Marriage
Morris offers a Marxian view of marriage and divorce. Dick and Clara were once married with two children. Then Clara ‘got it in her head she was in love with someone else,’ so she left Dick only to reconcile with him again. Old Hammond informs the reader that there are no courts in Nowhere, no divorce in Nowhere, and furthermore no contractual marriage in Nowhere. When dealing with marriage and divorce Old Hammond explains, ‘You must understand once for all that we have changed these matters; or rather that our way of looking at them has changed…We do not deceive ourselves, indeed, or believe that we can get rid of all the trouble that besets the sexes… but we are not so mad as to pile up degradation on that unhappiness by engaging in sordid squabbles about livelihood and position, and the power of tyrannizing over the children who have been the result of love or lust.' In Nowhere people live in groups of various sizes, as they please, and the nuclear family is not necessary.
Concerning marriage, the people of Nowhere practice monogamy but are free to pursue romantic love because they are not bound by a contractual marriage.
Read more about this topic: News From Nowhere
Famous quotes containing the word marriage:
“the marriage twists, holds firm, a sailor’s knot.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.”
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
“Why don’t you go home to your wife? I’ll tell you what. I’ll go home to your wife and outside of the improvements, you’ll never know the difference. Pull over to the side of the road there and let me see your marriage license.”
—S.J. Perelman, U.S. screenwriter, Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and Norman Z. McLeod. Groucho Marx, Horsefeathers, a wisecrack made to Huxley College’s outgoing president (1932)