Abstract
The English law forbidding divorce prevented Coleridge from achieving the completion to which the songs of women summoned him. Unique in Protestant Europe, this English law was a far more oppressive element in Romantic culture than critics have yet observed. It cast a pall over many unhappily married men and women, demanded the expense of two establishments for separated couples, and gave unusual power to husbands over their wives. At this time of Romantic rebellion against the forces that constricted individual liberty, under the very eyes of reformers, the lives of women worsened, and the shouts of men swelled, “Hear, Hear!” In 1800 the House of Lords held a debate lasting two months, March 21 to May 19, to establish increasingly harsh punishments for aristocratic wives who violated their marriage vows.1 Just a few months after falling in love with a woman not his wife, Coleridge attended the first two weeks of these debates. This chapter shows what the debates revealed about lordly British attitudes toward women, how Coleridge responded in print to these legal realities in the midst of his own emotional turmoil, and how these laws prevented Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson from legalizing their love for each other. It was not his choice to “refuse to divorce his wife,” as even his admirers have suggested, but the law of the land.
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Notes
Molly Lefebure, The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Norton, 1986), pp. 52–53, believes that they were exultantly happy.
Lawrence Stone, The Road to Divorce (Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 26.
Keith Thomas, “The Double Standard,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, 1 (1959), 195–216, cites prostitution, divorce, and the laws related to property of married persons as the chief categories for the exercise of the double standard.
Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) sets this disturbing aspect of Romanticism in a philosophical context of looking at alterity;
Jon-Christian Suggs, Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in African American Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 19–30, uses the words of slaves to describe what it feels like to be property;
Anya Taylor, Coleridge’s Defense of the Human (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), pp. 14–16 and 35–60, sets slavery in the context of Coleridge’s rage at the dehumanization of persons.
Blackstone writes, “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage; or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything; and is therefore called in our law—French, a feme covert, and is said to be under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord, and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture…. For this reason, a man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to convenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself,” in J. W. Ehrlich, Erlich’s Blackstone: Part One, Rights of Persons, Rights of Things (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959), 78–86.
The Essay on Property, ed. H. S. Salt (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. 1890; rept. 1949), pp. 103–104.
Samuel Pyeatt Menefee, Wives for Sale: An Ethnographic Study of British Popular Divorce (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981).
Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women 1450–1550 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 82–87.
A similar degeneration had occurred in classical Athens, where women lost the freedoms that their foremothers had enjoyed in the Archaic period; autonomous persons in the eighth century B.C.E, women in the fifth century were enclosed in their homes, their names not used in public. See Elaine Fantham, Helene Peet Foley, Natalie Boymel Kampen, Sarah B. Pomeroy, and H. A. Shapiro, Women in the Classical World: Image and Text (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 39, 79, 101, 109–112, 113–115.
This unique injunction was, ironically, instituted by Henry VIII, who in fact “never did obtain a divorce.” For a summary of the stages of court appearances in this complex process, see Allen Horstman, “The Origins,” Victorian Divorce (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 1–5.
Dickens saw the burdens of the law against divorce from a husband’s point of view. See Hard Times, chapter 11, “No Way Out,” and see Margaret Simpson, The Companion to Hard Times (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 8–9, 132–138, for his collaboration with Caroline Sheridan Norton on what eventually became the Married Women’s Property Bill in 1857.
Kathleen Coburn, Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from his Published and Unpublished Prose Writings, ed. Coburn, revised (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979; original in 1951), p. 307, saw long ago Coleridge’s enlightened interest in women’s lives, and grouped some of his comments together in pages 303–309.
William Galperin, “Lord and Lady Byron and Mrs. Stowe,” paper at North American Society for Romanticism conference, July 2003, New York.
Andre Maurois, Byron (New York: Ungar, 1930), p. 322. See
Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byrons Wife (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962).
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), cited in
Sense and Sensibility, ed. Beth Lau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), p. 344, declares that “Willoughby’s crime proves after all not to have been rank villainy, but expensive self-indulgence so habitual that he must sacrifice everything, including domestic happiness to it.”
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© 2005 Anya Taylor
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Taylor, A. (2005). Divorce and the Law. In: Erotic Coleridge. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979179_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979179_8
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