A History of the Wife (19 page)

The English, on the whole, seem to have allowed for love matches to a greater extent than continental Europeans. By the turn of the seven- teenth century, English conduct books assumed that a man would choose a wife “according to his own heart,” and that a woman, though not so free as a man, had the right to respond to male initiative.
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Mon- tesquieu in the eighteenth century and Engels in the nineteenth con- trasted the freedom of English daughters to marry “according to their own fancy, without consulting their parents” with the situation of Euro- peans, who were required by law to obtain their parents’ consent.
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This greater freedom was connected to the generally uncloistered lives that British women enjoyed, as opposed to their European and espe- cially their Mediterranean counterparts. It also reflected the later age of English marriage for both men and women, and the narrower age gap between brides and grooms.

Still, it would be wrong to assume that England under the Tudors and Stuarts renounced its patriarchal inheritance. Ministers continued to remind their parishioners that children should honor their parents and that wives should obey their husbands. Both of these forms of sub- mission inspired not only sermons and tracts, but also stories, poems, and plays, including those of the best known Elizabethan playwright, William Shakespeare.

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Over and over again, Shakespeare’s plays turn upon the conflict of parental authority and the opposing will of youthful lovers. Reading
Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew,
or
The Winter’s Tale,
we hear the echoes of contemporary questions: What should parents do to arrange the best matches for their children? Should a daughter be able to refuse a match proposed by her parents? Should young people be able to follow the inclinations of their hearts, even when parents object? Whether the story was set in a mythical Sicily or Bohemia, Shakespeare put a theatrical gloss over the changing attitudes toward marriage that evolved during his lifetime (1564–1616), and among these, none was more vocal than the growing belief that young people should wed according to mutual attraction, rather than by parental decree.

There is a scene in
The Winter’s Tale
that articulates this debate. The young prince Florizel woos a shepherd’s daughter named Perdita (who is, of course, a princess abandoned at birth). In the presence of Perdita, the shepherd who had adopted her, and two unknown travelers in dis- guise, Florizel asks everyone to witness his vows, and the shepherd asks his daughter if she gives her assent. Then the shepherd father betrothes Perdita and Florizel with these words:

Take hands; a bargain;

And, friends unknown, you shall bear witness to ’t: I give my daughter to him, and will make

Her portion equal to his.

We recognize several of the elements we have seen elsewhere in the betrothal ceremony: the bride and groom join hands as in handfasting, the father gives his daughter to the groom, witnesses attest to the vows, and the father promises a dowry. By virtue of the young people’s con- sent in the presence of witnesses, this makes for a binding betrothal.

At this point one of the travelers—who is none other than Florizel’s father in disguise—initiates a probing dialogue with his son.

POLIXENES
: Soft, swain, . . . Have you a father?

FLORIZEL
: I have; but what of him?

POLIXENES
: Knows he of this?

FLORIZEL
: He neither does nor shall.

POLIXENES
: Methinks a father

Is, at the nuptial of his son, a guest That best becomes the table . . .

Florizel agrees in principle that a father should usually be consulted in his son’s marital choice, yet demurs in his own case: “for some other reasons, my grave sir,/ Which t’is not fit you know, I’ll not acquaint/ My father of this business.” So here we have a clear-cut picture of a son who selects a bride without his father’s knowledge because the latter would probably object to her lowly station; the son simply follows the dictates of his heart. Of course, in this comedy—Shakespeare’s last—everything works out for the best.

