FROM OTHER HALVES TO HAREMS: SOME CONCEPTS OF MARRIAGE

Modern Western culture has a peculiar horror of the arranged marriage.  Historically, however, it was the norm.   For the gentry, that is to say; given the difficulties of travel, for the peasantry the choice was determined by who else happened to be in your village.  But for upper-class parents, parental choice seemed the obvious way of deciding who their offspring married.
     We see this principle at work in Romeo and Juliet.  Juliet’s mother was married and gave birth to Juliet when she was fourteen.  Juliet has reached puberty, and is fourteen herself.  Time to marry in turn and give birth; for mortality is high and life may be short.  Juliet’s father is “old”; although he is probably not yet fifty.

     If the parents decide when she should marry, they also decide to whom.  Old Capulet has found the eligible Count Paris for her.   Animal impulse will take care of procreation.  Similarity of background -  class and income - will encourage friction-free cohabitation which might in time grow into affection, and even love.  If not, there is at least the prospect of reasonably-compatible co-existence: for there is no divorce. 

     That parental choice, however, may have its limitations is seen in the literary tradition of Courtly Love.  Parental decision may determine whom you marry, but not  to whom you give your affections.  Arthur may have Guinevere’s hand, for dynastic reasons, but Launcelot has her heart. 

     And that goes, of course, for Romeo and Juliet.  As a dutiful daughter, Juliet might have married Paris if she had not encountered Romeo.  Despite parental disapproval, including a threat of disinheritance, and all the distancing power of the family feud, the attraction is immediate, and lasting, and defeated only by death unless renewed in the afterlife. 

     What we have here is the concept of the soul mate:  the one person right for you in every respect, provided that person can be found.

     Where does the idea come from?  Probably it is an intensification of the idea of the other half that we find expounded by Aristophanes in Plato’ Symposium.  Aristophanes suggests that there were originally three types of being:  male/male, female/female, female/male. 

      When they rebelled against the gods, Zeus had Apollo cut them in two.  They then sort reunion with the missing halves of themselves.  If one half died, the survivor would seek union with another of the same type.

     If you’re a hermaphrodite male and female, therefore, in Aristophanes’ terms, any member of the opposite sex will do.  In practice this is not the case.  An individual man, for instance, is not generally attracted to each and every woman, but to a certain type, or types, of woman.  A more accurate representation than that of Aristophanes is given in Jane Eyre, and the compatibility or otherwise of the elements. Jane (air) is compatible with Rochester (earth) but not with St John Rivers (water).  Rochester is not compatible with Bertha Mason (fire): a spectacular example of when an arranged marriage does not work.   I do not suggest for a moment that Charlotte Bronte took the idea literally, but as a metaphor for why a woman will be attracted by one type of man rather than another, and vice versa, the concept is interesting.  

     There is a superficial similarity between the concept of the other half with the Genesis idea of woman having been drawn from man, and the two becoming one flesh, but there are significant differences.   In the Symposium myth, if you were originally part of a same-sex unit, you will seek a same sex union. Aristophanes thus gives parity to heterosexual and homosexual parings, which the Bible does not countenance.  His myth also suggests that everyone is incomplete and seeks another half. The New Testament, by contrast, says that some people are self-contained and have no need of marriage.  Singleness, indeed, may give the opportunity for better service to God.

.  The concept of the other half, and its development the soul mate, therefore, is not biblical.  At most, if you give your life to God, God will guide you to someone compatible with whom you will become one flesh.  Your partner will become your soul mate through the process of co-existence, but not come pre-prepared.   And even then it is a temporary arrangement.  There will be on marriage in Heaven.  Your ultimate soul mate, so to speak, is God not another human.

The biblical concept of one flesh is not an easy one.  If your partner dies, are you still one flesh with him/her while you are alive?  Clearly not; for the Church allows re-marriage for widows and widowers.  But what if you divorce?  Are you still one flesh while your former partner is alive?  Again, clearly not.  Christ allowed for divorce on grounds of unchastity.  (Matt 19:9).  Paul says that if one of a couple becomes a Christian, the unbelieving partner may wish to divorce, and that is allowable.  (1 Cor 7:15).  

     If you’ve been one flesh, can you, then, cease to be; or can you be one flesh with more than one person simultaneously?  What about polygamy?

