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58 | Arno Haldemann www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 55â66
unique, love. As a result, love came to be thought of as something singular, self-
determined, individual, and liberal, as a matter between two individuals who
established family and household on the basis of romantic love. Strategic, ma-
terial, and political points of reference were either veiled by bourgeois feelings
or became irrelevant because both parties were likely from the same privileged
social class. This is exactly the reason that Hester responds to her own ques-
tion (âWho, being loved, is poor?â) with a romantic answer: âOh, no one. I hate
my riches. They are a burden.â12 Only her bourgeois material status allows her
to conceive romantic love as a true emotional luxury and, therefore, material
riches as a burden. She does not realize that wealth and social status are the
constitutive preconditions for her subjective feelings. She cannot recognize
that the script for her own play is already socially determined. In this context,
the answer to Wildeâs question may well be âalmost no oneâ or perhaps ânot
manyâ, but with a concept of wealth in mind completely different from that
held by Hester. A person of the 18th or 19th century normally had to be wealthy
and to belong to a sophisticated bourgeois milieu if that person was to have the
luxury of marrying romantically, and therefore purposelessly and individually. If
that wealth was in the form of financial security, it was possible to take passion-
ate love as the fundament of marriage and conceive it as true riches. Romantic
love was a privilege of wealthy and thus closed social circles whose existence
was neither dependent on the agrarian or industrial-labour context nor defined
by the Sisyphean struggle for security.
That homines academici13 should take up Wildeâs question and use it as the
point at issue in their call for papers is not surprising if one follows Andreas Reck-
witzâs theory on the invention of creativity: we have a tendency to be Wildeâs
epigones in relation to our individualism and socialization. The bourgeois and
avant-garde Wilde can be interpreted as a pioneer of our own contemporary
urban middle-class culture, in which âideas and practices from former oppo-
sitional cultures and subcultures have now achieved hegemonyâ.14 In that cul-
ture, creativity that is directed at singularity seems inevitable and characteristic.
This might explain the editorsâ hypothesis as to why âmany couples are looking
for alternative expressions of the wedding ritualâ: modern lovers are on a com-
pulsive quest for an unconventional, outstanding, and singular audio-visual and
material performance of their unique love in their very individual marriage. The
use of Wildeâs question confirms him as a reference point of our own bourgeois
12 Wilde 1969, 173.
13 In his study Homo Academicus, Pierre Bourdieu depicts the social constellation of the academic com-
munity and establishes âthe proportion of sons of farm workers ⌠[is] smaller in the population of the
âpowerfulâ, whereas the proportion of sons of primary teachers, craftsmen and tradesmen and above
all the sons of businessmen is much greaterâ, Bourdieu 1988, 78.
14 Reckwitz 2017, 4.
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
- SchĂźren 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