In
Romeo and Juliet,
Shakespeare had made the theme of youthful love and parental opposition the stuff of great tragedy. The quintessen- tial lovers must oppose not only their respective parents, but their two clans—the Montagues and the Capulets. Despite the Italian setting, the story certainly reflected problems that were current in Shakespeare’s England—namely, feuds among gentry families and the practice of clandestine love marriages. Indeed, the clandestine marriage of two well-born sixteen-year-olds, Thomas Thynne and Maria Marvin, whose families were staunch enemies, may have inspired Shakespeare to write
Romeo and Juliet;
both the real marriage and the writing of the play occurred in 1595. Six years afterward, the elder Thynnes were still not reconciled to their son’s marriage, as evidenced by a surviving letter from Maria to her mother-in-law hoping that God would be instrumen- tal in the “turning of your heart towards me.”
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Romeo and Juliet,
however imaginative, sheds light on the marital practices of Elizabethan gentry. For example, Juliet was not yet four- teen when the suitor Paris asked for her hand. At first Juliet’s father responded “Let two more summers wither in their pride/ Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.” So initially he considered her too young, and preferred to see her married at fifteen or sixteen. Yet he did not think her too young to be wooed, and advised Paris to “get her heart.” The father’s consent was dependent on the daughter’s willingness. Later—for reasons that are never made clear—the father goes back on this position, and assumes that he alone has the right to give his daughter away, even without her consent. He and his wife order Juliet to prepare for imminent marriage with Paris. The father becomes

angry when Juliet says, “I’ll not wed, I cannot love,/ I am too young.” As far as he is concerned, a father has the right to say, “I’ll give you to my friend.”

But as the audience knows, Juliet cannot, under any circumstance, marry Paris because she and Romeo have already been secretly married by Friar Laurence. Since the friar knows this, he comes up with the plan that will ultimately lead to Juliet’s death, as well as Romeo’s. The implication is that the friar is an unreliable, meddling soul. He should not have married them clandestinely in the first place, and he should not have tried to cover up the marriage with his harebrained, danger- ous scheme of having Juliet fake death. But even worse is the hard- nosed position taken by the Capulet father. His intransigence precipitated the disaster. Moral: one cannot force a person to marry someone she doesn’t love. And second moral: no parental (religious, ethnic, national) barrier should interfere with the natural inclinations of youthful lovers.

The Taming of the Shrew
presents another marriage contracted with- out the consent of the son’s father in the case of Lucentio and Bianca. But the real meat of the play concerns Petruchio and Kate and the proper relationship between a husband and his wife. A husband—so the play suggests—must command absolute obedience from his wife, at least in public.

In Shakespeare’s England, a disobedient wife was one of the stock characters of comedy. Popular literature told husbands how to subdue shrewish wives or, conversely, made fun of the man who did not know how to enforce his authority. The wife who wore the breeches and the henpecked husband appeared in numerous comic treatises, broadsides, and woodcuts throughout England and Northern Europe.
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Some sharp-tongued women were not only reviled in text and image, but actually brought before the courts as “common scolds,” often by neigh- bors complaining of behavior that disturbed the peace.
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Now, it is true that there is often a discrepancy between prescription and practice: what is prescribed is not always the way one behaves.
The Taming of the Shrew
is a good example of one woman’s attempt to sub- vert this prescription, and one man’s attempt to restore it. Petruchio believes that good marriages are based on a wife’s total submission to her spouse. And his job is to bring Kate—a notorious shrew—around to this point of view. Does he succeed?

In the final scene of the play, Kate appears to have been tamed by Petruchio. She wins the wager he had made with two other husbands by showing herself more willing to obey than their wives. Adopting the selfless “Griselda” model, she goes so far as to make the following dec- laration to the two other women.

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

Thy head, thy sovereign—one that cares for thee.

. . .

I am ashamed that women are so simple

To offer war where they should kneel for peace, Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,

When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.

And she advises her sister wives to “place your hands below your hus- band’s foot,” which she does as a sign of complete submission to Petruchio. The question, of course, is whether Kate really means it—does she really agree with Petruchio that a wife’s subservience to her husband bodes “peace, love, and quiet home”? Or is she merely a clever woman paying lip service to her spouse in public, and following her own will in private? Or is it possible that she and Petruchio are both acting out

roles they will laugh about in bed?