     Interestingly, although adultery is unequivocally condemned in the Old Testament, polygamy is not.   There is nothing to say that you may not have more than one wife.  Solomon had seven hundred wives, and three hundred concubines. 

     The toleration of polygamy in the Old Testament may have had a humane purpose: to safeguard the financial status of women who might have no other opportunity of marriage, and who might otherwise have been financially destitute. 

In the New Testament, however, there are to be new ways of caring for widows, orphans and the poor.  The Genesis ideal of one flesh and lifelong monogamy between a man and a woman is re-iterated by Christ.    Paul points out that to have intercourse with a prostitute is to become one flesh with her (1 Cor 6:16): emphasising the desirability of married monogamy. Perhaps what most knocks polygamy on the head in the New Testament is the requirement that a bishop shall be the husband of one wife.  (1 Tim 3:2).   There can be debate from this about whether a bishop may be single, but what is clear is that a bishop may not have more than one partner at a time. 

Taking its lead from Christianity, the West adopted a pattern of lifelong monogamous marriage that served it reasonably well for centuries.  True, there was the odd bohemian challenge.   Shelley liked to surround himself with a harem.  Wilkie Collins, who disapproved of marriage, cohabited with two women.   But things rubbed along more or less and finally collapsed only in the 1960’s when cohabitation as a serious alternative began to take off.

     Cohabitation can take many forms.  It can be marriage in everything but name.  It can be serial monogamy.  It can be relationships with more than one partner simultaneously.  This last opens the way to acceptance of polygamy for Muslims as they become a greater presence in the West.

     The standard argument against polygamy is that marriage must be between one man and one women.  But who now says it must be?  That mould has been broken with same-sex marriage, and if a man may marry a man, why should a man not marry more than one woman?  (Polyandry, where one woman has more than one husband, might take off in China as a result of the one-child policy, but is unlikely to take off in the West because it not an issue within Islam in the way that polygamy is.)

     Are we going forwards or backwards?   Back to the Old Testament, or back even further to Aristophanes and the Symposium?   Traditional marriage, same-sex-marriage, polygamy and cohabitation (or various combinations of all four) are competing with one another to be the future model for the West.  It will be interesting to see which model will prevail

    

    

WALLS

Those who hate the Israeli Wall and the proposed Mexican Wall also hate the idea of the Calais Wall. People should be free to live where they choose. Actually, those who say this don't have that freedom themselves. True, they are free to live in Britain, but where in Britain they can live is constrained by where they can find employment and, if they are home owners, by the kind of property they can afford.

Following Rousseau (whether consciously or otherwise), they see walls as something unnatural. But all those with whom I have argued find nothing strange about sleeping within walls at night, or about creating a protective wall for their possessions by closing and locking the front door when they go out. They have a mental wall, to protect themselves from unwelcome ideas, and consider it evidence of intellectual virtue.

Through history, people have found it an entirely natural impulse to live behind protective walls. Castles, fortified farms and manor houses, walled cities (at one time, all cities were walled), Hadrian's Wall, the Great Wall of China...

I suppose those troubled by the Calais Wall are social evolutionists. Protective walls belonged to the bad medieval past. We should have evolved beyond the need for them. But mass invasion is not merely a phenomenon of the past. It is happening now: by land and by sea. If the barbarians (metaphorically speaking) are at the gates, you do not remove the problem of the barbarians by removing the gates.

BERTHA MASON RECONSIDERED

Modern readers (or increasingly, modern viewers) of Jane Eyre whether they know it or not, have had their impressions filtered (via editors, directors etc) by two immensely influential works.  Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, retold the novel from the perspective of Bertha Mason.  Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s the Madwoman in the Attic, in framing a theory of Victorian fiction, took a feminist perspective of Bertha as the victim of male oppression. 

     A quick survey of recent online essays on Jane Eyre shows three main lines of development from these two seminal books of the 60’s and 70’s.    Jean Rhys saw her protagonist as Caucasian, but some of the postcolonial theory her work has generated sees Bertha as part black, and Charlotte Brontë as guilty of racism.  From Attic have developed the views that either Bertha is not mad at all, or that she is mad and the cause of her madness is syphilis.   These are all interesting perspectives that have come on stream since I first encountered Jane Eyre as a child and formed my own impressions, and all worthy of consideration. 

