Marriage is not for everyone. Many figures throughout history were involved in unconventional marital arrangements.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and painter Georgia O’Keefe had arrangements with their husbands that involved separate living quarters. Eleonor and Franklin D. Roosevelt were known to have a marriage in which each had a lover.
Monogamy apparently is most perculiar to swans who mate for life.
Infidelity and collusion: One of the more intriguing marital arrangements was fostered and encouraged by the poet Emily Dickinson. It seems that her brother Austin, treasurer at Mt. Holyoke, and the highly accomplished Mabel Loomis Todd, wife of a young professor at Mount Holyoke College, fell deeply in love. She was more than 20 years younger.
The affair, which went on for approximately 13 years, infuriated Austin’s wife, Susan. But Mabel’s devoted husband –wanting nothing more than his wife’s happiness — and tenure at the college — also colluded to facilitate the affair between Mabel and Austin. In fact, on nights when he suspected that Austin was there, he would arrive home whistling a tune from the opera Martha to give them fair warning.
A threesome: Mabel’s husband was impressed by Austin. The two gentleman got along so well together that during one of Mabel’s trips to Europe, Austin began thinking of a ménage a trois. He wrote Mabel and said: “I think we three would have no trouble – in a house together -in living as you and I should wish.” (p 180)
This never happened. The affair continued both at the Todd home and at Austin’s family home where Emily and his sister Lavinia helped the couple keep the affair alive.
In love with two men: Mabel declared herself capable of loving two men at once each in a different way. They wrote each other daily and Austin even wrote self- addressed stamped envelopes so that her handwriting would not be recognized. But their affair was known throughout Amherst. Each dreamed that they would outlive their spouses and live happily ever after.
However, the affair cost the good professor his sanity; he died in a mental institution. And Austin died about two years after Mabel challenged Austin “to do something.”
Emily Dickinson’s biographer, the late Professor Emeritus Richard Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, winner of the National Book Award, and former Yale College dean, has said that Emily encouraged the affair. She apparently told a relative that she did so “because I believe in passion.”
Yesterday I wrote about modern day open marriage. Do take a look at the comment from the author of one of the books.
Copyright 2008 Rita Watson