The Mystery (Historycal Context)

Historycal Context

The greatest source of Glück’s inspiration derives from personal loss — whether that loss is through death, separation, or divorce. While little is written about the specifics of her own marital problems and eventual break-up, her poetry is filled with tinges of rejection, anger, and bitterness, especially those poems written prior to Vita Nova. Her “new life” apparently did not begin until the late 1990s, but the culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when she first started writing and publishing poetry, saw a softening of the strictness of the expected behavior of the American family and of women in particular.

After the surge in marriages and childbirth following World War II, commonly called the Baby Boom era, society took a turn toward liberation and individual freedom, as opposed to the constraints of settling into a monogamous relationship, raising a family, and living life according to traditional gender roles. The high value placed on personal freedom was aided by a growing U.S. economy and by the fact that women had the opportunity to support themselves instead of being provided for by a husband. The availability of birth control and female emancipation also contributed to women not having to marry and form traditional nuclear family structures. As women became more common in the workforce, many of them gravitated away from the traditional “female jobs” as secretaries, nurses, and grade school teachers and into positions geared more toward business and advancement within a company. As a result, both men and women found themselves more committed to their employers than to each other, and the typical family life of previous decades began to fade. So, too, did the number of people getting married at a young age and the number of couples who remained married. For many, being single again simply seemed more attractive.

Today, approximately one marriage out of two will end in divorce. This has been the trend for the past two decades, making the end of a marriage as common as the beginning of one. The old stigma placed on children of divorced parents is unheard of now since as many kids come from broken homes (or from parents who never married in the first place) as are raised in so-called traditional families. Divorce is common in movies and television shows, including children’s programming, and it has become more accepted in religious sects, even those in which divorcing a spouse was formerly denounced, if not forbidden.

The increase in the divorce rate has also meant an increase in the poverty rate for women. Even women with professional careers suffer financial burdens after divorce settlements that often stipulate no alimony and little child support. Unemployed women or women with low-paying jobs suffer the most. While many divorced women may feel they have been treated unfairly and blame ex-husbands for their economic hardships, the introduction of the no-fault divorce in the 1960s and the more recent fad of signing prenuptial agreements are perhaps the true root of many inequities in settlements.

During the conservative movements in America in the 1980s and in the late 1990s, society experienced a shift back toward old-fashioned family values, and the marriage rate seemed to increase. Numbers can be deceiving, however, because many of those marriages were actually second or third times around for the men and women involved, and the divorce rate for people who remarry is even higher than the rate for first marriages. In other words, the “newlyweds” of the conservative years had already contributed to divorce statistics, and in their new marriages, the cards were stacked against them from the outset. Statistics, of course, can also err on the side of pessimism, and undoubtedly thousands of happily remarried couples would be willing to attest to it.

Not all youthful women during the 1960s and 1970s celebrated their freedom to remain single and pursue a career as well as a variety of personal relationships. Some, like Glück, opted for matrimony and made plans to spend the rest of their lives with one man. And when the poet’s marriage ended sometime around the publication of Meadowlands in 1996, she did not initially respond with newfound strength and a determination to carry on with her life in the best way possible. Like many women and men who endure the break-up of a marriage, she felt lost, betrayed, frustrated, and unneeded, eventually slipping into a state of depression. By the time she wrote the poems for Vita Nova a few years later, average Americans were still divorcing as often as they were marrying, and the number of Internet web sites dedicated to information surviving divorce rivaled the self-help sections of major bookstores. Glück’s recent work indicates that she will survive, too. Marriage and divorce trends will likely continue to seesaw throughout the coming decades, but it is doubtful that American society will ever return to a culture in which broken homes, unwed motherhood, and living single are given much notice, much less frowned upon.