Marriage is a noose.” “When a
man takes a wife, he ceases to dread hell.”
“Marry in haste and repent in leisure.” “A woman is necessarily
an evil, and he that gets the most tolerable one is lucky”—and so on. There
is an edgy, bridegroom-beware quality to the old proverbs that make marriage
into a joking matter, with the joke on women. Today, yesterday’s derisive
sayings may seem as far removed from contemporary reality as some of the
herbal remedies of an earlier age. But unlike calomel and the wild datura
vine, these reproachful wisdoms from the past still carry authority and
reflect our uncertain attitudes about the matrimonial state. We remember
them because marriage is a universal, habitual human behavior—the ultimate
in institutional survivals, however modified. We also remember them because
marriage is so little studied, and this vacuum of historical information
returns us to the folklore of the past.
Consequently evaluations of marriage which is
my subject this evening are largely subjective. Lacking context and for
that reason varying tremendously, they float outside of historical analysis
and remove a typical middle-class marriage from its moorings. Writes David
Donald in the most authoritative biography ever written about Lincoln,
“For all their quarrels, {the Lincolns} were devoted to each other. In
the long years of their marriage Abraham Lincoln was never suspected of
being unfaithful to his wife. She, in turn, was immensely proud of him
and was his most loyal supporter and admirer.”
1
But listen to what Michael Burlingame has written in The
Inner World of Abraham Lincoln in a fifty-eight page assessment of the
Lincoln marriage, fifty-six pages of which are a condemnation of Mary Lincoln:
“In 1864 {the President} pardoned a soldier who had deserted to go home
and marry his sweetheart, {saying}, ‘I want to punish that young man..
.probably in less than a year he will wish I had withheld that pardon’.”
According to Burlingame who argues that Lincoln regretted his marriage
as much as he expected the young soldier to rue his, the Lincolns’ marriage
was a “fountain of misery..."
2
Burlingame is certain that Mary Lincoln is responsible for this fountain
of misery, without any acknowledgment that proverbs, peers and popular
culture had taught Lincoln to joke about marriage, although never his own.
Mostly the depictions of marriage as a disaster
focus on Mary Todd Lincoln’s failings. Of course it has always been women
who are held responsible for the quality of a marriage, for many reasons
not the least of which is that men write history and have especially controlled
the Lincoln story. After her husband was assassinated, Mary Lincoln told
the biographer Josiah Holland that during their courtship she had “trespassed”
on her husband’s “tenderness of character.”
3
Such a sense of guilt is hardly an unusual feeling for any recent widow
or widower to acknowledge. But listen to how Douglas Wilson interprets
the commonplace reaction of a widow.
He writes: “Had she been a man, {Lincoln}
would have known how to respond {to this trespass on his tendernessj: he
could have ridiculed her in public, planted a malicious piece about her
in
7