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Book Review: A Modern Instance
Jan. 26th, 2020 08:37 amI just finished reading William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance, which was a wild or at least an extremely nineteenth-century ride.
When last we left them, Marcia and Bartley Hubbard’s marriage was slowly disintegrating, while Bartley’s erstwhile friend Ben Halleck (who has fallen in love with Marcia and has grown to despise Bartley) watches from afar and helplessly pines over his lady fair. Desperate to escape the coils of this hopeless passion for a married woman, he flees to South America to aid a Spanish-American friend in an educational project! (Spanish-American here seems to mean South American.) But after two years of hopeless pining in foreign climes, he owns himself beaten by his passion and returns, whereupon he discovers…
Marcia’s husband disappeared two years ago! That heartless rat has abandoned her! And the first word that she receives of him comes in the form of a newspaper notice that he is divorcing her on the grounds that she abandoned him, which pretty much sums up Bartley Hubbard for you right there.
So Marcia, accompanied by her father and Ben Halleck, race across the country to confront Bartley in court in Indiana, home of famously lax divorce laws! Which had just become not-so-lax around the time Howells was writing: you can just tell that someone mentioned it to him and he ripped his hair out and then said to himself, “Let’s be real, Bartley is exactly the kind of bum who would file for divorce in a state with famously lax divorce laws without checking to make sure those laws had not recently been tightened.”
Marcia and Bartley do indeed end up divorced, mostly because Marcia is unwilling to seee Bartley prosecuted for perjury. Bartley, that perfidious snake, jocularly suggests to Ben that he should marry Marcia, she’s always thought so well of Ben, and of course this sends Ben into a tailspin of self-loathing because he’s a nineteenth-century Bostonian and that’s just what they do. How dare he covet a married woman? Sometimes he wished that Bartley would die so he could marry Marcia, and doesn’t that make him a murderer in his heart?? Doesn’t his passion for Marcia undermine the sanctity of all marriages everywhere in its refusal to respect the inviolability of the marriage bond????????
Ben, exhausted by these moral quandaries, falls back on the stringent Puritan certainties of his childhood and becomes a minister in a backwoods congregation where, presumably, they still like a little fire and brimstone. But he and Marcia continue to correspond, and then! A few years later! BARTLEY DIES.
(Bartley in fact gets shot for publishing something a little too scandalous in his paper, which seems like pretty much the way that he would go.)
Bartley’s death finally frees Marcia from her marital bonds - but didn’t the divorce do that, you say? Well, kind of sort of not really, it meant that she and Bartley didn’t have to live together anymore, but apparently to a nineteenth century Bostonian perspective it didn’t actually leave her free to marry anyone else. But now she’s a widow and can definitely remarry! Probably!
Well, it’s definitely okay if she’s marrying a person who is not Ben. But Ben is afraid that his earlier illicit passion has disqualified him as husband material: does the fact that he fell in love with her while she was still married to another man means that his love is forever soiled and he can never marry her and should just hopelessly pine forever from afar?
He puts this question to his friend Atherton in a letter, and Atherton reads the letter aloud to his wife who thinks the whole thing is nonsense and Bartley should ask for Marcia’s hand, while Atherton is like, no no, Ben is right! His love is SOILED FOREVER. And his wife is like, sweetie, you can’t actually be so heartless as to write that to him, and Atherton can’t decide, and…
That’s where the book stops! THAT’S HOW IT ENDS. Marcia has been freed from her marriage by both divorce AND the death of her husband and it’s STILL not clear if it’s okay for Ben to ask for her hand. (It would be okay, on her side, for her to marry Ben, because she didn’t conceive of an illicit passion for Ben during her marriage, but that doesn’t make it okay for Ben to actually ask. FUCKING BOSTONIANS.)
...I have definitely decided in my head that Atherton’s wife shames him into writing a letter that is at least lukewarmly “Follow your heart, Ben,” which I think would be enough to let Ben ask for her hand - it’s clear from Ben’s letter that he’s basically asking for permission to do something he’s almost decided to do. And then they get married and everyone is happy THE END.
***
So, to recap: Ben fell in love with Marcia while she was still married and this love is so incredibly wrong that he flees to South America to escape it (and also refuses to tell anyone in his family why he is fleeing to South America: his love for a married woman is so shameful he can’t even confess it to his beloved sister Olive!), and even after Marcia is widowed, that shame remains so intense that he’s not sure it’s right for him to ask for her hand. Won’t the illicit circumstances in which he first conceived his passion cast a shadow over their entire married life?
This possibly wasn’t the best book to read while writing an m/m/f novella set in the 1870s, because it has definitely left me with the impression that most actual nineteenth century people would lie down and die at the prospect of the sheer moral turpitude of sexually involving a third person in a marriage. All Ben does is love Marcia from afar and his love is TAINTED for LIFE, can you imagine the actual moral collapse he would suffer if Bartley (an immoral snake, as we have established) suggested some sort of wife-sharing arrangement?
...Actually, I think this is more or less how Ben sees Bartley’s suggestion that Ben should marry Marcia after the divorce. Oh, sure, the divorce dissolves the marriage legally, but can it actually morally dissolve it? Isn’t Bartley, in essence, suggesting that Ben should involve sweet innocent Marcia in an act of bigamy?? And therefore undermining the sanctity of all marriages everywhere?????
