I was watching a Marx Brothers movie the other day, when I heard the following:
Having been involved in the debates around here regarding the current marriage problem, I was curious about what might have been threatening the institution seven decades ago.
All I could come up with was Jung’s essay Woman in Europe(1927):
That, and a reference to an article in the Chicago Tribune in 1927 publishing an article that claimed that marriage would be kaput in 50 years.
Can anyone give me an idea of what the issues central to the marriage problem were, in the context of the times? It was apparently a common subject of discussion; why is it we’ve forgotten this threat now, decades later?
I also found this poem excerpt, which seems to fit nicely. It’s by Helen Rhoda Hoopes, published in 1927.
A quick bump, in the hopes that someone out there can clear this up for me. What was the marriage problem? What were the causes? What were they afraid was going to happen?
Speaking totally in my capacity as a doctoral history candidate, I believe that Groucho’s statement on “the marriage problem” was…a joke. Disparaging references to the institution of marriage were common in slapstick/screwball comedy of the era. (Another good example is from a Three Stooges skit in which Curly is pretending to be a barber, and asks his “customer,” “So, are you married or happy?”)
All I think that’s happening here is that Groucho is likening being married to an annoying problem like a traffic jam. I don’t think Groucho is calling marriage a problem, but rather an undesireable situation to find oneself in, much like the old line “Marriage isn’t a word, it’s a sentence.” Having been in a spectacularly failed marriage myself, I see where he’s coming from.
Speaking totally in my capacity as someone who has actually read some history, the “marriage problem” was one of the hottest topics to come out of the freedoms that women were demanding in the Roaring 20s, as major a controversy as gay marriage is today.
The book drew responses both serious (I am against Companionate Marriage.) and comic, as when humorist Corey Ford, wrote one of his John Riddell parodies, “Comparative Marriage” in the pages of Vanity Fair.
Animal Crackers was a 1928 play and was as filled with gags based on contemporary references as any episode as SNL.
Can we please save history from the history professors?
Aw, come on, even us history folks can appreciate that throwaway lines in slapstick comedies don’t always have deep meanings. Sure, it could have been referring to the feminist movement, and could have been touching on the sociological changes in American society. Or, it could have been just a gag.
Considering the track record of SNL in recent years, that may not be a good thing. But you could say the same thing about a Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movie, to some extent.
Really, there’s just not enough context here to say. Groucho did go in for political and social satire, true, but who knows if he was doing that here? It really strikes me as a throwaway line, but you could well be right, Harpo Marx-as-transliterated-into-Cyrillic.
BTW, I say I’m a doctoral history student as somewhat of a joke: there is absolutely no danger of me ever becoming a history professor. Future history students should breathe a sigh of relief.
Thanks, Exapno Mapcase. There’s a ton of references out there for “companionate marriage” which explain the situation beautifully. That was the piece of the jigsaw that I was missing.
Duke, the idea that it was a throwaway line was dispelled, for me, by my discovery of the poem quoted in my OP. The author listed a series of issues that gripped the newspapers of the day, such as the trial of James Branch Cabell over indecency in Jurgen, and listed the marriage problem among them. That’s how I figured out that Groucho’s line was a clue to a domestic issue that, while it raged in its time, was all but forgotten now.
It certainly does give one a sense of perspective, doesn’t it?
The poem is called “Winter Twilight on the Victory Highway”, and it contrasts the lively and vibrant life of the country home against the self-important and pompous sterility of the big city. The rest of the stanza you quote:
I wouldn’t say the controversy over it is either dead or forgotten. Indeed, I’ve seen various anti-gay-marriage types lambast it (even if they don’t know what the term means) as an “invalid” marriage as well. (Don’t want to pull this into GD, but I don’t think they’re any more right there either.)
In apology for getting this one so messed up, I put my feeble research skills to finding this review of Animal Crackers which discusses this very issue. It includes this section of dialogue, which I suppose will put my comment about it being a “throwaway line” to bed forever:
Duke, you don’t seriously belong to the group of people who thought that Groucho made up his lines, do you? Animal Crackers was written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, two of the leading social satirists of the decade. No matter how many ad libs Groucho would throw in, the play’s script was firmly set in place from the very beginning.
And full of current references, as noted in this Percy Hammond review of the play:
Not all of these lines were carried over into the movie script, but many of them were. The “Strange Interlude” parody is the oddest. While all the insider Broadway audiences would have been familiar with O’Neill’s technique of having the actor break character and talk directly to the audience, the movie of Animal Crackers made it to the screen several years before the movie of Strange Interlude did. So only a tiny percentage of cognoscenti would get that joke.
But everyone in the country would have heard of the controversy over companionate marriage.
Studying American humor over the last century gives one a surprisingly intimate look at the country’s concerns from moment to moment. Buddy, I gots all the context I want, right here.
Preview Post Interlude: the above was written before I saw your last post, Duke. An apology with research: that’s the Doper way.
