Mrs. Maisel's Marriage Critique: Turning Tropes on Their Tuchus

This paper was delivered at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference at the Sheraton Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts on March 7, 2024.  It is a first draft and part of a much larger project.

Introduction
 
We love romance.  We love it on a structural level, as married couples are given privilege in laws and policies throughout the world.  We love it on a spiritual principal, as marriage and other forms of coupling are often referred to as “holy unions.”  We also love it on our popular culture consumption.  Movies and television series often end with characters coupling up.  Examples that have nearly every character romantically linked include The Big Bang Theory, Friends, and Sex and the City.  Three concepts are exemplified in these representations: 1) singlism, the stereotyping and stigma around people who are not married or otherwise unpartnered (DePaulo, 2005); 2) matrimania, the societal obsession around marriage (DePaulo, 2007); and 3) amatonormativity, the assumption that a romantic union must be placed at the center of one’s live, above all other familial and platonic relationships (Brake, 2012). 

It makes sense that movies and television shows would propagate messages that contain those three elements; many creators are in marital unions, and the general viewing public believes that marriage (or at least coupling) is the key to happiness.  So naturally, they would want the media they consume to reflect those beliefs, and in many cases, provide an escapist ideal for which viewers can hope in their own lives.  The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a show that challenges these ideas and represents a form of liberatory activism.  Set in the 1950s, it stars Rachel Brosnahan as Miriam (Midge) Maisel, a Jewish housewife who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  In the series pilot, her husband, Joel, tells her he wants a divorce and he reveals he’s been in an affair with his secretary.  When she tells her parents, they blame her for the divorce.  “You need a husband, your kids need a father,” her father, Abe, says.  “Do what you have to do to get him back!”

Joel had been attempting to start a career as a stand-up comedian, performing at a small club called The Gaslight.  He appears talented, but it is revealed he’s been plagiarizing jokes from other comedians.  After Joel’s announcement, Midge is in a Dark Night of the Soul moment.  She gets drunk and wanders into the Gaslight, where she had been a patron, supporting Joel in his comedy endeavors.  Distraught and despondent over her situation, she walks up on stage and starts talking about her life and divorce.  The audience interprets it as an impromptu comedy act and loves it.

Midge’s act also attracts the attention of Suzie, the club’s manager, who sees true comedy potential in Midge and offers to coach her.  This begins Midge’s arc from dutiful housewife to famed comedian and independent woman.  This essay will argue that: 1) Midge is also a Single Person at Heart, a term Bella DePaulo coined to refer to people who live their best lives while they are single, even though she may not recognize her orientation (2023); 2) while singlist and matrimanical comments pervade the show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ultimately offers a pro-singlehood narrative, contrary to the messages of most TV shows; and 3) the hatred toward Midge by popular culture writers stems from systemic amatonormativity, which manifests in their lack of acceptance toward her newfound orientation as a single-at-heart person.

Midge’s Growing Independence/Midge as a Single at Heart
 
As the series begins, we see that outwardly, Midge is living a traditional life as a housewife and mother, subject to the gender and matrimanical norms of the 1950s.  Such norms are intersectional with the “colonial gaze,” as Western women existed in relation of subordination to men.  However, her independence starts in the show’s pilot, as she’s influenced by Suzie, who bails her out of jail for an indecency charge, as she bared her breasts onstage.  In telling her she has a gift for comedy, she says, “If you’re still upset about your husband, don’t be.  He’s a fraud and a loser.”  The implication in her blunt statement is that comedy is a much more worthy pursuit for her than romance.  When Midge questions Susie’s position, her response is “I don’t mind being alone.  I just do want to be insignificant.  I want to remembered as something other than a housewife and mother.”  These words function as a theme throughout the entire series, as Midge forgoes the roles of wife and mother to pursue her passion.  On a societal level, they questioned the norms of female roles in that time period, when it was much more common for women to fill the roles of “wife” and “mother” while excluding all other identities.

While under Suzie’s tutleage, Midge learns the ropes of the stand-up comedy world, such as timing her jokes, responding to hecklers, trusting her instincts, and even having a “weird ask,” a quirky request that’s outside the norm, in order to enhance her credibility.  Hers is yellow teddy bears.  However, she learns a great deal more.

