Pursuits of Happiness

“Marriage is always divorce, always entails a rupture from something” – Stanley Cavell

This weekend I’m reading Stanley Cavell’s book Pusuits of Happiness, which is a series of readings of what Cavell calls the remarriage comedies of the 1930s and ’40s–movies like The Awful Truth, Bringing up Baby, The Lady Eve, &c.

I suppose this warrants an explanation. Cavell basically claims a heritage of artistic statements about divorce that I’m more or less trying to rip off and represent as my own. Or at least that’s how I think of my project whenever I get discouraged about it.

The sense in which I’m committing plagiarism: Cavell mentions the works that I would like to use, and he does so in pretty much the same context that I’m talking about them. Two senses in which I’m not committing plagiarism: (1) Cavell reads chronologically, so that Milton (gently) informs the movies he’s talking about, whereas I’m interested mostly in doing an anachronistic reading of Milton in which the movies (gently) inform Milton’s ideas; (2) In Cavell’s argument, Milton’s concept of divorce initiates a trend that in the 20th Century culminates in a democratic, (relatively) healthy notion of marriage–I, on the other hand, will spend some time talking about the ways that Milton’s ideas about divorce promote the women-as-chattel take on marriage.

Anyway, the book is a real pleasure to read. It was interesting in revisiting this book to find that Cavell self-consciously models his critique as a “conversation” (see “DDD” below). While the common reading is that Hollywood fast talk (which the comedies he’s talking about are famous for) is a throwback to Shakespearean dialogue, Cavell suggests that it might actually be read as an instance of Miltonic marital conversation. And he wants to share this with his reader, I guess…so it’s sort of like he’s proposing to you while you read the book. Or something.

This is the part of my project that I’m least confident about. I know that I have plenty to say about Milton and divorce, and that I could do it using close readings (Joel Fineman and Lana Cable being two incredibly different scholarly models), using scholarly/readerly surveys (Stanley Fish being the only scholarly model), using history/biography (Kim Hall and James Grantham Turner being the scholarly models), or with movies (Aaron Kunin being the scholarly model, I guess). The latter option sounds like the most entertaining, and it’s worked out OK in a couple other things that I’ve done, but I’m not sure that I’m capable of mustering the critical bravado necessary to sustain the method over 70+ pages. But the thing is, while I like Kim Hall and Lana Cable pretty well, I get a sort of bad taste in my mouth when I read Turner, and Stanley Fish is hard to discount not because he’s such a great or even necessarily smart critic but because he deliberately structures his arguments to look like bear traps that you’ve already stepped in.

If I go the movie route, I’ll obviously have to come up with a new way to do it. I’m just not sure it’s worth it.