Private Lives | Coward's Treatment of Gender-Roles and Marriage
Faulkner is a professional writer with a B.A. in English from Wayne State University. In this essay, he examines Coward's treatment of gender-roles and marriage.
As Noel Coward repeatedly insisted, Private Lives is a light comedy, intended to amuse and captivate its audience, rather than to teach moral lessons or advance a particular ideology. It is exactly the sort of popular work scholars may “murder to dissect:" to over-analyze its "deeper meanings" is to risk blinding ourselves to its glittering surfaces or sacrificing the light-hearted pleasures its author has carefully provided. Nonetheless, the lasting popularity of Private Lives indicates that it does have "something to say'' beneath its eccentric, entertaining banter,...
[The entire page is 1438 words long]
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