One theme in the show is Midge’s growing independence, which runs parallel to a narrative that Midge is finding her way as a comedian during a time period when women generally did not engage in stand-up comedy, and when they did, they had a persona (i.e., Sophie Lennon’s frumpy Queens housewife and Moms Maibley’s toothless old lady).  In contrast to this gaze, Midge is finding a style that is based in storytelling and observation, which succeeds in decolonializing expectations of the female comic.  The opening scene of the series’ second episode has her walking around downtown Manhattan, a far cry from her ritzy Upper West Side life.  She appears dazed and confused as she observes a person urinating on the street, another randomly dumping water out the window, and a dog barking.  She doesn’t know about the current events of her time, such as the Civil Rights Movement, Jim Crow, Ethel & Julius Rosenberg, and the Red Scare.  She also appears to have trouble understanding courtroom etiquette, as she argues with the judge about the double standards men and women are held to.  While such gender disparities are valid and a theme in the show, she doesn’t appear to understand that the judge and court are the authorities in this situation.  When she travels for a gig with Suzie, she also doesn’t understand that in most hotels, there is no bellhop to carry your bags; you do that yourself.  “I’m open to trying new things,” Midge says upon learning this fact.

Midge’s street savvy and worldliness grows as the series progresses, as she grows in her role as a “single at heart.”  Early in the series, she observes a group of activists in Washington Square Park to prevent the building of a nearby road.  She speaks into a megaphone and even gives advice to the organizer.  Later on, she gets her first job, working the makeup counter at a department store.  This feature of Midge’s new life as a single female is intersectional with feminism in that “expenses associated with the consumerist lifestyle forced many middle-class married women into work outside the home, a situation that was compounded by their desire to keep up with the “Happy Housewife” ideal prevalent in popular culture during that time (Kearney, 2012, pg. 5).  While on tour with famed singer Shy Baldwin, she befriends one of Shy’s musicians and learns about how to determine whether a guy is worth having a one-night stand with.  “If his place is dirty, what is the rest of his body like?” is the advice she receives.  She heeds this advice and forgoes sleeping with Lenny Bruce, as he lives in a hotel, at least for the moment.

In the final season, she acquires a job at NBC, writing for The Gordon Ford Show.  The fact that Gordon, a married man, repeatedly tries to sleep with her is a commentary on how, while marriage has a place of privilege in the abstract, many people don’t necessarily take that union seriously in practice, particularly during that time period.  While she initially struggles for respect among the all-male staff, her writing eventually makes her “one of the gang.”  In the final episode, she’s allowed to appear on the show, despite the tradition that writers do not perform on it.  When she’s told she’ll mostly be talking with Gordon about her role as a writer rather than performing her comedy act, as she was promised, she disrupts the tradition by taking the stage and giving her act, which delights the audience and even impresses Ford, despite the fact that he promptly fires her.  This night propels her to stardom.  

Midge’s Independence and Gender Roles
 
Despite Midge’s apparent naivete and dependence on men, she may just be a single at heart.  When Midge’s despondent mother, Rose, talks to Trina, her fortune teller about Rose’s divorce, Trina responds, “She’s always been her own girl.”  After getting dropped from Shy Baldwin’s tour, Midge takes a job as an emcee at the Walford, a strip club, warming up the audience with jokes before the main acts.  Backstage, she crusades for better working conditions, including preventing the club’s male manager from entering the women’s dressing room unannounced.  She also inspires the people around her to live their most authentic lives, married or single.  Once again, this authenticity in living a single life is intersectional with feminism in Midge’s finding of relatve independence by working outside the home.

According to Brown (2012), “feminine discourse” implies acknowledgement of women’s subordination often expressed in parodic form by making fun of dominant culture (37).  In this case, this parody extends to married life as the dominant culture, as matrimaniacal comments and actions are expressed in a caricaturistic fashion by some of the characters, even though they may not be aware of the challenges of their own married lives.  One such example includes Joel’s mother Shirley attempting to set him up with a woman who’s nine months pregnant; she tells him, “You need companionship, smeone to be with, a good woman makes a good man, where would your father be without me?”  When Joel looks askance, Shirley says, “Don’t start.”

Why the Hatred Toward Midge?
 
