Scenes From A Marriage - The Crucible Of Maturity Or The Persistent Myth Of Romantic Love?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, perhaps Edward Albee's most famous play, is about a couple, George and Martha, who 'flay each other to the marrow' to rid the marriage of resentment, hostility, suspicion, and jealousy. 

Martha is a harridan, a self-centered, deviously malicious woman who, because of her frustration with the confines of marriage, the desultory promise of her husband, and the deadly confines of the small university town in which they live, mercilessly attacks him, browbeats, harangues, and abuses him throughout an evening. 

 

As a history professor who has failed to achieve the academic success he once aspired to, George is deeply insecure and resentful. His bitterness toward Martha—who constantly demeans and ridicules him for his shortcomings—fuels their toxic dynamic. Instead of confronting their issues directly, George and Martha engage in cruel mind games, using sarcasm, manipulation, and alcohol-fueled arguments to avoid facing their deeper pain.

George's inability to assert himself against Martha’s relentless taunts leads him to retaliate through intellectual sparring rather than genuine communication. He contributes to the dysfunction by feeding into their cycle of emotional destruction, pushing Martha and challenging her delusions, particularly when it comes to the imaginary son they have created. In some ways, he enables the chaos by refusing to break free from their destructive patterns, preferring to wound Martha with words rather than break away from their toxic environment.

Ultimately, George is both a victim and an architect of the marriage’s dysfunction. He refuses to challenge his circumstances beyond their verbal sparring, resigning himself to a life of mutual torment rather than meaningful change. His responsibility lies in his passive acceptance of their unhealthy dynamic, his refusal to seek fulfillment beyond Martha, and his complicity in their shared illusions.

Yet Albee has written,  'Marriage is the crucible of maturity', and without its confinement marital partners would remain adolescent in love, sex, and intimacy.  When he wrote the play in the Sixties, divorce was still uncommon if not frowned upon, so this indissolubility was the context within which the psycho-sexual drama of George and Martha is played out.  In today's world, a George and Martha would simply part ways without ever coming to any self-understanding, and would exit the marriage as immature as when they entered it. 

At the end of the play the couple sits exhausted, spent, and empty.  Nothing has been spared in the emotional violence of the evening.  Every posture, every false assumption, every grain of hatred, suspicion and deliberate neglect has been exposed for the selfishly brutal weapons they are.  Now that they are vulnerable and defenseless, they can begin over again in a marriage based on honesty, truth, and respect. 

Albee leaves the audience discomfited, for after such horrific meanness and emotional savagery, how can any marriage be saved? More than likely George and Martha will go though a period of calm understanding, but will return to the festering animosity that is an integral part of them. 

Tennessee Williams broached the same theme in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof where Maggie is as destructively critical of her husband, Brick as Martha is of George, flaying him and his indifference to the bone to revive his spirit, his masculinity, and his place in the family without which they will not inherit the largest fortune in the state. 

 

Brick, like George, is complicit.  Because of a pernicious, nagging guilt for the neglect of his friend, Skipper who commits suicide over Brick's abandonment and Maggie's evil manipulation of him, outing the homosexuality he he has repressed, Brick becomes an emotional and sexual cripple, shuffling through days and absent at night.  He complains about 'mendacity' and the lies that infect the family, and yet he refuses to acknowledge his own. 

At the end of the play, when, as in Albee's work, all has been revealed, Maggie says to Brick that she loves him, to which he replies, 'If only it were true'.  In the crucible of marriage the couple has found a meeting ground after wicked battle but neither Brick nor the audience believes it will stand. 

All of Shakespeare's Comedies end well with the lady marrying her love; but because she has so outshined all the men around her, a complaisant, clueless lot and married one of them because for an Elizabethan woman that was her only recourse, the playgoer suspects that under modern circumstances, divorce would follow soon after the wedding. 

 

There is no crucible of maturity in Shakespeare's marriages, just a predictable denouement of a romantic interlude.  Medieval poet Petrarch had created the idea of romantic love, of knights and their fair ladies, of the sublimity of women and the courage and nobility of men; and the Comedies were descendants of Petrarch's love poetry to his intended, Laura. 

Shakespeare in all his plays but Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew was diffident at best about marriage, more often than not a struggle between willful women and powerful men.  Only in a play about adolescents and one about pre-Lawrentian dominance-submission finality, does he suggest that marriage can be mutually satisfying. 

It is ironic, albeit perfectly understandable, that half of American marriages end in divorce - that is, couples begin with romantic love, avoid conflict and unpleasantness when it inevitably begins, and give up quickly and surely.  Romantic love is no more than an idle fiction, the age-old social cover for sexual desire, and there is no place for a crucible of maturity. 

When an older couple is seen holding hands in the park, the observer wonders not how but why are they still together. The lesson of matrimony is that of human nature - a self-interested, territorial, aggressive, and defensive affair - and that survival, far from praiseworthy, is an indication of capitulation.  Besides, with the world full of eligible men and women, why waste youth on unnecessary circumscription?

So, what’s love got to do with it? Nothing at all.  As marriages age, they become little more than private institutions providing social and emotional support.  Easier to rely on a partner with whom one has lived for fifty years than on the vicissitudes of the State.

What to make, then, of romantic pictures of 80-somethings walking on the beach? Do they still love each other after all those years? Mutual dependency is a kind of love after all; and there is every reason to avoid any chance of dissension or disagreement and jeopardize the arrangement.  Holding hands is the visible sign of an operational contract.

The Apostle Paul was notorious in his views on marriage.

Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife…those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that (Corinthians 7:27-28)

Of course Paul was not necessarily misogynistic.  He understood how difficult marriage was and how hard it was for a man to keep his mind on God when he had a wife to deal with. The notion of celibacy was given a boost thanks to Paul.  Since he was speaking in spiritual terms – i.e. ideals rather than practicalities – he ignored the economic necessities of marriage.  All well and good, Paul, new Christians in Corinth or Ephesus might have said; but celibacy for us means penury.

“I would spare you that” certainly resonates in the mind of many married people who realize what a fine kettle of fish they have ended up in; and most wish that they were once again footloose and fancy-free. Romantic love fades quickly, and as routine settles in, husbands and wives ask, “Why did I do that?”

A good question.  If marriage has outlived economic necessity – men and women increasingly pull their own weight for and by themselves, and children have become an economic liability rather than a benefit – then why bother?

“I don’t want to die alone”, is often heard. What greater comfort than to expire surrounded by loving family and friends.  Yet as Tolstoy wrote in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, that’s exactly what we do.  A man’s final moments are between him and his maker, no one else.  If anything, the crowd of well-wishers is a distraction for his one, pure, indefinable, and absolute moment.

So, there's that - marriage is little more than a sinecure, an insurance policy, a hedged bet against death and dying - but everyone in a confused age of romance, divorce, and contractual obligation wants to get married despite the sorry history of the institution.  Youth is the great deceiver, but the engine of human survival.  In an age where economic necessity is no longer the principal reason for joining sexual forces, something has to fill the gap, and that old saw, romance, fits the bill. 

Are there happy marriages anywhere? Perhaps, especially in the first few years, but a more representative sample would be after thirty or more.  Howzit goin'? is a question few husbands or wives are likely to answer honestly.