Nearly 50 members of Syracuse University and the Syracuse community attended ‘Marriage: Does It Really Matter,’ the Syracuse Symposium on marriage yesterday at Syracuse Stage. Following a short continental breakfast and reception in the Sutton Pavilion of the theater, the name-tagged guests took their seats in the dimly lit theater.

‘It takes a hardy group to get up at 9 o’clock,’ said Michael Donald Edwards, head coordinator of the symposium and director of the play, ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’

The symposium resulted from collaboration between Syracuse Stage and the Syracuse University community, a union reflected in the spectrum of panelists consisting of SU professors and local professionals seated on couches placed within the living room set of the play. After the two panel discussions with a different keynote speaker-the first surrounding the topic of the evolution of marriage and the second surrounding the cultural representation of marriage-all of the guests attended the evening performance of Syracuse Stage’s ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’

‘I think it’s really important that we incorporate two aspects of the campus,’ said Simone Lindenfeld, a senior drama major and one of the few students in the audience. ‘We should integrate these resources more.’

The most current cultural debate surrounding marriage centers on President George W. Bush’s push for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

‘It goes straight to the heart of what an American is, this institution of marriage,’ Edwards said.

Through theater and the arts, people can explore, analyze and debate social issues that may or may not seem possible in reality, Edwards said.

Marriage has become a part of normal life, and society has idealized it into a sphere ideally more private than public, said Chancellor Nancy Cantor in her introductory speech. But recent dialogue on the subject has centered around the idea whether the law or religion regulates marriage.

‘Who owns marriage?’ Cantor said. ‘Who gets to be blessed? It depends on the function of marriage. Each place has its own warm and cold spots.’

Stephanie Coontz, renowned scholar on the institution of marriage, delivered the first keynote address, explaining the evolution of marriage from an economic bargain to create in-laws, consolidate wealth and property, form peace treaties or alliances, to an institution that has nothing to do with love or attractiveness.

‘Everyone knows marriage isn’t what it used to be, but an awful lot of us are confused of what marriage used to be,’ said Coontz, a professor at The Evergreen State College in Washington. ‘The luxury of marrying for love not available and not even considered reasonable.’

Many complain of today’s abundance of one-parent families, but, in 18th-century America, the majority of families consisted of one parent as the other usually died within the first 15 years of marriage, Coontz said.

The debated epidemic of divorce also at one time raised no eyebrows. In the first six centuries of its existence, the church permitted divorce, Coontz said. Those in many Native American tribes and in Japan and other nations simply could move their partner’s belongings outside the dwelling or write a three-line letter to divorce him or her. Society also accepted adultery as normal behavior for the majority of history, until the turn of the 19th century, she said.

Divorce also helped to liberate women, allowing them to escape dangerous marriages, she said. Once they became accepted by the church, the suicide rate for women declined by 20 percent, according to Coontz.

The idea of a family in which the man acts the breadwinner rarely existed before the past hundred years, Coontz said. But women who control their own income are, from a historical perspective, unprecedented.

Today many people seem to be seeking alternate forms of relationships, either remaining single or living in cohabitation, or simply get married at a later age.

‘The question is not whether we like these changes for marriage, but how we adapt to them,’ Coontz said. ‘We need to figure out new relationships rather than pretend we could go back to a mythological past.’

Following Coontz’s lecture, Amy Lang, an SU English professor, began the panel discussion which began with questions from panelist Julie Abraham, a professor of seminars at Sarah Lawrence College relating to topic of homosexuality and Virginia Woolf.

Abraham, with Samuel Gorovitz, a philosophy professor at SU, Deidre Neiland, a faculty member from the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the State University of New York-Upstate Medical University, and Sarah Ramsey, a professor in the SU School of Law, began the discussion with questions surrounding the reasons behind the argument against same-sex marriage, what society’s values of marriage should be, and the question of same-sex medical benefits for partners.

After a lunch break, the symposium resumed with keynote speaker Adam Haslett, graduate of Yale Law School and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, who spoke about how marriage has become a tragedy of collective hubris because people have such high ideals of how it should be. It should consist of friendship, love and spiritual and sexual gratification, he said.

Images of romantic love became popular in the 1300s and 1400s through poetry and other media.

‘Love was an illness you should overcome by committing yourself to marriage,’ Haslett said.

Today’s society has marriage in a squeeze, he said. It has an idealist image of marriage, however the idea of individual satisfaction overrules everything, which makes living with eternal compromise more difficult.

Panelist Amy Falker, an advertising professor at SU who works as the key researcher for the Gay and Lesbian Consumer Online Census and online polls with GL Census Partners and Zogby International, began the second discussion describing some of the results from the online poll and how advertisers are beginning to reach out to the gay and lesbian audience. Following the discussion, the panelists again took questions from the audience.

Other panelists, including Peter Moller, a television, radio and film professor at SU, R. Gustav Niebuhr, a New York Times reporter and part-time religion and communications professor at SU, and Paul Whitworth who plays the male lead from the ‘Woolf’ play, raised issues about how the representation of marriage has changed, especially on television, as well as how the play portrays marriage.

‘The end of this play feels like the beginning of marriage,’ Whitworth said, with nods from audience members. ‘But is it possible to portray marriage at all in an artistic way?’

Published on September 19, 2004 at 12:00 pm