Gilbert, you may recall, is author of the best-selling memoir of leaving marriage, Eat, Pray, Love. That book was a blockbuster, and Gilbert has been a fixture on shows such as Oprah, telling and retelling her story of finding true love after leaving marriage behind.
Now, in Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, Gilbert explains her unexpected (and unconventional) road to marriage. By all accounts, Committed is likely to join Eat, Pray, Love atop the best-seller lists. In any event, the book reveals the vast redefinition of marriage taking place within Western cultures, right before our eyes.
Gilbert is an experienced writer, but until the publication of Eat, Pray, Love, she had been mainly known for writing articles for male-focused magazines. No more. Her two autobiographical books are clearly in the "chick lit" category, and women are devouring her writing. A movie version of Eat, Pray, Love is in the works, with Julia Roberts cast as Elizabeth Gilbert.
What makes these books so important for Christian consideration is the view of love and marriage the two books present with such unabashed passion. Over the last century, love and marriage have been driven apart in the modern secular mind. Marriage has been presented as a domestic prison camp for women, even as the divorce revolution has meant that every marriage is now, legally speaking, a tentative contract.
We are now in the age of personal expression and radical individualism. As Barbara Dafoe Whitehead has suggested, the invention of "expressive marriage," by which the individuals made a statement of their self-expression through marriage, has now been joined by "expressive divorce," in which the formerly-married explain that the divorce was how they liberated themselves to even more truthful self-expression.
Few have told their story of self-expression so successfully -- or so candidly -- as Elizabeth Gilbert. Eat, Pray, Love is nothing less than a complete rejection of the Christian conception of marriage. The applause she has gained from the public should tell us something.
In Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert told of coming to the conclusion that she no longer wanted to be married to the man she had married at age 25, after living with him since age 23. She wrote:
My husband and I -- who had been together for eight years, married for six -- had built our entire life around the common expectation that, after passing the doddering old age of 30, I would want to settle down and have children. By then, we mutually anticipated, I would have grown weary of traveling and would be happy to live in a big, busy household full of children and homemade quilts, with a garden in the backyard and a cozy stew bubbling on the stovetop.
But Gilbert did not want to have a baby and, as she realized, she didn't want to be married any more, either. So, having expressed herself by getting married, she then expressed herself by getting divorced. After her acrimonious divorce was final, she set off around the world once again -- this time in search of love.
Gilbert describes herself as "culturally, though not theologically" Christian, but she rejects outright the limitation of sex to marriage. "I got started early in life with the pursuit of sexual or romantic pleasure," she writes. "I barely had an adolescence before I had my first boyfriend, and I have consistently had a boy or a man (or sometimes both) in my life ever since I was fifteen years old. That was -- oh, let's see -- about nineteen years ago, now. That's almost two solid decades I have been entwined in some kind of drama with some kind of guy. Each overlapping the next, with never so much as a week's breather in between."