A young woman living at the time of Shakespeare, who attended such plays, listened to her minister’s sermons on Sundays, and bantered in the alehouse with her friends, would have absorbed conflicting views on her obligations as a daughter and wife. The minister told her to obey her parents and her future husband. The plays she saw, songs she sang, and books she read (if she could read), told her to obey the impulses of her heart. Looking around her, she saw married couples, like her own parents, whose union bespoke stability, if not always harmony. She also saw women jilted by suitors or deserted by husbands—unlucky women who had chosen unwisely. And even worse, reprehensible women whose sexual freedom had become known and led to public whippings for fornication. Why even the rumor of sexual promiscuity could ruin a woman’s chances for marriage! And what of unmarried women with babies, forced not only to bear the humiliation but the burden of lifelong support? There was little sympathy for single moth- ers, who were viewed as an affront to public morality and, worse yet, a

potential drain on public charity.

Anything that insulted the dignity of marriage could not be toler- ated. Adultery, however common, was vigorously denounced by clerics of every stripe. Puritans vehemently condemned it for both men and women, and even attempted to change the double standard that had prevailed for centuries.
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Generally speaking, a wife’s adultery was grounds for marital separation (while men’s adultery was not), and for a short period, beginning in 1650, female adultery was made a capital offense, though it was enforced only two or three times.
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Even nonadulterous couples living apart from one another were not allowed to remain separated for long. The case of Helen Dixon is illustrative: having refused to follow her husband to “a strange place where she had no acquaintance,” she was called up before the church court and ulti- mately forced to join him.
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With all these cautionary tales before her, a young Englishwoman of any sense would think long and hard before making a marital commitment.

Marriage would normally give her status and protection. In the best of circumstances, she would have an economic provider and an affectionate companion. She and her husband would become, according to the words of one inspired pastor, “yoke-fellows . . . fixing their hearts in the good liking of each other.”
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She would be able to engage in sexual relations without the fear of sin. She could have legitimate children to love and care for, who would in turn care for her in her declining years. By enter- ing the estate of holy matrimony (an estate now championed above celibacy), she would be fulfilling her Christian vocation. Conversely, if she did not marry, she could count only on being consigned to the end of the table with the “spinsters.” (The term “spinster” derived from “spin- ning,” a wage-earning occupation for many unmarried women.)

Still, marriage was by no means an unqualified blessing for a woman. Marriage meant giving up one’s freedom and becoming the subject of one’s husband. It meant accepting his authority, his whims, and sometimes his fists. It meant running the risk of conjugal dishar- mony and the ongoing mental strain that women experienced in such unions. Records of the early seventeenth-century physician Robert Napier concerning more than a thousand female patients treated for mental illness conclude that they were especially troubled by the oppression they experienced as daughters and wives.
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Marriage was also the fearful gateway to pregnancy and the travails

of labor, which pre-nineteenth-century women endured without the benefits of anesthesia or antisepsis. It entailed the possibility of dying in childbirth, the frequent loss of children, and probable widowhood. In the end, most English daughters did marry, though they married later and in fewer numbers than their continental counterparts.

Perhaps what distinguishes English marriage from continental mar- riage of this period is the belief that marriage was, at its best, essentially a form of companionship. Returning to the words of Genesis, English Protestants took very seriously God’s statement, “It is not good for the man to be alone” and that a wife was to be “a sustainer beside him.” Hand in hand, two Christian souls were encouraged to share the pleas- ures and duties of this earth as they simultaneously made their way, step by step, to eternal life.

And among the pleasures that Protestants recognized and condoned were the pleasures of marital sex. Puritans in particular, contrary to the now popular view of them as inhibited hypocrites, saw regular sexual intercourse as necessary for a lasting marriage. Husbands and wives were expected to try to please each other, and abstinence was generally frowned upon, especially when one partner would unilaterally abstain by his or her choice. In the words of William Whateley’s conduct book (
A Bride’s Bush,
1623), “mutual dalliances for pleasure’s sake” were to be encouraged in bed, where wives had the same rights to sexual satisfac- tion as their husbands.
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Indeed, if we take Puritan writers seriously, gender distinctions regarding dominance and submission were to be abandoned in the bedchamber: “the wife (as well as the husband) is therein both a servant and mistress, a servant to yield her body, a mis- tress to have the power of his.”
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