Divorce in Literature

At Issue

Since divorce, the dissolution of marriage, is a legal process, it constitutes a socially sanctioned transformation of one kind of social unit into another. Divorce is significantly different from a dissolution of the family through the desertion or abandonment of one partner by the other, or of one or both partners of their children, because desertion is not sanctioned by society. On the contrary, abandonment is generally perceived as a socially unacceptable action, one which breaks with the culture’s established norms of order and moral value. Therefore, the legitimate return of married people to the legal status of a single individual is important because it means that society accepts that the rights and interests of the individual can be more important than those of the family or of social stability in general. Historically, divorce often figured in North American literature, with some significant exceptions, as a powerful means of dramatizing a married woman’s struggle to attain an identity of her own. A man’s marital status was not, traditionally, considered as important to his identity as it had been for a woman; hence the emphasis in the past on the woman’s experience with divorce.

Literature to 1900

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, divorce was conspicuously absent from the literary work produced in North America. Such writers as James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving idealized marriage but never dealt with it directly in their fictions, and earlier writers tended to be conventional, moralistic, and provincial regarding public morality in general and the sanctity of the marriage bond in particular. Beginning with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), however, North American writers began to present strong female characters entangled in troubled, inadequate, or unsatisfactory marriages, and more than that, to suggest women could replace these failed relationships with a more satisfactory life as emancipated individuals, with or without a more suitable partner. Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne marks the first example in American literature of this kind of female character. Although she endures physical punishment and social rejection by a society that judges her adversely for having a child during her husband’s extended absence, and for refusing to identify the father, she is undaunted and self-reliant, urging her lover to elope with her to Europe, where they can live together outside the laws that govern them in America. Her lover, the highly respected young minister Arthur Dimmesdale, can neither bring himself to make public admission of what he has done nor escape with her to Europe and make a new start. Instead he punishes himself for years in private before making a humiliating public admission of his sin and finally dying in Hester’s arms, a broken man. After Dimmesdale’s death, Hester goes to Europe with her daughter and enjoys the fruits of her strong-minded individuality in peace, free from the social stigma that was her lot in New England. Since social norms in the mid-nineteenth century strictly forbade divorce on any grounds but adultery, and since such divorces were considered scandalous and socially unacceptable, the position Hawthorne takes in this novel is a radical one, for he makes it clear that an inflexible insistence on maintaining marriage at any cost is incompatible with individual happiness.

The conflict between marriage and a woman’s individual identity Hawthorne suggested in The Scarlet Letter was specifically linked to divorce later in the century by such writers as Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and What Maisie Knew (1897). In The Portrait of a Lady James’s heroine, Isabel Archer, openly considers and rejects divorce from Ormond, her sophisticated but immoral husband. Eventually Isabel asserts her independence by disobeying her husband’s direct command to remain with him in Italy; she goes to tend to her dying cousin in England. When she is offered a chance to elope with one who truly loves her (and whom she loves in return), she refuses to be the possession of any man and returns to Rome and to the husband whom she no longer loves. Because she does not love him, he no longer has the power to control her actions or limit her growth as a mature individual.

The Portrait of a Lady does not present readers with an actual divorce or with a protagonist who was divorced. Nearly twenty years later James addressed this issue in What Maisie Knew (1897), a powerful, subtle, and at times disturbingly funny portrait of a high-society divorce and the ensuing vicissitudes of custody squabbles, love affairs, remarriages, and parental neglect, as seen through the eyes of the only child of the divorced couple. This novel was revolutionary in its frank, detailed, and explicit treatment of divorce. The novel also broke new ground in its perspective, for James focuses on the identity of the child of the divorced couple rather than on that of one or the other of the partners in the marriage. As Maisie watches her parents divorce, remarry, and divorce again, she finds that she is manipulated, flattered, and used by each of them in turn, and develops not only a substantial aversion to her natural parents but also a deep conviction that marriage and individuality are incompatible. The novel ends with another round of marriages—this time the former spouses of Maisie’s parents are marrying each other, and Maisie refuses to live with anyone but Mrs. Wix, the faithful nurse and governess who was hired soon after her parents were first divorced and who has proved to be the only person in Maisie’s life who is truly devoted to her. By shifting the focus from the persons getting a divorce to the child of divorce, James poses the problem of the compatibility of individual identity and marriage with greater intensity—and considerably less optimism—than Hawthorne does.

Literature from 1900 to 1950

The fictional landscape of divorce and the question of the compatibility of individual female identity and marriage are brilliantly explored by Edith Wharton in The Custom of the Country (1913). The custom referred to in the title is divorce, the country is the United States, and the novel recounts the rise of Undine Spragg, through a series of marriages and divorces, to social prominence in New York and later Parisian society. Along the way she acquires a son, has an affair, converts to Catholicism, marries a French count, and finally marries Elmer Moffatt, a self-made railroad tycoon who had been her first husband years before when he was poor and unsuccessful. The power to obtain a divorce is linked to a positive personal benefit in terms of freedom, happiness, and self-realization. Divorce is depicted as the “wave of the future,” a vigorous practice of the young and economically booming Midwest which, in the person of Undine, invades and conquers the conservative bastions of the old aristocratic order. Undine’s career is paralleled throughout the novel by the steady rise of Elmer (whose identity as her first husband is hinted at early in the story, but not revealed until its final chapters), and their joint victory over old-fashioned ideas and customs is symbolized by their marriage and by the fact that they finally take up residence in a mansion, in a new section of Paris, furnished in part with heirloom tapestries surreptitiously purchased from the impecunious French count who had been Undine’s previous husband. Wharton’s attitude toward her heroine’s success is more complex than a simple summary of the plot may make it appear. The universal stupidity, frivolity, and complacency of the upper-class elites on both sides of the Atlantic attest a moral and spiritual weakness that deserves to be exploited. Undine, however, is undoubtedly shallow and insatiably ambitious. She neglects her son, and for all her success she never seems to know who she really is or what she really wants to become. When her husband tells her he can never be an ambassador because Undine had been divorced, she is convinced that she was meant to be an ambassador’s wife. Wharton is too realistic to believe that divorce will necessarily lead to complete happiness, but she is also too sensible not to see that divorce gives a woman an opportunity to develop an identity that is suited to herself and to the times in which she lives. The right for a woman to pursue opportunity is what Undine, for all her flaws, triumphantly represents.

Despite the example of The Custom of the Country, until the mid-1920s most literature that treated the theme of individual identity in relation to marriage relied on the affair. Divorce itself was becoming more common, and eventually mainstream novelists began to depict divorced people with regularity as a facet of urban life, particularly among the rich, the intelligentsia, and artists. Examples of novels that treat divorce in such a way include John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), his U.S.A. trilogy (1937), and later stories and novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, especially Tender Is the Night (1934). Divorce is not the central or crucial experience depicted in these later novels, as it is in What Maisie Knew or The Custom of the Country, but divorce in the later novels remains linked to a search for individual identity, especially for strong-minded and talented women who find that marriage prevents them from fully realizing themselves.

Literature Since 1950

Divorce became much more prevalent in North American society during the second half of the twentieth century, especially from the 1960s on, and its appearance in fiction increased correspondingly. The focus of interest shifted from the question of the effect of divorce on the identities of women to the effect of divorce on the identities of men. In the powerful climax of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), for example, Rabbit Angstrom, unable to decide whether to divorce his wife and marry his pregnant girlfriend or desert the girlfriend and stay with his wife and child, abandons them all, literally running away from his past life. Divorce propels Saul Bellow’s protagonist in Henderson the Rain King (1959), a middle-aged Connecticut millionaire, to go to Africa in an attempt to quell an inner voice that continually cries “I want, I want.” After extraordinary adventures in a world “discontinuous with civilization” he achieves self-knowledge and, at peace with himself at last, returns to America. In Arthur Miller’s After the Fall (1964) the audience is forced to enter the mind and experience the memories of a middle-aged man as he relives two failed marriages in an effort to gain a better sense of his true personal identity. Not only do these works, for the first time, make the male experience of divorce a central theme in American fiction, but also they consistently deal with divorce’s adverse effect on the male identity. For female literary characters up to the late twentieth century, divorce facilitated, or was necessitated by, a growth in personal identity. For male characters in the fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, divorce marked a painful collapse of traditional forms of personal identity.

During the late twentieth century female characters also began to experience divorce in terms of a collapse of identity along with the collapse of a marriage. This was not really parallel to the fictional presentation of the male experience of divorce in this period but rather was an extension of the earlier pattern: Women need freedom from the limitations of marital roles in order to gain individual identity. In Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963), for example, when Kay Strong’s marriage ends in separation and she is on the verge of divorce when she dies in a sanatorium, it is clear that her failed marriage and death are a direct result of her inability successfully to separate her identity from that of her husband, Harald. Her classmate Norine, however, has a stronger sense of herself and terminates one unsatisfactory marriage and eventually makes a successful second marriage. This tendency to present both pros and cons to the project of promoting strong personal identities for women (but with the emphasis clearly on women’s finding a way to succeed as individuals in a male-dominated world) continued in the 1970s. Marilyn French’s autobiographical novel The Women’s Room (1977) is a good example of realism in the handling of this theme, recounting the heroine Mira’s transformation of herself from a repressed, vain, and shallow wife and mother who “slammed genteel doors in her head” into a divorced, independent, self-supporting individual who, despite having “opened all the doors in my head,” still knows frustrations. Mira is willing to face the fact that the price of her independence has turned out to be loneliness, and she is ready to begin something new.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, divorce became a standard part of the fictional landscape, as it had become a familiar part of the lives of North Americans in general. Short fiction, novels, and plays frequently contained characters who had been divorced or who were going through a divorce. Divorce no longer seemed to be a primary vehicle for the theme of identity, which more frequently had been developed in terms of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or regional affiliation. Some of the stories in Bobbie Ann Mason’s collection Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), for example, feature the breakup of a marriage or the visit of a divorced daughter to a holiday family dinner, but the identities that are explored in her fiction are founded on the shared life experiences, habits, and customs of southern rural America. Similarly, the central issue for Wendy Wasserstein’s characters in the play The Sisters Rosensweig (1991) is not the multiple divorces of the oldest sister, the successful marriage of the second sister, or the failed relationships of the youngest, but rather their identities as successful Jewish women. Marriage is no longer a constant, a given, an enduring personal commitment, as it was in the days when Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, and as a result it has lost most of its ability to define the issue of individual identity.

In the early twenty-first century, authors of middle-grade and young-adult literature frequently incorporated divorce as a means of exploring the development of children of divorced parents. In C. C. Payne's coming-of-age novel The Thing about Leftovers (2016), protagonist Elizabeth "Fizzy" Russo has faced a difficult journey to determine her self-identity and a sense of belonging following the divorce of her parents. At the same time, Sharon M. Draper's 2018 middle-grade novel Blended combines an exploration of divorce with considerations of racial identity as it focuses on eleven-year-old Isabella, who is struggling to define herself when she is forced to divide her life between her divorced parents, one of whom is black and one of whom is white.

Bibliography

Bell, Millicent. Meaning in Henry James. Harvard UP, 1991. A literary interpretation of James’s most important novels, focusing on the subtleties of his development of character, including discussions of the construction of identity in The Portrait of a Lady and What Maisie Knew.

Review of Blended, by Sharon M. Draper. Kirkus Reviews, 16 Dec. 2018, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sharon-m-draper/blended-draper/. Accessed 26 Aug. 2019.

Bloom, Harold, editor. Hester Prynne. Chelsea House, 1990. A collection of essays exploring a range of views of Hawthorne’s heroine, from dangerous violator of social norms to healthy individualist.

Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Anchor Press, 1957. An excellent introduction to the American novel.

Hook, Andrew. Dos Passos. Prentice-Hall, 1974. A collection of essays that discuss the ways Dos Passos’ fiction documents the social, sexual, and economic changes of early twentieth century urban America.

Joslin, Katherine. Edith Wharton. St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Compares Wharton to other women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with emphasis on her unusual concern for the plight of the individual whose identity is too constrained by social ties and obligations.

Review of The Thing about Leftovers, by C. C. Payne. Kirkus Reviews, 30 Mar. 2016, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/cc-payne/the-thing-about-leftovers/. Accessed 26 Aug. 2019.