SUNRISE, SUNSET: Eve Tushnet replies to Jonathan Rauch

(This is the first in a short, disorganized, and impressionistic series of comments on Jonathan Rauch's Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America. I should say at the outset that Rauch's book is very much worth your time; it presents some of the best arguments for SSM that I've seen. I'll be starting with the places where I take issue with Rauch's stance, but I'll end the series--today or tomorrow--with what I thought was his strongest argument. OK, let's go.)

Gay Marriage begins and ends with references to the very sweet duet, "Do You Love Me?", from "Fiddler on the Roof." Tevye, the main character, persists in asking his wife, "Do you love me?", even though she finds the question bizarre: "I'm your wife." But he keeps asking: "Do you love me?"

And finally she replies: Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I've lived with him,
Fought with him, starved with him,
For twenty-five years, my bed is his.
If that's not love, what is?

The song nicely captures Rauch's view (and mine) that love, in the context of marriage, is not some wash of emotions and hormones, in the face of which we are powerless. Married love is an action. It's a stance of care and partnership, in which each spouse works for the good of both the other spouse and the family as a whole. Rauch writes about this active, willed love very well; he's mentioned that several heterosexual couples have told him that his book helped them to better understand their own marriages, and I'm not surprised. (Although there are big problems with his conception of the nature of the marriage partnership, of which more presently.) "Fiddler on the Roof" also has a recurring theme of change, of a traditional culture shifting away from arranged marriages.

So FOTR would seem to be a perfect exemplar of Rauch's view of marriage.

Except that I randomly happened to see a medley of FOTR songs recently, and (in between indulging my sentimental side) I couldn't help but notice the primary way in which the FOTR worldview is radically different from the Rauch view.

Because Tevye's isn't the only marriage in FOTR. Tevye's daughter Tzeitl also marries (in fact, she's the one who doesn't get an arranged marriage). And the song at Tzeitl and Motel's wedding, "Sunrise, Sunset," gains its emotional intensity from the aspect of marriage that Rauch downplays and often simply ignores: the way marriage links the generations, not only past and present, but future as well. Marriage, in "Sunrise," is inextricably linked to childbearing and childrearing, because marriage is about a future beyond the lives of the people gathered around the chuppa that day. Marriage is about a sense of continuity despite time and change, and a sense that the couple getting married is part of something much bigger than themselves--something bigger, even, than their love for one another. Something bigger even than those "twenty-five years."

"Sunrise" is really powerful. I mean, I don't like to think of myself as a sentimental person, but when the cast sang "Sunrise" at this medley performance I found myself thinking, C'mon, get a grip, if you tear up your mascara is going to run. The emotions at play here are deep-rooted and strong, and they form part of the core of our cultural understanding of marriage.

I expect that this emotional intensity is one of the main driving forces behind the movement for same-sex marriage: We know marriage is a huge thing, bigger than ourselves. We want to form our identities by embedding ourselves in a community and tradition, rather than being left to our own unsatisfying devices; we want commonality with our own parents; we want the reconciliation with time and mortality that marriage brings. But those deep emotions make sense only in a child-centered, rather than couple-centered, understanding of marriage.
posted by Eve at 10:34 AM | link

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