Seite - 58 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 04/02

Charivari or the Historicising of a Question | 57www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 55–66 with famous contemporary artists and intellectuals of Dublin’s local scene. He thus received “the socialization of artists”.3 He enjoyed an outstanding educa- tion in classical philology. As a student, he became a member of a freemasons’ lodge.4 Wilde is to be viewed as an integral part of “the artistic field”, the very specific element of modern society which Andreas Reckwitz sees as responsible for the formation of the creativity dispositif.5 The successful but controversial author was not just a prominent but formative part of the contemporary artis- tic avant-garde. He paradigmatically embodied dandyism in his time. Wilde was an outstanding representative of literary aestheticism, and his whole existence must be attributed to the modern “aesthetic of genius”.6 Retrospectively he can appear as the personified icon of individualism.7 This individualistic aestheticization drew from the concept of romantic love, in which English sentimentalism played a crucial role.8 The sentimentalist ideal of love became central, albeit in reconstructed form, to Wilde’s own iterations of love.9 During the 18th century, a critical backlash against “aristocratic and agrar- ian traditionalism” had culminated in the romantic novel and theatre. Thus, a normative concept of romantic love became a constitutive part of “bourgeois modernity”, which structured Europe’s 19th century socio-culturally.10 Wilde’s play A Woman of No Importance revolves around romantic love, by which the self-determining bourgeoisie appears to have distinguished itself from the aristocracy. The question we are exploring is posed in the fourth act by the bourgeois character Miss Hester Worsley and refers to a historically spe- cific emanation of love. This love dissociated itself from traditional and aristo- cratic forms of convenient love, but it stemmed from a thin, privileged and elit- ist social stratum, in which at the time it was exclusively disseminated.11 The bourgeois dispositif of romantic culture raised passionate love to its own end. Thus, passionate love became the essence of the modern marital relationship. Henceforth, according to the ideal of romantic love, no one was to marry for convenience; one should marry for “pure”, which is to say self-referential and ing that none of the usual translations – ‘bourgeois’, ‘middle class’ and ‘citizen’ or ‘civil society’ – can do justice to”, Reckwitz 2017, 33. 3 Reckwitz 2017, 38. 4 Ellmann 1988, 3–50. 5 Reckwitz 2017, 33–37. 6 For the genesis of the aesthetic of genius cf. Reckwitz 2017, 38. 7 On Wilde’s (self-)iconization cf. Reckwitz 2017, 160–162. 8 Luhmann 1986, 145. 9 Wilde not only adapted this ideal in his writings but also integrated it into his personal life: “Wilde wanted a consuming passion; he got it and was consumed by it”, Ellmann 1988, 362. At a certain point in his life, he lived out his homosexual love relatively openly, which was not “convenient” for his con- temporaries at all; see Ellmann 1988, 258–262. 10 Reckwitz 2017, 202–203. 11 On the genesis of romantic love see Giddens 1992, 38–41, and Luhmann 1986, 129–144.