Getting Married

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Etext prepared by Eve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, USA,
and Distributed Proofreaders

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Transcriber's Note -- The edition from which this play was taken
was printed without most contractions, such as dont for don't and
so forth. These have been left as printed in the original text.
Also, abbreviated honorifics have no trailing period, and the word
show is spelt shew.
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GETTING MARRIED, PREFACE TO

Bernard Shaw

1908

THE REVOLT AGAINST MARRIAGE

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and
thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and
thinking it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into
disastrous anarchical action. Because our marriage law is inhuman
and unreasonable to the point of downright abomination, the bolder
and more rebellious spirits form illicit unions, defiantly sending
cards round to their friends announcing what they have
done. Young women come to me and ask me whether I think they ought
to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with; and
they are perplexed and astonished when I, who am supposed (heaven
knows why!) to have the most advanced views attainable on the
subject, urge them on no account to compromize themselves without
the security of an authentic wedding ring. They cite the example
of George Eliot, who formed an illicit union with Lewes. They
quote a saying attributed to Nietzsche, that a married philosopher
is ridiculous, though the men of their choice are not
philosophers. When they finally give up the idea of reforming our
marriage institutions by private enterprise and personal
righteousness, and consent to be led to the Registry or even to
the altar, they insist on first arriving at an explicit
understanding that both parties are to be perfectly free to sip
every flower and change every hour, as their fancy may dictate, in
spite of the legal bond. I do not observe that their unions prove
less monogamic than other people's: rather the contrary, in fact;
consequently, I do not know whether they make less fuss than
ordinary people when either party claims the benefit of the
treaty; but the existence of the treaty shews the same anarchical
notion that the law can be set aside by any two private persons by
the simple process of promising one another to ignore it.

MARRIAGE NEVERTHELESS INEVITABLE

Now most laws are, and all laws ought to be, stronger than the
strongest individual. Certainly the marriage law is. The only
people who successfully evade it are those who actually avail
themselves of its shelter by pretending to be married when they
are not, and by Bohemians who have no position to lose and no
career to be closed. In every other case open violation of the
marriage laws means either downright ruin or such inconvenience
and disablement as a prudent man or woman would get married ten
times over rather than face. And these disablements and
inconveniences are not even the price of freedom; for, as Brieux
has shewn so convincingly in Les Hannetons, an avowedly illicit
union is often found in practice to be as tyrannical and as hard
to escape from as the worst legal one.

We may take it then that when a joint domestic establishment,
involving questions of children or property, is contemplated,
marriage is in effect compulsory upon all normal people; and until
the law is altered there is nothing for us but to make the best of
it as it stands. Even when no such establishment is desired,
clandestine irregularities are negligible as an alternative to
marriage. How common they are nobody knows; for in spite of the
powerful protection afforded to the parties by the law of libel,
and the readiness of society on various other grounds to be
hoodwinked by the keeping up of the very thinnest appearances,
most of them are probably never suspected. But they are neither
dignified nor safe and comfortable, which at once rules them out
for normal decent people. Marriage remains practically inevitable;
and the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we shall set to
work to make it decent and reasonable.

WHAT DOES THE WORD MARRIAGE MEAN

However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think
so little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order
of nature, like gravitation. Except for this error, which may be
regarded as constant, we use the word with reckless looseness,
meaning a dozen different things by it, and yet always assuming
that to a respectable man it can have only one meaning. The pious
citizen, suspecting the Socialist (for example) of unmentionable
things, and asking him heatedly whether he wishes to abolish
marriage, is infuriated by a sense of unanswerable quibbling when
the Socialist asks him what particular variety of marriage he
means: English civil marriage, sacramental marriage, indissoluble
Roman Catholic marriage, marriage of divorced persons, Scotch
marriage, Irish marriage, French, German, Turkish, or South
Dakotan marriage. In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized
countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties
wish it, without any question of conduct. That is what marriage
means in Sweden. In Clapham that is what they call by the
senseless name of Free Love. In the British Empire we have
unlimited Kulin polygamy, Muslim polygamy limited to four wives,
child marriages, and, nearer home, marriages of first cousins: all
of them abominations in the eyes of many worthy persons. Not only
may the respectable British champion of marriage mean any of these
widely different institutions; sometimes he does not mean marriage
at all. He means monogamy, chastity, temperance, respectability,
morality, Christianity, anti-socialism, and a dozen other things
that have no necessary connection with marriage. He often means
something that he dare not avow: ownership of the person of
another human being, for instance. And he never tells the truth
about his own marriage either to himself or any one else.

