Is marriage doomed in the 21st century? asks Jane Smiley in "Money marriage & monogamy", in the January 6 issue of the Sydney Morning Herald's lifestyle magazine, Good Weekend.
Unlike anti-feminist Bettina Arndt's ravings which regularly grace the pages of the SMH, Smiley brings a class consciousness to her analysis of the role of marriage within capitalist society.
Smiley, known for her Pulitzer Prize novel and New York Times articles said in an interview in 1998, "I'm interested in ... how power is negotiated among people ... in the relationship of power to love. I'm always interested in the concerns of the natural world — in capitalism and how it fails, mostly, but also in how it sometimes succeeds."
Smiley exhibits a left-wing class-based understanding of marriage as a socioeconomic institution. For example, she writes: "Capitalism has an excellent reputation among fans of the free market for disseminating goods and information and moulding consumers' lives in ways that best serve both the system and individuals. Late capitalism has evidently decided that what is best for us is serial monogamy, frequent changes of employment and a high degree of instability. It has decided that, on balance, it is better for all adults to work, rather than for one designated gender to stay at home with the children." Not the usual stuff one expects from a weekend magazine.
Reading further on however, many of the arguments she uses turn out to be just as pro-traditional marriage as the usual offerings in magazines of this kind, they are just more disguised and hidden in among the left talk.
"It seems evident from history", Smiley recognises, "that marriage as a property relationship is more stable than marriage as a personal relationship."
Yes, this is true, with women also being part of that marriage property, belonging first to their fathers, then "given away" in marriage to be owned by their husbands. Monogamy was instituted primarily for women, as a way of ensuring that a man's sons, set to inherit his wealth, are really his own flesh and blood, and not that of, at best, a casual interloper, and at worst, a rival.
But after recognising the material basis of marriage, Smiley then goes on to describe the male "tension about monogamy and promiscuity". The conclusion she comes to on the relative merits of monogamy, promiscuity, serial monogamy and serial infidelity is that serial monogamy is bad ("each transition comes with a person defeat") but that "serial infidelity is even worse — a strange combination of victory and defeat every time the husband cheats [yes only the husband it seems] on his wife, until he is numb not only to the moral attractions of monogamy but also to the erotic attractions of promiscuity."
What lifestyle choice are we left with if serial monogamy, serial infidelity and promiscuity are discarded? Ongoing monogamous relationships or none at all it seems.
Smiley writes: "It was inevitable that women would rise out of property status. Capitalism wants every consumer, and distinctions between consumers according to gender, age, location or ethnic background must break down as the market extends itself. Since marriage began as a property relationship, it foundations are challenged by the transformation of property into personhood. True marriage begins with the revelation that union between male and female is a divine reconciliation between equals."
So the old fashioned notion of marriage as a property contract transforms itself, according to Smiley, into a "true marriage". Her description of what that means actually only differs from the conservatives in her hope for the removal somehow of the inequality between the sexes. How this will happen under free market capitalism is not explained.
Warning against the pitfalls of legal uncertainties over wealth and property in the wake of a break-up, Smiley ends the article with what she sees as the underlying reason people still get married. "The social redemption of marriage in our time is precisely in intimacy as a countervailing force against the chaotic isolation produced by free-market capitalism." The connections built in a marriage union can then be generalised to family, friends, then further into the community which will lead to a network "that reminds us over and over that connection is the very stuff of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
Yes, the need for companionship and intimacy is an important part of our lives. In a Time/CNN poll in 2000 that asked single women and men what they miss most about not being married, 75% of women and 80% of men listed companionship, compared to 4% and 7% who answered that they would miss sex.
The traditional, heterosexual, monogamous, lifelong marriage has developed from and is shaped by capitalism, but also provides for many the only emotional refuge from capitalism's distortion of human existence.
But recognising this is different to promoting it. Everyone has a need to develop meaningful relationships with other people, that is a part of our humanity. But we should be striving to create a society where human relationships can flower under a range of different circumstances, free from the economic or traditionally "moral" restraints that shape our associations now. In a rational society where human needs are not subordinated to the dollar, we will discover what real intimacy and companionship can be.
BY MARGARET ALLUM