Three Marriages, Lots of Risks

I have already begun to do research on Miller’s life, and I am planning to read both his autobiography Timebends and a biography of his second wife called, appropriately Marilyn Monroe, written by Barbara Leaming (who is a well-known biographer). The lives of his first wife, Mary, and his second wife, Ingeborg, will obviously be more difficult to research since they are not famous. In case you were curious (and because I just found out how to do this) here are the Amazon links to those two books: and .

I also found an interesting article called “Signs of a Divorce Ahead?” by Rome Neal on the CBS news website. The article mentioned research done by psychotherapist Bonnie Maslin, who identified five types of marriage, all with different risk factors. Pursuer-Distancer Marriages are at the highest risk for failure (divorce) and were described as marriages in which “typically the wife raises problems; the husband dismisses them and/or refuses to talk about them”. This seemed significant to me for two reasons: first of all, there was something that bothered me about the gender generalization in this definition. The fact that the woman is almost always the one to raise problems in high risk marriages, and the man is the one to ignore, makes me question the underlying reasons for this. Is it because men are often taught to be more emotionally distant from a young age? Is it because women are as nagging and needy as they are stereotypically made out to be? Or is it when two specific types of people get together that the woman becomes insecure, and begins to get overly whiny, for lack of a better word? Or is it that for a marriage to truly work, the man must be more in love with the woman than she is with him, rather than the other way around? For some reason, I’m inclined to believe the last, but these questions are worth researching. I’m also wondering if there are typical behaviors seen in a marriage based on gender, or if these behaviors are independent of gender and are due to personality types. I will get back to these questions in a later post, I’m sure. Now, the second reason this seemed significant is because in After the Fall, a significant scene is Quentin’s memory of the first time his first wife, Louisa, stood up to him. She had always been shy and accepting, and one day, she decided to fight back and demand more. Their marriage dissolved soon after. In the scene, she tells Quentin she is dissatisfied, that he does not pay enough attention to her and he does not seem to see her as a person, or to notice her at all. Quentin’s reaction is one of stupefaction, denial, and dismissal, exactly the word the article uses to define marriages at the highest risk. It seems that even in his plays, Miller portrays marriages that fit the psychological outline for divorce, and if Louisa really represents Mary Slattery, Miller’s first wife, then this article gives insight as to the psychology behind their divorce. Another interesting fact pointed out by the article is that marrying younger than 25 makes divorce risks skyrocket, and Miller happened to marry Slattery straight out of college at the age of 24. Quentin also married Louisa young.

Another marriage type that related to both Miller and After the Fall was Operatic Marriage, which is defined as being “characterized by a tumultuous and volatile relationship, marked by cycles of fighting and making up”. This is a high risk marriage, and it seems to fit perfectly with Miller and Monroe’s marriage, as well as Quentin and Maggie’s. Both men married attractive, charming women that they felt the need to fix. In the article “Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller: Extract from Christopher Bigsby’s biography” in The Telegraph, Bisgsby stated that during her marriage to Miller, Monroe had a miscarriage, attempted suicide, and increased her drug use. Bigsby wrote that “there was a profundity to her despair that he seemed unable to penetrate, and she taunted him with his failure to rescue her”, but she also seemed desperate for his approval, both hallmarks of a rocky Operatic Marriage.

Finally, the lowest risk Traditional Marriage was defined as a marriage in which “couples share a traditional interpretation of gender roles”. I want to look into this more, because I was not sure whether this means marriages in which the woman is a housewife and the man works, or what. If it is, I see no reason why these should be the most successful marriages, and I actually find the idea that they would be a bit offensive and behind the times. From the limited research I have done thus far on Miller’s final marriage, I do not think that it was a Traditional Marriage but rather a Cohesive Individuated Marriage, which includes “shared responsibilities, autonomy, and a view of marriage as a refuge”. Until I read Miller’s autobiography (which should be coming in from Amazon any day now) I won’t know his mental state during his final marriage, or whether he saw it as a refuge, but I do know Ingeborg was an intelligent, well-educated woman with an important career as a photographer. She was far more independent than his first two wives, and if she is at all like Holga from After the Fall, she was also opinionated, headstrong, and understanding. All these seem to fit into the characteristics of a Cohesive Individuated Marriage, which is low risk (but not lowest risk, although I like its description more than that of a Traditional Marriage). An important thing to note it that Miller seemed to move up in each subsequent marriage, in that each woman he chose fit better with his personality than the one before. However, this does not usually happen, as all the research I have seen so far indicates that with each new marriage, divorce risks go up, and they are already high enough in a first marriage: 50% in America.

Hopefully, my research will continue to be this insightful and interesting, because every new thing I find only seems to open up more questions. Right now, everything fits well together, but one of my biggest worries is that by the end of this project, I will have too much information I want to include and no idea how to organize it. Oh well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Happy Monday!