Hatred of female television characters is a popular pasttime among some televsion fanatics.  The “I Hate Brenda” anti-fan club launched in the height of Beverly Hills, 90210’s popularity (Amatangelo, 2020).  Skyler White garnered much hatred among Breaking Bad fans for being a “bully” toward her developing drug kingpin husband (Lynch, Doll, Gooding-Nieves, Patton & Loughlin, 2023). 
Similarly, Midge Maisel is unpopular among much of the show’s fanbase for her choices.  One blogger from Writing Without Rules: Deep Dives called Midge “a terrible person.  She selfishly puts her own needs ahead of everyone else, largely ignores her own children, and lies pretty constantly.”  While most people would not condone a person doing those things, we must consider that the matrimaniacal norms of the time period forced Midge into the role of “wife” and “mother.”  And when one takes on those roles, they buy into a system with its own rules.  Midge broke  those rules to pursue her authentic life.  One might question whether she is single at heart due to the fact that she married four times after Joel.  Before one of her weddings, Midge has this exchange with Suzie, in which she says “I don’t love him,” to which Suzie responds, “You didn’t love the last guy either, that didn’t stop you.”  Simply put, Midge is a single person at heart born in the wrong time period, a period where marriage was more compulsory than it is today.  Therefore, she is compelled to marry, even though it isn’t her authentic way of living.

This reading of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in terms of its position as a form of liberatory activism may not reflect the interpretations of average viewers nor of other media scholars and critics.  Society, particularly the media consumed by it, is not built toward singlehood, especially those who are engaged in happy singlehood.  Bella DePaulo’s recent book, Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life, interviewed people who live their best lives as singletons.  One writer, unprovoked, wrote the following message, cited in her book:

Hi Bella,
 
Just want to let you know that single people are inferior in every way.  They’re worthless, useless, lazy, and stupid.  Ther’s nothing I hate like single people.  Anyone single is completely defective, otherwise someone would love them.

Now, Bella, I know you found some micro/macro agressions there, but I want you to use all of your Harvard skills to understand it’s entirely your fault.  You’re single, therefore you suck.

You suck because you’re single.  Say it out loud.  You are nothing.  Worthless.
 
When the book was released, Bella received a lot of fan mail from people who felt the
messsage spoke to them, but there was one complaint:
 
Obviously you did not interview me.  I am 68 years single and am a poster boy for the conventional thinkers.
 
I wanted to be married, have children and grandchildren.  And even if you are married, you can enjoy the solitude you crave and enjoy.  Singleness is not a guarantee of privacy, fulfillment and complete enjoyment. It may facilitate it but certainly does not guarantee it.  What accomplishments and successes and contributions to society will you have to look back upon at the end of life?
 
Thanks,
Steve K
 
These letters, while extreme examples of the hatred toward singles, particularly happy singles, are reflective of societal attitudes toward people who choose to be happy as singletons.  Midge is being lambasted as selfish for her choices.  Sarah Jae Leiber of the Jewish Women’s Archive called Midge an antihero who feels no loyalty to the people who helped her along the way; Midge has, in fact, been very loyal, funding her mother’s matchmaking business, buying back her parents’ house, and even staying connected with Joel.  Maintenance of these ties is an exemplificiation of Elyakim Kislev’s finding that singles are more connected with their families of origin than married people are (2019); yet one can speculate whether she’d receive this same maligning if she had stayed married to Joel.
Conclusion
In these ways, Midge Maisel is subject to the type of singlism that Bella DePaulodefines
and catalogues in her body of work on singles.  Viewing The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel through a
Singles Studies lens raises many important questions about how we look at more conventional
types of shows in which the protagonists sacrifice freedom for romance, such as Gilmore Girls and The Big Bang Theory.  Moreover, such shows have the potential to influence how people approach relationships in their lives, including those that may be detrimental to their well-being out of fear of being alone.  Future research could approach these shows by studying how single protagonists negotiate their own narratives and experience intimacy outside of romance, and possibly influence some to engage in such connection.
 
References
 
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Kislev, E. (2019).  Happy Singlehood: The Rising Acceptance and Celebration of Solo Living. 
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Leiber, S.J. (2022).  I’m tired of trying to root for Midge Maisel.  Jewish Women’s Archive.  Web. 
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Lynch, J., Doll, K., Gooding-Nieves, D., Patton, J.M., & Loughlin, K. (2023).  How Skyler White
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​Rosen, C. (2023).  “‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Reveals Why Joel Went to Jail: ‘He’s Taken
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