Miller Discusses Marilyn

So, here we are at the final blog post and I am not quite finished researching. I emailed David Smith, PhD, a marital psychologist and Notre Dame, to ask him if he would allow me to interview him, but he hasn’t gotten back to me as of yet. I also found a video on youtube that I will probably use during my senior exit project presentation. It is a documentary featuring an interview with Arthur Miller. I could not find the full documentary on youtube, only the part that focused on his marriage to Marilyn, so I will use that and keep looking for the rest of it. Part one is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1W5X8gmD5g&feature=related. 

During the interview, Miller discusses the way he fell in love with Marilyn. He mentions that at first, his feelings for her made him feel incredibly guilty (he was still married to his wife at the time). Quentin is also guilty about his initial feelings and physical attraction for Maggie in After the Fall, and both men felt the need to protect the perfect beauty and perceived joy of Maggie/Marilyn from the hands and looks of other, sinister men, both before and after Maggie/Marilyn becomes a star. I’m wondering if this initial guilt and continued protectiveness is part of what poisoned their relationship.

Meanwhile, Miller mentioned that he believed Marilyn wanted him so much because he loved her, and he saw the good in her: he saw her as she wanted to be. Barbara Leaming’s biography of her mentioned the same motivation for Marilyn’s love of Miller: she idolized him as a thinker and a moral man, a man who did not immediately try to sleep with her (although this may have been because of shyness and guilt rather than respect), and she thought that if he could love her, then she might be able to love herself. Her extreme emotional abuse as a child, which Miller also mentioned, led her to hate herself, and she had never felt she was deserving of anyone’s love, especially her own, until Miller came along. She was sexually abused in several of her foster homes as well, and she was raised to think that this was her fault, because she presented a temptation for men. Of course, when she became an international sex symbol, it must have recalled these childhood accusations and brought back the same sense of guilt and unworthiness. 

These feelings combined with a genetic predisposition towards mental illness, led Marilyn to be a very depressed, paranoid individual. At first, however, she only allowed Arthur to see the good side of her, saying men only want “a happy whore.” Maggie did the same to Quentin, only allowing flashes of her dark side to come out. When Marilyn finally allowed what she called her inner monster to come out, it shattered Miller’s illusion of her, and his disappointment in the truth of Marilyn Monroe convinced her he did not truly love her, and her illusion of the perfect marriage with him was also shattered. These feelings intensified, especially as she became convinced he was using her to get in with Hollywood and get his short story The Misfits made into a screenplay.

Now, everything I have read either is impartial or somewhat defends Miller’s behavior, but I wish I could find something that presented the other side of the story. Some of the things Miller did do suggest that he could have been using her. Even if he loved her at first, these feelings went away almost immediately, Miller himself stated that he only believed he could save his marriage “at first”. However, he stuck with it even after he saw there was no hope, and there is reason to believe that he did so because there was no way The Misfits could get made without Marilyn, and after a string of plays that had had a bad critical reception and his HUAC debacle, Miller desperately needed a comeback. The Misfits may have been originally intended to give Marilyn the serious role that she so desired, and the respect that would come with it, but by the end, Miller was making it purely for himself.

So, my research is far from over, but I hope that anyone sticking with me after all these incredibly long posts is enjoying it (:

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller

I am almost finished with Barbara Leaming’s biography of Marilyn Monroe, called Marilyn Monroe. When I first began this book, I was unsure whether it would provide much useful information senior exit project wise, but it was absolutely fascinating so I was going to read it whether it was helpful or not. As it happened, not only did I find a huge amount of important information on Marilyn and Arthur’s marriage, there was also some information about Mary Slattery and Arthur, and I’m hoping there will be some about Inge Morath at the end, since Arthur seems to have been cheating on Marilyn with her. I am only about three years into their marriage right now.

I have decided that I will largely focus on Marilyn and Arthur for the senior exit, and maybe include information on BOTH of their previous and subsequent marriages, rather than just look at Arthur’s. Also, I might read The Misfits since it was the play that Arthur began writing as a testament of his love for Marilyn, but which ended up contributing to the end of their marriage. When Marilyn read the play, she thought that the character Arthur meant for her, Roslyn, was idealized and passive, that he had created her not to show his love for of Marilyn, but in order to try to retrieve the image of the girl he thought he’d fallen in love with, a girl that lacked what Marilyn called “the monster within her”. When Marilyn read The Misfits, she determined that Arthur truly did not love her, because if he did not accept her emotional fragility and outbursts, then he obviously loved a girl that did not truly exist, the same girl that America had fallen in love with, but that was only an act.

