A Certain Way By V. F. Calverton: The Bankruptcy Of Marriage
1343 Words6 Pages
Marriage, to some people, is a sacred institution that occurs when two people who truly love one another agree to share their lives together. However, marriage wasn’t always like this, and continues to suffer to some degree even in our current age that we live in. While society tends to lean a certain way towards the social construct of failing marriages (either in favor of the man or women) literature shows us that the institution of marriage is something that isn’t favorable to one sex, and that love is a concept that can be unpredictable. While modern society thinks that a man is more prone to be disloyal in terms of marriage compared to the women, the poem ”A Certain Way” disproves this. The poem, published in 1937, tells how a wife listens to her husband going on about the…show more content… This new girl in essence was morally responsible for causing what Calverton refers to as an “Age of Innocence” (724) to die. What directly relates to this Age of Innocence dying is that the “old sanctity of marriage” (724) was so violated that there was a sudden increase in divorces per marriage. As the title suggests, Calverton refers to a certain bankruptcy of marriage that “is the very antithesis of the binding contract upon which marriage has been founded” (725). Moreover, the fact that this article was written in 1928 does make the case that times might have changed (as there was a World War that may have spurned this fluctuation in divorces), but that doesn’t mean that wives/husbands are less likely to cheat in modern society as marriages tend to be fail on terms of commitment. We see this in both contemporary society and literature, presenting the conclusion that the institution of marriages has been in a state of distress ever since the early