Processing Marriage, feat. Jude the Obscure

“I have tried hard all the time I’ve been thinking; for a marriage would be very nice in one sense. People would talk about me, and think I had won my battle, and I should feel triumphant, and all that. But a husband—”

“Well!”

“Why, he’d always be there, as you say; whenever I looked up, there he’d be.”

"I have been looking at the marriage service in the prayer-book, and it seems to me very humiliating that a giver-away should be required at all. According to the ceremony as there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure; but I don’t choose him. Somebody gives me to him, like a she-ass or she-goat, or any other domestic animal. Bless your exalted views of woman, O churchman!" 

As she read the four-square undertaking, never before seen by her, into which her own and Jude’s names were inserted, and by which that very volatile essence, their love for each other, was supposed to be made permanent, her face seemed to grow painfully apprehensive. “Names and Surnames of the Parties”—(they were to be parties now, not lovers, she thought). “Condition”—(a horrid idea)—“Rank or Occupation”—“Age”—“Dwelling at”—“Length of Residence”—“Church or Building in which the Marriage is to be solemnized”—“District and County in which the Parties respectively dwell.” 

“It spoils the sentiment, doesn’t it!” she said on their way home. “It seems making a more sordid business of it even than signing the contract in a vestry. There is a little poetry in a church.” 

"[Marriage is] only a sordid contract, based on material convenience in householding, rating, and taxing, and the inheritance of land and money by children, making it necessary that the male parent should be known..."

 “I think I should begin to be afraid of you, Jude, the moment you had contracted to cherish me under a Government stamp, and I was licensed to be loved on the premises by you—Ugh, how horrible and sordid!" 

"[...] it is foreign to a man’s nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall be that person’s lover. There would be a much likelier chance of his doing it if he were told not to love. If the marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between the parties to cease loving from that day forward, in consideration of personal possession being given, and to avoid each other’s society as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples than there are now. Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife, the denials of having seen each other, the clambering in at bedroom windows, and the hiding in closets! There’d be little cooling then.”

"Jude, do you think that when you must have me with you by law, we shall be so happy as we are now? The men and women of our family are very generous when everything depends upon their goodwill, but they always kick against compulsion. Don’t you dread the attitude that insensibly arises out of legal obligation? Don’t you think it is destructive to a passion whose essence is its gratuitousness?” 

“But if people did as you want to do, there’d be a general domestic disintegration. The family would no longer be the social unit.”

“Yes—I am all abroad, I suppose!” said Phillotson sadly. “I was never a very bright reasoner, you remember. … And yet, I don’t see why the woman and the children should not be the unit without the man.” 

“That’s the only way with these fanciful women that chaw high—innocent or guilty. She’d have come round in time. We all do! Custom does it! It’s all the same in the end! [...] You were too quick about her. I shouldn’t have let her go! I should have kept her chained on—her spirit for kicking would have been broke soon enough! There’s nothing like bondage and a stone-deaf taskmaster for taming us women. Besides, you’ve got the laws on your side. Moses knew. Don’t you call to mind what he says? [...] ‘Then shall the man be guiltless; but the woman shall bear her iniquity.’ Damn rough on us women; but we must grin and put up wi’ it!”

“Nobody thought o’ being afeard o’ matrimony in my time, nor of much else but a cannon-ball or empty cupboard! Why when I and my poor man were married we thought no more o’t than of a game o’ dibs!”