Her resentment over this perceived lack of love led her to ridicule the play; she became increasingly cruel and suspected that Arthur was staying with her only to provide for the success of his screenplay, since it was doubtful that his project would proceed without her name attached to it as lead actress. This suspicion was due to Marilyn’s paranoia and mental illness, but while she was not right about Arthur’s motivation in that sense, she may have been right about the rest. According to Leaming, by creating Roslyn Arthur was trying to recapture the Marilyn he loved, trying to come to terms with the fact that he now wanted to leave the stranger she had turned into, and trying to convince himself that leaving his life and his wife for her hadn’t been a mistake. Meanwhile, he began writing the early drafts of After the Fall, not yet including Marilyn, but writing about his former wife, his parents, and a man he worked with who was mentally unstable but whom he felt obligated to help.

In those early drafts, Quentin was actually named “Miller”, supporting the idea that the play is largely autobiographical. There were also incredibly many parallels between Marilyn and Maggie, a famous singer who attempts suicide many times. Little details were there, like the house they bought together that Marilyn/Maggie threw herself into renovating in an effort to repair issues with the marriage, the fact that soon after the wedding Marilyn/Maggie ceased trusting her old agent, lawyer, and psychoanalyst and fired them, hiring new people that were friend’s of Arthur/Quentin’s to take their place, Marilyn/Maggie’s reading of a scribbled note Arthur/Quentin wrote expressing disappointment in the marriage which in her mind proved that he did not love her, Marilyn/Maggie’s initial adoration of Arthur/Quentin, which soon turned into mood swings, possessiveness. There was also the distancing between husband and wife that occurred because of her derision of his work ( Marilyn made fun of The Misfits and felt entitled to because she knew more about screenplays than Miller, who was primarily a playwrite, and this fact allowed her to take him off his pedestal and instead she began to regard him with what Leaming called “contempt”- one of the Horsemen that Gottman said to watch out for; meanwhile, Maggie has Quentin act as her lawyer and she begins to insult his work because he can’t get the studio to comply with her demands (like Marilyn, Maggie often skipped work or called in sick, infuriating the studio) and she feels disrespected by all the people in show business, like Marilyn did, and since her husband failed to get her the respect he thought he would and did not live up to her idealization of him she began to treat him disrespectfully, in a way that Quentin called embarrassing and that one of Arthur’s friends called “degrading”, according to Leaming), and Marilyn/Maggie’s overconsumption of pills and the disturbing pattern of extreme marital problems, attempted suicide, temporary reconciliation and return to honeymoon bliss, then return of extreme marital problems all over again.

Of course, Arthur fails to give Maggie the multiple (three in three years) miscarriages that Marilyn had, and the ensuing guilt she felt because they were caused by her endometriosis, consumption of barbiturates and alcohol, and what she perceived as her fated bad luck because she had been taught at a young age that she was evil and undeserving of any happiness. Perhaps he did not include these in the play because they, of all things, were the most painful for him to write about.

Marilyn and Arthur showed signs from all three of the marriage risk indicators I previously researched and discussed on the blog, but most significant was their perfect fit with Ted Huston’s study. Although they first met in 1951 and Miller briefly decided to leave his wife for Marilyn, he soon changed his mind and tried to fix the marriage (a difficult period also experienced by Quentin with his first wife, Louise- both the real and fictional man described the wife as “cold” and “unforgiving”). The guilt and doubt that resulted from this time is part of what pushed Miller to write  The Crucible and View from the Bridge. For quite a while, Marilyn and Arthur exchanged letters, and for a few months she held out the hope that he would come back to her. He cut off communication, however, and suggested that she Abraham Lincoln would be a better role model than him. Marilyn took him seriously, and for the next few years a portrait of Abraham Lincoln hung over her bed, replacing the picture of Miller that had been there before.

