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

Abstract

Differences in Northern and Southern European gender relations have historical roots that can be investigated in the regions’ literature and cinema. The mating morality of romantic love facilitated the West’s First Sexual Revolution of the mid-eighteenth century. The Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, a late-nineteenth-century literary movement, used Darwinian perspectives to reveal romantic delusions and double standards. The movement’s insights undergirded twentieth-century Nordic gender equality and social democratic governance. Coinciding with the Second Sexual Revolution, the film movement Comedy Italian Style (c. 1958–1979) used psychoanalytical perspectives to promote a similar cultural effect nearly a century later. Both movements contributed to the transition to our present era’s demythologised morality of confluent love, which sacralises gender equality, but the Scandinavians’ head start, evolutionary approach and genre choices partially explain why today’s Nordic women are more empowered than their Italian counterparts. Comparing these movements offers insight into how fiction helps populations transition to new mating moralities.