The Spinster's Story - Christianity Today

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

So Ross and Rachel finally got together on Friends? Now there’s an unexpected narrative turn. After ten years of supposedly celebrating singleness, NBC’s popular comedy finally concluded with the equivalent of “they all lived happily ever after”—in pairs. Even the highly idiosyncratic Phoebe found a suitable mate in the last season, joining Monica and Chandler, who had already enjoyed a few seasons of marital bliss. Only Joey finished the series unattached. Why? The character is slated for a spinoff come fall, and a committed relationship would severely limit his narrative possibilities.

And Friends wasn’t alone. On the comics page, cartoon Cathy, after over 20 years of making single people appear pathetic, will do the same for married folks by tying the knot with her longtime boyfriend, Irving, this coming Valentine’s Day. And over on HBO, the women of the often edgy Sex and the City ended their run no differently than the heroines of a standard romance novel: married or clearly committed to a longterm relationship. As on Friends, even the most extreme character, Samantha, whose sexual adventures rivaled Wilt Chamberlain’s, completed the series tamed by love. As for the show’s main character, Carrie: after years of emotional kerfuffle, she and her erstwhile lover, Mr. Big, finally find true love in (you guessed it) Paris. And it gets worse: the series, which openly questioned the notion of a soulmate, ends with our heroine standing on a bridge in Paris, hearing the fateful words, “Carrie, you’re ‘The One.’ ” So much for edgy. Cue the violins.

I know I should be upset about all of this. After all, not only am I single, but I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of articulating a theologically grounded, mature appreciation for singleness. By all rights, these endings should simply irritate me. Despite feminism and postmodernism and every other available ism, are we really still stuck with only the two classic resolutions: marriage or death? But I have to be honest: I’m a sucker for romance, and I’m annoyed if I read or watch a romantic comedy and the couple doesn’t get together—even when I think that’s a pretty bankrupt idea in real life. And I don’t think I’m the only one. We have to admit that the ideology of romance is very compelling, so much so that “she lived happily ever after with supportive friends and family and satisfying work” just doesn’t seem as good.

As I’ve thought about this, I’ve decided that perhaps I come by my ambivalence honestly. After all, who does romance better than a spinster? The real specialists in the genre are my heroes, the scribbling single women of the 19th century, the writers every girl seems to read around the age of thirteen: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, and their sisters of the pen.1Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Little Women are the über-texts of female adolescence. They shape the stories we tell ourselves about what kind of woman we can be and what kind of marriage we will be “rewarded” with. Certainly, all of these novels posit that the virtue of being Elizabeth Bennet, or Jane Eyre, or Jo March—that is, being intelligent, spunky, outspoken, independent, yet morally upright—is validated by the awarding of Mr. Darcy, Mr. Rochester, or Professor Bhaer, men who are desirable because they recognize the quality of these unconventional heroines. Who wouldn’t want to hear Mr. Darcy (or at least Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy) saying that one was chosen for “the liveliness of [one’s] mind”? Or to believe that the companionate marriage described in the last chapter of Jane Eyre is a real possibility:

I know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long. … All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character—perfect concord is the result.

That any time spent with actual married people gives the lie to this portrayal in many ways doesn’t seem to matter. This past semester I asked a class of upper-division students at Calvin College if it bothered them that in Pride and Prejudice, despite its many merits, marriage seemed to be the reward for virtue. “No offense,” said one of my students, “but I’m twenty years old and I’m sitting here waiting for my Mr. Darcy. Don’t tell me he’s not coming!” When, some weeks later, we read George Eliot’s Middlemarch—with its more adult (to borrow Virginia Woolf’s characterization) portrait of marriages typified by unfulfilled expectations, struggles over money, failed communication—my students complained about how “depressing” it was. Since they viewed my own knowledge of marriage as purely theoretical, they remained unpersuaded when I suggested that, from my observations, marriage was often like that. And so I wonder: do readers, particularly young Christian readers, who are struggling to lead lives of virtue, need to believe that such lives will be rewarded? Is this why Sex and the City—despite its provocative sexuality—nevertheless resembles Pride and Prejudice more than one would imagine? The HBO conception of virtue may be different from the Austenian kind, but the viewer is still supposed to believe that the best prize for the ideal woman is a romantic relationship.

Perhaps. I’m willing to acknowledge the power and the attractiveness of narratives that end in marriage. It may be that these novels give us a way of thinking about marriage in its ideal state, the way people might strive for it to be. My respect for Austen, Brontë, and Alcott makes me believe they were no more naïve about marriage than I am. Certainly their books helped to educate women to value certain previously undervalued traits in themselves and to imagine situations wherein those traits would be seen as desirable (in both senses of the word). The importance of that seems undeniable. And perhaps, too, as with so many things, it takes outsiders—in this case, single women writers—to provide reminders of what is good about marriage. What singles sometimes miss, I think, is not just companionship writ large but the little, overlooked moments of intimacy: the arm around the shoulder in church, the harmless bickering in the car, the telephone call from a spouse in the middle of the day to discuss the meatloaf for dinner, the child’s baseball game, the leaky roof.

There’s no denying that the marriage plot taps into something very deep. But I still worry when other narratives can’t seem to compete. It’s pretty obvious that the consequences of buying wholesale into such a story are imaginatively limiting for both single and married. The English novelist Anita Brookner (not coincidentally a spinster herself) begins her first novel, The Debut, rather wonderfully: “Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. … But really it had started much earlier than that, when, at a faintly remembered moment in her early childhood, she had fallen asleep, enraptured, as her nurse breathed the words ‘Cinderella shall go to the ball.’ The ball had never materialized.” Of course it didn’t—does it ever? As long as we wait for the ball, we will always miss the larger lesson: our faith teaches us that virtue is rewarded in ways far richer than any fairy-tale ending. Married or single, that’s a story we could all profit from hearing more often.

Jennifer Holberg is assistant professor of English at Calvin College.

1. Its true that Bront married in the last year of her life, but she wrote all her books as an unmarried woman.