Carmela Ciuraru - Lives of the Wives

For Terry Karten, who waited

Possibly she would have been a genius if we had never met.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The wives... are buying groceries or cleaning up messes or having a drink. Their lives are concerned with food and mess and houses and cars and money. They have to remember to get the snow tires on and go to the bank and take back the beer bottles, because their husbands are such brilliant, such talented incapable men, who must be looked after for the sake of the words that will come from them.

Alice Munro, Material

Dear Natalia, stop having children and write a book that is better than mine.

Cesare Pavese, postcard to Natalia Ginzburg, 1941

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife, Jane Austen famously wrote in Pride and Prejudice. Two hundred years later, Margaret Atwood offered a riposte from the other side: Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

The problem with being a wife is being a wife. Historically, the primary function of marriage was to bind women to men as a form of property, and to protect bloodlines by producing legitimate offspring. Women existed to serve men, in every sense, and did. Wives are young mens mistresses; companions for middle age; and old mens nurses, Francis Bacon wrote in 1597. The fundamental predicament of womanhood can be traced back to the myth of Adam and Eve, in which female agency poses an existential threat to paradise. The creation of Eve, from the rib of Adamwoman from manestablished the notion that a womans very existence depended upon, and was only validated by, a dominant male counterpart. In the book of Genesis, God decrees to Eve: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be for thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. Eve was probably thinking, Kill me now, God. But the template was set.

Once upon a time, women were told that someday their prince would come. Being a wife was a badge of honor, no matter how miserable the marriage. The alternative, spinsterhood, was worse. To be a wife was to be offered up as chattel, cook, housekeeper, and nursemaid, among other things. The woman vowed to serve and obey, and legally, she ceased to exist. Of the husband, little was demanded in return. (Proverbs 18:22: Whosoever findeth a wife findeth a good thing.) The invention of marriage was a gift to men and a strategic alliance between families. Societal stability was said to depend on it. When marital relations did not go as he wished, the husband could do what he deemed necessary, apart from murder, to make things right. If he beat his wife, the law upheld his authority. He was also entitled to sex, however loveless or coercedrape was considered a reasonable response if the wife did not comply. (In the United States, marital rape was not a crime in all fifty states until 1993.) In the thirteenth century, the English jurist and cleric Henry de Bracton, chancellor of Exeter Cathedral, declared that a married couple is one person, and that person is the husband. In 1863, Lucy Gilmer Breckinridge, a nineteen-year-old girl in Virginiawho had been keeping a journal to alleviate her boredom during wartimefretted privately that she might never learn to love a man: Oh what I would not give for a wife!

The history of wives is largely one of resilience and forbearance, with countless women demonized, marginalized, misrepresented, and silenced. As they found themselves trapped in bad marriages, their husbands were free to roam in search of more and better sex. The wives buried their desires, hopes, and regrets for the greater good and in the interest of keeping the peaceall while serving as beaming helpmeet. When a husband went astray, the wife had the additional duty to reform him. It isnt surprising that in the index of a book chronicling the history of marriage, wives (and drunkenness) is among the entries.

Contemporary marriage, in its ideal form, is an egalitarian, sexually fulfilling, and mutually supportive alliance, comprising love and friendship. Yet for many couples, heterosexual or otherwise, this perfect union is unrecognizable. Modern marriage is a series of compromises, a relentless juggling act of work obligations, childcare demands, household chores, money squabbles, hoarded grievances, simmering hostilities, and intimacy issues. (The burdens are more extreme at lower socioeconomic levels.) Perhaps that explains the endless discourse around the work of marriage, a predictable result of the tedium that can set in after two people have lived together for a long time. Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its dailiness, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in 1926. All acuteness of a relationship is rubbed away by this.

Toss in male privilege, ruthless ambition, narcissism, misogyny, infidelity, alcoholism, and a mood disorder or two, and its easy to understand why the marriages of so many famous writers have been stormy, short-lived, and mutually destructive. Given the extraordinary works of literature that could only have been produced as a result of their marital partnerships, theres a topsy-turvy aspect to assessing what it means to have had a failed marriage. The typical rules do not apply. (For the wife, happily ever after often means happily ever after the divorce.) Yet an ending does not always provide a clear path to salvation, even when the wife is a prominent writer. In a 2013 interview with Sharon Olds, the Pulitzer Prizewinning poet was asked whether she had reinvented herself in the aftermath of a devastating divorce. I was fifty-five, she said. I would not have known how. What I had to do was persevere.

In traditional literary marriages, the lot of the wife is rather bleak. She must tend to the outsize needs of the so-called Great Writer, and her work is never done. Literary wives are a unique breed, requiring a particular kind of fortitude. No vade mecum exists to guide them. Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike, V. S. Pritchett once lamented. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing. It is even more depressing for their wives. The phrase I dont know how she does it is commonly uttered about wives and mothers, with their numinous gift for serving others, but we are unlikely to hear it said of their writer-husbands. We know exactly how they do it.

With an ego the size of a small nation, the literary lion is powerful on the page but a helpless kitten in daily lifereliant on his wife to fold an umbrella, answer the phone, or lick a stamp (looking at you, Vladimir!). Those towering, mononymic geniuses of Western literatureTolstoy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Nabokovwhere would they be without their wives?

In the marriages of celebrated literati throughout history, husband is to fame as wife is to footnote. Yes, this framing is reductive, and in rare instances, the wife was the artist, served and supported by a manor, in homosexual relationships, by a same-sex partner. But conjuring historical examples of the latter model leaves us struggling to count fingers on more than one hand. (George Eliot and Virginia Woolf come to mind.) No matter the configuration of gender or sexuality, however, the long-held and much romanticized notion of the lone genius persists, as does the stubborn myth of the tormented genius. Even in instances when the writer is mediocre at best, if nothing else he is a genius at getting othersnamely, his long-suffering wifeto prop him up and perpetuate the myth of his greatness. In Diane Johnsons superb biography The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives