Seite - 59 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 04/02

58 | Arno Haldemann www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 55–66 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 (“Who, being loved, is poor?”) with a romantic answer: “Oh, no one. I hate my riches. They are a burden.”12 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 Wilde’s question may well be “almost no one” or perhaps “not many”, 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 Wilde’s question and use it as the point at issue in their call for papers is not surprising if one follows Andreas Reck- witz’s theory on the invention of creativity: we have a tendency to be Wilde’s 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 “ideas and practices from former oppo- sitional cultures and subcultures have now achieved hegemony”.14 In that cul- ture, creativity that is directed at singularity seems inevitable and characteristic. This might explain the editors’ hypothesis as to why “many couples are looking for alternative expressions of the wedding ritual”: 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 Wilde’s 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 “the proportion of sons of farm workers … [is] smaller in the population of the ‘powerful’, whereas the proportion of sons of primary teachers, craftsmen and tradesmen and above all the sons of businessmen is much greater”, Bourdieu 1988, 78. 14 Reckwitz 2017, 4.