Cheryl Mendelson is a philosopher, a lawyer, a novelist, and the author of a legendary book about housekeeping. (We’ve been using our copy for a quarter-century now.) And her new book, Vows: The Modern Genius of an Ancient Rite, stands somehow at the intersection of all those things. After all, a wedding ceremony, with vows at its center, is a peculiar rite indeed. To make such a vow is to promise; is to enter into a kind of contract; is the fruit of a decision for two people to make a home together. And of course, the events that lead up to a marriage, the events that constitute a marriage, and (sometimes) the events that end a marriage, are endlessly productive of stories. This is all to say that Cheryl Mendelson is probably the perfect person to write this book.
(Disclosure: I don’t know Cheryl Mendelson but have known her husband Edward for many years now. He is W. H. Auden’s literary executor and has always been of inestimable aid and support to my work on Auden.)
Mendelson begins the book by describing her first marriage, one made impulsively when she was quite young; she concludes by describing her happily enduring second marriage. And it is her belief that we can grasp why one marriage failed and the other succeeded by understanding how the couples felt about, how they thought about, how they understood (or failed to understand) the vows with which they began their lives together. It’s a brilliant notion and one that frames the whole narrative, which is largely historical but also sociological, psychological, moral — and (often) religious, since the wedding vows we all know arose through the long development of Christian rites of Holy Matrimony.
After describing her hasty first marriage, Mendelson writes,
It’s hard to imagine a world in which our absurd decision to marry wouldn’t have ended in divorce. But I could see that friends whose marriages had more propitious beginnings than ours had to fight many of the same battles. The general atmosphere of suspicion toward the institution seemed to me to seep into actual marriages, exaggerating their frustrations and minimizing their satisfactions. Most marriages in our circle of friends broke up. Social hostility toward marriage and even toward love, expressed in contempt, disapproval, and unfriendly theorizing, took a toll on both.
This widespread social hostility to, or at best irony about, marriage is, it seems to me, the primary impetus for the book. Mendelson challenges it, and challenges it compassionately but forcefully. She knows that her celebration of marriage (and its classic vows) will be a hard sell for many:
To write about the marriage vows … is to pick one’s way through a cultural minefield. Whether wedding vows need rethinking, updating, or, possibly, discarding is now a wide-open question. Having thought, read, and rethought, I concluded – for reasons that this book exists to lay out – that the answer is a solid no. The traditional marriage vows, though they contain phrases composed a thousand or more years ago, are a form of words that say exactly what love still wants to say.
Vows is a remarkable book, and I hope it gets a wide readership. The defense and, more, celebration of fidelity (Chapter 9) is itself worth the price of admission, and I wonder how many readers will reckon seriously with the case Mendelson makes. More generally, I would be especially interested to hear how people who despise marriage reckon with the book’s arguments. They won’t find Mendelson easy to refute.