After the Fall

I have finally made an absolute decision on what to do for my project. I am researching marriage, why it works and why it doesn’t and how it has changed in the past century, specifically as related to Arthur Miller, a playwrite who wrote extensively about the topic and was married three times himself. He had a fascinating life, and at first I was going to research him in general, but I decided if I did that it would be too easy to get dry and boring. As I research him, I will also research Marilyn Monroe, since they were married for about five years and the marriage failed only a few months before her suicide. Since Miller wrote many semi autobiographical plays, I will probably read more than one of them, but for now I am reading After the Fall, which Miller wrote soon after Monroe’s death and which, according to the analysis of Arthur Miller written by Leonard Moss, was his most autobiographical novel. In fact, the family history of the main character, Quentin, matches that of Miller, and the characterizations of Louise and Maggie match those of his first two wives, Mary Slattery and Marilyn Monroe. Maggie also died shortly before the play was written, as did Marilyn, and according to critics of the time, many of the events of Maggie’s life matched Marilyn’s. Arthur Miller vehemently denied this correlations, and even more vehemently denied that the pessimistic, confused character of Quentin was actually a representation of himself. For some reason, I’m not inclined to believe him, and neither were literary critics. In fact, the play garnered a lot of criticism, Miller apparently autoplagiarized (he used his own words from other plays) and the play was called “not art but a self-indulgent foray into catharsis”. Of course, not all the reviews were this negative, especially as time passed, but as I began to read the play I could understand some of the disgust with the main character, Miller’s literary counterpart.

After the Fall takes place inside Quentin’s head, and as a result it tends to jump back and forth between one thought and another, one person and another, one time and another, so that a conversation is interrupted midstream to start a conversation with someone new, then someone else, then back to the original person. Adding to the confusion is that Quentin occasionally breaks off and speaks to the Listener, a disembodied person to whom he directs his more organized thoughts after bouncing back and forth between recollections. For now, I’m assuming the Listener is either the audience or his conscience, because no specific person was named, although Quentin speaks to the Listener as though he or she is a friend he hasn’t seen in  along time. Quentin is catching the Listener up, but as he does, random memories of people and moments that formed him keep popping up, and each memory connects to the one after it in a way that is sometimes clear and sometimes not. Throughout, the backdrop is a concentration camp in Germany, and in a way Quentin seems to compare the struggle of the Jews and the Germans and the questionable morality of the citizens who stood by their country despite signs of its moral decrepitude with his confusion and bleak outlook. He seems to be defined by his utter hopelessness, Quentin repeatedly cites himself as feeling purposeless, without faith, lost. He describes himself during his first marriage as innocent, believing in destiny and seeing things clearly in black and white, but now he seems muddled and unsure.

Quentin describes multiple marriages in the first third of the play (that’s about where I am right now). That of his mother and farther seems the most important in a way, as it is what formed his initial views on marital life. He recalls her mother telling of the unemotional, completely rational way she chose to marry his father: her uncle decided upon him, and she complied to please her parents. He was financially secure, very manly, but the way she tells of this marriage has Quentin seeing it as a convenient partnership rather than a union of love and affection. Like Miller, Quentin’s family lost everything during the Great Depression, and his father kept the full extent of their financial issues a secret from his mother until they were irreparable, and the family had lost everything. While he tried to justify his secrecy as an attempt to protect her, his mother saw it as a breach of trust, and was horrified, yelling and telling him she should never have married him. Quentin seems to take his mother’s side, and as an adult he admits that he always saw his father as all bluster and no real strength, completely dependent upon his more willful and capable mother. In fact, from the way he speaks of other women, it seems she was the only woman he truly respected for a long time, at least until after his first marriage.

After his two marriages, Quentin is also extremely cautious, as if living his life from an outside perspective: several times he mentions what he should feel, which is rarely what he actually feels. He repeatedly states that he doesn’t know what he is to anybody, as if he previously described himself as a function of his relationship to others, and since his two divorces and his mother’s death, he feels stranded and unsure. He also seems to feel heavily the weight of others’ expectations of him, and he is convinced that he cannot fulfill these expectations satisfactorily. He is unable to escape his past, feeling haunted by the women of his life (all the men in the play seem to be side characters, rather than people who majorly affected him), and he seems to face an identity crisis: he does not know who he is or where he is going, he has quit his job and severed his ties to others, and he is floundering. Quentin cites his two marriages as his wake up call, the things that made him doubt himself most completely.

One of my favorite moments in the play so far has been when Holga, Quentin’s current love interest, tells the story of her life. She lived through Nazi Germany, and several terrible things happened to her that were symbolically significant but that I don’t feel like getting into right now, but the most important thing is that at the end, after she described all the issues and problems she had faced, she described a recurring dream of hers. In this dream, she has a baby, and it is born with Down syndrome. She says that part of her is disgusted by the baby, horribly depressed that she brought something into this world that would suffer so much, but that she also sees a piece of herself in the child. At the end of the dream, she realizes that she must embrace that part of herself in the baby, that she must kiss it and take it as her own, as hard as that may be. And by this she means that despite all the issues and imperfections in her life, she still intended to grasp it tightly in both hands and kiss it, accepting it for what it was, and herself for the woman she has become. The idea of this scares Quentin immensely, because it is exactly what he is unable to do. And if Holga really is a representation of Miller’s third wife, then this might be exactly why their marriage worked: she didn’t expect more from him, as his other wives did. Rather, she understood his flaws and her own, and embraced them anyway, like the baby in the dream. She didn’t give up. And like his parents’ marriage, she was ultimately the reason why it worked, not Quentin/Miller. I want to find out what I can about his actual third wife, Ingeborg, and see if she is at all like Holga in the play. I would also like to see some psychological studies of members of marriages who work and those who don’t, and see what makes the difference.