Love, Knowledge, and Freedom in Pleasantville, Religious Scripture, and Wider Western Literature

Abstract

Love has long been extolled as a route to human moral and spiritual progress and fulfilment, not only in much past religious literature and narrative but in the more recent work of writers such as the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. In such texts, however, the sentiment (or virtue) of love is clearly more than just blind or brute passion and presupposes distinctive human capacities for knowledge and free agency. That said, the relationship between knowledge and (right or virtuous) agency seems highly problematic or ambivalent on many traditional (perhaps most notably Christian) religious conceptions. This paper addresses such issues and complexities via some exploration of Genesis and the modern movie Pleasantville—with further aid from literary works of Shakespeare, Blake, Heinlein, and others—to the end of a more realistic view of human love and its moral and spiritual implications.