More about Marriage and Divorce

So, I solved my problem of not finding scholarly articles about divorce and marriage and only finding self help articles. In case anyone else is facing the same issue, if you search your topic on googlescholar instead of normal google the results are far more credible! Also, does anyone know if we can use personal stories as examples in our papers? Because I have quite a few I could share. For example, since I would like to discuss different types of marriages in depth since 1 that is what I have mostly found in my research up until now and 2 I’m doing marriage and divorce in the US, but I’m tying it to Arthur Miller and his three marriages, and I would like to analyze which type each one of those falls under as well, and maybe compare it with a real life example. Does anyone know if that’s allowed?

Moving on, this week I read part of an article called “The Evolution of Divorce” written by University of Virginia professor W. Bradford Wilcox. The article can be found at http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/pdfs/Wilcox_Fall09.pdf. This article also discussed the marriage revolution in the 60’s and 70’s, mentioning that by 1980 divorce rates had doubled: 20% of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced, while 50% of those who married in 1970 did. Of course, the divorce rate stopped growing so steeply after 1980, but the article cited several factors that contributed to the extreme growth over those two decades.

First, of course, was the law change from fault divorce to no fault divorce, which began in California with Ronald Reagan and spread outward from there. For some reason, the date of the law change didn’t quite click last time I read about it, but now it hit me: Arthur Miller had divorced his first two wives, Mary Slattery and Marilyn Monroe, in 1956 and 1961, respectively. So, he had divorced each of them with a fault divorce. I was unable to find any information about why Arthur and Mary divorced or who was found to be at fault, other than a brief mention at http://www.ibiblio.org/miller/life.html that he “lived in Nevada for six weeks in order to divorce Mary Slattery”. I’m not sure if that means that he had to be separated from her for a certain amount of time to divorce, or that since the divorce was finalized in Nevada he had to be a permanent resident there for six weeks in order to make the divorce happen, or maybe he just went to Nevada so Mary would be able to accuse him of leaving her in court in order to have the divorce go through. I’m not sure which of these it was, but I will keep looking. Meanwhile, I was able to find far more information on Marilyn and Miller (as I expected).

According to an article from 1961 on the BBC website, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/24/newsid_4588000/4588212.stm, Marilyn and Miller went to divorce finalized (maybe because they couldn’t do it in the US?) and it was granted on grounds of incompatibility. These grounds were certainly true: as I mentioned in a previous post, Marilyn was very unstable, constantly using drugs and alcohol, and she had had a miscarriage at the beginning of their marriage. They also had different expectations from each other: Marilyn wanted to pursue her career the same way Arthur was, but Arthur wanted her to reduce the time she spent on films so she could be a full time wife. The filming of The Misfits, Marilyn’s last movie, which Miller had written for her and in which she basically played herself, was tense and hectic. Marilyn wouldn’t show up, she increased her use of drugs without her psychiatrist there with her, she went to the hospital, and she and Miller barely spoke the whole time. Meanwhile, he met Inge Morath, his third wife, on the set. Since he married her a month after his divorce, it is highly probable that he was having an affair. Meanwhile, several months later Marilyn was set to remarry her second husband, Joe DiMaggio, but three days before they were to be married she was found dead from an overdose, at only 36 years old.

Marilyn had been married twice before Arthur Miller: at sixteen to Jimmy Dougherty, and later on to Joe DiMaggio. Based on the biography of Marilyn that I am currently reading, she married Jimmy partially to get out of the foster care system, and when he went to fight in the war she went to work in a factory. A photographer came to take pictures for the newspaper, and he is the one who “discovered” her. At first, she modeled, then she began to act and her newfound fame is considered to be why she divorced Jimmy. I have not yet read about Joe, but apparently their marriage was “tumultuous” (according to the BBC article) and only lasted nine months. I am curious to see why the courts granted her that one. While these easily granted divorces may just have been because Miller and Monroe were famous, I find it unlikely, and that’s part of why I find it hard to assign the change in divorce law to increasing divorce rates and loss of respect for marriage: I think it was already happening well before that, and that’s why the laws were passed.

The original article (from University of Virginia) also mentions that the sexual revolution and feminist movement increased divorce rates, as well as the rebellion of the youth against authority and religious institutions. This was a huge change in attitude in the 1960s and 1970s, especially from the conformist, family and white picket fence thinking 1950s. In fact, when Miller married Mary Slattery straight out of college, they had two kids and lived the life that was expected of them, and I think that part of what attracted him to Marilyn was the adventure that came from a relationship with her in comparison to the one he had with Slattery.

In After the Fall, part of the reason that Quentin divorces his first wife is that she begins protesting about the inattentive and uncaring way he treats her, and the thing that pushed her to finally protest was reading about women’s rights and becoming more independent. So, the marriages and events that Arthur Miller wrote about really do fit with the reality of marriage and divorce.

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