Marriage as a lifelong commitment

Marriage as a lifelong commitment is debated at Styles as both an ethical obligation and a constraint on personal freedom. The discussion sets Arthur Hastings’s willingness to favor divorce against John Franklin’s insistence that a chosen spouse remains one’s responsibility until death; Franklin’s devotion to that principle shapes his marriage to Barbara and his unspoken love for Judith, but his reaction to Barbara’s death exposes the distance between marital duty and affection.

The debate at Styles

The subject arises after George Luttrell and Daisy Luttrell appear to be on good terms. Their apparent reconciliation prompts a broader question: whether easier access to divorce makes men and women happier, or whether temporary estrangement, irritation, or a romantic complication may pass and give way to renewed affection. The conversation therefore treats marriage not merely as a formal bond but as a relationship that can change over time, for better or worse.

Arthur Hastings recognizes the irony in how personal experience fails to dictate principle. His own marriage has been exceptionally happy, and he considers himself old-fashioned, yet he supports divorce as a way of cutting losses and beginning again. Sir William Boyd Carrington offers the reverse example: although his marriage was unhappy, he reveres marriage as an indissoluble institution and calls it the foundation of the state. The debate makes the principle’s stakes visible through opposing lives: a happy marriage does not necessarily produce opposition to divorce, and an unhappy one does not necessarily dissolve belief in permanence.

Franklin’s rule of responsibility

John Franklin, despite his identity as a modern scientific thinker, also opposes divorce. To him, the decisive issue is not whether a marriage remains emotionally satisfying but whether a person has accepted responsibility. He describes marriage as a freely entered contract whose obligations must be carried through rather than evaded. Divorce, in his view, leaves loose ends and half-dissolved ties—a disorderly result he calls a mess.

Franklin states his rule in stark terms: “A man chooses his wife. She's his responsibility until she dies - or he does.” The formulation makes death the boundary of the obligation, not the loss of love or the failure of the relationship. Stephen Norton answers with the darkly comic observation, “And sometimes - oh, blessed death, eh?” His interjection gives the ideal of permanence an unsettling edge: the death that ends responsibility may also be welcomed as release.

Marriage, Barbara, and the limits of the ideal

Franklin’s own account of his marriage complicates his absolute principle. He says that he fell in love with Barbara because she was very pretty, married her, and fell out of love again within roughly a year. He describes himself as selfish and pigheaded, and says Barbara had been disappointed because she thought she could influence him. His blunt self-description presents a man who acknowledges his shortcomings without suggesting that recognition has made him more accommodating.

Franklin had refused a job in Africa because leaving Barbara would have made it difficult to maintain the way of life he had undertaken to provide for her. He insists that this decision was financial rather than romantic: he had accepted responsibility for her material support. After her death, he says that her loss was his greatest relief and calls the outcome amazingly lucky for him. Arthur Hastings is revolted by the undisguised nature of this response. Franklin’s actions thus distinguish practical obligation from tenderness: he met a financial responsibility while remaining emotionally estranged, and he does not pretend that Barbara’s death has left him grieving.

Judith and the principle’s unresolved cost

Franklin’s attachment to Judith reveals another consequence of his rule. He is in love with her, and she is deeply and unhappily in love with him, but Franklin’s standards bind him to the wife he chose. His brusqueness and habit of avoiding Judith’s gaze conceal rather than disprove his feelings. Judith believes Arthur Hastings has recognized the truth when he finds her in the rose garden, and her furious response reflects the pain of being met with pity. She later allows him to think that she cares for Major Allerton, using flirtation as a desperate distraction; she knows Allerton’s type, and her relationship with him is amusement and solace, not love.

The marriage principle therefore persists beyond its most obvious test. Franklin’s fidelity is not a sign that his marriage to Barbara remained loving; his own account says otherwise. It is instead a commitment he considers binding despite changed feeling, and it prevents him from pursuing a relationship he and Judith both desire. The debate leaves the principle unsettled rather than resolving it: permanence can express duty and self-command, yet it can also prolong unhappiness and make a new attachment impossible. The tension between contractual responsibility, emotional truth, and the relief that may follow death is what gives the rule its force at Styles.