The Duchess

This weekend I saw the film, “The Duchess,” and it has me reflecting on what makes relationships work.

In the film, an 18th-century English duke chooses a bride and, as my wife likes to say, “mayhem ensues.”  The “mayhem” in this case is mostly relational:  marital tension, infidelity, and a very small (by 21st-century film standards) amount of violence.  It’s not a happy marriage.

So, being a good 21st-century American, I naturally have found myself trying to decide who is to blame for all this unhappiness.  In so doing, I had to re-examine my own theories of what makes a marriage happy (after all, one has to have an idea what the machine looked like when it worked before one can see what’s wrong with it). 

The film presents a relationship in which the man has virtually all the power.  So, one tends to blame the man.  One also tends to blame the society of that time and place for giving the woman so little power.  But I see that many 21st-century American marriages are also full of tension, infidelity, and violence — and as far as I know, women have never been more empowered.  I think a war metaphor makes this clear:  If Nation A and Nation B are at war, and Nation A has vastly superior military power, then Nation A will get its way and Nation B will not.  Nation B will, of course, continue to have some kind of resistance movement doing damage wherever it can, but it will mostly have to live under Nation A’s rule.  But what if Nation A and Nation B have similar military power?  Well, then their war will be very bloody and will last until they arrive at a compromise in which each gets only some of its desires fulfilled — or until they have destroyed each other.  But even when the shooting stops, the tensions that caused the war will continue and the shooting will begin anew just as soon as one thinks it has the military advantage over the other.

So, it seems that the tension and fighting are not caused by the difference or similarity of power.  Well then, where do they come from?  In a word:  selfishness.  It is as James said:  “What causes fights and quarrels among you?  Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?” (James 4:1).  In the film, the Duke’s desires were portrayed as 1) maintaining his position in society, 2) passing that position to the next generation of his family, and 3) gratifying his own sexual desires.  The Duchess’s desires were portrayed as 1) expressing her creativity, 2) being “loved” (or, perhaps more accurately, being liked), and 3) being with her children.  The reality of a person’s desires is more complex than what can be portrayed in a film, of course, but this is what I saw.  The point is that the Duke and Duchess pursued their own desires without regard for the other’s.  I think the Duke might have treated his wife with more respect and still obtained most of his own desires, but his focus was so much on his own desires that he utterly disregarded his wife’s.  The Duchess, for her part, only helped the Duke because of her own lack of power in the situation.  She wasn’t getting what she wanted out of the relationship, and clearly would have preferred to leave him.

The Christian ideal is not like that.  What is it like?  Let’s look at what Jesus had to say:

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducess, the Pharisees got together.  One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:  “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Jesus replied:  “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it:  ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”  (Matthew 22:34-40)

“Love your neighbor as yourself,” He says, and the term “neighbor” certainly applies to one’s spouse. 

Now, while selfishness seeks the well-being of oneself, love seeks the well-being of others.  Imagine for a moment a world in which everyone seeks the well-being of everyone else.  In such a world, I don’t need to look out for my own well-being because everyone else is doing that for me.  Forget the clouds and the harps — this is what heaven is. 

Now imagine a world in which everyone seeks his own well-being without any regard for anyone else’s.  In such a world, can anyone really be happy?

And so, the Duke and the Duchess are both to blame (the Duke probably more so, but it can be tough to get a fix on proportional blame).  And so we are all to blame, to some degree, for all the unhappiness in the world today — because who has eliminated selfishness from his own heart?  I certainly haven’t.