The Marriage Book (12 page)

Mexican legislators rejected the proposal, and the archdiocese deemed it “absurd.”

“THE SALE OF WIVES”

WHITEHAVEN HERALD AND CUMBERLAND ADVERTISER
, 1832

British citizens really did auction off their wives—even as late as the end of the nineteenth century. The practice was not legal, but it was widespread enough that upcoming “sales” were advertised, and usually held in public marketplaces, where onlookers—and potential bidders—would gather. This account was retold and republished throughout the nineteenth century.

“Moore’s melodies” refers to a collection of popular Irish songs by the poet Thomas (“Anacreon”) Moore.

Joseph Thompson, a small farmer, renting between forty and fifty acres, lived at a village three miles from the city of Carlisle. He had been married about three years. He had no children. He and his wife could not agree. There was a continual soreness between the Montagues and Capulets, his family and hers. These three things made them resolve to part. So, on the 7th of April, early in the morning, Mr Thompson sent round the bellman to give notice that a man would sell his wife at twelve o’clock in the market. The odd announcement, of course, drew together a considerable mob. The lady placed herself upon a high oaken chair, with a halter of straw about her neck, and a large circle of relatives and friends around her. The husband-auctioneer stood beside her, and spoke, says my authority, nearly as follows: “Gentlemen, I have to offer to your notice my wife, Mary Ann Thompson, otherwise Williamson, whom I mean to sell to the highest and fairest bidder. Gentlemen, it his her wish as well as mine to part for ever. She has been to me only a bosom-serpent. I took her for my comfort and the good of my house, but she became my tormentor, a domestic curse, a night invasion, and a daily devil. Gentlemen, I speak truth from my heart when I say may Heaven deliver us from troublesome wives. Avoid them as you would a mad dog, a loaded pistol, cholera morbus, Mount Etna, or any other pestilential phenomena in nature. Now I have shewn you the dark side of my wife, and her faults and failings, I will introduce the bright and sunny side of her, and explain her qualifications and goodness. She can read novels and milk cows; she can laugh and weep with the same ease that you could take a glass of ale when thirsty. Indeed, gentlemen, she reminds me of what the poet says of women in general— Heaven gave to women the peculiar grace,

To laugh, to weep, and cheat the human race.

She can make butter, and scold the maid; she can sing Moore’s melodies, and plait her frills and caps. She cannot make rum, gin or whisky; but she is a good judge of the quality from long
experience in tasting them. I therefore offer her, with all her perfections and imperfections, for the sum of
fifty shillings
.”

The reporter, I fancy, must have dressed up this speech. . . . It is difficult to believe that she had the kind of accomplishments mentioned in the speech, or that he really uttered this speech. He affirms that she did, however, and adds that the lady was a “spruce, lively damsel, apparently not exceeding twenty-three years of age. She seemed,” he says, “to feel a pleasure at the exchange she was about to make.” The sale took between an hour and a half and two hours. At last, Mrs Thompson was sold to Harry Mears, a pensioner, for one pound and a Newfoundland dog. The newly coupled pair left the city together, the mob huzzaing and cheering after them. Mr Thompson coolly took the straw-halter from off his old wife and put it on his new dog. He then betook himself to the nearest inn, and spent the remainder of the day there. No doubt, before the setting of the sun, the whole purchase-money of his wife had gone down his throat in drink. “He repeatedly exulted,” says my authority, “in his happy release from bondage.”

ELLEN COILE GRAVES

LETTER TO HENRY GRAVES, 1844

A Pennsylvania couple named Ellen Coile and Henry Graves married in 1841, but the bride left the groom just a year later, setting up a store in Philadelphia. He eventually sued her for divorce, noting that she had abandoned him. As part of her deposition to the court, she offered the following explanation.

This letter was written without punctuation but with spaces between sentences. We have added periods and capital letters. We have not corrected the misspellings.

Henry

I received your letter and in compliance with your request I send you this answer stating my feelings towards yourself. I thought that you was fully acquainted with me to know that you had no cause to imagine that I had for a moment entertained a thought of returning to you. It would be impossible for us to live
peaceble
together after what has occured and in connection with my feelings towards yourself which is that of perfect coldness. I do not and could not love you. I am not one of those lukewarm creatures who can bestow their affections upon all alike where they please. My affections spring spontaneously. I
cannot compel
myself to love where there is no congeniality of feeling. I did wrong very wrong in marrying you without feeling a sincere attachment but I believed you was capable of attaching me to you by kind and
affectionate treatment. You encouraged me in this belief for you was not deceived in this respect. When I married you it was with the full determination of loving you which I believed to be an easy task. I was mistaken. I tried for three months as ardently as ever woman tried but each day devolved something calculated to turn me from you rather than win me to you. I gave up the task for I found it impossible. My punishment I think has paid for my indiscretion. I am sorry that you still love me and I trust that this letter will prove effectual in removing your unfortunate attachment for believe me that by me it can never be returned. And now let me remove every false hope by solemnly assuring you that you and I parted
forever
in this World. It is better that I should speak thus plainly than that you should encourage hopes that will only bring you disappointment. I wish you well sincerly from the bottom of my Heart. I should be glad to hear that you was Happyly married and successful in your Business. Mother sends her Love to you and the Family. Give my love to them likewise and Believe me I am your Freind, Ellen Coile

JULES MICHELET

LOVE
, 1859

Historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874), known for his nineteen-volume history of France, also wrote popular books about love, women, natural history, and religion.

Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to find a firsthand account of the following practice.

In Zurich, in the olden time, when a quarrelsome couple applied for a divorce, the magistrate never listened to them. Before deciding upon the case, he locked them up for three days in the same room, with one bed, one table, one plate, and one tumbler. Their food was passed into them by attendants who neither saw nor spoke to them. When they came out, at the end of the three days, neither of them wanted to be divorced.

EUGENE O’NEILL

LETTER TO AGNES BOULTON O’NEILL, 1927

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and four-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) was in many ways the personification of the tortured, alcoholic author with a chaotic saga of home life and a haunting past. He had yet to write some of his greatest plays when he sent this letter to his second wife, Agnes Boulton.

O’Neill was married to his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins, for three years and, despite various separations, to his third wife, actress Carlotta Monterey, from 1929 until his death; she is the woman to whom he was referring in this letter.

I just got your cable a while ago, saying you understand. I wonder if you really do. Well, I will not beat about the bush but come to the point at once. I love someone else. Most deeply. There is no possible doubt of this. And the someone loves me. Of that I am as deeply certain. And under these circumstances I feel it is impossible for me to live with you, even if you were willing I should do so—which I am sure that you are not, as it would be even a greater degradation to your finer feelings than it would to mine to attempt, for whatever consideration there may be, to keep up the pretense of being husband and wife.

We have often promised each other that if one ever came to the other and said they loved someone else that we would understand, that we would know that love is something which cannot be denied or argued with, that it must be faced. And that is what I am asking you to understand and know now. I am sure that I could accept the inevitable in that spirit if our roles were reversed. And I know that you, if for nothing else than that you must remember with kindness our years of struggle together and that I have tried to make you happy and to be happy with you, will act with the same friendship toward me. After all, you know that I have always been faithful to you, that I have never gone seeking love, that if my love for you had not died no new love would have come to me. And, as I believe I said in my last letter, if you are frank and look into your own heart you will find no real love left for me in it. What has bound us together for the past few years has been deep down a fine affection and friendship, and this I shall always feel for you. There have been moments when our old love flared into life again but you must acknowledge that these have grown steadily rarer. On the other side of the ledger moments of a very horrible hate have been more and more apparent, a poisonous bitterness and resentment, a cruel desire to wound, rage and frustration and revenge. This has killed our chance for happiness together. . . .

I am not blaming you. I have been as much as you, perhaps more so. Or rather, neither of us is to blame. It is life which made us what we are.

My last letter did not mention being in love because, even if I were not so . . . entirely in love with someone else, I think we ought to end our marriage in order to give us both a chance, while we are both at an age when there still is a chance, to find happiness either alone or in another relationship. Soon it will be too late. And if in the end we have failed to give happiness to each other, then all the more reason why each of us owes the other another chance for it.

Looking at it objectively, I am sure freedom to do as you please will mean a lot to you. You can go to Europe, for instance, as you have always wished—live there or anywhere else you like. You can have the use of Spithead exclusively for the rest of your life as a permanent home. I will never go to Bermuda again. You can be reasonably sure, unless catastrophe beans me, that you will always have enough income from me to live in dignity and comfort. You know I am hardly a stingy person, that I will do anything that is fair, that I will want to do all I can for you. And, above all, you will have your chance of marrying someone else who will love you and bring you happiness. I am happy in my new love. I am certain that a similar happiness is waiting for you. It seems obvious to me that it must be.

When I say I am happy now, it is deeply true. My only unhappiness is what I expressed in my last letter—a bitter feeling of sadness when I think over all our years together and what the passage of time has done to us. At such moments I feel life-disgusted and hopeless. It gives me the intolerable feeling that it is perhaps not in the nature of living life itself that fine beautiful things may exist for any great length of time, that human beings are fated to destroy just that in each other which constitutes their mutual happiness. Fits of cosmic Irish melancholia, I guess! Otherwise I am strangely happy. Something new in me has been born. I tell you this in the trust that your friendship may understand and be glad and wish me luck—and set me free to live with that happiness.

I mean, divorce me. That is what we agreed we would do if the present situation ever occurred, isn’t it?

DOROTHY THOMPSON

LETTER TO SINCLAIR LEWIS, 1938

A world-famous journalist, lecturer, radio commentator, and suffragist, Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) was the model for Katharine Hepburn’s hard-charging heroine in the movie
Woman of the Year
and, like that character, seemed more naturally suited to public than domestic life. Novelist Sinclair Lewis was the second and most famous of her three husbands and the only one with whom she had a child. By all accounts, their marriage, which began in 1928, was fractious at best, though they didn’t divorce officially until 1942. Thompson never sent this letter.