Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama Book

A Question of Divorce
22 April 2020

This is one of those plays that I heard about a while ago and was quite interested in seeing what Shaw had to say about the institution of marriage. This is also one of those plays where he writes a treatise on the subject before actually launching into the play, and the thing that I love about Shaw is reading his thoughts in these preludes. Unfortunately, the collection of plays that I have of his don't include the preludes, so I had to go further afield to find it, and I had actually printed it out, but it ended up getting stuck on a pile of papers that sat at the bottom of one of my closets until recently.

Look, this work is somewhat rather dated because things have changed significantly since 1908 when the play was written. For instance, the number of people getting married has dropped, and many people in the Western world are opting for domestic partnerships, in one sense because it is much cheaper than getting married, and also there is a belief that ending the relationship is much easier (spoiler alert - it isn't). Another thing is the question of divorce, which was quite hard to get back when the play was written, but is much easier these days. In fact, these days, at least in Australia, we have what is called 'no-fault' divorce, which means that a divorce can be granted simply by agreement between the parties, though of course, that does not mean that it is any less simple, particularly when property, and children, come into the mix.

The play sort of follows these ideas, where the main characters are in a church where a wedding is going to happen, however, the couple that is getting married has been reading a pamphlet which shocks them into a reality that marriage will bring about a lot of problems, such as debt, and the fact that if the husband goes insane and starts murdering people, the wife will not be able to divorce him because becoming an insane murder is no grounds for divorce, at least it wasn't back then.

Shaw does note that the whole question of marriage is a pretty complicated topic and that there really doesn't seem to be much in the way of replacing it, though one does wonder what this whole idea actually is, and why it seems to be something that is encountered the world over - it isn't just a Christain idea - it is embraced by the Christians because their holy text supports it, but many other cultures, both past and present, also have the concept of marriage.

I guess the biggest problem, and one that Shaw is writing about is the question of getting out of a bad marriage. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not really a fan of people getting divorced simply because the spark has gone out of the marriage. This, in a way, is a symptom of our disposable society. Also, I'm not a particularly big fan of the whole idea of 'try before you buy' mentality that seems to be about the place as well. In a way, it is commodifying marriage, but it is doing it in a way that is resulting in little change from what marriage was like back in Shaw's day.

One of the biggest complaints that Shaw has here is the fact that the woman is the commodity. In fact, he considers marriage to be a form of legalised slavery - the woman becomes the property of the husband and becomes reliant upon the husband. In fact, back in those days, once a woman had married she was forbidden from earning an income and had to stay home as the housekeeper and the childminder. Mind you, this is particularly a middle-class thing, since the poor simply didn't care about these social rules, and the wealthy were able to hire housekeepers anyway, and the thing with being wealthy was that in most cases you didn't have to work anyway. So, these rules were pretty much rules for the middle class.

As I mentioned, things have changed dramatically, and sure, we still have instances of where you have one partner stay at home while the other works, but this seems to be becoming less the norm (I only know of a couple of people who have that arrangement, though that was the case with my parents, who by the way are well and truly retired). However, there is also the catch that where both parties work and have kids, it ends up being the case that childcare is so expensive that one partner probably shouldn't bother working anyway, though a part of it does have to do with the fact that once the kids are at school, then the dynamics change.

However, moving on from the concept of modern secular marriage is little more than a contractual agreement between two consenting parties, the reason that for a time I had an issue with marriage was because of the way that it was portrayed in the church. Look, there are actually quite a lot of religions that use marriage as a form of control, and in fact, if you get involved in a cult the first thing that they will try to do (other than forcing you to break off relationships with your friends and family) is to get you married so that you are much more bound to the cult than otherwise. Yet, I'm not talking about cults but rather mainstream religion, though some friends have suggested that some of the evangelical churches out there are nothing more than cults.

You see, the issue I had with them was the way that he carried on about sex. Sure, I can sort of understand why they were doing it, but I don't necessarily think that they went about it the right way. You see, they describe sex as this wonderful thing, but only in the confines of marriage. So, we have all these people getting married because, well, they want to have sex. Guess what, we also had a whole heap of these people end up getting divorced as well. Okay, I don't quite know the reasons, and am not going to speculate, but it does make me wonder why a heap of my friends whom I went through youth group with, who were being taught that marriage is for life, ended up breaking up.

Yet, it also, in my mind, sort of suggests that there is something wrong with you if you don't end up getting married. Look, I'm not talking about the incel culture, because that is certainly not a culture that I was ever involved with, it is just that the church would control who we would marry. So, they would give us a list of requirements, and of course no sex before marriage as well, and it turned out that the only girls that I seemed to actually get along well with didn't go to church (and they didn't particularly like me hanging around with them either). Look, these days I'm not particularly interested in atheists or agnostics, but the problem was that the girls that I liked didn't like me, and the others were, well, just boring. However, looking back on the situation a part of me is glad that I didn't end up marrying any of them, if the statistics are anything to go by.

I guess there is also this idea of happy families as well, but in my mind, that is a whopping great big lie. It really seemed to come about as a form not so much of control, but of belittling people who weren't married. This was especially the case of the pastors who would preach about the gift of singleness, but not surprisingly were all married. Yeah, it really didn't go down well with me, and no wonder I eventually starting to think that this whole marriage thing was a crock.

Not so much anymore, namely because I have moved away from that lot, and don't really associate with many of them anymore. Look, in a way I still find that it is a bit of a farce, but the church I go to these days, the married people don't actually behave as if they are superior to those who aren't married, probably because there are an awful lot of single people at the church. Further, they don't seem to be anywhere near as sex-obsessed as that other particular church.

This raises another thing that Shaw discusses, and that was that when Paul the Apostle was writing, the belief was that the end of the world was nigh, so people weren't getting married, and in fact, Paul was suggesting that it was better for them not to get married. I guess this is also one of the reasons that they suggested that the Church had a communist set up, namely because what is the point of collecting stuff if the world is going to end, and you can't take it with you. Mind you, I'm not entirely sure how well Shaw knew his Bible, because Paul does comment on how there were rich people in the church in Corinth that were flaunting their wealth, to the chagrin of the less wealthy. However, this hasn't been the case, and it seems that the attitude these days is that he'll come sometime, we just don't know when, so we will just keep on doing what we have always been doing - getting married and having kids and all that.

This sort of brings me to the concept of polygamy, and polyandry - that is having multiple wives/husbands. Shaw suggests that this isn't a good idea because the male/female split is roughly half and half. However, one interesting thing that he points out is that polygamy works better than polyandry, because pregnancy lasts for nine months about, and once your pregnant, you have to wait for that nine months to pass before you get pregnant again. However, polygamy means that you can get multiple women pregnant at once, which is a great way of building up an army of loyal followers. Yeah, I can sort of understand why Joseph Smith encouraged polygamy, and why there is a huge backlash against the Mormons at the time. Yet there also seems to be this idea of sexual selection, something that Darwin speculated upon. That is that a woman will want to breed with the best specimen of a man as possible, so as to produce the best children. However, I do feel that while this may work in theory, it doesn't quite work in reality.

Well, it seems as if I've gone way off topic again, but I guess I wanted to talk about some of the issues that I see with marriage, particularly since what Shaw was writing about is vastly different. Okay, there are some that say that the family unit is one of the strongest units out there, and in part, I'd agree, however, what we in the Anglosphere tend to forget is that the family unit is much, much bigger than the nuclear family that we have grown up with. Then again, I do feel that there has been too much of a focus on promoting the family to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. However, that is another discussion for another day.