LGBT Book, Film & Video Blog

Such is the vaunted social institution that gays in the United States struggle to enter (with notable recent success), that hordes of evangelicals and Christians hit the barricades to "defend," that heterosexuals increasingly flee, as indicated by the U.S. census finding in 2000 that the "most common household type in the U.S." is now "people living alone."

If professional philosophers did their jobs, analysed concrete philosophical problems and won media attention for their conclusions, we wouldn't be sentenced to the simplicities of right-wing marriage pundits, or the often ahistorical rights-focused arguments of same-sex-marriage champions. We'd be forced to think hard about what marriage has been, is, and should be, before deciding to whom we're willing to sell tickets.

That's not our culture today, so we're lucky Frances Dolan, a professor of English at the University of California at Davis, steeped herself in the history, brought along a philosopher's antennae for blunt contradiction, and produced Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

Dolan's in-your-face introduction takes the usual, saccharin apotheosis of marriage in American culture, illustrated by Christian conservative James C. Dobson's description of it in Marriage Under Fire as "the very foundation of human social order," and turns it upside down. Marriage may be historic, Dolan concedes, "but its history is one of constant, constitutive crisis and conflict." As a result, she writes, "the legacy of marriage is a burdensome one."

For Dolan, who works in the scholarly tradition revitalized by Lawrence Stone's classic The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England: 1500-1800 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), "conflict between incompatible models and irreconcilable expectations is the history of marriage." She rejects the standard story that marriage has moved from "patriarchal to companionate, from obedience to intimacy, from sacrament to contract."