Faux-academic warbling

To fully understand the break up of the Jameson's marriage we must look beyond the 1987 Polly Affair. Certainly this was a key factor in how the marriage collapsed. The vicious encounter between Anne Jameson and Polly Smithers in Sainsbury's frozen food aisle is rightly seen as a turning point. However even a superficial analysis shows that the Polly Affair cannot fully explain the collapse. Both partners had been unfaithful before, and had either been caught or confessed.[2] Moreover neither partner considered the affair particularly serious, as Thompson and Smaill show by a semantic deconstruction of Mr Jameson's letters and Mrs Jameson's diary.[3] A more careful analysis of the data reveals that the Polly Affair was the catalyst, but not the cause.

The recently released bank records of the troubled couple have given fresh insights. In their seminal 1999 paper, Jamnuk and Bondy reopened the academic debate.[1] Basing their argument on the bank records and other financial evidence and using an economic and statistical approach, they show that the Jamesons were living beyond their means, leading to increasing strains. These crystallised around Mrs Jameson being unable to renovate the kitchen, and Mr Jameson's thwarted desire for a sports car.

At first this seems completely opposed to Schlangekraft and O'Reilly's classic sociological analysis.[4] They argue that in focusing on big events, such as the Battle of the Frozen Food Aisle, we are missing the underlying socio-personal causes. Their work focused on a detailed dissection of the Incident of the 27th Anniversary. Although this was seemingly resolved, it was symptomatic of many such small-scale conflicts and compromises, which in a very real sense direct the more obvious macro-events. However the two approaches are in fact orthogonal. Recent work in the field has focused on combining them to give a broader understanding of the many factors involved, and the interplay between them. Nevertheless many questions remain open, and any conclusive answers seem unlikely at this stage.

References
[1] An Economic Analysis of the Jameson Marriage - M.Jamnuk & A.Bondy, 1999.
[2] The Decline and Fall of the Jameson Marriage - E.Gibbon, 1990.
[3] The Jameson Marriage as a Case Study in Gender Discourse - R.Thompson & J.Small, 1996.
[4] A Dialectic of Reality: The Jameson Marriage and the Caucasian Myth - P.Schlangekraft & B.O'Reilly, 1994.

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