The History Of Sexuality - Volume 3 by Michel Foucault

Author:Michel Foucault
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0394741550
Publisher: Vintage (November 28, 1988)
Published: 2010-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

The History Of Sexuality - Volume 3

PART FIVE The Wife

The great classical texts that dealt with the question of marriage-Xenophon's Oeconomicus, Plato's Republic and Laws, Aristotle's Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, the Aris totelian Economics-inscribed their reflection on marital rela tions within a broad context: the city, with the laws or customs necessary to its survival and its prosperity; the household, with the organization that made possible its maintenance or enrichment. From this subordination of marriage to civic or familial utilities one should not infer that marriage itself was considered an unimportant tie that had no value other than that of producing descendants for the benefit of families and states. We have seen how demanding were the precepts that Xenophon, Isocrates, Plato, or Aristotle imposed on spouses so that they might conduct themselves properly in marriage; the privilege to which the wife was entitled, the justice owed to her, the care taken to set an example for her, to train her: all this would suggest a mode of relations that went far beyond \ generative functions alone. But marriage required a particular style of conduct, especially insofar as the married man was the head of the family, an honorable citizen, or a man who aspired to exercise over others an authority that was both political and moral; and in this art of being married it was the requisite self-mastery that was expected to give its particular form to the behavior of the reasonable, moderate, and just man. The ethics of matrimonial behavior appears in a rather 147

148 The Care of the Self different light in a series of texts that spread out from the first two centuries B.C. to the second century of our era, over the length of that period in which one notes a certain change in the practice of marriage. We thus have the Peri gamou by Antipater, the Latin translation of a Greek text that was for a long time held to be the last part of the Economics attributed to Aristotle, the different passages Musonius devotes to mar riage, the Marriage Precepts by Plutarch and his Dialogue on Love, the treatise on marriage by Hierocles, without counting the indications that one can find in Seneca, Epictetus, and certain Pythagorean texts. I Must it be said that marriage became a more insistent and more often debated question than in the past? Should one suppose that the choice of the matrimonial life and the way one was expected to conduct oneself in it occasioned in this period more apprehension and that they were more carefully problematized? It is doubtless not possible to give an answer in quantitative terms. It does seem, however, that the art of leading the married life was considered and defined in several important texts in a relatively new way. The first change appears to consist in the fact that the art of matrimonial existence, while continuing to be concerned with the house hold, its management, the birth and procreation of children, places an increasing

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