Courtship in Cold Mountain

Among the many themes that Charles Frazier explores, he uses the main characters’, Inman and Ada’s relationship along with other stories to demonstrate courtship during the Civil War era. In the beginning of the novel Ada considers her options and one of them is to get married to pretty much survive. With her independent nature, she doesn’t want to fall into a marriage without love and she grew bored of earlier suitors though “all of society stood at attention to watch [young women’s’] progress toward marriage as if the primary moral force of the universe were focused in that direction” (49). To be accepted in society you must marry well and whether there was love in the relationship was mostly luck. When Inman showed an interest in Ada, she had built herself a shield between her childhood with her father and a life anew with a husband and to her Inman was another boring suitor though she began to realize Inman was more than a suitor.

Men are also under similar pressure to choose a wife in order to start a family and carry on their families’ trade. Odell, a fellow traveler who Inman comes across shares his story of forbidden love. He fell in love with his family’s black housemaid though he was already married. When it came to the appropriate time for him to marry, he was given a wide selection of other major planter’s daughters near their own plantation. He chose the women who was “beautiful in a transparent way… though once he got the heaps of crinolines off her, there seemed to be nothing left” (131) which led him astray towards the housewife. Marriage was almost a state of business at the time, and although a loving relationship would be desirable it was never expected and rarely found.