The Marriage Book (32 page)

Boy, I love you, I admire you, I like you and I’m grateful for you and to you for our quarter century together. . . .

What we now know is that marriage isn’t about two becoming one, but about learning how to be yourself in the presence of another. That, to me, to us, is the secret of a marriage worth having.

INFIDELITY

EXODUS 20:14

The seventh commandment.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

JOHN WINTHROP

DIARY, 1644

Biblical injunctions informed many of the early laws of Puritan Massachusetts, including the capital law against adultery: “If any person committeth Adultery with a mar[r]ied or espoused wife, the Adulterer and Adulteresse shall surely be put to death.” In the following passage from his journal, John Winthrop (1588–1649), first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, detailed one of the rare cases on record in which the penalty was actually carried out.

At this court of assistants one James Britton, a man ill affected both to our church discipline and civil government, and one Mary Latham, a proper young woman about 18 years of age, whose father was a godly man and had brought her up well, were condemned to die for adultery, upon a law formerly made and published in print. It was thus occasioned and discovered. This woman, being rejected by a young man whom she had an affection unto, vowed she would marry the next that came to her, and accordingly, against her friends’ minds, she matched with an ancient man who had neither honesty nor ability, and one whom she had no affection unto. Whereupon, soon after she was married, divers young men solicited her chastity, and drawing her into bad company, and giving her wine and other gifts, easily prevailed with her, and among others this [James] Britton. But God smiting him with a deadly palsy and fearful horror of conscience withal, he would not keep secret, but discovered this, and other the like with other women, and was forced to acknowledge the justice of God that having often called others fools, etc., for confessing against themselves, he was now forced to do the like. The woman dwelt now in Plymouth patent, and one of the magistrates there, hearing she was detected, etc., sent her to us.

. . . The woman proved very penitent, and had deep apprehension of the foulness of her sin, and at length attained to hope of pardon by the blood of Christ, and was willing to die in satisfaction to justice. The man also was very much cast down for his sins, but was loth to die, and petitioned the general court for his life, but they would not grant it, though some of the magistrates spake much for it, and questioned the letter, whether adultery was death by God’s law now. . . .

They were both executed, they both died very penitently, especially the woman, who had some comfortable hope of pardon of her sin, and gave good exhortation to all young maids to be obedient to their parents, and to take heed of evil company.

GEORGE MACKENZIE

MORAL GALLANTRY
, 1667

Known as “Bloody Mackenzie” for his unyielding prosecution of a group of Scottish religious protesters, Sir George Mackenzie (1636–1691) was most famous as a lawyer. But years before his legal maneuvers led to the deaths of thousands of his countrymen, he had begun his career writing about such topics as solitude, heraldry, and, in the case below, the moral imperatives of the married gentleman.

Today’s thesauruses equate the words
slut
and
strumpet
, but clearly the latter was once considered a more depraved version of the former.

Whoring renders men contemptible, whilst it tempts them to embrace such as are not only below themselves in every sense, but such as are scarce worthy to serve these handsomer Ladies, whom they either do, or may lawfully enjoy. Doth not this Vice persuade men to ly in Cottages with Sluts, or (which is worse) Strumpets, to lurk in corners, to fear the encounter of such as know them [?]. . . .

There is no Vice whereby gallantry is more stain’d, then by breach of promise, which becomes yet more Sacrilegious, when Ladies are wrong’d by it. . . .

. . . And though such as are guilty of Whoring, do justifie their debordings by a love to that glorious Sex, yet by this pretext they are yet more unjust and vicious then their former guilt made them; for by roaving amongst so many, they intimat that they are not satisfied with their first choice; and that not only there are some of that Sex, but that there is none in it who deserves their intire affection.

WILLIAM WYCHERLEY

THE COUNTRY-WIFE
, 1675

A classic Restoration comedy by William Wycherley (circa 1640–1715),
The Country-Wife
features characters with names like Mr. Horner, Old Lady Squeamish, and the relatively serious Mr. Dorilant, who nonetheless has one of the best lines in the play.

A mistress should be like a little country retreat near the town, not to dwell in constantly, but only for a night and away, to taste the town the better when a man returns.

SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1768

Dr. Samuel Johnson (see
Devotion
;
Triumphs
) would have been a legendary literary figure even without becoming the subject of the biography written by James Boswell. But Boswell’s
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,
first published in 1791, made the older man more vivid—and more casually quotable—than his own writings could ever have done. Johnson’s earlier musings on “the heinousness of the crime of adultery” were captured by Boswell in the following passage.

