Page - 57 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

56 | Arno Haldemann www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 55–66 INTRODUCTION In their call for papers, the editors of this volume cite Oscar Wilde as they ask a wide-reaching question: “Who, being loved, is poor?” For a postmodern his- torian, this instantly and inevitably becomes a twofold question: what kind of love did Wilde intend and why do the editors refer to it? As the call’s eponymous question encompasses different temporal levels, the answer should be histori- cally nuanced and socially differentiated. For this reason, I will focus on three questions: (1) what does the question tell us about its famous originator, his socialization, and the social field he was participating in, or, in other words, how would Wilde have understood his own question? (2) what does the use of this question tell us about the editors who refer to the famous playwright in their call for papers for a contemporary scholarly journal and about those who per- ceive the reference and answer it? While the first two questions will be explored on a meta-theoretical level, I want to answer a third question on the basis of empirical data from a case study from the canton of Bern. Notwithstanding its peculiarities, in this article Bern represents a relatively arbitrarily selected place at the centre of Europe during the transition from the 18th to the 19th cen- tury. The majority of the populace in this city-state were agrarian and rural. So, (3) how would actors in this society have answered Wilde’s question? In my re- sponse to this third question, I hope to advance to the very core of this call for papers. I will demonstrate the irrelevance of Wilde’s intentions in his question for the audio-visual and material dimensions of the marriage rituals of Bern’s agrarian majority in its transition from early modern times to modernity proper. I will put forward the argument that certainly in this part of Europe, and likely elsewhere too, a large part of the population would never have considered Wil- de’s question. Perhaps, however, they would have asked the inverse question, “Who, being poor, is loved?”, and, more fundamentally, “What is love?”1 THE BOURGEOIS BIAS OF ROMANTIC MARRIAGE Wilde was the son of a renowned medical doctor who had been educated in the humanities. His mother was an equally educated translator and poet who oper- ated a well-known salon. He was descended from a quasi ideal-typical bourgeois background.2 In his mother’s social circles the very young Wilde had contact 1 If the editors searched for a reference frame for this hypothetical question, for better or worse they would have encountered Haddaway’s eponymous pop song. This reference would possibly not have sat so easily in the academic and intellectual milieu of the editors as does the citation from Oscar Wilde, but it would have more likely corresponded with the folk culture of the subaltern actors I investigate in my study. 2 The term “bourgeois” is used here for want of a better translation of the German bürgerlich. The term “bourgeois” denotes here a specific life style “with an emphasis on personal education and political participation. As such, bürgerlich has a positively connoted discursive tradition and breadth of mean-