When the two met again four years later in New York, Miller soon began to have an affair with Marilyn, and soon decided to leave his wife. His six week stay in Nevada was necessary for him to establish residence so the divorce could be finalized, and he sued her for divorce (fault based marriage!) saying that she had mentally and emotionally abused him, despite the fact that he was the one having an affair. A mere five months after the divorce was final, Marilyn and Miller were married, having experienced life together only in unstressful situations, and only a day or two at the time (the first point against them). They also had highly idealized visions of each other (point two). At that time, Miller was also being called to testify at HUAC (the House of Un-American Activities Committee) because he had filed for a passport to go to England, where there would be a stage play of A View From the Bridge and Marilyn would work on her next film, The Prince and the Showgirl. During his testimony, he planned to refuse to name names, but to gain sympathy with the press, he decided to announce that he wanted to marry Marilyn during the testimony, hoping that would make him more sympathetic. That was the way she found out he wanted to marry her. In order to get the passport, Arthur hoped to say that he needed to go to England in order to have a honeymoon with Marilyn. So, he needed to marry her before they left, providing an external push to rush the wedding (point three).

Within the first few months, Marilyn and Arthur faced problems: he could see immediately that she was not the girl he had imagined, and he saw a new side of her as he witnessed her paranoia, craziness, over drinking and over drugging during the process of filming her movie. This neurotic Marilyn was new and unwelcome, and this was the fourth point against them: a bad first two years, the passionate fall out of infatuated love, signaled that this was not a marriage meant to last. It is the same fall from paradise that Miller depicted in After the Fall.

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.

Courtships, Newlyweds, and Hollywood Romances

Sorry for the slight lateness of this post, but I have been sick and I was hoping I’d be better by today, but no such luck. So I decided to just medicate and tough it out for the duration of this post (: 

Anyways…I found several interesting articles this week. The first was in the online journal/magazine/whatever it is Psychology Today. I think two of my past sources were from there, too, but that’s just because it’s incredibly difficult not to just find personal stories or self help or counseling websites when googling marriage. If anyone has a suggestion on how to fix that, please let me know!

This article (http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200001/will-your-marriage-last) was once again about what makes marriage work and what doesn’t, but it was completely different from the last two I read, both of which expressed somewhat similar viewpoints. The first one discussed different types of marriage and their success rates, and the one from last week discussed indicators of marital dysfunction and the idea that the way a couple handles conflict rather than the marriage type is what affects their chances of staying married. This one presented a different take: it’s not conflict handling or type of marriage, but rather what happens in the first two years of a marriage and courtship that affects whether it will last.

Ted Huston, Ph.D., conducted a long term study on over 160 couples for about 13 years. He found that marriages take one of four courses: divorce happens early, within the first two or three years, divorce happens later, at about 7 to 10 years (sometimes later), couples stayed unhappily married, or couples stayed happily married. Now while most people read about the unhappily married couples and question their sanity, Huston mentions that it’s really not that bad: these couples may not be satisfied with their marriage, but it’s not vicious or poisonously bad so there is no spillover into the rest of their life, so they can stay married out of habit or religion or whatever it is and still be okay.

He found that the major difference between the couples that stayed together and those that didn’t was shown immediately. Most psychologists think that couples who get married are in a state of total marital bliss, then that goes away after the honeymoon period and if the couple is unable to learn how to handle conflict, that’s when divorce happens. But Huston found that many newlyweds actually don’t have this period of marital bliss, and those that do run into more trouble later because that kind of joy and intensity is impossible to keep going for an extended period of time. Also, he found that it is not inability to handle personal conflict that leads couples to divorce, but rather an erosion of love and affection, which is why couples who had a boring, comfortable (or not boring, just comfortable) newlywed period are less likely to divorce because there are no Hollywood happily ever after romanticized ideals there from the outset, so there is no disappointment later when love turns out not to be the fairytale it was expected to be. Of course there were also the couples who were very loving and affectionate from the beginning, but they were able to maintain these feelings with few negative emotions creeping in. Those were the happily married ones. So the major predictor in whether a couple will remain married or not is not the level of affection or conflict management at the beginning of the marriage, but rather the amount of change the couple faces within the first few years.

For example, if a couple has a very short courtship that is pushed alone by other factors (jealousy, parental pushing, pregnancy, etc) then they get married, it is highly likely that in the first few years the idealized versions they had of their spouse will change as they reveal their true personalities, and this can lead to issues (obviously). This loss of the rah-rah-rah we’re so happy and affectionate woohooo feeling that propelled them through their short courtship and into marriage leaves them facing the stark reality of a person whom they no longer love, but they are married to. Meanwhile, the couples that are together for a longer period (say two to three years) BEFORE getting married, and are used to handling issues together and have open lines of communication and know and accept each other’s flaws are the ones that are more likely to carry this stability throughout their marriage and stay together.