With those individualists who in the mid-XIXth century dreamt of
doing away with marriage altogether on the ground that it is a
private concern between the two parties with which society has
nothing to do, there is now no need to deal. The vogue of "the
self-regarding action" has passed; and it may be assumed without
argument that unions for the purpose of establishing a family
will continue to be registered and regulated by the State.
Such registration is marriage, and will continue to be called
marriage long after the conditions of the registration have
changed so much that no citizen now living would recognize them as
marriage conditions at all if he revisited the earth. There is
therefore no question of abolishing marriage; but there is a very
pressing question of improving its conditions. I have never met
anybody really in favor of maintaining marriage as it exists in
England to-day. A Roman Catholic may obey his Church by assenting
verbally to the doctrine of indissoluble marriage. But nobody
worth counting believes directly, frankly, and instinctively that
when a person commits a murder and is put into prison for twenty
years for it, the free and innocent husband or wife of that
murderer should remain bound by the marriage. To put it briefly, a
contract for better for worse is a contract that should not be
tolerated. As a matter of fact it is not tolerated fully even by
the Roman Catholic Church; for Roman Catholic marriages can be
dissolved, if not by the temporal Courts, by the Pope.
Indissoluble marriage is an academic figment, advocated only by
celibates and by comfortably married people who imagine that if
other couples are uncomfortable it must be their own fault, just
as rich people are apt to imagine that if other people are poor it
serves them right. There is always some means of dissolution. The
conditions of dissolution may vary widely, from those on which
Henry VIII. procured his divorce from Katharine of Arragon to the
pleas on which American wives obtain divorces (for instance,
"mental anguish" caused by the husband's neglect to cut his
toenails); but there is always some point at which the theory
of the inviolable better-for-worse marriage breaks down in
practice. South Carolina has indeed passed what is called a freak
law declaring that a marriage shall not be dissolved under any
circumstances; but such an absurdity will probably be repealed or
amended by sheer force of circumstances before these words are in
print. The only question to be considered is, What shall the
conditions of the dissolution be?

SURVIVALS OF SEX SLAVERY

If we adopt the common romantic assumption that the object of
marriage is bliss, then the very strongest reason for dissolving a
marriage is that it shall be disagreeable to one or other or both
of the parties. If we accept the view that the object of marriage
is to provide for the production and rearing of children, then
childlessness should be a conclusive reason for dissolution. As
neither of these causes entitles married persons to divorce it is
at once clear that our marriage law is not founded on either
assumption. What it is really founded on is the morality of the
tenth commandment, which English women will one day succeed in
obliterating from the walls of our churches by refusing to enter
any building where they are publicly classed with a man's house,
his ox, and his ass, as his purchased chattels. In this morality
female adultery is malversation by the woman and theft by the man,
whilst male adultery with an unmarried woman is not an offence at
all. But though this is not only the theory of our marriage laws,
but the practical morality of many of us, it is no longer an
avowed morality, nor does its persistence depend on marriage; for
the abolition of marriage would, other things remaining unchanged,
leave women more effectually enslaved than they now are. We shall
come to the question of the economic dependence of women on men
later on; but at present we had better confine ourselves to the
theories of marriage which we are not ashamed to acknowledge and
defend, and upon which, therefore, marriage reformers will be
obliged to proceed.

