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Marriage is Prison
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A Review of Margaret Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage by Stephan R. Toms Margaret Drabble, like her sister A. S. Byatt (author of Possession), deals frequently with the theme of women who are trapped in marriages that prevent them from pursuing their own dreams and goals. The title of this novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, is taken from a play, The White Devil (1612) by John Webster: “’Tis just like a summer bird-cage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.” Though Webster’s quotation is not about marriage, Drabble uses it to describe how women feel about the confining nature of marriage. In the view of some, many women are anxious to get married, not realizing that it is a cage that will deny them freedom. Though the cage may seem to offer security and comfort, women do not realize that marriage may become a prison. Those who are in such marriages are just as anxious to get out of the cage as they were to get inside it.
This novel’s two main characters are sisters: Louise, who is a beautiful woman frequently on the cover of gossip magazines, and Sarah, an Oxford graduate trying to decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life. Suddenly, Louise announces that she is going to marry Stephen Halifax, a well-known novelist. The marriage shocks most people since Stephen and Louise are such opposites. Some people know that if Louise has a real love, it is for an actor, John Connell. One of the questions that runs throughout the book is why Louise married Stephen. The marriage becomes an allegory of the wrong motivations that lead people to marriage, and why some people might choose a single life. Everyone has the feeling that Louise’s marriage to Stephen is a farce, and the novel reveals why the marriage is a sham. This novel was published in 1963 when women were beginning to have more career and educational opportunities. Sarah thinks, “The days are over, thank God, when a woman justifies her existence by marrying. At least that is true until she has children” (74). Though women have a little more freedom, Drabble is still writing at a time when it seemed that women had to decide between family and career, an issue that is still problematic forty years after the publication of this novel. Drabble’s novel was at the forefront of a movement that led to women trying to juggle more than one vocation in life. Sarah is a progressive young woman of the 60s who intends to have it all, to “have one’s cake and eat it” (60). Later, however, she comes to the conclusion that this goal is unattainable: “ …I learned myself how difficult it was to get anything, let alone the everything that is showered on one in garlands and blossoming armfuls until one faces the outside world” (61).
The symbol of a woman trapped in a cage occurs frequently in this novel. On the eve of Louise’s marriage, Sarah finds her awake late at night “walking backwards and forwards, like an animal in a small cage trying to take exercise” (22). Sarah’s roommate, Gill, describes a party as “an utterly sick-making drunken orgy, with foreign girls and models with their hair done up over bird-cages” (77). Women’s actions, clothing, and even hairstyles point to the strictures society has placed on the roles of women. There may be some autobiographical inspiration in this novel. The mother of Margaret Drabble and A. S. Byatt appears to have been a woman who was frustrated because of the opportunities that were denied her after her marriage. She was determined that Margaret and Antonia (A. S.) would go to Cambridge. A. S. Byatt’s marriage also seemed to be one that, temporarily at least, caused some problems in the pursuit of her career as a novelist. In A Summer Bird-Cage, Louise and Sarah’s mother is a woman who has given up everything to be a wife and mother. One evening, after Sarah has been thinking about her parents’ marriage, she says that she “went to bed feeling sick with myself and sick with the whole idea of marriage” (21). Sarah’s ambivalent feelings about marriage are the theme of the book. Sarah’s fears of marriage are summed up in her thoughts:
I looked at myself in fascination, thinking how unfair it was, to be born with so little defence, like a soft snail without a shell. Men are all right, they are defined and enclosed, but we in order to live must be open and raw to all comers. What happens otherwise is worse than what happens normally, the embroidery and the children and the sagging mind. I felt doomed to defeat. I felt all women were doomed. Louise thought she wasn’t but she was. It would beat her in the end…. I can get very bitter about this subject with very little encouragement….” (28-9).
At times, Sarah reaches a state of despair when she tries to imagine a life where people could be free. She thinks to herself: “I would like people to be free, and bound together not by need but by love. But isn’t so, it can’t be so” (31). The issue of freedom is important to Sarah. Even a dress she wears becomes a symbol of her desire for freedom: “It was a wonderful and exhilarating dress to wear because it left me complete freedom of movement: it had no belt to sever my legs from the movement of my shoulder, it didn’t mould or make me any way, it just met me where I went out to meet it, with a casual friendliness. It was a perfect garment to feel happy in” (81). For Sarah, the societal structures, especially marriage, try to mould one to fit a pre-ordained pattern. In a discussion about liberty, her friend Stephanie tells Sarah that magazines such as Vogue are instruments of capitalist pressure to make her buy things she doesn’t want. When Sarah replies that she is still free not to buy them, Stephanie retorts that Sarah is “not free not to want them” (86). It seems that society puts pressure on us to fit the norm. As Sarah sees it, it is true that we are free not to marry, but because we have been programmed in such a way, it is not possible for us not to want to marry, though marriage may not be the best thing for us. Sarah believes that the forces of society and nature are too powerful for us to use our will-power to overcome them: “I am vaguely aware of a hinterland of non-personal action, where the pulls of sex and blood and society seem to drag me into unwilled motion, where the race takes over and the individual either loses himself in joy or left helplessly self-regarding and appalled” (71). As Sarah thinks about Louise’s marriage and the possibility of her own, she fits into the category of the “appalled.”
The characters in A Summer Bird-Cage represent the attempts of a post-Christian culture to change marriage into something other than a Biblical view. The older purposes of marriage, such as mutual help, pro-creation, and symbolizing the mystical union between Christ and his church, have been discarded. Sarah admires a woman who can “force marriage into a mould of one’s own, while still preserving the name of marriage” (180). For some time, with dubious results, we have been attempting to force marriage into a new mould, while still calling it marriage. One of the difficulties is that marriage has been divorced from God. Sarah, speaking of Louise’s husband, Stephen, says: “Oh well…I suppose you can say this for Anglicanism, that at least it’s rich and respectable. I can’t see Stephen believing in anything ridiculous like God. He chooses to believe in something good, solid, and social, like the sacrament of marriage instead” (141). This statement sums up the modern attitude toward marriage. When belief in God became “ridiculous,” people didn’t want to give up some of the good things that came along with the Christian faith, such as viewing marriage as sacred. Trying to hold on to the sanctity of marriage without a belief in God has proved to be difficult, as American and European cultures have discovered. Finally, the idea of marriage being sacred or a sacrament was discarded as well. Without the God and the Church, the last trappings of the traditional marriage were gradually abandoned. There was nothing left to do but find a new mould, but the mould is based on the personal opinions of the individual. As our society struggles to redefine marriage, we can see that this struggle has its roots in the abandonment of the Christian concept of marriage. For many, traditional, Christian marriage is a bird-cage for women. In the American quest for absolute freedom, we have tried to have our cake and eat it too as far as marriage is concerned. In our pursuit of personal freedom and self-centered goals, we have thrown away, not only God’s mould, but all moulds. The instability of the Western family has been the result.
Copyright © 2004 by Stephan R. Toms