Another article I looked at, but didn’t really get through because it was more about the history of marriage and not the psychology of marriage and I find that more boring (I know history is supposed to be part of my exit project, but I was thinking of making it a veryveryveryvery small insignificant part that requires far less researching than all the rest). And actually, I am being unfair to the article (which is here: http://www.enotes.com/marriage-divorce-article) because it’s NOT all about history, that’s just all I’ve read so far.

So anyways, the article is discussing the way marital laws change in the late 1960s. Before then, the law was fault divorce, which meant that in a divorce, one party had to prove in court that the other party was guilty of doing something terrible enough to ruin the marriage (such as abuse, infidelity, etc) and only the innocent party could sue for divorce. This ensured that both parties wanted the divorce. California was the first to change the law into what it is today (no fault divorce) and all fifty states followed by 1984. Some researchers have blamed the change in divorce law for increased divorce rates between 1960 and 1970 and say that we should go back to fault divorces, because these days it’s easier to just give up on a marriage than actually try to fix it, which is why couples divorce so much. However, researchers on the other side say that correlation does not imply causation (and they are right! Yay AP Stats!) and divorce rates had been rising anyway since 1800, they peaked in 1980 and have now level off (at a terrible 50%) so the no fault divorce laws are not to blame. They also point out that although no fault divorces only require one party to want to end the marriage, fault divorces ensure that a marriage cannot end in a friendly manner, and kids are often psychologically harmed far more by a fault marriage where they have to witness the accusations and cruelty that occur in court.

I have not yet fully formed an opinion, but right now I am leaning towards no fault marriages. I will have to look into it more (and actually finish reading the article…). That’s all for this week! Bye!

The Four Horsemen of Marital Doom

This week, I read an article by marriage psychologist John Gottman called “What Makes a Marriage Work.” I looked up Gottman’s research because I remembered reading about it a few months ago when I read the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (which I strongly recommend, by the way. It’s absolutely fascinating, and it has a bunch of random topics and research so I’m sure someone else could use it for their project as well). This is the Amazon link to the book: <p><a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/0316010669/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1328585996&amp;sr=8-1&#8243; title=”Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”>Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking</a></p>.

Gottman is a marriage psychologist who has conducted research on over 200 couples in the past 20 years, but the interesting thing about him is the way he conducts his research: he has a marriage lab, and he tapes a short conversation between a husband and his wife (about thirty minutes long) recording their physiological responses (heart rate, perspiration, etc), facial expressions, and tones of voice. He analyzes each video carefully, makes a prediction about the marriage, and sees whether it comes true in 5 or 10 years. The amazing thing is that 99 percent of the time, it does. By watching one short, 30 minute conversation between a married couple, he can predict whether the marriage will last.

Through this lab, Gottman discovered several indicators of marriage success, but since the whole explanation of what he discovered is long (I will definitely use as much of it as I can on my senior exit project because it’s fascinating, but the articles I read on him along with the Blink chapter about him are nearly 50 pages long so I can’t discuss everything) I will only focus on the article I mentioned above, from the magazine Psychology Today.

In this article, Gottman mentions that the conventional view that marriages in which a lot of fighting take place or marriages in which conflicts are ignored are at high risk for failure are wrong. This goes directly against some of what I discussed in my last blog post, but I would like to explore both of the differing views in my project. According to Gottman, any of the three major types of marriages (Validating, in which couples compromise and calmly work out issues; Volatile, in which passionate arguments are the norm; and Conflict-avoiding, in which the couples rarely discuss their problems) can work equally well. 

He went on to mention several couples, each with one of these types of marriages, and he discussed how they got along and their strongly contrasting methods of dealing with conflict. The interesting thing was that each of those couples stayed together many years after he had first interviewed them. Instead, Gottman found that the predictors of marital failure come in the same forms, no matter what type of marriage a couple has. First and foremost is the negative to positive ratio. To have a healthy marriage, the amount of negative interactions and comments must be balanced out with positive affirmation, affection, and kindness. This balance was far greater than what I expected: it must be in a five to one ratio; in other words, couples need to have five times as many positive as negative interactions AT LEAST, because anything less is a strong indicator of impending marital failure.