When last we left them, Marcia and Bartley Hubbard’s marriage was slowly disintegrating, while Bartley’s erstwhile friend Ben Halleck (who has fallen in love with Marcia and has grown to despise Bartley) watches from afar and helplessly pines over his lady fair. Desperate to escape the coils of this hopeless passion for a married woman, he flees to South America to aid a Spanish-American friend in an educational project! (Spanish-American here seems to mean South American.) But after two years of hopeless pining in foreign climes, he owns himself beaten by his passion and returns, whereupon he discovers…
Marcia’s husband disappeared two years ago! That heartless rat has abandoned her! And the first word that she receives of him comes in the form of a newspaper notice that he is divorcing her on the grounds that she abandoned him, which pretty much sums up Bartley Hubbard for you right there.
So Marcia, accompanied by her father and Ben Halleck, race across the country to confront Bartley in court in Indiana, home of famously lax divorce laws! Which had just become not-so-lax around the time Howells was writing: you can just tell that someone mentioned it to him and he ripped his hair out and then said to himself, “Let’s be real, Bartley is exactly the kind of bum who would file for divorce in a state with famously lax divorce laws without checking to make sure those laws had not recently been tightened.”
Marcia and Bartley do indeed end up divorced, mostly because Marcia is unwilling to seee Bartley prosecuted for perjury. Bartley, that perfidious snake, jocularly suggests to Ben that he should marry Marcia, she’s always thought so well of Ben, and of course this sends Ben into a tailspin of self-loathing because he’s a nineteenth-century Bostonian and that’s just what they do. How dare he covet a married woman? Sometimes he wished that Bartley would die so he could marry Marcia, and doesn’t that make him a murderer in his heart?? Doesn’t his passion for Marcia undermine the sanctity of all marriages everywhere in its refusal to respect the inviolability of the marriage bond????????
Ben, exhausted by these moral quandaries, falls back on the stringent Puritan certainties of his childhood and becomes a minister in a backwoods congregation where, presumably, they still like a little fire and brimstone. But he and Marcia continue to correspond, and then! A few years later! BARTLEY DIES.
(Bartley in fact gets shot for publishing something a little too scandalous in his paper, which seems like pretty much the way that he would go.)
Bartley’s death finally frees Marcia from her marital bonds - but didn’t the divorce do that, you say? Well, kind of sort of not really, it meant that she and Bartley didn’t have to live together anymore, but apparently to a nineteenth century Bostonian perspective it didn’t actually leave her free to marry anyone else. But now she’s a widow and can definitely remarry! Probably!
Well, it’s definitely okay if she’s marrying a person who is not Ben. But Ben is afraid that his earlier illicit passion has disqualified him as husband material: does the fact that he fell in love with her while she was still married to another man means that his love is forever soiled and he can never marry her and should just hopelessly pine forever from afar?
He puts this question to his friend Atherton in a letter, and Atherton reads the letter aloud to his wife who thinks the whole thing is nonsense and Bartley should ask for Marcia’s hand, while Atherton is like, no no, Ben is right! His love is SOILED FOREVER. And his wife is like, sweetie, you can’t actually be so heartless as to write that to him, and Atherton can’t decide, and…
That’s where the book stops! THAT’S HOW IT ENDS. Marcia has been freed from her marriage by both divorce AND the death of her husband and it’s STILL not clear if it’s okay for Ben to ask for her hand. (It would be okay, on her side, for her to marry Ben, because she didn’t conceive of an illicit passion for Ben during her marriage, but that doesn’t make it okay for Ben to actually ask. FUCKING BOSTONIANS.)
...I have definitely decided in my head that Atherton’s wife shames him into writing a letter that is at least lukewarmly “Follow your heart, Ben,” which I think would be enough to let Ben ask for her hand - it’s clear from Ben’s letter that he’s basically asking for permission to do something he’s almost decided to do. And then they get married and everyone is happy THE END.
***
So, to recap: Ben fell in love with Marcia while she was still married and this love is so incredibly wrong that he flees to South America to escape it (and also refuses to tell anyone in his family why he is fleeing to South America: his love for a married woman is so shameful he can’t even confess it to his beloved sister Olive!), and even after Marcia is widowed, that shame remains so intense that he’s not sure it’s right for him to ask for her hand. Won’t the illicit circumstances in which he first conceived his passion cast a shadow over their entire married life?
This possibly wasn’t the best book to read while writing an m/m/f novella set in the 1870s, because it has definitely left me with the impression that most actual nineteenth century people would lie down and die at the prospect of the sheer moral turpitude of sexually involving a third person in a marriage. All Ben does is love Marcia from afar and his love is TAINTED for LIFE, can you imagine the actual moral collapse he would suffer if Bartley (an immoral snake, as we have established) suggested some sort of wife-sharing arrangement?
...Actually, I think this is more or less how Ben sees Bartley’s suggestion that Ben should marry Marcia after the divorce. Oh, sure, the divorce dissolves the marriage legally, but can it actually morally dissolve it? Isn’t Bartley, in essence, suggesting that Ben should involve sweet innocent Marcia in an act of bigamy?? And therefore undermining the sanctity of all marriages everywhere?????
