Keep a Tender Distance, So We'll Both Be Free

Fates and Furies. Lauren Groff. 2015.

"The legal theory is, that marriage makes the husband and wife one person, and that person is the husband." Lucretia Mott

“You can be my best friend, I can be your right arm. We'll go through a fight or two, no harm, no harm. We'll look not too deep. We'll go not too far. We won't have to give up a thing, we'll stay who wе are. Right?” Stephen Sondheim

“Marriage is a racket.” Mad Men

It makes a certain amount of sense that I would close 2024 and this project with another novel by Lauren Groff, a writer I’ve returned to several times over this past year. In the course of my reading I’ve mulled over numerous questions - mostly to do with why I like certain things from certain books. It’s been Groff’s work that has provoked perhaps my deepest thinking and reflected my deepest worries during this time. 

I finished Fates and Furies just days before giving birth to my daughter, who arrived just before Christmas. This meant that all of 2024 was spent first planning to get pregnant, then (thankfully briefly) trying to get pregnant, and then being pregnant. The future has been on my mind, and womanhood. I’ve asked myself more than once what kind of world I’m giving her, and what kind of life I can reasonably expect her to have in it. Groff’s novels, even personal dramas like this one, tend to ask existential questions. She’s fully conscious that she writes at what sometimes looks more and more like the end of the Anthropocene. Are we leaving behind any kind of world worth living in, and how are women and girls going to live in it in the meantime, are the questions I was left with after each of the novels by her I read this year, including this one.

I wasn’t exactly expecting that. Fates and Furies was initially recommended to me as a more literary Gone Girl, and I only knew that the novel was a portrait of two people in a marriage, first from the husband’s perspective and then from the wife’s. I expected unreliable narrators (another thing that’s cropped up again and again this year, without my really planning for it). There weren’t any, exactly - only two people who only knew what they knew. The knowledge gaps were revealing, but neither character was deliberately evasive or even especially deluded.

Instead, they were two people who told themselves and each other lies in order to live with themselves and each other. Married people do it every day. If Mathilde hides herself from Lotto, it isn’t malicious, though she is devious in her way. She is instead convinced of her own badness, sure that she must lie to keep him and care for him. Lotto, correspondingly, is unable to see all of the help she gives, all of the ways she constructs their life together, except in the most material terms: she cooks, and cleans, and manages their money. He is as foolish as many men who go from being cared for by a mother to being cared for by a wife and never do a load of their own laundry in between.

Neither of them question whether that is what marriage ought to be: one person caring, and another being cared for. They do love each other, certainly. But their marriage has a kind of Victorian element to it that we tell ourselves was left with the Victorians. I kept thinking of the legal theory of coverture, wherein a woman, once married, ceases to be a legal person and is fully subsumed by the legal person of her husband, even more than a child is by their parent. Mathilde and Lotto’s marriage is not this, legally, but every part of the marriage is arranged around the comfort and convenience of one person: Lotto.

I think women can fall into this without meaning to. We’re so used to thinking of ourselves as existing for others; a woman is a thing looked at, used, always serving and rarely served (and usually by other women, if she is). I swore many times I would never be this kind of wife: I wouldn’t manage my husband’s relationships, I wouldn’t preemptively take over any household chores. I wouldn’t run his life for him. I’ve never tried. I can’t do it with parenting, though - it sometimes feels frighteningly impossible to imagine boundaries between yourself and a person grown out of your own body. You lose yourself when you’re a mother. It’s why I could hardly condemn Mathilde’s secret refusal to have children with Lotto, despite the barrier the deception caused between them (and despite my own general satisfaction with motherhood). I was honestly rather proud of her, for that refusal, knowing what parenthood would cost her. Her refusal of it was the only refusal she allowed herself. She lost so much of herself in marriage; surely in motherhood she’d lose whatever was left.

Lotto hardly knows - doesn’t know at all - of the drama and pain that goes on in the background of his life. It was difficult to finish this novel with anything but the conviction that while marriage is a great bargain for men, it’s at best a mixed bag for women (and yes, yes, not all men and not all women). What kind of life did Mathilde have? She had Lotto’s life, and then she was alone. Nobody knew she wrote, not even him. She rewrote his acclaimed plays and he didn’t even notice. When she wrote on her own, hardly anyone noticed at all. It’s not what I would want.

And yet - there is love. I’m loathe to consider straight women as the ultimate victims of patriarchy and patriarchal expectations - generally I think that the women who refuse those expectations get it worse. But the problem of love is one of the trickier ones that feminism has to handle, and feminism hasn’t always handled it ably. Many women - throughout history, most women - live alongside the people who oppress and exploit us, in the greatest intimacy with them. We enjoy sex with them, we tell them of our secret selves, we lie beside them trustingly at night, we give life to more of them, and we love them, and they live off our labor in ways large and small. Is that love? Is that oppression, always? It’s both, I suppose. Like I said, tricky. I finished Groff’s Matrix thinking about many of the same things, and thinking that in contrast to married women the nuns there had it figured out. Maybe if Mathilde had ended up in Marie’s convent she would have been a happier, more fulfilled person. I think it’s likely she’d end up running the place.

And what about Lotto? It’s hard not to feel at least a little sorry for him. He has almost no control of his life, despite it being arranged around his wants and needs. He loves his wife madly but doesn’t really know her, and is never given the chance to know her. There’s something almost Hegelian about their marriage, in that it contains a kind of dialectical master/servant dynamic. The constrained position of the servant ensures a service on which the master quickly becomes dependent, and without which the master cannot live. Lotto is the person in their marriage, but Mathilde is still the doer. She gains control of her life through giving it up; she makes herself indispensable to him and invisible at once. Though I wouldn’t want her life, I wouldn’t want his either. And yet - there is love. That’s not nothing.

These are the things I think about as we leave 2024 behind. I know many of us will leave it with regret and disappointment for all that was lost, and look forward to the new year with fear for whatever’s coming. I feel that fear and disappointment myself. But as I write this, my newborn daughter sleeps next to me - only a week old, and already curious, strong, and strangely patient in a way that astonishes me. I think every day lately of the simple declaration of James Baldwin, perhaps my favorite American writer, when asked if he was in despair about the world: “you can’t tell the children there’s no hope.” He was right; even if you should, even if it’s true, you can’t ever do that. You mustn’t.

Maybe one day we can make marriage, and America, what they never have been yet but yet must be. I’ll leave you again with the words of Lucretia Mott, who would perhaps have called even Mathilde, comparatively, free:

Let woman then go on—not asking as favor, but claiming as right, the removal of all the hindrances to her elevation in the scale of being—let her receive encouragement for the proper cultivation of all her powers, so that she may enter profitably into the active business of life…Then in the marriage union, the independence of the husband and wife will be equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.

Happy new year, and if nothing else may there be more hope and more books in 2025.