Søren Kierkegaard had one great love, but he chose to remain single. What he wrote about marriage, and about relationships in general, is shaped by a middle-class conservatism that is hard to find in other subjects and that seems at times inflated if we attend to his own experience. He was engaged to Regine Olsen, he loved her and was loved back with passion, but that love did not thrive. The details of the engagement and of the breakup were not a secret to anyone and breathe out, and inspire, a mood worthy of an ultra-romantic novel: the Wednesday letters from Søren to Regine; the engagement ring with five diamonds (the stunning gray ones) that after the ring was returned was turned into another one, for his own personal use, with the diamonds forming a cross, or Christ’s sacred wounds, if we want to look at it differently; the rosewood cabinet where Kierkegaard stored his works specially bound for Regine; the comings and goings, after the breakup, in the paths they strolled in while engaged; Kierkegaard’s apparent consent regarding Regine’s engagement to her future husband, F. Schlegel; the farewell, with her blessing of him, before Regine’s departure to St. Croix, in the West Indies; and Kierkegaard’s death not six months after that farewell.

The possibility of a marriage to consummate that deep love crumbled due to Kierkegaard’s passion for writing and to his decision of materializing the heterogeneity of his thought. After the breakup, which coincides roughly with his doctorate thesis presentation in October 1841, Kierkegaard set himself into a project of multiple authors which led him to write between 500 and 600 pages a year until 1850, reducing this pace to about half in the last five years of his life. The enterprise (yes, he was a business man, the manufacturer and his own factory of ideas, authors and literary genres, and even bankroller of almost all of his books) was launched quickly and swiftly—between February 1843 and March 1846 sixteen works were published, one in two volumes. This exclusive commitment, along with a frantic production, were obviously unsuited with any other life-style other than celibacy. Actually, we can question how he could have moved forward with an engagement proposition when all this was already breeding in himself. It was not, as it is with fatalism, a case of love being blind and seeing no one knows why. He knew why and always saw clearly. He believed that the writer’s life is not compatible with a marriage life. And, nonetheless, believing what he has written on marriage, he cherished the institution.

In general, his thoughts are favorable to marriage. We can notice a more optimistic perspective, while marked by skepticism, to which I will call the A side, and a B side, more austere, where marriage is taken strictly on an ethical-religious level. The A side clearly accounts for the unsuitability between marriage and writing, most obviously in two moments that stand out for being two of the longest prefaces with diegetic development, one written by Nicolaus Notabene, the pseudonym that authors Prefaces, and another by Hilarius Bogbinder, who is a publisher and takes responsibility for the editing and publishing of Stages in Life’s Way. Marriage is taken on lightly, almost in a cartoonish fashion, but nonetheless symptomatic of a crippling character for any literary aspirations. On the one hand, we have the husbands/authors resigned to their fate and abiding to their spouses’ decisions, and, on the other hand, the wives protecting the marriage bliss, understood and fulfilled in their own way. The B side is mostly taken up by the Judge/B pseudonym in the second part of Either/Or, A Fragment of Life and the second chapter of Stages in Life’s Way, where a middle-class vision of the marriage institution and of marital happiness prevails, built, most clearly in Stages, on the diminishing of the woman’s role.