What is the postcolonial case for seeing Bertha Mason as partly non-white?  She is described by Jane as having a discoloured, savage face, “fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments”, the lips swelled and dark.  (Ch 25).  In the statement of impediment to the marriage there is reference to her mother Antoinetta, a Creole (Ch 26).  Rochester refers to his “Indian Messalina” (Ch 27), and describes himself as having come from “a good race” (Ch 27). So, by implication, his wife didn’t?   A case can, it seems, be made for clear-cut racism.

     Actually, it isn’t that clear cut at all.  Bertha Mason is also described as having had good looks when Rochester married her – she is, in fact, specifically compared to Blanche Ingram: “tall, dark and majestic”.  (Ch 27) –   in which case the “purple face and bloated features” (Ch 26) of her later self would be the result of subsequent insanity rather than ethnicity.   

    It should be noted that some others of those who are a threat to Jane are described as dark: her cruel aunt Mrs Reed and bullying cousin John, for example, who “sometimes reviled her for her dark skin, similar to his own”. (Ch 2).   The stress here seems thematic (dark personalities) rather than racial.  Mr Rochester – in his untamed state a threat to Jane – is also dark.  And the beautiful Blanche Ingram, whom Jane fears will marry Mr Rochester, is, despite her first name, “as dark as a Spaniard”.   (Ch 17).

     That simile, I think, is key; for it leads us into the meaning of ‘Creole’ in the novel: about which there is some postcolonial critical confusion.  Understandably.  The term ‘Creole’ is as confusing as the term Anglo-Indian: which can mean either those of mixed race, or those of British stock in India.   In the British-influenced Caribbean, ‘Creole’, certainly nowadays, tends to mean those of mixed black/white race.  But in Louisiana, ‘Creole’ was the word used to describe French settlers.  And Creole was also the term for a Spaniard born outside Spain in the Spanish Empire.  It is stressed (Ch 18, 19, 20) that Mason comes from Spanish Town in Jamaica.  Jamaica was Spanish before it was British, and some Spanish terms lingered.  So “her mother the Creole” might mean simply that Bertha Mason had an English-origin father and a Spanish-origin mother.  “Indian Messalina”, rather than having any ethnic connotation, might simply mean that she behaved like Messalina and came from the West Indies. 

     Mr Rochester’s good race.  Does it mean white (in which case, a slur on blacks) or English (in which case a slur on Spaniards)?  Or does it mean neither?  There might be a case if Mason Senior had been a Creole like his wife; but he is English, like Rochester.  We might consider here the reason for Mr Rochester’s marriage.  As Mrs Fairfax explains to Jane (Ch13), Rochester’s elder brother inherited all the estate because Rochester Senior wished to keep it intact.   However, he wished the younger brother to marry money and so preserve the prestige of the family name.  So then the reference to Mr Rochester’s good race might be no more significant than the reference to his good family in determining his marital eligibility. He might not have the money, but he’s still a good catch.  He comes of good stock.  If so, a sense of offence is being generated by some postcolonialist readers where none would have been intended. 

Those influenced by The Madwoman in the Attic tend also to be influenced by Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation.  Drawing on his own social experiences as a homosexual sado-masochist, Foucault’s general argument is about society’s dread of difference.  Historically, many of those merely different were seen as a threat and designated mad by society as a means of social control.  Homosexual sado-masochists, for example.   Or a girl confined to an asylum merely for having an illegitimate child.  

     Is Bertha Mason, then, not mad at all, but simply perceived as a threat by a patriarchal society?   Rochester describes her as “intemperate and unchaste”.  (Ch 27).  For that read sexually liberated and unsubmissive?   Too independent to be easily controlled; so lock her up?  The Soviets dealt with their dissidents by interning them as insane. Same sort of thing?

     This sort of reading seems to me to run against the grain of the novel.  It has got things the wrong way around.  Bertha is not declared insane because she is intemperate; her intemperance is a symptom of her insanity. 

