Getting Married | Page 3

circumstances; but such an
absurdity will probably be repealed or amended by sheer force of
circumstances before these words are in print. The only question to be
considered is, What shall the conditions of the dissolution be?
SURVIVALS OF SEX SLAVERY
If we adopt the common romantic assumption that the object of
marriage is bliss, then the very strongest reason for dissolving a
marriage is that it shall be disagreeable to one or other or both of the

parties. If we accept the view that the object of marriage is to provide
for the production and rearing of children, then childlessness should be
a conclusive reason for dissolution. As neither of these causes entitles
married persons to divorce it is at once clear that our marriage law is
not founded on either assumption. What it is really founded on is the
morality of the tenth commandment, which English women will one
day succeed in obliterating from the walls of our churches by refusing
to enter any building where they are publicly classed with a man's
house, his ox, and his ass, as his purchased chattels. In this morality
female adultery is malversation by the woman and theft by the man,
whilst male adultery with an unmarried woman is not an offence at all.
But though this is not only the theory of our marriage laws, but the
practical morality of many of us, it is no longer an avowed morality,
nor does its persistence depend on marriage; for the abolition of
marriage would, other things remaining unchanged, leave women more
effectually enslaved than they now are. We shall come to the question
of the economic dependence of women on men later on; but at present
we had better confine ourselves to the theories of marriage which we
are not ashamed to acknowledge and defend, and upon which, therefore,
marriage reformers will be obliged to proceed.
We may, I think, dismiss from the field of practical politics the extreme
sacerdotal view of marriage as a sacred and indissoluble covenant,
because though reinforced by unhappy marriages as all fanaticisms are
reinforced by human sacrifices, it has been reduced to a private and
socially inoperative eccentricity by the introduction of civil marriage
and divorce. Theoretically, our civilly married couples are to a Catholic
as unmarried couples are: that is, they are living in open sin. Practically,
civilly married couples are received in society, by Catholics and
everyone else, precisely as sacramentally married couples are; and so
are people who have divorced their wives or husbands and married
again. And yet marriage is enforced by public opinion with such
ferocity that the least suggestion of laxity in its support is fatal to even
the highest and strongest reputations, although laxity of conduct is
winked at with grinning indulgence; so that we find the austere Shelley
denounced as a fiend in human form, whilst Nelson, who openly left
his wife and formed a menage a trois with Sir William and Lady
Hamilton, was idolized. Shelley might have had an illegitimate child in

every county in England if he had done so frankly as a sinner. His
unpardonable offence was that he attacked marriage as an institution.
We feel a strange anguish of terror and hatred against him, as against
one who threatens us with a mortal injury. What is the element in his
proposals that produces this effect?
The answer of the specialists is the one already alluded to: that the
attack on marriage is an attack on property; so that Shelley was
something more hateful to a husband than a horse thief: to wit, a wife
thief, and something more hateful to a wife than a burglar: namely, one
who would steal her husband's house from over her head, and leave her
destitute and nameless on the streets. Now, no doubt this accounts for a
good deal of anti-Shelleyan prejudice: a prejudice so deeply rooted in
our habits that, as I have shewn in my play, men who are bolder
freethinkers than Shelley himself can no more bring themselves to
commit adultery than to commit any common theft, whilst women who
loathe sex slavery more fiercely than Mary Wollstonecraft are unable to
face the insecurity and discredit of the vagabondage which is the
masterless woman's only alternative to celibacy. But in spite of all this
there is a revolt against marriage which has spread so rapidly within my
recollection that though we all still assume the existence of a huge and
dangerous majority which regards the least hint of scepticism as to the
beauty and holiness of marriage as infamous and abhorrent, I
sometimes wonder why it is so difficult to find an authentic living
member of this dreaded army of convention outside the ranks of the
people who never think about public questions at all,