Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
And then, as I got a bit older and started reading things that were more literary, two things stuck in my mind. One was A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, which I helped dramatize in high school when I was about 15. And the other was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which I discovered at about the same age. And what those two plays have in common is their very dark view of marriage. Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf is all about a deeply dysfunctional, co-dependent marriage. The marriage of both couples that feature in the play is obsessive, destructive: they can’t escape except by liquor or by playing these insane games. A Doll’s House is not quite as dark. The notion is that a marriage is anti-feminist. That this woman, Nora, becomes free when she leaves her marriage, that leaving it is a statement of liberation. And in the 1970’s that made an immense amount of sense to me.
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Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for the National Journal and contributing editor for The Atlantic, as well as a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington D.C.. He is the author of Gay Marriage: Why It is Good For Gays, Good for Straights and Good for America, though most recently has been advocating a compromise solution that would stop short of wedded bliss for gays.