Confusion of progeny constitutes the essence of the crime; and therefore a woman who breaks her marriage vows is much more criminal than a man who does it. A man, to be sure, is criminal in the sight of God; but he does not do his wife a very material injury, if he does not insult her: if, for instance, from mere wantonness of appetite, he steals privately to her chambermaid. Sir, a wife ought not to greatly resent this. I would not receive home a daughter who had run away from her husband on that account. A wife should study to reclaim her husband by more attention to please him. Sir, a man will not, once in a hundred instances, leave his wife and go to a harlot, if his wife has not been negligent of pleasing.

GEORGE SAND

JACQUES
, 1833

Notorious for a string of famous lovers including Frédéric Chopin, Prosper Mérimée, and Alfred de Musset, French author George Sand (1804–1876, née [with several variations] Amantine-Lucille-Aurore-Dupin) was a popular and controversial author whose more than three dozen novels often questioned the social conventions of the day. Famously, she wrote: “There is only one happiness in life, and that is to love and be loved.” Even in her first novel,
Indiana
, Sand defended the right of women to leave their husbands in search of that happiness. In
Jacques
, she wrote in the voice of the jilted but resigned husband.

No human creature can command love, and no one is guilty for feeling or for losing it. It is falsehood that debases a woman. That which constitutes adultery is not the hour that she accords to her lover: it is the night that she afterward passes in the arms of her husband. Oh! I should hate my wife, and I should indeed become ferocious, if to my lips she had offered lips still warm from another’s kisses, and had passed, unblushing, from his embrace to mine. She would have
become hideous to me from that day, and I would have crushed her as I would a caterpillar that I should find in my bed. But such as she is, pale, depressed, suffering all the anguish of a timorous conscience, incapable of lying, and ever ready to confess to me her involuntary fault, I can only pity and regret her.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

THE SCARLET LETTER
, 1850

Hester Prynne, probably the most famous adulteress in American literature, is best known for the initial
A
that she is forced to wear as punishment for her infidelity but that she embroiders artfully and exhibits without the expected Puritan shame. Her creator, Nathaniel Hawthorne (see
Anniversaries
), based his celebrated novel on a 1658 Plymouth Colony law that, like the Massachusetts Bay law (see
John Winthrop
), was rarely recorded as having been enforced, but stated: “whosoever shall commit Adultery shall be severely punished by Whipping . . . and likewise to wear two Capital letters viz A D cut out in cloth and sewed on their uppermost Garments.”

The baby in Hester’s arms is named Pearl and is the product of the adulterous affair that ultimately proves the undoing of both Hester’s husband and her lover.

The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into the sunshine, the grim and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he thus drew forward; until, on the threshold of the prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air, as if by her own free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison.

When the young woman—the mother of this child—stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a
burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold-thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony. . . .

. . . Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,—so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,—was that
SCARLET LETTER
, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

JOHN GRAHAM

OPENING ARGUMENT IN THE MURDER TRIAL OF DANIEL SICKLES
, 1859

U.S. Congressman Daniel Sickles (1819–1914) was in Lafayette Square, within sight of the White House, when he fatally shot his young wife’s lover, the District of Columbia DA, Philip Barton Key II. The ensuing trial featured a two-day opening by John Graham, who argued, in the alternative, that his client should be acquitted because of a biblical mandate to protect the weaker sex and/or because he had been defending his property and/or because he had been rendered temporarily insane by the discovery of adultery, “the greatest wrong that can be committed upon a human being.”

The trial represented the first time that temporary insanity was used as a murder defense. The jury took barely an hour to acquit Sickles, who went on to become a major general in the Union army and to win the Medal of Honor.

Gentlemen, you would have thought, from this opening, that the learned counsel for the Government was describing a case of the most deliberate homicide—and yet the case, he was describing, was the case of a man, who, while acting from a sense, and under the influence of a sense, of right, was nevertheless, no doubt, at that particular juncture, entirely bereft of his reason. . . .

. . . [The question to ask is] whether the case is one of pardonable or excusable unsoundness
of mind, or of wanton or ungovernable passion; whether the defendant, not being to blame for the provocation, the frenzy, or its results, can be holden for a crime? This point is regarded as one of the most important items in this prosecution. We mean to say, not that Mr. Sickles labored under any insanity consequent upon an established, permanent mental disease, but that the condition of his mind, at the time of the commission of the act in question, was such, as to render him legally unaccountable,
as much so,
as if the state of his mind had been produced by a mental disease.