Marriage and Divorce in America

Abstract

In John Updike's story of marital breakup, Separating, daughter, Judith Maples, home after a junior year in England contrasts American mode of responding to gas shortage (the OPEC embargo) with how English responded to electricity workers' strike: It was so sweet . . . during worst of it, how all butchers and bakery shops kept open by candlelight.... From papers, things sounded so much worse here: people shooting people in gas lines, and everybody freezing (197). This has everything to do with Maples' which Updike contextualizes as a national question, implicating American individualism and social irresponsibility. Is this a stretch? It's not, according to five books under review. But is divorce a departure from traditional American values or an instance of them? The American right wing sees it as a catastrophic departure that threatens fabric of American moral identity: [O]bservance of Christian model monogamy was made to stand for customary boundaries in society, morality and civilization; nation's public backing of conventional became a synecdoche for everything valued in American way of life (Cott 219). This is not new. The nineteenth-century novels of courtship Karen Tracey studies focus on female characteristics are most apt to contribute to happiness of individual, to solidity of middle class family, and to strength of a nation (14). But does happiness curl up comfortably with solidity and, if not, which should one choose? Norma Basch shows how Victorian American moralists championed what they believed to be the self-sacrificing communitarianism of against selfish individualism of divorce, thereby translating the divorce question into a symbolic focal point for competing worldviews (188). Thus marriage was (and is) a metonym for social order (3).