We may, I think, dismiss from the field of practical politics the
extreme sacerdotal view of marriage as a sacred and indissoluble
covenant, because though reinforced by unhappy marriages as all
fanaticisms are reinforced by human sacrifices, it has been
reduced to a private and socially inoperative eccentricity by the
introduction of civil marriage and divorce. Theoretically, our
civilly married couples are to a Catholic as unmarried couples
are: that is, they are living in open sin. Practically, civilly
married couples are received in society, by Catholics and everyone
else, precisely as sacramentally married couples are; and so are
people who have divorced their wives or husbands and married
again. And yet marriage is enforced by public opinion with such
ferocity that the least suggestion of laxity in its support is
fatal to even the highest and strongest reputations, although
laxity of conduct is winked at with grinning indulgence; so that
we find the austere Shelley denounced as a fiend in human form,
whilst Nelson, who openly left his wife and formed a menage a
trois with Sir William and Lady Hamilton, was idolized. Shelley
might have had an illegitimate child in every county in England if
he had done so frankly as a sinner. His unpardonable offence was
that he attacked marriage as an institution. We feel a strange
anguish of terror and hatred against him, as against one who
threatens us with a mortal injury. What is the element in his
proposals that produces this effect?

The answer of the specialists is the one already alluded to: that
the attack on marriage is an attack on property; so that Shelley
was something more hateful to a husband than a horse thief: to
wit, a wife thief, and something more hateful to a wife than a
burglar: namely, one who would steal her husband's house from over
her head, and leave her destitute and nameless on the streets.
Now, no doubt this accounts for a good deal of anti-Shelleyan
prejudice: a prejudice so deeply rooted in our habits that, as I
have shewn in my play, men who are bolder freethinkers than
Shelley himself can no more bring themselves to commit adultery
than to commit any common theft, whilst women who loathe sex
slavery more fiercely than Mary Wollstonecraft are unable to face
the insecurity and discredit of the vagabondage which is the
masterless woman's only alternative to celibacy. But in spite of
all this there is a revolt against marriage which has spread so
rapidly within my recollection that though we all still assume the
existence of a huge and dangerous majority which regards the least
hint of scepticism as to the beauty and holiness of marriage as
infamous and abhorrent, I sometimes wonder why it is so difficult
to find an authentic living member of this dreaded army of
convention outside the ranks of the people who never think about
public questions at all, and who, for all their numerical weight
and apparently invincible prejudices, accept social changes to-day
as tamely as their forefathers accepted the Reformation under
Henry and Edward, the Restoration under Mary, and, after Mary's
death, the shandygaff which Elizabeth compounded from both
doctrines and called the Articles of the Church of England. If
matters were left to these simple folk, there would never be any
changes at all; and society would perish like a snake that could
not cast its skins. Nevertheless the snake does change its skin in
spite of them; and there are signs that our marriage-law skin is
causing discomfort to thoughtful people and will presently be cast
whether the others are satisfied with it or not. The question
therefore arises: What is there in marriage that makes the
thoughtful people so uncomfortable?

A NEW ATTACK ON MARRIAGE

The answer to this question is an answer which everybody knows and
nobody likes to give. What is driving our ministers of religion
and statesmen to blurt it out at last is the plain fact that
marriage is now beginning to depopulate the country with such
alarming rapidity that we are forced to throw aside our modesty
like people who, awakened by an alarm of fire, rush into the
streets in their nightdresses or in no dresses at all. The
fictitious Free Lover, who was supposed to attack marriage
because it thwarted his inordinate affections and prevented him
from making life a carnival, has vanished and given place to the
very real, very strong, very austere avenger of outraged decency
who declares that the licentiousness of marriage, now that it no
longer recruits the race, is destroying it.

As usual, this change of front has not yet been noticed by our
newspaper controversialists and by the suburban season-ticket
holders whose minds the newspapers make. They still defend the
citadel on the side on which nobody is attacking it, and leave its
weakest front undefended.