Let’s look at side A. Nicolaus Notabene confesses his firm and sincere wish to write books. Meeting with his wife’s objection, something he only took notice of after getting married, he commits himself and writes an introductory paragraph that he hopes can change his wife’s mind on him reading it to her. It is in vain; while he reads, she takes the candle up to the page so that her husband’s illusions can be burnt along with the paper. She declares that he belongs to her completely, and, as so, “to be an author when one is a married man (…) is downright unfaithfulness” (Prefaces, 10). Notabene then explains to the reader how, having in mind the harmony and happiness of the couple, he has decided to follow his wife’s prescription and not to write books, dedicating himself exclusively to writing prefaces. Interestingly, this decision marks a three-sided commitment, with aesthetic and ethical validity: to marriage, to his own decision of becoming an author, and to a single genre, the preface. For his part, Hilarius Bogbinder, the happy bookbinder, is already a widower, but the influence of his late wife is so strong that he keeps obeying her in absentia. Hilarius Bogbinder introduces himself as an honest citizen, hardworking, and respectful of his customers; he goes from bookbinder to editor in Stages in Life’s Way, a work that in the midst of all Kierkegaard’s production is, by far, the one which has more pseudonyms, more paratextual elements, and more genre diversity. In the preface "Lectori benevolo!” he explains how the preservation of manuscripts is owed to his late wife, that had previously identified the author has a customer also deceased, and how he believed she kept overseeing the organization and the shop cleaning according to her now widower’s wishes of preserving her memory. That being so, Bogbinder, freeloader, bound in a simple way the pristine handwritten manuscripts, using them as writing exercise books for his son, in what ends up with a cameo by Kierkegaard as a tutor of the boy. The brief lines delineating the dead wife’s character contrast with the successive outlines of the wife, the seduced woman, or the beloved, that come up in the different chapters of Stages and it is in that that the interest of Bogbinder’s late wife as character rests.

Now let us look at side B. The second part of Either/Or consists of two long letters (around 130 pages each) addressed by pseudonym B to pseudonym A, who is the author of the first part, with a clearly revealing title on their subject: “The Esthetic Validity of Marriage” and “The Balance between the Esthetic and the Ethical in the Development of Personality.” The validation of marriage and of its significance for the development of the human being connect most of the Judge’s life fragment and I will limit myself to a small and unavoidably narrow sample. While in A prevail the esthetic ideas, meetings and living practices, in friendship and in love, in B we find the description of an esthetic-ethical life stage of existence open to the religious. B faithfully and with dignity fulfills his professional and familiar duties and the references to his own experience of married life draw pictures of domestic bliss and respect for individual marital roles. The husband should provide for the family’s safety and well-being and separate it from the work life; the wife should look after for the peace and harmony in the family home so that the joy between parents and children can help restore the head of the family’s energy; both should welcome friends. At a certain point, he offers his theory on what distinguishes love from marriage:

The substance in marriage is love (…) Marriage, then, ought not to call forth love; on the contrary, it presupposes it not as something past but as something present. But marriage has an ethical and religious element that love does not have; for this reason, marriage is based on resignation, which love does not have. (35-36, transl. slightly modified)

Even more curious are the Judge/B’s statements about a certain way to live love in an engagement, which seem to justify Kierkegaard’s own engagement breakup:

[The engagement] is a love [elskov] which has no actuality, which merely lives on the sweet pastry of possibility. The relationship does not have the reality of actuality; its movements are devoid of content, and it continually goes on with the same “meaningless, infatuated gestures.” The more irreal the engaged people themselves are, the more even these merely simulated movements cost them in effort and exhaust their strength, the greater the need they will feel to evade the earnest form of marriage. Inasmuch as the engagement as such seems to be devoid of a necessary actuality derived from it, it would indeed be a splendid escape for those who lack the courage for marriage. (35, transl. slightly modified)

