Thoughts on Muriel’s Wedding and the Question of Whether Marriage Is a Competitive Sport?

My mother’s two favorite movies were Gone With The Wind and Muriel’s Wedding. I recently rewatched Muriel’s Wedding, thirty years after it was released in theaters in 1994, while soaring across the Atlantic en route to a film festival with my husband. It felt like a yellow, hand-written message sealed with a cork in a green glass bottle bobbing along with the ocean current.

Muriel’s world is similar to the one my mother grew-up in: marriage gave you status, an identity outside of your parents, a new name, perhaps access to money, and the right to engage in sex without incurring the labels that are easily assigned to women who are “easy”: slut, whore, cocksucker,… no need to continue.  These labels are bandied about between Muriel’s friends in a never ending need to determine social standing and dominance, which rests largely on being sexually attractive and having a committed mate.  Muriel’s desire to be a bride, to be successful, “to win,” as she confesses to her aspiring Olympian husband whom she has hastily married, is an obsession that she shares with all of her peers from her small, backward Australian community. For Muriel, marriage is an obsession from the opening scene where Muriel catches the brides maids’ bouquet to the almost immediate reveal that the marriages, whether of her girlfriends or of her own parents, are hollow if not nightmarish. There is no fidelity, no loyalty, no empathy, no respect and certainly no tenderness, support nor love. 

The death of her mother by overdose after her father leaves her for another woman and blames her for his failures, is too much to bear and her death opens Muriel’s eyes to the dark side of marriage. Her mother had set the lawn on fire and like Anna Karenina, decided to end her sojourn on earth. She never expressed anger or frustration, even when Muriel wiped out the family bank account and her other children refuse to help around the house. She fetches, she serves, and she shows up with gifts, which are never acknowledged. In exchange they lie to her, insult her and berate her. She loved those around her but they do not reciprocate. She is like a mountain lake that at the end of the movie has dried up for lack of any rain. 

Marriage was a risky gamble that could lead to early death, alcoholism, and poverty.  My mother frequently reminded me about her best friend Charlene, who married a Catholic and had four children, resulting in an early death. Or her Aunt Leona who died at the hands of her husband, Herman Hainney, because he had fallen for another woman and divorce was not an option. Or cousin Sarah who did divorce and was exiled to Texas to live in shame. Or there was my paternal grandmother Ethel, who took to the bottle after the death of my grandfather, who had been the local dentist in the small hamlet of Buhl, Idaho, leaving her broke with four children to raise. My mother always ranted against my grandmother that she didn’t leave my grandfather and I was always baffled at the accusation; where would Grandma Vondah have gone? Chicago? Kansas City? She had cousins in Kansas City but not real family, her mother and sisters who created a tight web of support in the hard scrabble years of the 1930s and 40s in Ash Grove, Missouri. My mother knew that to get a divorce was to shame your family, your children, a shame that was inescapable and scarred you for life as an outcast. 

Like Muriel, my mother was proud of her wedding dress and it still hangs in a back closet at my house, even though my mother has been reduced to an urn full of ashes that sits on a shelf in my garage, next to the photo albums from the 1970s and 1980s, images that are fast fading of cruise trips and road trips and dinner parties that mean little to me. I do not know the people in the pictures beyond their names and memories of my mother cancelling them as she moved up in the world. 

Poverty was the greatest fear and there were three steps to prevent poverty: not having too many children (thank God for birth control), obtaining an education and employment, and marriage. What was high risk was depending solely on a man to provide for you and/or having too many children. Muriel’s mother had too many children, Charlene had too many children. My mother’s problem was not too many children but a husband whose ambition did not match hers. She was not content with a teacher’s salary and did not hide her lust for luxurious cars, fur coats, jewelry, and travel. She needed a partner who could satisfy these urges but was trapped because divorce was taboo and my father was a kind man who enabled her. She couldn’t leave him because what other man would cook, shop, iron, chauffer the children around and still want to have sex at the end of the day? But it wasn’t enough. She wanted the tokens of success that she saw around her and she knew that access was only possible through men and not to her, as a woman. Only men earned six figure salaries, until my mother did it in 1986. She felt like she had won and she had. She was invited to speak at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. She was successful.

The final scene of Muriel’s Wedding is of Muriel and her now wheelchair-bound, best friend Vanda leaving Tortoise Bay together in a taxi. They say goodbye to the plaza, to the tourists, to the high rise apartment buildings that litter the skyline, as they return to Sydney with their friendship intact, their loyalty recovered, their integrity restored. It is a vision of female fidelity and friendship. It is an optimistic end that promises a world in which women can forge identities outside of marriage and family, outside of male dominated relationships, where women can have autonomy and make decisions about their fates.  Muriel will face challenges but she is a gutsy, brave young lady who isn’t going to quit nor be stopped and my impression of Australia from the movie is that an ambitious young woman like Muriel with a little tenacity, a little charm and a little imagination could go far.  

I wonder what Muriel is up to today?