M

MARRIAGE

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.

Genesis 2.24

So begins marriage. In this day and age, most people think of such ‘cleaving’ as kinda cute, an emotional commitment “’til death do us part”; and indeed the union matrimony represents (‘bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh’) begins with the word’s Latin ancestor, the double-gendered maritus / marita (= ‘husband / wife’). Ever-efficient, the Romans join husband and wife in one word, giving us, in miniature, marriage’s first definition: ‘the relation between married persons; wedlock’.

Ooh little darlin’…

I do... Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride. Image from http://www.halloweenweb.co.uk/

But before all our newfangled post-Romantic notions of individualism, marriage was much less dewy-eyed. It required nothing more than parental consent, and its functions were social, religious and legal. Firstly, it acknowledged a sexual relationship and those children born within it, thus easing the financial burden of bastard upkeep on society and oiling the cogs of inheritance. Secondly, it was a Holy Sacrament, an institution to prevent sin, though it did not sanction guilt-free sex – too much fun with your wife, and it became adultery (= ‘pollution of the marriage bed’).

Finally – then as now – marriage linked families, dynasties, and countries together ‘in-law’, in a way that could be personal, symbolic, or world-changing: new money meeting impoverished aristocracy; the Venetian Doge annually ‘marrying’ the sea; Catherine of Braganza bringing England £300,000, Bombay and Tangier as her dowry. In extension, it helped negotiate the legal exchange of worldly goods, including a dower for the bride should she survive her groom, inheritance for the children, and the resolution of all money matters under the auspices of the pater familias. So it was impossible for a wife to run up debt, to own property, or, in any sense, to exist independently of her husband. In consequence, marriage became the Holy Grail for 99.9% of young women, who dreaded remaining financially dependent on rich relations or married sisters should the marriage-market reject them (as it did, if you were the wrong side of one in three aristocratic women).

…if U ain’t busy for the next 7 years…

Phew. In its second definition marriage takes up the legal challenge, becoming ‘the action, or act, of marrying; the ceremony by which two persons are made husband and wife’.

Dearly Beloved... Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin.

The non-specifics here are no accident: to the irritation of the early modern church, ‘contract marriages’ and Dodgy Marriage more generally (Scotch Marriages or Fleet Marriages) endured for centuries before the Marriage Act of 1753 put paid to such shenanigans and demanded a public service or none at all. Previously, ‘the ceremony by which two persons are made husband and wife’ could be an exchange of bent or halved coins, the presentation of a ring, or a declaration (‘I make you my wife’). There were certain caveats to this last, of course – you had to use the present tense (no conditionals), unless you used the future and then tumbled into bed: present consummation is present consent.

All very neat, in theory, although such marriages generally took place on the hoof between impetuous couples and only became of real significance once the bride fell pregnant or one or both of the parties got into difficulties. Then you get into semantics: what does ‘will’ mean, exactly? It’s an uncooperative word, conflating what you ‘want’ and what you ‘will do’. Church courts agreed, and many of those marriages that were challenged were dissolved, with an inevitably skewed impact on the would-be wife.

So marriage is as much about speech and silence as ‘cleaving’: moreover, much of its value depends on the weight society gives how you live (today, you can lose your state benefits if you ‘live with another person as if you are married‘). It also creates interesting problems if you are physically silenced before you can assert your consent (as happens in Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed), or if your marriage is explosively interrupted, as in Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun. Conversely, Renaissance actors wondered what God thought about marriages carried out on stage as part of a performance: valid or not? Why not? This whole idea is, in essence, the premise of Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride (2004), where nobody questions the legality of Victor’s (clearly accidental) declaration to the bride of the title, despite trying every other conceivable method to get him out of it.

…Let’s pretend we’re married and go all night.

The word marriage reflects this in a now-obsolete sense, as ‘intimate union’, antonymic to virginity. And here I nearly tripped up on another little tradition: breach of promise, a common law tort allowing a partner to sue their long-fled lover for damages based on the impact of such ‘intimate union’ but also on the value of language – ‘Does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you die? Well you’re still alive…’

This tort was overwhelmingly used by women, although originally payable to the father of a seduced girl, who had lost ‘services’ (make me a cuppa, love) because of her pregnancy. Later on, it became a means of quantifying waste of time, reputation and trousseau-money in a marriage market competitive enough that such things mattered. Although the tort was abolished in the UK in 1970, a version is still in use elsewhere: a jilted woman in Chicago is currently suing her fiance for the costs of her cancelled wedding, and ’emotional distress’. Whether or not she will succeed is unclear, but her early-modern precursors inevitably triumphed:

See my interesting client
Victim of a heartless wile!
See the traitor all defiant ,
Wears a supercilious smile!
Sweetly smiled my client on him
Coyly wooed and gently won him….

W.S. Gilbert, Trial By Jury (1875)

Trial By Jury explains why the tort was so useful to jilted women, but also why it declined: by 1875 female financial options were expanding enough to change the public perception of such cases from ‘poor innocent maid vs. base seducer’ to ‘I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger…’ So what began as a way to compensate gender inequality itself ended as a vehicle for misogyny, with stories of pretty girls luring men in and then threatening to do the legal equivalent of ‘thcreaming and thcreaming until i’m thick‘. What God has joined, let no man put asunder.

Further Reading:

• Check out Lawrence Stone’s The Road To Divorce: England 1530-1987, which tells you everything you need to know about everything.