     Some feminist criticism has seen Bertha as the victim of Rochester’s oppression.  There is something in it (Jane is also a victim of his attitudes).   But if Bertha’s madness is a general symbol of a male-dominated society’s oppression, then it seems to me to be a failure.   The novel’s attitude towards madness reflects bewilderment with how to deal with it; that, and pity. Mason implores, “Let her be treated tenderly”, to which Rochester replies that he does his best.  (Ch 20).   When grappling with Bertha, Rochester could have felled her with a blow, “but he would not strike” (Ch 26).  When Rochester elects to make a fresh start by quitting Jamaica for England, he could have settled Bertha in the dampness of his other property Ferndean Manor where the atmosphere would have finished her off (we should remember that that Mason  (Ch 18) finds even Thornfield too cold and asks for the fire to be replenished) but his conscience recoils.  (Ch 27) His solution is to “place her in safety and comfort: shelter her degradation”.  (Ch 27).  Rochester tries to rescue Bertha from the fire, and calls to her by name.  (Ch 36). 

     Far guiltier than Rochester in their treatment of Bertha are the respective male parents.  Mason Senior conducts the marital negotiations with Rochester Senior behind the son’s back, with a settlement of £30 000 as the price for getting shot of her, and with the mad mother carefully concealed in an asylum.  (Ch 27).   Rochester the younger son is quite as much a victim as any of the female characters.

       Yes, there is oppression in the novel, but rather than primarily male over female it seems to me to be primarily that of the old over the young.  The tyranny is not confined to elderly males.  Mrs Reid, for pure spite, tells Jane’s wealthy uncle Mr Eyre that Jane is dead, thus hindering her life chances, when he is trying to find Jane in order to adopt her (and subsequently leave her his fortune). Overwhelmingly, the law forbidding divorce is the most crushing tyranny of all.  Hardy arraigned against it too, and so did Dickens in Hard Times. Stephen Blackpool must remain wedded to a drunkard, and unable to marry the woman whom he loves. 

     Whatever take modern readers might want to put on the novel, there seems no doubt that Charlotte Brontë intended Bertha to be mad.  One of the great houses near Haworth had had a mad woman in it for several years: a story that the Brontë sisters discussed with one another.  Charlotte consulted the section on madness in the family medical dictionary to acquaint herself with the symptoms.  Jane Eyre is at least as much Gothic as it is realistic.  There are frequent references to elves and fairy tales, and Bessie’s songs and folk tales, and one senses the story of Bluebeard hovering somewhere in the background.  Of course there’s room in such a work for a literal mad woman.

     Why, then, is Bertha mad?   We are told that there has been insanity in the family for three generations, and the mother is in an asylum. (Ch 26). The younger brother is a congenital idiot.  (Ch 27). Observing Richard Mason before she knows who he is, Jane is struck by an impression of vacancy (Ch 18) and Rochester says that Richard, too, is likely to go the way of his sister.  (Ch 27).

     It is possible to inherit the consequences of syphilis – a point made forcibly in Ibsen’s Ghosts – but there many more obvious causes than syphilis for hereditary insanity. 

     Why then, the idea of syphilis: when there is nothing in the text to suggest it?  Power.   To inherit madness is passive; to acquire it as a result of your own actions is active.  And it involves a fight back against male dominance.  Rochester’s bitterness arises from his knowledge that his infected wife has infected him. 

     This theory, it seems to me, in either of its manifestations, is not supported by the text.  It isn’t Bertha’s fault if her madness is inherited.  But If she had acquired her madness as the result of her sexual actions, then it would be.  Charlotte Brontë could have indicated culpability had she wanted to.  Instead, Jane says, “she cannot help being mad”.  (Ch 27) And Rochester’s personality, like Heathcliff’s, has its origins in Byronism rather than sexual disease. 

   Even wider of the mark, it seems to me, are those who – insisting on the awfulness of male dominance, and unable to leave the syphilis theory alone – see Rochester as guilty of infecting Bertha, rather than the other way around.  But, allowing for a moment the validity of the concept, Bertha is five years his senior (Ch 27) and would have had a five-year head start in getting herself infected.  She would not have needed any help from Rochester.  And there is no suggestion in the text that Rochester is initially promiscuous; although he is later driven to three different women – French, Italian and German (Ch 27) – by the circumstances of his marriage.  We can say that Rochester is lying, or telling less than the whole truth, but we are then moving into the argument from silence and away from the realms of literary criticism which – for me, anyway –  is about what the text actually says. 

The words may remain constant, but the significance attributed to them will change as new readers bring new suppositions to the text.  Jane Eyre’s popularity seems destined to last for a long time; and for as long as it does, Bertha Mason will continue to invite controversy.