Searching for a Soul Mate

Abstract

Searching for a Soul Mate Elizabeth H. Pleck (bio) Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 224 pp. Bibliography and index $49.95 Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 224 pp. Bibliography and index $49.95 The prize for the most famous metaphor in literature goes to Shakespeare, either for "All the world's a stage" or "But soft! What light through window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun." The world is decidedly not a stage and Juliet was a teenage female character in a play (that was on a stage), not a centrally placed star consisting of blazing hot gasses. But the mind delights in finding correspondences between wildly different things. Metaphors comparing marriage to something else are centuries old because the wedded state is known by all and significant almost everywhere. Marriage could be the caboose or the engine of comparison. The marriage could be the unqualifiedly favorable term, as in postrevolutionary America where the bonds of citizens to the new republic were likened to the lifelong and affectionate ties of husband to wife. Or marriage could be the clearly unassailable term, as for defenders of slavery, who argued that the peculiar institution resembled marriage since both were based on "natural hierarchy." Since the seventeenth century, intellectuals and reformers have employed the metaphor of marriage as a form of slavery to critique the unequal, even unsavory aspects of marriage. Madeleine de Scudery, the French saloniste and novelist, originated the metaphor. She had in mind ancient bondage, not transatlantic slavery, and was especially animated by the unfreedom of arranged marriage. The English advocate of woman's rights Mary Astell picked up the metaphor about a half century later because she believed that in marriage the wife was subjected to the arbitrary will of her husband, a condition she thought morally wrong. Later on, U.S. abolitionists and "feministabolitionists" (the term of Blanche Glassman Hersh) amplified and made more concrete the marriage metaphor, naming runaway wives as "fugitive slaves." Utopian socialists in the early nineteenth century originated the comparison of marriage with prostitution, not quite as popular as the slavery metaphor, and communitarians and advocates of woman's rights followed their lead.1 A third metaphor—that marriage was a form of adultery—seems counterintuitive [End Page 569] and was considerably less popular, although it was often employed by the same reformers who used the slavery and prostitution metaphors. It, too, originated with European intellectuals; it surfaced in the American press when sex radicals in the U.S. in the 1850s began to refer to the unwholesome nature of sex within a loveless marriage. Historians have noted but not paid much attention to the use of the adultery metaphor because it was less commonly employed than the other two and because historians, like most nineteenthcentury Americans, dismissed those making use of it as cranks. Carol Faulkner, more respectful and appreciative of such rhetoric and the mavericks who employed it, traces the use of the adultery metaphor among critics of marriage between the 1830s and 1880. Her geographic focus is New York state—the newspaper capital of the nation, the home of many spiritualists and of several of the most important intentional communities whose members practiced their own version of freedom within and from marriage. Her cast of characters includes familiar figures—for example, John Humphrey Noyes and Victoria Woodhull—and some colorful unknowns she learned about from the records of communes, newspapers, published memoirs, and personal papers. The lesser-knowns and unknowns are a fairly heterogeneous group of white Anglo-Saxon men and women, some of whom were legally married couples. With the exception of Paschal Bradley Randolph, a biracial spiritualist who sometimes identified himself as Indian, sometimes as Black, the group is entirely white. Randolph, who was decidedly more on the moderate side of the movement, confronted the racism of one of his fellow reformers several times. The one member of the working class was Marie Howland, a former Lowell mill girl whose novel, Papa's Own Girl (1874), expressed her twinned...