Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era by Clare Virginia Eby (review)

Clare Virginia Eby’s new book is a welcome intervention into literary studies of the Progressive Era: her analysis of what she terms “the Progressive marital ideal,” as practiced with varying levels of success by Upton and Meta Fuller Sinclair, Theodore and Sara White Dreiser, and Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood, provides an enriched, interdisciplinary portrait of the more famous members of this group. Eby situates writers in relationships, constructing comparisons with partners’ work and—more to the point— suggesting the ways that unconventional marriages were important to both the realist and the Progressive projects.

The author begins by sketching an analysis of the artistic, cultural, and political significance of the era’s radical examinations of sexual and romantic intimacy. In chapter two, one of the two most effective sections— the other is the final chapter, on the Boyce/Hapgood relationship—Eby explains the influence of the period’s sexological and feminist debates, thereby rendering comprehensible the simultaneously revolutionary and reactionary elements of “the Progressive marital ideal.” These lovers believed that egalitarian marriage was a first step towards reforming society, but nineteenth-century notions of gender informed their ideas about public and private life. In chapter five, she uses Boyce and Hapgood to illustrate the practical and artistic challenges that resulted from this conflict; in this well-edited section, Eby examines the couple’s respective work as collaborative, and offers several instructive readings.

Interdisciplinarity—the book’s great strength—is also its weakness. This didn’t at all need to be the case: Eby’s engagements with psychology and legal history, for example, are frustratingly spotty and incomplete. Her rapid-fire review of the cultural history of marriage, in the aptly-named chapter two (“A Telescoped History of Marriage and the Progressive Era Debate”) rushes from St. Paul, to the Council of Trent, to Elizabeth Cady Stanton in two pages. This would perhaps be less egregious if other sections of the book didn’t seem underedited; chapter three, on the Sinclairs, often reads like an uncritical defense of Meta Fuller Sinclair’s version of the couple’s split. Even the close comparison of Upton’s Love’s Pilgrimage and Meta’s unpublished “Corydon and Thrysis” provides little substantive insight. We needed a real engagement with Fuller Sinclair’s work here, rather than extended reviews of public coverage of the divorce, with which most scholarly readers already will be familiar; in these sections, Eby seems simply to reiterate fantasies of the emasculated cuckold that so colored contemporary journalistic depictions. More analysis, as well as critical distance, was needed here. As an interdisciplinary scholar, why not engage with masculinity studies, as just one possible example? The chapter on the Dreisers is a bit more thorough. Again, though, the promise that new insights will result from a close comparison of the 1911 and 1915 versions of The “Genius” is underrealized; Eby doesn’t offer much more than the one-sided judgment that Dreiser was both a jerk and a revisionist. Similarly, the book’s epilogue interestingly includes the suggestion that “the rhetorical terms dominating debates on gay marriage . . . were established in the Progressive era debate.” Unfortunately, Eby’s sources on our own period’s particular conflict surrounding marriage are out-of-date and fail to examine the range of even the LBGTQ community’s discussion—the author is uncritical of the idea that “gay marriage” is the queer issue of our times. Even a brief paragraph, with half-a-dozen references footnoted, would have provided necessary context and pointed towards some of the questions of race, class, and political direction that frame this conversation away from the headlines. In short, the author’s compelling approach to her subject matter deserves better editing and a more fully-realized scholarly framework. As an original project this book merits reading—but critically.