solve. That’s one reason why they defend their positions so strenuously, presenting the stakes as very high and, for all of their moral certainty, not taking the outcome as determined.

In both eras, these authors of marital advice repeat and repackage themselves; they also quote and plagiarize from one another. Many writers in the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries expressly connect themselves to the predecessors they call Puritans.¹⁵ Reaching back before the “founding fathers,” they stake a claim to a conjoined church and state as the ideal state of affairs in America. Above all, Protestant writers in both eras rely heavily on the same biblical passages, citing and glossing them repeatedly.¹⁶ This reliance on the Bible is one of the chief links between the bodies of Protestant marriage advice produced in the two periods; it also poses a challenge to an historical understanding of these discourses by collapsing the distance between past and present. Does one begin in the beginning or does one start in the present? It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference.

Fantasies of Past Fantasies

The Bible remains one of the most crucial terrains of struggle over gender roles and relations in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America. As one rich sourcebook on interpretations of creation accounts asserts: “in no previous century has concern for establishing men as the ‘head’ of women been more pronounced” than in the twentieth.¹⁷ This concern has intensified both because of the perception that male headship is new...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. One Flesh, Two Heads: Debating the Biblical Blueprint for Marriage in the Seventeenth and Twentieth Centuries
• 2. Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the Legacy of Coverture
• 3. Fighting for the Breeches, Sharing the Rod: Spouses, Servants, and the Struggle for Equality
• 4. How a Maiden Keeps Her Head: Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, and the Perils of Marriage
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments