“Marriage,” writes Devorah Baum, in her incisive and thought-provoking interrogation of the subject, “is a formal relation that could arguably lay claim to being the world’s most enduring and universal.” It’s the plot that drives much of western literature and drama; it is presented to successive generations (especially women) as both the highest goal and a yoke of oppression. It has often been regarded as the most bourgeois and conservative of institutions, while proving flexible enough to accommodate radical reinventions. Why, then, she wonders, has there been so little serious intellectual engagement with the idea of marriage?
Baum herself has tackled the subject before, in a different medium; together with her husband, Josh Appignanesi, she is the co-creator of two films, The New Man and Husband, documentary (mockumentary?) explorations of the dynamic between a contemporary couple committed to a partnership of equals. In these movies, both partners offer what you suspect is an exaggerated version of themselves: Baum the straight woman, Appignanesi the butt of the joke. The point, of course, is that a marriage is unknowable to anyone outside it (and often to the people in it), so that only the couple themselves know where the lines between autofiction, truth and comedy blur in these retellings.
Baum brings this sharp self-awareness to her book; as she reflects with the analytical eye of an academic on different iterations and meanings of matrimony, she also frequently illustrates her points with scenes from her own marriage. But it’s telling that an early chapter centres on the concept of veils; in a nod to the story of Salome, she presents seven types of “veil” that serve to occlude or reveal meaning in marriage, and the reader is conscious throughout that she has chosen to draw a veil over the most intimate elements of her own relationship, or at least to offer only selective glimpses in the service of broader arguments. Unlike her films, On Marriage turns away from the personal in pursuit of a more far-reaching understanding of marriage as a philosophical, cultural and political phenomenon.
That, at least, is her stated intention, though by the time she reaches her epilogue, she finds herself questioning her own motives: “I’m married to someone I feel I can’t live without. Could that even be what this book is up to in the end? Was writing it my way of trying to tell someone that?”
I had approached the book with a measure of doubt, wondering whether – being of an age with the author but never married – I would find myself excluded from its thesis. In fact, the reverse was true; Baum is interested as much in the expectations created around marriage, for women in particular, by a society that is still principally organised around married couples and the resulting family unit, and what those expectations mean for anyone who chooses to arrange their life and relationships differently. An entire chapter is devoted to divorcing. As she observes, “much as parents don’t own children, spouses don’t own marriage”; she notes wryly that when, during the course of her research, she canvassed both married and single people on the question of why couples still choose to marry, it was the singles who mentioned love.
Baum is an erudite and entertaining guide through the landscape of marriage, bringing a lively intellectual rigour to changing attitudes on matters of religion, feminism, parenting and sexuality. She draws on a formidably broad frame of reference, from Kant to Fleabag via George Eliot and Nora Ephron, and any number of intriguing detours through less familiar literary and cinematic representations. But at the end of all her analysis, a definitive understanding remains elusive: “Having thought so much about marriage, the truth is that I still don’t know what I think about it. Pretty much all the positions I’ve encountered on the subject seem to me to have a great deal of validity.”
This is not so much a cop-out as a recognition of the fact that marriage, for all its legal and social connotations, remains the ultimate subjective experience. For anyone who has experienced, contemplated or rejected it, On Marriage offers a fascinating exploration of an institution that, for better or worse, “continues to shape and carry our human story”.
• On Marriage by Devorah Baum is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
