Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage and Feminism. - book review

Public Interest, Fall, 1997 by Diana Schaub

DIANA SCHAUB

Speaking of the burgeoning feminist movement, Henry James's tough-minded female doctor in The Bostonians (1886) says:

"Well, what it amounts to is just that women want to have a better time. That's what it comes to in the end."

"And don't you sympathize with such an aspiration?"

"Well, I don't know as I cultivate the sentimental side," said Doctor Prance. "There's plenty of sympathy without mine. If they want to have a better time, I suppose it's natural; so do men too, I suppose. But I don't know as it appeals to me - to make sacrifices for it; it ain't such a wonderful time - the best you can have!"

In this posthumous collection of essays, Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism,(*) Christopher Lasch explores the origins, permutations, and costs of the feminist quest for "a better time." Although most of these previously published essays date from the early 1990s, the theme engaged Lasch's attention from the 1960s forward. The very fine introduction by Lasch's daughter, Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, includes a letter in which her father spoke of his longstanding attempt "to trace the interconnections between the modern ideology of intimacy, the new domestic ideal of the nineteenth century, and feminism," a project he envisioned under the heading "The Domestication of Eros." The eventual title is perhaps to be preferred for the way it captures Lasch's concern for that threatened realm between the state and the individual - "the common life" increasingly overtaken by the expansion of artificially constructed public and private realms. Nonetheless, the original title better indicates Lasch's thesis about the direction of the last couple of centuries, during which love has settled down (not altogether happily) in marriage.

Lasch's "domestication of eros" might also be called its democratization. Accordingly, like Tocqueville who always sketches democracy in light of the aristocratic alternative to democracy, Lasch begins by recovering the aristocratic conception of love and marriage, not as a live possibility, politically speaking, but rather as a crucial imaginative one if we hope to understand our own situation. Contemporary academic feminists, intent on finding patriarchal misogyny in the historical record and/or valiant (and precociously feminist) subversion of same, lack the freedom of imagination to see anything in the past other than a costume version of themselves and their "oppressors." Lasch's reading of the past is, by contrast, genuinely perceptive in that he discerns the different spirit of a different age.

We learn that both parties to the highly ritualized combat of the medieval querelle des femmes shared a common premise: "They took for granted the contradiction between love, which rested on sexual equality, and marriage, a hierarchical arrangement in which a wife was expected to submit to her husband's authority." According to Lasch, works from the Roman de la Rose (circa 1275) forward, which are often read as attacks on womankind, are better understood as diatribes against marriage. Moreover, the barbs directed at wives touch husbands as well:

It is he [the jealous husband] who usually gives voice both to the stock criticism of marriage and to the stock vilification of women; and since he is himself an object of conventional satire, the satire against women also contained a satire against the male in his capacity as householder, husband, and cuckold. Far from giving vent to "antifeminist" prejudices, aristocratic satire rested on criticism of marriage and more specifically of jealousy, rightly believed to dominate relations not founded on the principle of voluntary, reciprocal submission.

On the other side of the querelle, Christine de Pisan, often hailed as the ur-feminist, turns out to have been an advocate of old-fashioned female honor, which is to say women's capacity for fidelity and "wifely submission." What is perhaps most notable about this centuries-long literary controversy is that neither the detractors nor the defenders of aristocratic marriage denied or sought to ameliorate the distance between love and marriage, between freedom and necessity. Instead, they met it with "tears and laughter," courtly poetry and comic satire.

Only in the eighteenth century did the playful aristocratic contest of wits give way to the earnest democratic science of reform. What was new about feminism was not its assessment of male tyranny (or male sexual inadequacy or male bellicosity or male unreliability). The complaints were age-old; the cure - indeed, the very notion of a cure - was what was new. According to Lasch, feminism begins with the attempt "to reconcile marriage with sexual equality" (and thus, love). But the idea that feats of social engineering are possible may be traced back much further to Descartes (who gave us the disembodied, which is to say ungendered, mind) and Hobbes (who gave us the unencumbered self, for whom "right is of no sex").

In fairness it should be pointed out - and Lasch's second essay (a review of Jean H. Hagstrum's Esteem Enlivened by Desire) does so - that there had long existed a "countertradition" of marital love (remember Penelope and Odysseus): "From the beginning, it would seem, the West was able to imagine that marriage might rest on sexual attraction and mutual respect, instead of on the sexual subordination that was taken as the norm elsewhere in the world." To turn that imagined ideal, that rarely experienced exception, into a new norm was a task the rising bourgeoisie saw as eminently reasonable and moral.