When the tropes of courtly love left the royal courts of France to move across the English Channel and, in time, down the social ladder, they were very gradually naturalized into an idea of romance that often found its happy end in marriage. In the most summary fashion, one could say that chivalric heroism, the pursuit of wedded and unattainable queens–products of feudal societies who were regularly at war with near-neighbours–gave way by the sixteenth century to a literature which reflected both the lives and the aspirations of a new, more settled gentry and a rising middle class. Here, in the English language at least, the civilizing features of romance find a licit end. In As You Like It, Shakespeare combines old romance with new. Orlando is a noble, courtly lover–ever pinning verses declaiming his love of Rosalind to the trees. His verse is hardly of the highest calibre and Rosalind mocks it gently. Yet this love at first sight, proved by bravery and good character, finds its romantic end in marriage. Shakespeare provides a template replayed in fiction down the ages, from its more textured examples in Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë to the popular romances.
When marriage doesn’t mark the triumphant climax of love, death comes in its place. In Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), written when he was just twenty-four, the young artist-hero’s romantic lovesickness for an unattainable Charlotte moves from intense idealization into an abject melancholy and eventual suicide. The book attained a celebrity akin to that of a pop hit today. A wave of copycat suicides across Europe followed, while Napoleon himself was inspired into verse and carried Werther with him on his Egyptian campaign.
The long eighteenth century saw the first great growth in the fiction-reading public in England. Richardson’s mid-century epistolary classics of sentimental psychology, in part conceived as manuals of good conduct, Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (1741) and the tragic Clarissa (1748), became the bestsellers of the day, read in towns and villages alike. They spawned both parodies and imitations. The rise and rise of popular romantic fictions and verse followed.
Popular romances emphatically twinned romantic love with marriage, making the first a sufficient motive for the second. The new circulating libraries extended the reach of these novels. In 1772, the Universal Magazine observed: ‘Of all the arrows which Cupid has shot at youthful hearts, [the modern novel] is the keenest. There is no resisting it. It is the literary opium that lulls every sense into delicious rapture.’ Both Samuel Johnson and Mary Wollstonecraft criticized these addictive fictions, reflecting that the romantic love they described was no more than a male cover for lust. But their readership grew and the form proliferated, eventually to be condemned by Victorian clerics and mind doctors alike, who found them inimical to the health of young girls. By imbuing women with impossible fantasies of love which had all the redemptive features of a secular religion, they threatened to displace the godly one. ‘He who burns a romance purifies the human mind,’ wrote Richard Carlile, the radical nineteenth-century publisher, capturing the visceral tone of puritan revulsion that romance would elicit in the public sphere in the Victorian era. His disapproval may have been strengthened by the fact that, in that sexual division of labour which at the time placed emotion and the intimate life in the feminine camp and public life in the male, such popular romances were increasingly written by women.
The strength of the Victorian attacks on romance betrays a double fear. It is as if the reading of romance has begun in some mysterious way to stand in for sexuality itself. The pleasure women readers take in these stories of courting males and passionate or resisting heroines is illicit. Reading wives, daughters and servants will be led forever astray, rebel against parental or husbandly wishes, once their imaginations have been fired by the likes of Ouida’s audacious cross-dressing heroine, Cigarette, in Under Two Flags, or indeed, by Madame Bovary, whom Flaubert in part makes a victim of that same romantic impulse.
Not all men have been quite so vitriolic about a literary form read largely by women–one which offered both escape from drudgery and dreams that somewhere love and marriage (if not only love and death) could be combined. Earlier, at the height of literature’s Romantic period, the venerable Sir Walter Scott, whose own fictions charted the heights and depths of grand passion, had criticized Jane Austen for not being romantic enough. Cupid, he complained in a review of Emma, was unfairly left out of popular novels. Romance can render young men’s characters ‘honourable, dignified and disinterested’. For Scott, it seems, the reading of romance could provide a sentimental education for men, as much as for the women usually assumed to be its regular readers.
If romantic fiction in part charts the changing mores of relations between the sexes and ideas about love and marriage, it nonetheless has a fairly permanent psychological core. It is assumed that the business of love–of locating, wooing, getting to know and coming together with the other–is an elevating or civilizing vocation that matters, whether it ends in tragedy or in the domesticity of marriage. Despite our sophisticated and openly sexualized times, simple, happily-ever-after romances still sell in their millions around the world, in Mills & Boon and Harlequin novels as well as in a fertile swell of other popular fictions.
The principal characteristics of these stories were laid down early by Jane Austen and then with greater romantic and moral aplomb for the Victorian reading public by the Brontës. Stripped down, only a little unfairly, to its essential narrative line, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a bestseller then as now, provides the template. A young outsider, with inner rather than flagrant beauty, meets a wild and reprobate, landed Byronic male, Mr Rochester. After a variety of misadventures and misunderstandings, he is tamed by fire and blindness as well as by Jane’s educational and spiritual ministrations into the domestic bliss of a marriage which unites body and soul. Near the end of the novel, after Jane has memorably declaimed, ‘Reader, I married him’, she spells out the lineaments of this ideal marriage:
I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest–blest beyond what language can express: because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh… We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character–perfect concord is the result.
