A Long Conversation, Which Always Seems too Short.

         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