Gottman also identified what he calls “The Four Horsemen,” or the four signs that communication is getting progressively worse in a marriage. The first horseman is criticism. This shows up when a couple moves from complaints (which actually help the marriage, since they allow husband and wife to discuss any issues they might be having and work them out to their mutual satisfaction rather than holding them in, so nothing ever gets better) to making things personal. The example Gottman uses is that instead of saying “We never go out” a wife might begin to say “You never take me anywhere.” The accusatory use of the word “you” is critical: it indicates that the problem is the husband’s fault, instead of merely being an issue the wife is having.

The next horseman is contempt, which comes riding on the heels of criticism. As a husband and wife begin to criticize each other more and more, what began as a complaint becomes disgust in the behavior of the other person. Each time an argument and a criticism is repeated, this behavior is brought up again and again until it becomes cemented in the husband/wife’s mind that this is a negative personality trait of his/her spouse, and contempt shows up in the form of rolled eyes, curled lips, and failure to listen.

The third horseman is defensiveness. This obviously shows up as a result of criticism and contempt, as both the husband and wife begin to take a defensive attitude to protect themselves from their spouse’s accusations. The problem with defensiveness is that when people are busy protecting themselves from insult or refusing to take blame, they can fail to listen to others. Gottman cites several signs of an overly defensive mode of communication: denying responsibility, making excuses, and cross complaining (or meeting a complaint with a complaint, ignoring what the other person said) . None of these lend themselves particularly well to paying attention and trying to cooperate or compromise, and that is what makes defensiveness so destructive to a relationship.

Finally, the last horseman is stonewalling. This is when one person gets so fed up with the arguments of the other that he/she just shuts down, refusing to respond or show any sign of listening. While this is an extremely negative behavior and can hurt marriage when executed by both men and women, it seems that it is actually worse when the man stonewalls, because a woman has a far more negative, aggressive, and hurt response to being ignored. According to Gottman, stonewalling “conveys disapproval, icy distance, and smugness” and this can lead to a total failure in any attempts at communication, essentially ruining chances of fixing the marriage. 

The most fascinating thing about this for me is that Gottman could see early predictors of these four horsemen in a mere thirty minute conversation between newlyweds. His research is definitely going to have to be included in my senior exit project, and I’m thinking of using a movie or a clip of a theater production of one of Miller’s plays (maybe After the Fall, or maybe a more well known piece of his) and seeing if I can detect any of what Gottman sees in these couples in the actors of the plays. While I know it’s just acting and fiction, I would like to see if the conversations Miller invented based on his life experiences and the emotions he urged his actors to convey are accurate representations of a failing marriage, and if they show any of the traditional conversational patterns Gottman observed.

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.

Beowulf, Cain, and Abel

After reading Beowulf, I was curious about what happened to Cain and Abel once they left the Garden of Eden. Why did Cain kill Abel? What was the mark of Cain exactly? And how in the world did Cain have little demon spawn descendants if he was literally the only man left on Earth…and his mother was the only woman? Part of the reason I was so curious was because I realized that although I have often heard the story of the Garden of Eden and the two brothers who were kicked out because of the sins of their parents, I actually lack a detailed knowledge about them. And so, my research began on a site about folklore and mythology: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html.

