Modern Love
When I recently stumbled across a little-known play called The Modern Husband by Henry Fielding (1707-1754), I was curious to find out what in the eighteenth-century made a marriage so characteristically “modern” that it became not only the title of the play but the names of the two main characters. Fielding is now more famous for his novels (along with Samuel Richardson, he is often called the “father” of the English novel), but before he penned his comic masterpieces Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), he was better known as a playwright. The Modern Husband, which premiered at Drury Lane in London on February 14, 1732, is about a fashionable London couple, Mr. and Mrs. Modern, and the rather unorthodox arrangement of their marriage: deep in debt from their high London living, Mr. Modern has made himself a willing cuckold by encouraging his wife to find a wealthy lover, so that he can save face and profit from the gifts she receives as a mistress. Unfortunately, Lord Richly has grown tired of her, and Mr. Modern proposes that he “discover” Mrs. Modern’s infidelity so he can profit by suing Mr. Richly for adultery damages. To save her public reputation as a woman of virtue, Mrs. Modern fixes on another wealthy married man, Mr. Bellamant. As C. B. Woods puts it, Mr. Modern decides to “gild his horns in public by springing the same trap on Bellamant.” But Mr. Modern’s “nefarious traffic in his wife’s dishonor” is revealed and “the demands of poetic justice are satisfied” at the end of the play.
Marriage A-la-Mode by William Hogarth (1743): The Tête à Tête
So what makes Mr. and Mrs. Modern’s marriage “modern”? Samuel Johnson’s dictionary simply defines “modern” as “late; recent; not ancient; not antique.” In the eighteenth century, to be modern was to be new. But in this period, the word “modern” begins to take on negative connotations when the latest fashions—whatever was novel and modish—were seen as a sign of widespread cultural decline. Jonathan Swift lamented the paucity of “modern” writing and wit, in his satire A Tale of A Tub, and moralists, politicians, and critics wrung their hands over what they saw as the decline in English morality and the rise of luxury. The corrupting influence of material consumption was seen as an especially pertinent issue as England continued to expand global trade and as the merchant class became wealthier. The artist William Hogarth, like his friend Fielding, worried especially about the effect of cultural decline on courtship and marriage. His painted series Marriage A-la-Mode (1743) depicts an arranged marriage between a merchant family who want a title and a bankrupt noble family who want the money to continue to support their aristocratic lifestyle. The rest of the paintings in the series chronicle the young couple’s marriage, which quickly crumbles in spite of their material prosperity. While Hogarth’s marriage is not modern per se, it is the current “mode,” which in the eighteenth century was the equivalent of “modern.”
The marriage of the word “modern” with “love” continues to be an unhappy union. I distinctly remember reading for the first time in college the English poet George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), a sonnet sequence about the failure of his marriage. The first sonnet ends with the haunting image of the husband and wife’s “common bed” as a tomb: “Like sculptured effigies they might be seen / Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between; / Each wishing for the sword that severs all.” Not much less depressing is the New York Time’s popular “Modern Love” column, which seems to publish stories that revel in the most labyrinthine twists and turns of the human heart. To celebrate the column’s fifteen-year anniversary, they curated a list of the top hits in the article “25 Modern Love Essays to Read if You Want to Laugh, Cringe, and Cry.” Though the headline indicates a mix of the tragical and comical, the best-ofs are still a veritable graveyard of human confusion and misery. To list just a few from the 25:
One of the more recent Modern Love post’s headline reads: “Love in the Time of Low Expectations: ‘Never count on a man,’ her father had told her. ‘They will always let you down.’ So she didn’t, and they still did.’” In the film industry, the more complex and quietly tragic the love story, the more likely it seems that it will receive accolades for an unflinching vision of real love in the modern world. Among the several critically-acclaimed love stories of the last decade, Her (2013) showed the new complications of romance in a digital age, La La Land (2016) portrayed a couple who broke up to follow their separate professional paths and was hailed as a “thoroughly modern romance,” and NPR declared that the bleakness of Marriage Story (2019) was brilliant: “But the performances are so good and the story is so complex that it is, in the end, startlingly and deeply humane. ‘Who was in the wrong here?’ you might find yourself asking as you get to the end. Neither of them, is the answer, and both of them.”
There’s been plenty of ink spilt in op-eds and studies about the relative merit of what sociologists distinguish as “modern marriage” vs. “traditional marriage,” whether marriage is an outdated institution in the modern world, and whether the modern ideal of romance is actually responsible for greater dissatisfaction in relationships. It’s not that love was never tragic or complex before the modern age—the annals of ancient and medieval love quickly supply the stories of Dido and Aeneas, Abelard and Heloise, even Odysseus and Penelope. But at least as early as Fielding’s The Modern Husband, “modern” romance becomes its own category of romance, a phenomenon that seemed to distinguish depressing-but-interestingly-nuanced-and-sophisticated-romances. Is there something about the conditions of the modern world that have “shipwrecked,” to borrow an image from George Meredith, love in its stormy waters?
While I don’t claim to have an answer to this question, I do think there is an interesting difference between Fielding and Hogarth’s day and our own when it comes to this genealogy of “modern love.” Fielding and Hogarth were, first and foremost, satirists: they unmasked the hidden problems of modern courtship and marriage because there was a standard from which they saw their culture falling short. Mr. and Mrs. Modern’s marriage needs to be chastised because it pretends to marital virtues like loyalty and chastity, while in reality Mr. Modern has covertly prostituted his wife to maintain his aristocratic lifestyle. But in our own day, “modern love” is not exposed to be critiqued so much as it is to become the new ideal. If, as Samuel Johnson once quipped, “second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience,” it would seem that modern marriages are the triumph of experience over hope. To love in the modern world and modern way, it seems, is to accept some amount of disappointment, to embrace and beautify it.
