Call it cliché. I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. The cover makes me want to throw the thing across the room. People might think I’m reading … a romance novel? Chick lit. Wedding porn.
It’s got some real gems like this comment from Balzac, describing the married women of his era:
Boredom overtakes them, and they give themselves up to religion, or cats, or little dogs, or other manias which are offensive only to God.
Liz Gilbert can be annoying at times with her modern prose that’s just a little too accessible. She overshares. But to be honest, my French lit teacher never quite pointed to that Balzac quote. I learned quite a bit when Gilbert wasn’t going on and on and on about herself.
Gilbert ends up defending marriage as a cultural rule that always ends up bending toward what society is actually doing. Iconoclasts be damned, marriage wants you! I also love her description of marriage as a super secret club between you and your lover, a club the government ought to be scared of if it knows what’s good for it. That is, until the advent of the Thought Police (or this super small spy plane?)
This all makes me want to live years and years or skip ahead in a time machine to see if society succeeds with the destruction of marriage and replaces it with a purely social contract. And what of gender and sexuality?!
Were French ladies really were so awful to get obsessed with a few puppies and little babies? Some glass figurines. Balzac was really into … books and thoughts and stuff. Today mania seems OK if you’re getting paid for it. Or if it makes you happy. Onward, machine …
So what’s next? (I admit, I want to see how Big Love ends.) And Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex has been on my bookshelf a good, long time. That lady proved “imaginary” marriages are perfectly real to the people in them. She was buried with her lover Sartre. Never moved in with him, never had children. Left behind good books. I’m intrigued.
