Running in Circles: My Best Friend’s Wedding After 19 Years

ABSTRACT

This essay revisits My Best Friend’s Wedding (Hogan, 1997) 19 years later. It compares its way of combining laughter and tears with 2 genres of literature: Marivaux’s (1964) 18th-century comic theatre and the 19th-century novel of adultery, with its overtones of classical tragedy. In each, an outsider observes, envies, and seeks to destroy a “happy couple”: the 2 genres end, respectively, in a wedding or in death. How do 3 women view this film, and its ending, in 2016?

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Notes on contributors

Naomi Segal

Naomi Segal, Ph.D., researches in comparative literature, gender, psychoanalysis, and the body. Her most recent monographs are Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch (Rodopi, 2009); André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy (Oxford University Press, 1998); and The Adulteress’s Child (Polity, 1992). She has just completed a new English translation of Anzieu’s Le Moi-peau [The Skin-ego] (Karnac, 2016). Naomi Segal is an Academic Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques, and a Member of the Academia Europaea.