Life After "I Do"

George Eliot's subversive vision of marriage

- Ann Hulbert

"Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings." George Eliot wrote those sentences in her 1872 masterpiece, Middlemarch, an examination of marriage unmatched by any other. She scrutinized the relationship-its intimate secrets and its public contours-with rare imaginative and moral intensity in her other fiction too. But that fearsome declaration, uttered by her protagonist Dorothea Brooke, stands out. It was meant to disorient a reader, and still does.

It definitely sounds un-Victorian, framing marriage as the antithesis of a demurely conventional arrangement. Does it sound contemporary? The shudder at suffocation might seem familiar-I need some space. That "awful," though, isn't just a way of saying dreadful; it surely also means awe-inspiring, which delivers a jolt. Americans may marvel at the romantic spectacle of lavish weddings and wonder at the endurance of an institution that has weathered so many rounds of criticism, calls for redefinition, and diagnoses of crisis. But we appear to be more wary than awed. A quarter of 40-year-olds in the United States (where the surgeon general recently issued an advisory on "our epidemic of loneliness and isolation") have never been married a new milestone. Who knows whether they'll change their mind. To those holdouts as well as the rest of us Eliot's sentences say: Don't take marriage at face value or assume you understand it.