ABSTRACT

In my exploration of the analogy between remarriage film comedy and Restoration courtship comedy, I pair texts in order to explore various facets of the central relationship. As Cavell has noted of his own pairings of philosophical texts and films, other combinations would be possible, and “each . . . would yield its own accents” (CW, 15). The reasons for my choices may strike some as arbitrary, but (again like Cavell) I have tested them in the classroom over the period of a decade in five slightly different courses (different due to the deletion from course to course of texts and contexts that I deemed ultimately unhelpful or even distracting). Although the combination of It Happened One Night and The Rover is one that I thought initially would not sustain itself, it proved early on evocative to students in an almost Jungian fashion. Walls and water, in particular, function in both texts as central symbols of the key relationship. Kings hover in and around the action of the texts, as does the threat (and sometimes more) of violence against women. Both narratives begin with female rebellion against paternal (and fraternal in the case of The Rover) control; both explore the possibility of women charting their own courses in love, and both figure such charting as an actual journey.