Recently
I read two short stories, "To the Ladies" by Mary, Lady Chudleigh and
"Eveline" by James Joyce. These texts savagely critique marriage and domesticity as a form of slavery for women. Both acknowledge that marriage brings respect and security for wives and Joyce in particular recognises that some marriages offer love and companionship. Each author advocates that women have independence as people as a prerequisite to happiness in marriage.
Most people only know about Joyce what I did. He
was a renowned twentieth century novelist from Ireland. His oeuvre includes a
number of novels, poems, a play, and the short story collection, Dubliners, of which “Eveline” was one. I’ve heard of James Joyce, but I had
never heard of Lady Mary of Chudleigh.
So I googled her. She was born
around 1656 in Devon, England. Very few women received an education at this
point in time, and she was not one of the very few. She educated herself by reading theology,
science, and philosophy. She married a nobleman from Ashton, which is also in
Devon, and that’s how she became Lady Mary. To the extent she is known as a
writer, she is known for her letters and poetry. While people may argue about
if she was happy in her marriage, at that point in history the husband still
had to allow the woman to publish, and Chudleigh posted quite controversy
feminist pieces. Little else is known about her and her personal life besides
that they had at least three children.
"To the Ladies" is not something you
would quote in a wedding toast. The first line of the poem -- “Wife
and servant are the Same” -- alludes to the theme of the poem. “For when that fatal Knot is ty’d … Then all
that’s kind is laid aside.” Her advice
to women: “shun, oh! Shun that wretched
state.” This poem is an argument
directed to women about why they should not marry. While men only have to
promise to cherish their wives, women have to obey their husbands, just as
slaves must obey their masters. Not only must the wife obey, she cannot even
speak. “Like Mutes she Signs alone must make,/And never any Freedom take.” For
a writer nothing could be worse than to be silenced. As a married woman her
ability to publish depended entirely on the good will of her husband. She uses
a comparison to slavery because in her opinion silencing her would be the
equivalent of enslaving her. She concludes her poem with advice to women
considering marriage: “Value your
selves, and Men despise,/ You must be proud, if you'll be wise.” She
believes that women are wise to resist offers of marriage.
"Eveline"
is another indictment of marriage. The story begins with a girl sitting at a
window leaning against curtains of "dusty cretonne." She recalls at
that moment how she and the "other children" used to play in the
empty lot across from her house. She “seemed to have been rather happy
then. Her father was was not so bad then;
and besides, her mother was alive."
Her thoughts return to the present and to her mixed emotions about
leaving for a “distant and unknown country” (Buenos Aires) where “she would be
married – she, Eveline. People would
treat her with respect then.” Eveline is leaving Dublin to marry Frank
who is "very kind, manly, open-hearted." The exact opposite of her
father. Frank "took her to see The Bohemian Girl and she felt
elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him. He was
awfully fond of music and sang a little." And Frank sang along with the music
at the theatre, something she would never be able to do, because she would
worry too much about what others thought of her. She reminisces about when her
father was a good man and about the day her mother died. Eveline promised her
mother that she would keep the house together although her father has become
drunk and abusive. Her mother’s last words were, in Gaelic, “the end of
pleasure is pain.” She cannot leave her father because of the promise she made
to her mother and yet if she keeps the promise she will be trapped in the same
snare of domesticity as her mother.
At
the beginning of the story Eveline seems trapped and marriage to Frank seems
like an “escape… Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love,
too. But she wanted to live.” Yet at the end at the station where she and Frank
are to depart, she cannot pass with him through the “barrier”. “He would drown
her.” And so “She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal.”
Both
Joyce and Lady Mary note the pride and respect that married women enjoy in the
community, but portray marriage and domesticity as a trap for women. Marriage
may seem an escape from the dismal life of the spinster, but as Eveline
suddenly realises and Lady Mary knows, wives are denigrated and enslaved every
bit as much as adult unmarried daughters living in their father’s home.
Yet
at another level, neither Joyce nor Lady Mary entirely condemns marriage. Lady
Mary’s husband apparently does not treat her as a slave because he allows her
to write and publish under her name, and indeed to write very critically about
marriage. The reader will never know if Eveline would in fact have found
freedom and happiness with Frank in Buenos Ayres, but there is no reason to
believe that she found freedom or happiness by staying in her father’s home in
Dublin. So although in law marriage was a state of servitude for women at the
times that Joyce and Lady Mary wrote, not every marriage would turn out to be
awful. The most these authors can say and the reason why neither is appropriate
for a wedding toast is that the state of matrimony is an extremely risky one
for women.
The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.
--- By Henny Youngman