Scores of lesser romantic fictions followed the Jane Eyre model. Boots, the English chemist, which ran popular lending libraries from 1898 to 1966, itemized the essential features of the form in their first literary course for librarians. These consisted of an essentially strong and silent hero from a good family who, owing to some misunderstanding, has cut himself off from society to brood about it in the outposts of Empire. The heroine is well bred, with a distant ethereal beauty, and needs to find someone to lean on. These two opposing poles meet: at first she is repulsed by the brute, but gradually her delicate charm, like Beauty’s with the Beast, brings forth a softer side to his nature and the story ends in a fervent embrace. The man is transformed, that is, educated in the value of an intimate life, and tamed, while the woman recognizes where her true desires lie–and, indeed, that she has desire–which can be fulfilled by the man in question through marriage.
Contemporary ‘chick lit’ is not fundamentally different. Of course, empires–except for business ones–are gone; and sexuality, rather than being expressed in lightning storms or sublimated into purple prose, is lived out. Heroines are now independent working women and have some sexual experience. In many of these novels, they have been through a bad first marriage: their ‘delicacy’ lies in their hurt, which can sometimes be the earlier hurt of an abused childhood. The hero is still inarticulate and his actions are thereby rendered incomprehensible to the heroine. His rescuing her from whatever plight she may find herself in is simultaneously her rescuing or ‘taming’ of him, whether he is a real o
r an imagined rake, so that he can become the better man it is in him to be. Both, in the gaze of the other, recognize parts of themselves to which they had previously been blind. One might say that in the other’s loving attention–and what else is courting and the pursuit?–they become aware of a new value in themselves and in life.
In Rosie Meadows Regrets (1998) by the bestselling Catherine Alliott, the heroine is freed from a miserable marriage by the sudden death of her odious first husband, a man she weds because she has a less than high opinion of herself. The sculptor hero, at first seemingly cold and contemptuous, also has a dead wife, plus a bitchy new one, too hastily married. After various false starts and tribulations of his own, the hero saves the heroine from a sorry end, but not before she has made some strides in refashioning herself and becoming the woman it has always been in her to be.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s hugely popular and wittily exuberant Eat, Pray, Love, though cast in the memoir mould our century has convinced itself is somehow truer to life than fiction, has many of the same tropes. An attractive and successful journalist, Gilbert’s marriage has failed, as has the affair engaged in on the rebound. Depression ensues. Needing to find a better version of herself, she sets forth on a healing journey, one which will enable her to explore the arts of life: pleasure in Italy, spirituality in India; and in Indonesia, the balance between the two. All this achieved, the last part of her journey catapults her into a dashingly romantic love affair with an older man, who in the next book also becomes her husband. Gilbert acknowledges that her story has a ‘ludicrously fairy-tale ending’, while protesting that ‘I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.’ So, one might say, was Cinderella–with a little help from her benefactors, who provided the wherewithal if not to go to Bali, at least to go to what felt like an equally distant ball.
Indeed, many of such women’s romantic fictions bear a distinct relationship to the Cinderella story–and not only because of the magical transformations that love and its happy end in marriage can bring. One way of thinking about why romantic fictions continue to hold a popular appeal, and are read and watched by young and old despite the changing status of women, their key players, is that they are in a sense all stories about the mysteries of growing up and acquiring some kind of more adult–or better–self. How does one move out of the constellation of the first family and that first familial romance in which the child finds itself–amidst Mum and Dad, absent or present, and siblings–and shapes its first attachments into a place where adult desire and desiring are possible and somehow bring out the best of oneself, or make one into the best possible adult version of oneself? These are never-ending stories and ones that can be repeated, with innovations, throughout life, even after a failed first marriage which didn’t do the trick.
The powerful, mysterious, incomprehensible hero in popular romance, one who too often transgresses, bears a decided resemblance to Daddy seen from the little girl’s perspective. How to capture and tame that powerful figure’s ever wandering attention? The answer must in part be to grow up and become like mother, that sexualized being he desired (at least once). Then she’ll be rescued from the plights of dependent childhood. But that’s not so easy. Mother’s in the way, the adult woman the girl must somehow become and also separate herself from. If the mother is dead and hasn’t been replaced, then there is the danger that Daddy will want to keep or imprison the girl at home, far from sexualized rivals.
In life, mothers are both good and bad, often in turn, sometimes at the same time. In Cinderella stories, they’re often enough split into two. Good mothers come as fairy godmothers–sometimes displacements, as in Cinderella itself, of the good mother who is dead. (In the Brothers Grimm pre-Disney version of the story, the dead mother has told Cinderella she will look after her from above, and it is the animals around her grave that Cinderella assiduously tends who take on the magical helping function.) Good/Godmothers abet the process of growing up. They find familiar objects around the child–pumpkins, mice, her own sense of herself and her desires–which will help transform her into a princess.
