A Marriage Below Zero

English · 5h 45m

By 1889, when A Marriage below Zero appeared, very few English novels had been published that contained even a hint of homoeroticism. The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared the next year, in 1890. It is not, then, surprising that the secret at the heart of Alan Dale’s story dares not speak its name.

Readers, on the other hand, would have been at least dimly aware of the nature of the husband’s secret because of the conventions of fiction, where only details strictly relevant to either texture or plot are mentioned. Real life, on the other hand, is nothing but texture; there is no plot, and therefore details that are later recognized as having been significant are not noticed when they occur. The fast friendship of two men need not be perceived by a naive young woman as the cause of their being shunned by their social peers, but with these matters spotlighted by an author, even before “closet,” “outing,” and “LGBT” had become part of daily speech, any reader must have seen a connection.

The goal of the plot is to lay bare what was then considered an unmentionable, almost inconceivable vice. The plot consists of a gradual peeling away of the veneer masking the husband’s infidelity, with the injured wife remaining one step behind the reader throughout. To appreciate the dramatic irony generated by this process, modern readers, who will be already five steps ahead of the wife, must adjust their powers of insight to see the story from the point of view of the original audience, bearing in mind that some women at that time could be completely ignorant of sexual intercourse itself. Indeed, there is no evidence in the novel that the betrayed wife even knew enough about sex to realize that married couples engaged in any greater intimacy than passionate kissing.

Even when she finds herself on the verge of full knowledge, she does not realize that her husband's condition is a matter of his innate nature rather than simply of behavior, but he does. At this point, the story's interest shifts from wife to husband, and the reader begins to see the entire story from his point of view—as a desperate experiment that has gone tragically awry. (Summary by Thomas A. Copeland)