Utopian marriage, divorce, and adultery rules

Utopian marriage, divorce, and adultery rules bind marriage to monogamy and make separation subject to public scrutiny. They protect spouses from abandonment in illness and old age, yet impose severe penalties for adultery and even for deliberately attempting it. The rules combine restraint in granting divorce with the possibility of reconciliation, remarriage, and, in the gravest repeated case, execution.

Marriage and the Grounds for Divorce

The Utopians permit neither polygamy nor divorce at will. The Senate of Utopia may dissolve a marriage and allow the injured spouse to marry again when adultery or insufferable perverseness provides grounds. A spouse cannot put away the other against their will because of a great calamity affecting them: abandoning a partner when they most need tender care is regarded as cruelty and treachery, especially in old age, which brings many diseases and is itself treated as a disease.

The account also describes a safeguard before marriage: each prospective spouse is shown naked to the other, presented by a grave member of the same sex. The practice is defended as a precaution against concealing bodily conditions that might profoundly affect married life. The narrator and his companion condemn it as indecent, while the Utopians compare it to the care taken to inspect a horse before purchase and question why a lifelong choice of spouse should be made with less scrutiny.

Separation Under Public Scrutiny

When a married couple cannot live well together, they may mutually agree to separate and seek partners with whom they hope to be happier. Their agreement alone is insufficient: they must obtain permission from the Senate of Utopia. Senators and their wives investigate the reasons for the request, and even a case that satisfies them is handled slowly. The delay is deliberate, reflecting the concern that readily granted permission for new marriages would weaken the kindness between spouses.

Adultery and Its Penalties

Adultery brings severe consequences. If both offenders are married, their marriages are dissolved, and the injured spouses may marry one another or anyone else. The adulterer and adulteress are condemned to slavery. The injured spouse may nevertheless remain with the enslaved partner if affection persists, but must then share the labor assigned to the slave.

Repentance and the continuing kindness of the innocent spouse can lead the Prince to remit the sentence. That mercy has a strict limit: anyone who commits adultery again after being pardoned is punished with death. The rules thus make restoration possible without treating pardon as immunity from the law.

Deliberate Temptation and the Reach of the Law

A person who tempts a married woman to adultery receives punishment no less severe than that imposed on someone who commits adultery. The rule treats a deliberate plan to commit the offense as equal in guilt to its completion; failure to carry it out does not lessen the would-be offender’s culpability. Together with the restrictions on divorce and the Senate’s examination of separations, this provision makes intention as well as conduct a concern of marital law.