Butterfly, the Bride: Essays on Law, Narrative, and the Family

Chapter 2. The Couple

Chapter Two The Couple Marriage is a serious thing in America, not a temporary affair as it often is here. Sharpless, the American consul, in David Belasco, Madame Butterfly Long's Butterfly story can be seen as juxtaposing two institutions ofmarriage, the lifelong Christian marriage of the West, to which Cho-Cho-San adheres (though the Westerner Pinkerton does not) and the temporary marriage of Japan, used for their own purposes by Pinkerton, Yamadori, and the narrator ofMadame Chrysanthemum.1 The legal issues involved, including the conflict oflaws,2 are ofconsiderable complexity. Butterfly marries Pinkerton in a country where a husband who abandoned his wife was taken to have divorced her under traditional customary law. The wife had no corresponding right to divorce her husband) The civil code of1898 introduced afault-based system available to either party. These changes in the marriage law, whatever significance they may have had in real-life Japan, do not show much in the world of Madame Butterfly, Pinkerton, and Yamadori. The legal background provided by Long makes it possible that Pinkerton assumed he was operating under the older legal regime. The accounts offered seem often to describe customary law before 1898. Thus Long writes: "If Pinkerton had told her to go home, even though she had no home to go to, she would have been divorced without more ado."4 Puccini's opera invokes the law of Japan and of the United States. The descriptions of American law come largely from Butterfly, who has presumably been informed (or misinformed) by Pinkerton. She stresses that in America , unlike Japan, one cannot simply tell one's wife to go home. In the United States, she thinks, there is a proceeding involving ajudge and possibly jail. The contrast is between the system ofsequential marriages (represented at its fullest by YamadorO and the system that Butterfly believes to be operative in the United States, in which marriage is for life, although divorce is in 26 BUTTERFLY, THE BRIDE some cases, and with great difficulty, a legal possibility. Butterfly takes this law as controlling her own marriage to the American sailor, Pinkerton. The story by John Luther Long can be read as a comment on the "serial polygamy" that was becoming common in the United States, through the freer divorce law increasingly found in the American statutes. Cho-Cho-San's version ofAmerican divorce law-distorted and in pidgin English5-describes a law where one could not simply walk away from a marriage. Even "jail" was visible in the background. But she is describing an institution under attack-a process that reached its high pointfinally in the twentieth century with no-fault divorce and a revised set ofexpectations ofmarriage. The historical change was one not only in thefacility ofdivorce but in the meaning ofmarriage. This chapter reviews the history of marriage and divorce in America, using women's narratives to illustrate that history. The emphasis falls on the relation between the social institution and state regulation ofit. Ordinary use ofthe term marriage conceals major changes in the social institution ofmarriage that have parallels in changes in the law ofdivorce. Marriage does not mean one thing, and the law's understanding both influences and is influenced by the social meanings. Where an institution is understood (as now, in the United States) to be designed for the private happiness of the couple, it is almost necessary that it be regulated by a system offree and even unilateral divorce. Marriage and Divorce: Doctrines and Understandings The following narratives come from different historical periods. They were produced for different purposes and against different legal backgrounds . This chapter uses them to stress a consonance between the law of the state and the actual social sense of the marital institution. This social sense of marriage is not derived from the narratives used, but is taken from the work of historians. The narratives are used to support the historians' work, providing evidence of a social meaning as well as testimony about an inner meaning.6 Initially, this chapter provides an overview of the law of marriage and divorce together with the present understanding of substantive changes in those institutions. In effect, the narratives are used to illustrate conventional understandings. The narratives are selected and read to support the point-a point implied in historical and social- THE COUPLE science approaches to the history of divorce-that state divorce law is built on a particular...