The religious revolt against marriage is a very old one.
Christianity began with a fierce attack on marriage; and to this
day the celibacy of the Roman Catholic priesthood is a standing
protest against its compatibility with the higher life. St. Paul's
reluctant sanction of marriage; his personal protest that he
countenanced it of necessity and against his own conviction; his
contemptuous "better to marry than to burn" is only out of date in
respect of his belief that the end of the world was at hand and
that there was therefore no longer any population question. His
instinctive recoil from its worst aspect as a slavery to pleasure
which induces two people to accept slavery to one another has
remained an active force in the world to this day, and is now
stirring more uneasily than ever. We have more and more Pauline
celibates whose objection to marriage is the intolerable indignity
of being supposed to desire or live the married life as ordinarily
conceived. Every thoughtful and observant minister of religion is
troubled by the determination of his flock to regard marriage as a
sanctuary for pleasure, seeing as he does that the known
libertines of his parish are visibly suffering much less from
intemperance than many of the married people who stigmatize them
as monsters of vice.

A FORGOTTEN CONFERENCE OF MARRIED MEN

The late Hugh Price Hughes, an eminent Methodist divine, once
organized in London a conference of respectable men to consider
the subject. Nothing came of it (nor indeed could have come of it
in the absence of women); but it had its value as giving the young
sociologists present, of whom I was one, an authentic notion of
what a picked audience of respectable men understood by married
life. It was certainly a staggering revelation. Peter the Great
would have been shocked; Byron would have been horrified; Don Juan
would have fled from the conference into a monastery. The
respectable men all regarded the marriage ceremony as a rite which
absolved them from the laws of health and temperance; inaugurated
a life-long honeymoon; and placed their pleasures on exactly the
same footing as their prayers. It seemed entirely proper and
natural to them that out of every twenty-four hours of their lives
they should pass eight shut up in one room with their wives alone,
and this, not birdlike, for the mating season, but all the year
round and every year. How they settled even such minor questions
as to which party should decide whether and how much the window
should be open and how many blankets should be on the bed, and at
what hour they should go to bed and get up so as to avoid
disturbing one another's sleep, seemed insoluble questions to me.
But the members of the conference did not seem to mind. They were
content to have the whole national housing problem treated on a
basis of one room for two people. That was the essence of marriage
for them.

Please remember, too, that there was nothing in their
circumstances to check intemperance. They were men of business:
that is, men for the most part engaged in routine work which
exercized neither their minds nor their bodies to the full pitch
of their capacities. Compared with statesmen, first-rate
professional men, artists, and even with laborers and artisans as
far as muscular exertion goes, they were underworked, and could
spare the fine edge of their faculties and the last few inches of
their chests without being any the less fit for their daily
routine. If I had adopted their habits, a startling deterioration
would have appeared in my writing before the end of a fortnight,
and frightened me back to what they would have considered an
impossible asceticism. But they paid no penalty of which they were
conscious. They had as much health as they wanted: that is, they
did not feel the need of a doctor. They enjoyed their smokes,
their meals, their respectable clothes, their affectionate games
with their children, their prospects of larger profits or higher
salaries, their Saturday half holidays and Sunday walks, and the
rest of it. They did less than two hours work a day and took from
seven to nine office hours to do it in. And they were no good for
any mortal purpose except to go on doing it. They were respectable
only by the standard they themselves had set. Considered seriously
as electors governing an empire through their votes, and choosing
and maintaining its religious and moral institutions by their
powers of social persecution, they were a black-coated army of
calamity. They were incapable of comprehending the industries they
were engaged in, the laws under which they lived, or the relation
of their country to other countries. They lived the lives of old
men contentedly. They were timidly conservative at the age at
which every healthy human being ought to be obstreperously
revolutionary. And their wives went through the routine of the
kitchen, nursery, and drawing-room just as they went through the
routine of the office. They had all, as they called it, settled
down, like balloons that had lost their lifting margin of gas; and
it was evident that the process of settling down would go on until
they settled into their graves. They read old-fashioned newspapers
with effort, and were just taking with avidity to a new sort of
paper, costing a halfpenny, which they believed to be
extraordinarily bright and attractive, and which never really
succeeded until it became extremely dull, discarding all serious
news and replacing it by vapid tittle-tattle, and substituting for
political articles informed by at least some pretence of knowledge
of economics, history, and constitutional law, such paltry follies
and sentimentalities, snobberies and partisaneries, as ignorance
can understand and irresponsibility relish.

