“Marriage,” writes Devorah Baum, in her incisive and thought-provoking interrogation of the subject, “is a formal relation that could arguably lay claim to being the world’s most enduring and universal.” It’s the plot that drives much of western literature and drama; it is presented to successive generations (especially women) as both the highest goal and a yoke of oppression. It has often been regarded as the most bourgeois and conservative of institutions, while proving flexible enough to accommodate radical reinventions. Why, then, she wonders, has there been so little serious intellectual engagement with the idea of marriage?
Baum herself has tackled the subject before, in a different medium; together with her husband, Josh Appignanesi, she is the co-creator of two films, The New Man and Husband, documentary (mockumentary?) explorations of the dynamic between a contemporary couple committed to a partnership of equals. In these movies, both partners offer what you suspect is an exaggerated version of themselves: Baum the straight woman, Appignanesi the butt of the joke. The point, of course, is that a marriage is unknowable to anyone outside it (and often to the people in it), so that only the couple themselves know where the lines between autofiction, truth and comedy blur in these retellings.