• Sadly finished now, but keep an eye out for Amanda Vickery’s At Home With The Georgians, should it ever return to TV.

NEXT WEEK: N is for Nanny

I

INFANT

So runs my dream: but what am I?

An infant crying in the night:

An infant crying for the light:

And with no language but a cry.

Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)

LinkedIn.

Have you ever noticed how many I-words have the in/im prefix? These clarify what something is not.

Thus, in-nocent, in-nocuous = not harmful (the same root as ‘noxious’), im-potent = not powerful, in-capable = self explanatory; &c.

Infant is one such, but cleverly concealed by an unexpected etymology. Along with its archaic variants (enfaunt, infaunt), it derives from the Latin infans, which is the Greek ‘phemi’ in its plundered Roman form, ‘femi’, plus the Latinate negative (in- = ‘without’).

And phemi / femi? ‘To make known one’s thoughts, to declare’ or, simply, ‘to speak’.

Don’t Speak.

So an infant is ‘without speech’; or, as its first definition clarifies, ‘a child during the earliest period of its life (or still unborn)’ – Shakepeare’s ‘Infant, Mewling and puking in the Nurses Armes’.

Mew.

Newborns / kittens must indeed rely on ‘mewling’ for their day-to-day needs, but paradoxically such speechlessness gives them a symbolic potency that rings in the ear.

Indeed, they (babies, not kittens) have ‘spoken’ throughout history, from whistleblowing on promiscuous parents to confirmation of marital fidelity.

But hold on just one gosh-darned minute: that’s female fidelity, of course. The maternal connection is the only one you can prove, sans DNA testing. Male extra-curricular activity is neither here nor there.

And history is full of those awkward occasions when ‘speaking likenesses’ gives rise to speculation about what the child’s mother was up to nine months previously.

Mother’s Ruin.

Strangely, the infant’s own inevitable silence simply compounds the seeming power of what ‘they’ are saying: you’re hearing with your eyes rather than your ears. Or just reading.

Indeed, Paulina, the faithful lady-in-waiting in The Winter’s Tale would prove her mistress’ daughter legitimate by pointing to her book-like qualities: ‘Behold, my lords, / Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father…’

Well into the seventeenth century, the village gossip could also deduce parental naughtiness through something as seemingly random as a child’s constitution: weakness or disease suggested either that the parents had been having too much sex to copulate at their full vigour, or else that conception had happened during menstruation. You slags.

And it didn’t stop there: infants could also tell tales through the very time of their arrival. It was commonly believed that young’uns entered the world nine months to the day after their conception. Consequently, no child born on a Sunday could be christened until its parents had made a public apology for their desecration of the Lord’s Day. Busted.

Even a child’s existence could be disastrously significant.

To sea, To sea…

In 1741, the retired sea-captain Sir Thomas Coram set up London’s first Foundling Hospital, whence came unfortunates from all walks of life to ensure that their screamingly ill-begotten infants would be cared for and kept from incriminating them (not necessarily in that order).

In many instances, such abandonment was the alternative to killing the child or leaving it to die. So Coram was hardly acting on a whim: the social repercussions of Sin were severe, poverty and gin dependency rife (a woman’s problem, and also a means of inducing abortions – why else ‘Mother’s Ruin’?) and the streets covered with child corpses.

Infantine... 'The Angel In The House', photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron

So Coram’s critics accused him of fostering sin, by giving it a Hospital wherein to hide: to offer succour to bastard infants was to shield the sinful and encourage further debauchery. Let the wages of sin speak loud and clear.

Speak Now, Or Forever Hold Thy Peace.

In its second meaning, infant becomes more defined: it does not simply signify a speechless-screaming babe-in-arms, but also ‘a person under legal age; a minor’ (someone who has not ‘completed their twenty-first year’).

Here it is law-based, in reference, for example, to all those boy-kings of our early royal history (how many can you name????) – whose legitimacy is the most important thing of all, taking priority over minor considerations such as… oh, I don’t know, BEING OLDER THAN SIX.

Infant in this sense connotes something like having yet to earn freedom sui juris; the legal understanding that a person is fit to govern themselves (and, in royal cases, a country), and consequent emancipation from the rule of parent, guardian or Lord Protector.

Among Spanish royals – to this day – children who are not the direct heir to the throne have the title Infante / Infanta; presumably giving us English our third definition for infant (‘a youth of noble birth’), these are princes of the blood, but they ain’t ruling nothing.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear.

It is also worth considering the more direct fate of infants’ mothers: ‘The very being or legal existence of the women is suspended during marriage’ wrote William Blackstone in 1765. A financial, legal and social dependent – like the children she bore – a wife could be ‘infantine’ through her official speechlessness, than which there is no more perfect example than Coventry Patmore’s poem The Angel in the House (1854-62):

He’s never young nor ripe; she grows

More infantine, auroral, mild,

And still the more she lives and knows

The lovelier she’s express’d a child.

Yet, like the screaming infants littering Coram’s Fields, the silent appendage speaks vicariously: dress, jewellery and inactivity declare her husband’s wealth and status; ‘mildness’ and ‘loveliness’ (like youth and innocence) embody the ideals men battle to protect, with smatterings of the overpowering Rightness of the domestic sphere.

She remains, of course, firmly on her pedestal, and statues, as we know, do not speak (unless they are late Shakespearean and have the rather badass Paulina fighting their corner).

So being infantilised does not mean saying nothing; rather, it means saying what those around you choose to hear.

NEXT WEEK: J is for Jade