The Judge reappears in the second chapter of Stages in Life’s Way, called “Various things on Marriage in Answer to Objections,” this time signing “A Married Man.” The middle-class amenability and enticing friendliness from the letters addressed to A give place to a more pungent and piercing ethos in the expressing of his views, where the generosity regarding the wife’s role presupposes the wife’s submission to her part as a mother and to the defense of the “sacred walls of marriage” (Stages, 179). If the Judge’s goal while B was to convert A to a way of life where he could choose himself and take the paths of commitment, the Judge/husband assumes that that decision has been made, and takes as his goal to write down a eulogy to marriage as the actual realization of an existential dimension solidly anchored in a religious point of view. As a matter of fact, at the conclusion of the chapter, the Judge unconditionally reinforces the religious origin of marriage and condemns any husband who breaks with the principles he had been developing (Stages, 178). But right from the initial paragraph of the introduction to the many things he has to say, the Judge invites the reader to take on a much more relevant journey of discovery for the human being—marriage—, one which he will never regret having taken, undermining the dictum of the opening line of the ecstatic speech from the first part of Either/Or, in which it was established that to marry or not to marry were steps that would always and indifferently lead to regret (Either/Or I, 38). The triumph of such journey of discovery of himself and of the other (the word opdagelsereise also applies to the scientific expedition or to the great nautical discoveries, which presupposes facing the unknown and overcoming obstacles) relies on faith, in God and in marriage, and on the belief that comes from marriage being the right path, in full communion with the wife (Stages, 90-1). It is she that makes sure a husband, a married man (ægtemand) is an authentic man (ægte mand) (Stages, 93), that he can be friend and adviser of the wife, and it is she the guardian of the memory that one day she will hold of him after he has passed away (Stages, 94). In order for his ideas on marriage to become actual, the husband will have to be as a virtuoso who plays a single string (a reference to Paganini’s maddening virtuosity), although he will not play for an audience, but, instead, accompany the daily work of those listening to him (Stages, 95). The conversation between spouses is described as a mutual appropriation of ideas, initially coming from the husband, who yields to the wife the copyright of what it is said in the marriage—she is not just “coauthor,” she is indeed as a “literary firm” (Stages, 96). Surprisingly, the last sentences resume Nicolaus Notabene’s wife’s proclamation—the Judge confesses that the day will come in which he will abandon the quill, because he knows that the fortune presiding the finding of an idea and the happiness stemming out of expressing it in writing fall short of what he knows to await him as a husband (Stages, 183-4).

The abrupt contrast with the opinions on the wife and on seduction put forward by the guests in the banquet which are at the center of the previous chapter, “In Vino Veritas,” and with those in the next chapter, the diary of the pseudonym Quidam, “Guilty?/Not-guilty?,” containing the sorrows and outpourings of a love that has no hope of being materialized, tie up the Judge’s answer to those objecting marriage, not only for what it is said in these chapters, but also for the literary and philosophical feat they accomplish, which overshadow the chapter of the Judge. With particular occurrences in each, what is in discussion is erotic love as a vital power in affirming long-lasting, stable love, subsumed in the word kjerlighed, which is linked to the concept of agape. Another question raised is knowing if, in Kierkegaard’s writings, there is actually a place for love as a vital power of existence, as shared love with happiness for both lovers in the present moment, without being restrained by games of seduction, as in “Diary of the Seducer” or in “In Vino Veritas,” or by suffering, as with characters as Quidam or the pseudonym A Youngman, Constantin Constantius’ interlocutor in Repetition. As a matter of fact, there is not. On two occasions, it is said that the only happy love is the love of recollection (Either/Or I, 41; Repetition, 133). What the reader constantly finds is the mentioning of unsuccessful lovers (Axel and Valborg, Agnete and Triton, Romeo and Juliet, Sarah and Tobit, Abelard and Heloise), and not the literary handling of love stories with happy endings, turning Kierkegaard into a clear supporter avant la lettre of the maxim that unhappiness is the basis for a good story.

The diaries and notebooks are speckled with mentions to Regine, with outpours and some longer reflections on marriage, that, nonetheless, are not completely clear about the obsessive actualization that Kierkegaard wanted to stress between both, including making her his sole heir, something Regine Olsen, at the time already Regine Schlegel, refused. Regine and Søren, while they were both alive, and also while he was kept in the memory he bequeathed her and that she invoked for many years, since she outlived him for over fifty years, end up as another pair of unsuccessful lovers, for whom happiness is only possible within a recollection poetically created.

References:

Fear and Trembling/Repetition, Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong (transl.), Princeton UP, 1983.

Either/Or. A Fragment of Life, Parts I/II, Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong (transl.), Princeton UP, 1987.

Stages in Life’s Way, Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong (transl.), Princeton UP, 1988.

Prefaces, Todd W. Nichol (transl.), Princeton UP, 1997.