If Jack Worthing Marries Gwendolen isn't he marrying his first cousin?
shareYup!! I think that may be part of the tounge-in-cheek comedy. Plus maybe back in the time this movie was set, it wasn't so scandalous??
I don't patronize bunny rabbits!!
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Are you serious, ranier? Did you not watch the ending??? My goodness. It was all laid out for you that he was actually in fact Bracknell's nephew!
And that is why I cam on here, to see if anyone else thought it to be creepy, but that's the way it was back in the day.
Beg your pardon - I misstated for sure. Wilde was poking fun at these folks and their self-absorbed, pretentious ways. Having first-cousins marry was part of the gig. If this went over the heads of the society folks, - and audiences laugh at their antics - surely that's satire.
That's a relief :P
shareThere really is nothing wrong with marrying your first cousin. Birth defect rates are about the same as having a child over the age of 40. However, with my female first cousin...YUCK!
sharePossibly presumptuous question - but are you from the US? Cause over in the UK, first cousin sex/marriage is quite legal. It's not even a "back in the day" thing - it still happens.
"They think he's a kind of prophet, sir."
"They do or he does?"
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA!
Yes, and that explains the inbreeding, especially in the Royal Family.
shareCoupling with your cousin is probably less common than in the U.S. I've not heard of a recent case. Comparitively all those hillbillys in America didn't come from nowhere.
shareughhhhh!
Also, it's plain laziness!
Why is it that the original thread was an honest question and then it reduces itself down to making disparaging remarks about other people? It is just sad that good threads on a topic that someone would find interesting has to then go on to ragging on the Royal Family and then decent people living in the heartland of USA.
Now my only comment was, I also thought that it was odd the relationship of how the two could marry - while still enjoying the movie. It was nice to see an honest answer both from the satire point of view and also the legality of marrage in England.
Thank you to the people who are using the thread as a place to discuss topics of interest and too bad that some here and on the net seem to feel that they need to vent their spleens to gain some joy.
TheDoubleO
The part of the plot that really doesn't make any sense if you spend a moment to think about it is that no one would ever have told Algernon that he had a brother who disappeared as an infant. I guess Lady Bracknell would have felt that such a revelation would have been too demeaning to the family honour. Or maybe Wilde was making fun of W.S. Gilbert's tendency to throw in the "mixup in infancy" plot device into an amazingly large number of the operettas he wrote with Arthur Sullivan (see: H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, The Gondoliers, etc. -- and particularly Patience, in which he specifically lampooned Oscar Wilde).
shareI first noted this concept as a girl when I read 'Pride and Prejudice' (Mr. Darcy angers his aunt, because she has always meant for him to marry his cousin, her daughter) and 'Gone With The Wind'(Ashley Wilkes throws Scarlett O'Hara over for his cousin, Melanie Wilkes).
I also think this was common in order to keep property in the family and to keep the unspoken caste system of the upper classes. How better to insure that your daughter was marrying the 'right' kind of people than to have them marry your own people? That may be why in this country this kind of alliance lingered longest in 'clans' from areas with direct roots to English settlers.
The royals of Europe are almost all related because their ancestors actively tried not to marry commoners. After a while, there just weren't that many left to marry who weren't already your cousins. If people with the means to travel so seldom married outside of their extended family, it must have seemed inevitable to peoples who often never traveled more than one or two villages away from home.
Lastly, remember that the genetic dangers of intermarriage weren't as well known as they are now.
According to this website, it is still legal in half of the U.S., although in some states people have to be too old to have children, or promise not to have children -
http://www.cousincouples.com/?page=states
Wikipedia says first cousin marriage is legal in Canada and Mexico.
Thank you marteenuz for an insightful answer. In giving it more thought you are right in the Gone With the Wind movie.
Now at least the thread has discussed the item on cousin's marrying and why and how it was in US plays and movies.
Thank you
D
hear hear! quite agree, so often forums like this just become degraded by obnoxious trolls and threads turn into personal insulting slanging sessions - puts me off sometimes
something that also needs to be remembered is that the play is farce...it is not realistic and it is not about obeying any proprieties.
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Hello there,
I am sorry that this reply is so long in coming,but I have just seen it(after watching this film on TV).
I am guessing that you are in the US,where first cousin marriages(in many states)are considered(I think) bordering on incest?
In the UK,and much of Europe this is not so.I have in my own family four cousins who are married to each other,and before you say it, they have healthy intelligent children.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were first cousins. Her mother and his father were full brother and sister.
share