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30 | Toufic El-Khoury www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 23–37
vain and indefinite desire. The individuals who make up the couple must try to
pull themselves out of this state to understand better their acceptance of it.
The movie shows us the conflict and a way to resolve it but without guarantee-
ing success, thus faithful to the comic spirit. More importantly, it is the lack of a
guarantee that the marriage will succeed, its inherent fallibility, that gives the it
legitimacy in the minds of the parties involved.
CAVELL AND KIERKEGAARD’S LEGACY
Cavell’s approach seems rooted in what he considers a typically American way of
discussing marriage and romance. That idea is popular, but it is not always accept-
ed. David Shumway, a cultural and literary historian, criticizes Cavell’s approach
and locates the American screwball comedies’ approach to love and marriage in a
more global cultural legacy. He also claims that as the social role of marriage grew
smaller, the conjugal state was associated with romance and intimacy. Whereas
medieval romances opposed love and the state of marriage, as noted by Denis de
Rougemont in his study of Béroul’s Tristan and Iseult,15 the seventeenth century
introduced the idea of love as an emotion which formed a source of marriage and
as no longer “directed by social institutions such as family or religion”.16 The new
form of marriage we encountered earlier started to appear in the seventeenth
century in a form designated “companionate marriage” in England, but not as a
product of romance. According to Shumway, “The choice of spouse was increas-
ingly left in the hands of children themselves and was based mainly on tempera-
mental compatibility with the aim of lasting companionship”.17Two discourses
start to coexist, in essence contradictory and their differences unrecognized.
Romance offered “adventure, intense emotion and the possibility of finding the
perfect mate”, while intimacy promised “deep communication, friendship and
sharing that will last beyond the passion of new love”.18
In his study, Shumway points out a first paradox in our modern understand-
ing of what marriage must be. However, the idea of paradox is at the heart of
Cavell’s discussion of the subject. Moreover, Shumway’s assumption, as well as
his remarks about the difficulty of establishing the grounds for reciprocity while
discussing the unpredictability of human desire, suggests a tension between two
discourses that we can find in Kierkegaard’s thought about the same institution.
One of the differences between Kierkegaard’s esthetical and the ethical
stages concerns the subject’s choice to free himself from all “profane” media-
tions – the judgment of an outside gaze. For instance, in “Some Reflections on
15 See de Rougemont 2001, 17.
16 Shumway 2003, 18.
17 Shumway 2003, 17.
18 Shumway 2003, 27.
JRFM
Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02
- Title
- JRFM
- Subtitle
- Journal Religion Film Media
- Volume
- 04/02
- Authors
- Christian Wessely
- Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati
- Editor
- Uni-Graz
- Publisher
- SchĂĽren Verlag GmbH
- Location
- Graz
- Date
- 2018
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC 4.0
- Size
- 14.8 x 21.0 cm
- Pages
- 135
- Categories
- Zeitschriften JRFM