From the first website, I found the actual story of Cain and Abel in the book of Genesis. The story was a bit confusing and paradoxical to me, to be honest. The motive behind Cain’s murder of Abel appears to be jealousy and good old sibling rivalry. It seems that it was quite easy to talk directly to God back then, so the two brothers both offered sacrifices to him. Since Cain was a farmer, his sacrifices came from his land. Abel was a shepherd, so he sacrificed animals from his flock. God deems Abel’s sacrifice more worthy for some unknown reason, and that already confused me: after all, shouldn’t the Christian God be fair and kind and just? Both brothers gave what they had to give, but since God preferred meat over corn or vegetables or whatever Cain gave up, he liked Abel better. Nowhere did it say that Cain didn’t do his best or that he selfishly gave less than he could have, just that since all he had to bring were the products of his farming, God had “no respect” for his offering. Cain is understandably disappointed, but God doesn’t seem to get it. He asks Cain what’s wrong with him, and then insults him, saying that if he had done well, he would have been accepted. Now, if the story had mentioned Cain’s sin or what exactly was wrong with his offering or why he didn’t “do well,” I might understand this and see the moral behind it. However, no such information is offered so it seems that God just doesn’t think Cain is good enough for some reason. Then Cain makes his big mistake: he is so angry and jealous over the clear favoritism of God (perhaps the symbolic father figure?) that he decides to kill off Abel. I suppose his logic was that if he was the only brother left, he had to be the favorite, right? Wrong. His plan backfired (of course) when he tried to lie to God (not a good idea to lie to an omniscient being, but Cain doesn’t exactly seem like the sharpest crayon in the box in this story) about Abel’s whereabouts, saying that “he’s not his brother’s keeper.” (This, incidentally, reminded me of the Jodi Picoult novel My Sister’s Keeper…maybe the title came from this, since the protagonist in that story actually is keeping her sister alive, a clear opposite to Cain. Who knows.) Cain fails to admit to his sin and shows no sign of repentance, so the Lord metes out his punishment: the ground will no longer “yield its strength” to Cain, which I assume means he can no longer be a farmer, and he is cursed to be an eternal wanderer, cast out from God’s love and protection. And here Cain makes another major error: as he is going on about how terrible his punishment is (and it does kinda suck) he mentions that at least everyone he finds will kill him. Now, I assume that he meant the first person he finds, because it’s a bit disturbing to think that he could be killed multiple times. Also, I’m not sure why everyone who saw him would instinctively want to kill him. Maybe because no one back then liked homeless people? Which again begs the question: where in the world are all these other people coming from?! I thought it was just Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel? But I guess not, because * spoiler alert * Cain eventually gets married, so there must be someone else out there. Anyway, God decides to deprive Cain from the possible relief of death, giving him the legendary mark of Cain, which apparently makes it so that if anybody kills (or tries to kill, maybe?) Cain, “vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold”. Again, I’m not sure what that means exactly. Maybe that if someone stabs Cain, he will be stabbed seven times as many times as Cain was stabbed? Something like that. Anyway, then comes the really confusing paradoxical part: Cain was supposed to be a wanderer for life, but the Bible passage states that after this meeting with God, he “dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.” Well, that doesn’t quite add up. To dwell means to live in a specific place, and it has synonyms such as reside, inhabit, and remain. Basically, the opposite of wandering infinitely from place to place. Then, because even eternally cursed sinners with the symbol of their mistakes permanently emblazoned on their foreheads must have a happy ending, Cain gets married, has a kid, and builds a city. Once again, not sure how to reconcile the idea of having a family and founding a whole city with a curse of lifelong misfortune and nomadism, but I do know that it would suck to be the only son of the first murderer in all of history. Especially if your descendants are immortalized in literature as crazy killer demons.

 

(This is based on the King James version of the Bible. I’m not sure what the difference is between this and other versions, but maybe it is inaccurate or not complete and that’s why some parts of it were so confusing and morally ambiguous. After this story there are a few others on the website, each from various cultural backgrounds. While Cain kills Abel in all of them, the rest of the story varies hugely: the motive for killing is usually jealousy, but is manifested in different ways: God’s preference of one brother over the other in this story, Cain’s love for Abel’s wife in another, etc, and God’s punishment for Cain also changes or isn’t mentioned at all. I used the Bible story because I thought it was the original one, but it might not be. The different versions could be symbolic of how different cultures interpreted the crime of killing a family member, or it could just show how the story changed or was embellished in its retelling from one place and time to another. The other story which struck me the most was the Turkish version, which was quite short and did not even mention a punishment for Cain’s crime, only the motive: he loved Abel’s wife, who was prettier than the one God assigned to him. It ends by saying “thus because of a woman was the first blood shed upon the ground.” Obviously, the Turkish culture of the time was not exactly a fan of women. This Bible version answered some of my questions, though not all, but I’m sure the other versions would have given me different answers.)

Beginning Brainstorms

I’m not really sure what to do, but I have a few ideas. Mostly, I was thinking of going with option A and using Arthur Miller because his life was supposedly really interesting. If not, maybe read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and talk about insanity. Nothing really appeals to me though and since I’m probably going to spend a ridiculous amount of time on this, I would rather do something that I actually find interesting and that isn’t the same as every other project. I feel like I won’t have enough to say about any of these books or topics, and I wish that the project was more open to interpretation. Or maybe I just haven’t opened myself up to the possibilities yet.

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