Anticipating the modern mating moralities in Holberg’s comedies.

Abstract

Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) founded modern Scandinavian drama with comedies that still are among the region’s most popular plays. Critics have bemoaned how these romantic comedies lack passion; his modern standard biographer concludes that Holberg dramatized mating behavior simply to follow ancient convention and without adding anything new based on his own experience. An evolutionary approach to these works, situating them at the tail end of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP), reveals Holberg’s remarkable prescience with regard to modern mating. His dispassion toward pair-bonding and reproduction likely facilitated these insights. Scholars have already established that the celibate Holberg was unique among his era’s greatest thinkers in terms of supporting gender equality. This article adds to our understanding of Holberg as an original thinker and innovative playwright. A main concern throughout his dramatic oeuvre is to warn against several pitfalls of the sexual revolution that would unfold once modernity began to empower females in the mid-18th century. Holberg lets his progressive mating morality be embodied by domestic servants—young men and women temporarily deprived of reproductive opportunity by the EMP. While rebelling against their era’s ideology of companionate love, these characters argue for the romantic love that would mark the generations ahead. Holberg’s plays anticipate how an increasing reliance on mercantile logic in interpersonal relations would lead to the 20th century’s confluent love. Homophilic mating among the affluent, Holberg feared, would contribute to rising economic inequalities, such as those we experience today, which further a process of marginalization that disincentivizes reproduction.

European movements for confluent love: Revealing romantic delusions with the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough and Comedy Italian Style

“…When Nora slams the door, I propose that Ibsen can profitably be understood as primarily engaging the literary contestation between mating regimes that has marked the past millennium. Similar to the way in which authors of medieval romances had argued against antiquity’s polygynous social orders and how Ludvig Holberg – the eighteenth-century founder of Scandinavian drama – had argued against companionate love (Larsen, 2022b), Ibsen aims for the jugular of romantic love. These authors may not have had a conscious understanding of precisely which historical tradition they wrote in, but one of fiction’s many functions is to let moral communities discuss whether their mating practices are still functional and, if they are not, to develop and agree on new ones (Carroll et al, 2020, 2012).…”

An evolutionary case for polygyny to counter demographic collapse

“…The region’s preeminent Enlightenment figure wrote a line of comedy plays from the 1720s on that dramatized the emerging conflict between companionate and romantic love. He anticipated the further evolution of mating ideology and practices, as well as today’s economic stratification, once people could make their own pair-bonding decisions ( Larsen, 2022b ).…”