The Wife

It's vacation, and I've been going through the books I brought with me (two) at a fast clip.  I started and finished one on the plane here, actually, and have just finished the second (The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles and Left Neglected, respectively).  Which meant that today I had to go to the bookstore.

We located the nearest Barnes and Noble (Bonus!  An in-house Starbucks) and I browsed through the stacks.  I always find it hard to select a book -- this one looks too superficial, that one looks like too much of an emotional commitment, will I look like I want to be my niece/nephew if I read that one, I've already read that one, you get the picture. But I noticed a trend:  The Time Traveller's Wife, The Tiger's Wife, The Paris Wife, The Traitor's Wife...what is it about wives?  And why can't they use their own names? If someone wrote a book about me, would they call it The Professor's Wife?

Has anyone else noticed this?

And so, I did what any other sane person would do.  I Googled it.  I came up with posts such as the ten worst wives or girlfriends in literature (both Lady MacBeth from MacBeth and Gertrude from Hamlet make the list, BTW, for any Shakespearean fanatics out there), old wives tales, and the wives behind Russian literary geniuses.  And yes, it turns out others have noticed.  There is even a book club, called the Literary Wives, who read only books with "Wives" in the title. They won't run short anytime soon.

I was starting to feel as if husbands were getting a bit of a short shrift here, and so went to an online bookstore and put "husband" as the search term.  Turns out, most books with "husband" in the title are self-help books:  "Bringing Out the Best in Your Husband"or "How to Raise a Husband".

Hmmmm.

So -- wives are mysterious, compelling subjects for literature, but husbands -- well, if you've got one, you might need a self-help book?  It might help explain the divorce rate, if nothing else.