The New Yorker Books :

It’s an institution that informs the tax code and the disposition of wealth—while also shaping the idiosyncratic goings on within households. What could it be, at its best?

By Rebecca Mead 

“Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” So says Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” a novel that explores the many different ways in which the institution of marriage can be a site of discovery and delusion, proximity and estrangement, comfort and misery. Dorothea’s insight is informed by her own ill-advised marriage, to Edward Casaubon, a desiccated scholar and the blocked would-be author of a “Key to All Mythologies.” Dorothea’s words, which arrive close to the end of the novel, are addressed to Rosamond Vincy, the mayor’s daughter. In Rosamond’s marriage to Dr. Tertius Lydgate, a newcomer to Middlemarch, Eliot provides another illustration of curdled marital expectation, with each spouse disappointed and embittered by the other’s intransigent sense of selfhood. Between these two poles, Eliot offers refracted perspectives on more or less successful marriages: the complacent bourgeois harmony of Mr. and Mrs. Vincy, Rosamond’s parents; the sometimes contentious equality struck between Caleb Garth, an honorable land manager, and Susan, his frequently wiser wife; the secrets and lies that underpin the smug union of Mr. Bulstrode, a banker with a dark past, and the willfully unwitting Mrs. Bulstrode. In “Middlemarch”—as in the wider world the novel still speaks to—marriage is the default social arrangement; despite its omnipresence, it is too little questioned, often flawed, and only occasionally satisfactory.

How is marriage unlike everything else? And why is it sometimes so very awful? These are questions raised by the British critic and filmmaker Devorah Baum in her nimble new work, “On Marriage” (Yale). There is, she writes, “something enigmatic about the marital bond lying in excess of Enlightenment reason or easy description.” Marriage is a vast subject, being an institution that informs our most important social structures—including the tax code and the disposition of intergenerational wealth—while also circumscribing the idiosyncratic goings on within Baum’s household, or mine, or, quite possibly, yours. Yet Baum finds that marriage is a surprisingly unexamined subject, at least by professional philosophers, who have left the field to novelists, filmmakers, and other artists and theorists. 

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