Wicked stepmothers hinder the process, recognizing that Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty is a rival for paternal attention. They enslave the girl in a nether, dependent position, or send her into oblivion. In Alliott’s Rosie Meadows Regrets, both the heroine’s mother and her accomplished elder sister, as well as her best friend, urge on her diminished self-estimation as an ugly duckling. In Pride and Prejudice Mrs Bennet largely contributes to Lizzy’s humiliation, making her undesirable to Prince Darcy, while her aunt paves the way towards the happy end, providing a fairy godmother she can identify with as a woman, as well as a coach trip to Pemberley.
Within the family it is clear that jealousy and envy are abroad, and the fear of stimulating them chains the heroine to subservient duties and guilts, as do the envious actions of other women: in Pride and Prejudice the manoeuvres of the envious Miss Bingley serve the purpose. The bullying, or often enough the too passive presence of fathers, tied in the first instance to their wives, offers no help. Cinderella’s father, like Lizzy’s, fails his daughter. In finding or being found by Prince Charming, the heroine has first to locate her own desires, her own ball-gown glamour: Daddy is not for her and he can’t be her rescuer. This done, she can become a beautiful stranger to her own father. (Cinderella’s doesn’t recognize her at the ball; Mr Bennet doesn’t recognize in Darcy’s letter the Lizzy he knows.) Only then can she answer the persuasive Prince’s desire, fit her foot into the lost slipper and ‘fall’ away from the duties and restraints the family has tied her to. For women, this can often enough be compounded by an unwillingness to give up the Daddy who is implicated with Mummy, and who in countless Victorian instances enslaves his willing spinster daughter at his side to look after him.
In fairy-tales with male heroes, or the masculine romance of the Boy’s Own stories, the journey into adulthood is different. Boys leave home to go off on adventures without a backward glance, often sent away by their fathers, who see a rival in their sons and won’t countenance displacement by youth. The task of separation from the family is easier, or at least quicker, for boys: like girls, they have performed an early childhood version of this during weaning, but unlike girls, they don’t have to engage in the complicated process, often surrounded by ambivalence, of then identifying with mother in order to become female. In tales such as Freud’s chosen Oedipal template, boys are often given an early kick-start by father abetted by the highest authority of prophecy–though, in the contemporary real versions and in other older ones, when fathers stray (or die) they may stay home to look after Mum.
In Grimm’s tale ‘The King’s Son Who Feared Nothing’, the youth is bored with home and, like any good adolescent testing his manhood, leaves it to wander. He stumbles upon a giant’s estate–a big Daddy, you might say–and challenges him: ‘O you blockhead! You think only you have strong arms. I can do everything I want to.’ The giant responds with a dare: ‘If you are one of that kind, go and bring me an apple of the tree of life. I have a betrothed bride who wishes for it.’
The tree is not only distant–involving a foray into a kind of ‘empire’–but guarded by lions. To get at the apple of life, the youth must breach the ring that protects it–a task that takes ‘luck’. Symbol hunters might easily find a sexual reading here in the ring that guards the apple of life, and they wouldn’t be altogether wrong, for no sooner does the youth put his arm through the ring than he feels ‘a prodigious strength flowing through his veins’. When he returns with the plucked apple, the castrating big Daddy giant immediately blinds him and tries to throw him off the top of a cliff. But the lucky, plucky youth is helped not only by the giant’s (maternal) betrothed, but by a lion who has become his loyal familiar–and, by God, the biggest of Daddies. Water from a stream returns his sight and he sets out on his next adventure, the one that will finally turn him into a man.
This leads him into an enchanted terrain where a
young woman–always that final test in the transition into manhood–has had an evil spell cast over her which has turned her quite black (a hint of Cinder’s ashes here, which similarly blacken or hide a natural beauty that the princely hero is nonetheless attuned to). In order to release her from the spell, the youth must spend three nights in the great hall of the enchanted castle without uttering a peep, even though a pack of gambling devils bludgeon him and try to pull him asunder. Part of this feat of endurance, part of the self-sacrifice that will enable rescue, has all the overtones of a sexual struggle: to release the princess, to conquer her desire, the youth must remain pure and loyal despite lacerating temptation. After each night, the heroine brings the water of life to him to heal his wounds, and on the last morning, when he comes to, he sees that he has released her and the castle from the evil spell. ‘Love’ transforms the beloved as well as the lover. The girl is a great king’s daughter. And regal nuptials are celebrated with much rejoicing.
As the reading public expanded through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, romance became specifically gendered female, frivolous, morally suspect and secondary; and adventure stories, male. This splitting mirrored the division of labour in society as a whole, which placed the emotions and domestic life into the woman’s camp and the public world of action into the man’s. However, as Victorian values and their attendant sexual division of labour gave way in fits and starts–and never seamlessly–to a rebellious modern moment, the whole edifice of love and its psychological weight was reassessed.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 12