When did we decide that love isn’t serious?
One of the biggest criticisms hurled against books for girls/women is that “they’re just about romance”. As if romance (and by extension, love) is just a frothy, insubstantial, silly thing that isn’t worthy of discussion or exploration.
Love affects every single person on the planet, more personally and profoundly than war or catching big whales or dead girls in country towns. And it doesn’t just happen to girls. Boys fall in love too. We all do. It’s part of our evolutionary reason for being. It’s inspired poetry (good and bad, mostly bad) and music and art. So how come it isn’t “literary”?
Here’s Stephen Fry from his book The Liar.
It had taken him two painful terms to identify the symptoms. He looked them up in all the major textbooks. There was no doubt about it. All the authorities concurred : Shakespeare, Tennyson, Ovid, Keats, Georgette Heyer, Milton, they were of one opinion. It was love. The Big One.
Cartwright of the sapphire eyes and golden hair, Cartwright of the Limbs and Lips : he was Petrarch’s Laura, Milton’s Lycidas, Catullus’s Lesbia, Tennyson’s Hallam, Shakespeare’s fair boy and dark lady, the moon’s Endymion. Cartwright was Garbo’s salary, the National Gallery, he was cellophane : he was the tender trap, the blank unholy surprise of it all and the bright golden haze on the meadow : he was honey-honey, sugar-sugar, chirpy chirpy cheep-cheep and his baby-love : the voice of the turtle could be heard in the land, there were angels dining at the Ritz and a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.
Does that sound soppy? Why? We all go there, whether it’s requited or not. Even educated fleas do it, apparently. So how come when we write about it, it’s not “real” literature? Not unless it’s ALSO about the Thatcher era, or your alcoholic mother and absent father, or dead girls in country towns? Patty Smyth pointed out that Sometimes Love Just Aint Enough, but I want to know why?
Perhaps it is because the adults who hurl such criticism are of the opinion that the only love young girls can find is fleeting and superficial. They fall in love with the next pop/hollywood hearthrob without knowing a thing about the kind of people these boys might be.
Adults think young love can’t last. Adults think that anyone under 25 can’t possibly know what real love is.
Divorce rate is also high. Most people are bitter and disenchanted with love, don’t think they need it, don’t see it as being as important as a job, stable income, career, so on.
Most people (and I appreciate there might be exceptions) who have found love, are in love and are comfortable in their relationship, don’t need romance novels. They want something more, or something else at least. They want to read something that will have a profound impact on them. And reading about some other girl/woman trying to find love may no longer appeal.
People fall in and out of love all the time. But the pain of abusive parents, of surviving in war torn countries, all the gritty themes that win oscars, you don’t just fall in and out of that kind of pain. That experience is lasting.
The only time a pure love story is ever considered literary, is if it ends in tragedy. Because all the bitter people have their beliefs confirmed, and all the hopeless romantics are satisfied that true love endures for all eternity.
Gee, Amy, I gather you have never stayed up until 3am rolling around the floor, desperate to finish Pride and Prejudice? You’ve obviously never felt the tug of ‘just one more page’ of a Georgette Heyer? Swooned in the middle of a Nora Ephron film? I for one believe that being a ‘hopeless romantic’ and a serious partner can exist in tandem. Love and Romance are not the same thing, but somehow, in my mind at least, one without the other seems like a god awful waste.
Mighty good question Lili. Now I’m going to go finish reading Georgette Heyer’s ‘Cotillion’, given to me by my best friends who are both mad for romance and who are both very much in love with there adoring, and often romantic, husbands.