Session 9: Lessons of Love and History
Chair: Fiona Woollard

Comic Intimacy? The Case of Molière
James Gaines
University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, USA

It might seem counterproductive, at first glance, to seek examples of intimacy in 17th century French comedy, where even the act of kissing on stage was banned by theatrical convention and where marriage could only be represented by the signing of a legal contract before a notary. This might be particularly true with Molière, if we are to judge by the rare lines in The Impromptu of Versailles, where he addresses his own actress wife with the words, “Shut up, woman, you’re an idiot!”
But this would be a false assumption, since intimacy, though not directly portrayed, was vitally important to all aspects of life in a way much more pronounced than in our own time, since the very existence of the state depended however sylmbolically, on the intimate details of the monarch’s affairs with his mistresses and the crowd of illegitimate princes he had engendered. It is no accident that the bitterest quarrels between the regime and the Church usually concerned the management of marriage and sexuality. The fact that the nobility more or less separated the marital institution from the concept of sentimental love drove a further wedge into the public consciousness and raised the questions of intimacy to an even higher level.
In fact, Molière’s portrayal of intimacy became the center of a raging controversy itself, as religious and quasi-religious figures accused him of provoking a form of intimacy based on sin and indecency and spreading it among the population, while the playwright defended himself with the argument that comedy allowed the audience to overcome their own shortcomings to arrive at a state of greater honesty and authenticity.
Nevertheless, Molière’s portrayal of intimate relations is far from simplistic or one-sided. He is best remembered, perhaps, for his invention of the scene of “lover’s spite,” a type of lover’s quarrel based on prideful misunderstanding that parallels lovers’ confrontations in the tragic theatre that he had portrayed on stage for years before turning to writing his own comedies. An analysis of the “lover’s spite” in several plays, from the one that carries those words in its title to Tartuffe and The Misanthrope, shows that Molière both provides a modern framework for intimacy that has endured through the 21st century and initiates a critique of this very framework by demonstrating its instability and its contingency on other internal and external factors

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It is better to have loved … Kierkegaard's Works of Love and Ricoeur's Memory, History, and Forgetting on the Gains and Losses of Loving My Neighbour
Rachel I. Waterstradt
Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, California, USA

We are all familiar with Tennyson’s old saw, “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”  But when it comes to loving one’s neighbor, if I love as Kierkegaard urges – asymmetrically, without concern for reciprocity – then it appears that I lose just by loving.  Yet that is not the reality.  Tennyson had romantic love in mind, but I argue the proverb aptly applies to Kierkegaard’s ‘neighbor-love’ and Ricoeur’s discussion of the duty of memory as a duty of justice. 
To clarify the true gains and losses in “loving your neighbor as yourself,” it is necessary to briefly explicate the duty to love as Kierkegaard argues for it, examining carefully three central questions: first, how can love be a duty; second, who is the neighbor and how am I to love him; third, what is the cost and benefit in loving the neighbor?  As detailed as Kierkegaard’s text is, he only explicitly treats of the individual, yet contained implicitly in the argument is the possibility of the individual acting in concert with others.  This is where Ricoeur, in his text Memory, History, and Forgetting, builds off Kierkegaard’s position, highlighting the need to consider both individual and collective, freedom and determination, treating them as related, yet distinct.  To examine gains and losses for Ricoeur requires a concise examination of the duty of memory as a duty of justice, particularly as this would impact the work of the historian.  Justice is directed primarily toward another, not myself first.  To fulfill this responsibility to the other requires a ‘working through’ of personal and collective memory to address the abuses of memory that result in a skewed history and destructive ideology.
Although there is a satisfaction to be found in the fulfillment of duty, the gain realized is truly far greater when the real loss from neglecting this duty is uncovered.  In fact, in neglect of this duty, which would be mere selfishness and sloth, there is ultimately no gain, so even if there is some loss in loving the neighbor perhaps Samuel Butler is more correct: “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.”

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No Choice but the Given One: Maggie's Love Option in Hobson´s Choice (Lean, 1954)
Esther Pérez Villalba
Depto. Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Zaragoza, Spain

Surprisingly, David Lean´s Hobson Choice (1954), winner of several prestigious national and international awards, remains largely unexplored in scholarly terms. Based on the play by Harold Brighouse (1916) and set in late Victorian Salford, this comedy revolves around the lives of widower Henry Hobson and his three daughters, and especially around the apparently atypical ‘love’ story between Hobson’s eldest daughter, Maggie, and her father’s exploited employee Will Mossop. This paper will consider representations of ‘love’ and patterns of affection as experienced by these two characters. It will analyse how the issues of class and power relations interwoven into this ‘love’ story work to empower Maggie, and to question romantic notions of love that were very much in vogue during the Victorian period. This paper also considers how and to what extent this ‘love’ relationship, set in a given industrial and capitalist framework (concerned with self-interest and enterprise), is sustained by a reversal of deep-rooted gender roles, as well as by a (literal and metaphoric) re-mapping of traditionally gender-bound private and public spaces.