Marriage & Drink & Power

[Terrance]

Bad Habits : Drinking, Smoking,Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual
Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History 

by John C. Burnham

Uxorial Use-Value and Marxist Marriages: Evaluation of Women and
Desire in The Beggar's Opera
by Theoderek Wayne
October 20, 2001
Though set in the underworld of thievery, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera
codifies a set of Marxist sexual politics in which marriage stands as
the great
equalizer of desire and power. An often aphoristic overview of the
traditional
power struggle between men and women frames a world in which marriage
reduces the wooer's desire but raises his power by an equal degree
through
ownership as a husband. This commodity fetishism of the wife spurs, in
turn,
the external desire of potential suitors, restoring equilibrium to the
scales of
eros. I will argue that Macheath's eventual capture (disregarding his
brief
escape and ironically crowd-pleasing twist-ending) stems from the
complications his insatiable desire, at the expense of an all-consuming
greed,
introduces to a capitalistic society based on indirectly equitable
gender
relations.

http://www.classicnote.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/beggars/essays/essay1.html


The women have great power here. A man may promise you something, and,
if
he does not keep his promise, he thinks he is sufficiently excused when
he tells you that his wife did not wish to do it. I told him then that
he was the master, and that in France women do not rule their husbands.
(Father Paul Le Jeune, Jesuit Relations, Vol. 5 p. 181). 

http://www.vix.com/men/patria/leacock.html

"A woman's time of opportunity is short, and if she doesn't seize it, no
one wants to marry her, and she sits watching for omens."

	--Aristophanes,  Lysistrata