What they called patriotism was a conviction that because they
were born in Tooting or Camberwell, they were the natural
superiors of Beethoven, of Rodin, of Ibsen, of Tolstoy and all
other benighted foreigners. Those of them who did not think it
wrong to go to the theatre liked above everything a play in which
the hero was called Dick; was continually fingering a briar pipe;
and, after being overwhelmed with admiration and affection
through three acts, was finally rewarded with the legal possession
of a pretty heroine's person on the strength of a staggering lack
of virtue. Indeed their only conception of the meaning of the word
virtue was abstention from stealing other men's wives or from
refusing to marry their daughters.

As to law, religion, ethics, and constitutional government, any
counterfeit could impose on them. Any atheist could pass himself
off on them as a bishop, any anarchist as a judge, any despot as a
Whig, any sentimental socialist as a Tory, any philtre-monger or
witch-finder as a man of science, any phrase-maker as a statesman.
Those who did not believe the story of Jonah and the great fish
were all the readier to believe that metals can be transmuted and
all diseases cured by radium, and that men can live for two
hundred years by drinking sour milk. Even these credulities
involved too severe an intellectual effort for many of them: it
was easier to grin and believe nothing. They maintained their
respect for themselves by "playing the game" (that is, doing what
everybody else did), and by being good judges of hats, ties, dogs,
pipes, cricket, gardens, flowers, and the like. They were capable
of discussing each other's solvency and respectability with some
shrewdness, and could carry out quite complicated systems of
paying visits and "knowing" one another. They felt a little vulgar
when they spent a day at Margate, and quite distinguished and
travelled when they spent it at Boulogne. They were, except as to
their clothes, "not particular": that is, they could put up with
ugly sights and sounds, unhealthy smells, and inconvenient houses,
with inhuman apathy and callousness. They had, as to adults, a
theory that human nature is so poor that it is useless to try to
make the world any better, whilst as to children they believed
that if they were only sufficiently lectured and whipped, they
could be brought to a state of moral perfection such as no fanatic
has ever ascribed to his deity. Though they were not intentionally
malicious, they practised the most appalling cruelties from mere
thoughtlessness, thinking nothing of imprisoning men and women for
periods up to twenty years for breaking into their houses; of
treating their children as wild beasts to be tamed by a system of
blows and imprisonment which they called education; and of keeping
pianos in their houses, not for musical purposes, but to torment
their daughters with a senseless stupidity that would have
revolted an inquisitor.

In short, dear reader, they were very like you and me. I could
fill a hundred pages with the tale of our imbecilities and still
leave much untold; but what I have set down here haphazard is
enough to condemn the system that produced us. The corner stone of
that system was the family and the institution of marriage as we
have it to-day in England.

HEARTH AND HOME

There is no shirking it: if marriage cannot be made to produce
something better than we are, marriage will have to go, or else
the nation will have to go. It is no use talking of honor, virtue,
purity, and wholesome, sweet, clean, English home lives when what
is meant is simply the habits I have described. The flat fact is
that English home life to-day is neither honorable, virtuous,
wholesome, sweet, clean, nor in any creditable way distinctively
English. It is in many respects conspicuously the reverse; and the
result of withdrawing children from it completely at an early age,
and sending them to a public school and then to a university,
does, in spite of the fact that these institutions are class
warped and in some respects quite abominably corrupt, produce
sociabler men. Women, too, are improved by the escape from home
provided by women's colleges; but as very few of them are
fortunate enough to enjoy this advantage, most women are so
thoroughly home-bred as to be unfit for human society. So little
is expected of them that in Sheridan's School for Scandal we
hardly notice that the heroine is a female cad, as detestable and
dishonorable in her repentance as she is vulgar and silly in her
naughtiness. It was left to an abnormal critic like George Gissing
to point out the glaring fact that in the remarkable set of life
studies of XIXth century women to be found in the novels of
Dickens, the most convincingly real ones are either vilely
unamiable or comically contemptible; whilst his attempts to
manufacture admirable heroines by idealizations of home-bred
womanhood are not only absurd but not even pleasantly absurd: one
has no patience with them.

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