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As the happy glow of that wedding fades, literature provides some brilliant examples of what’s in store when the honeymoon ends Any sap can have a bad marriage, but some unions rise above the masses to become classics of dysfunction. Similarly, many novels claim to show us the dark heart of modern marriage, but only a few pull it off with real panache. Being a newlywed is fun for those involved, but you only really become interesting to neighbours, and readers, when it all starts to unravel. Who cares about a beautiful Home Counties bride happily signing over her best reproductive years in a tasteful frock, when you could be reading the history of a disappointed couple throwing insults and gin tumblers at each other after a dinner party? Of course, there’s always the hope one will lead inexorably to the other. There is perverse beauty in marital breakdown, and writers who show us this, from Henry James to John Updike, are worth celebrating. What really distinguishes an ordinarily bad marriage from a truly terribly one is the lengths to which those involved are willing to go in their unhappiness. Madame Bovary is an early archetype of the genre for this reason. Emma Bovary’s response to a loveless union is the opposite of settling down with some needlework and making the best of things; there is a laudable extravagance to the way in which she sets about causing her own destruction, fitting in two failed affairs, bankruptcy and a lingering suicide before the marriage is over. Of course, being married to Charles Bovary might tempt anyone to knock back the arsenic – he is one of literature’s great boring husbands, and Flaubert excels in anatomising his dullness. This is a man who never aspires to anything beyond eating a lovely piece of cheese and falling asleep. The contempt bred by familiarity is perfectly articulated in a passage in which Emma has grown so sick of Charles that she’s angered just by seeing his back as he snoozes: “even his back, his tranquil back, was irritating to behold, and in the very look … she found all the banality of the man.” The kind of fury and disgust, often inspired by little more than boredom, that someone can feel against a spouse is explored at length in the novels and short stories of Richard Yates . For Yates, every husband is a moral coward, every woman on the verge of a breakdown, every tray of cocktail-hour hors d’oeuvres just moments from being hurled at the wall. He revels in exposing the hypocrisy and pettiness in both himself (he took all of his plots from personal experience) and his middle-class readership. Yates’s ultimate frustration is with the idea of uniqueness: the way that most people go through life with the conviction they are exceptional, and so go into marriage thinking their love and legacy will be correspondingly great. Reading Yates’s novels, however, you start to feel he lacks a sense of humour about marital disaster. Yes, a bad marriage is a hideous thing that sucks in all the life around it, but some of the best writing on the subject acknowledges the darkly funny aspect of warring lovers and their witty cruelty to each other. Edward Albee demonstrated mastery of this black humour in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The play’s central couple, George and Martha, are bleakly hilarious in their unrelenting torture of one another. Utterly worn down by conflict, beyond caring about social reproof, to them, no subject is off limits. They joke to their guests and each other about everything from career disappointments and sexual inadequacy to depression and death. George and Martha have salvaged grim wisdom and gallows humour from their wreck of a marriage; they have made for themselves a kind of marital purgatory in which they are utterly despairing, but it is inconceivable for them to leave each other, for in doing so they would be leaving the one person who understands their suffering and can match them blow for blow. While some modern marriages are difficult to leave, it is at least technically possible to escape them. The most tragic, claustrophobic depictions of unhappy marriage in English literature undoubtedly have to come from a time before divorce was legally or socially an option. In James’s Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer’s suffering once she realises she’s married a miserly sociopath is horribly compounded by the knowledge that, as a woman in the late 19th century, she has messed up the most important decision of her life, and cannot go back on it. Bad marriages are just as depressing, if not more so, in Jane Austen’s novels, precisely because so little time is given to discussing them. If the reader paused to consider what Lydia’s marriages to Wickham or Charlotte Lucas’s marriage to Mr Collins are actually like they might be less inclined to celebrate the inescapable march towards matrimony of the other characters. The realities are hastily swept aside while Lizzie makes another winning quip, and Darcy huskily mentions his annual income. I think we’re overdue for a more realistic sequel in the style of Updike’s Couples, where Darcy has a nasty opium habit and Lizzie talks constantly about how pregnancy has ruined her thighs. Fiction Edward Albee Gustave Flaubert Henry James guardian.co.uk