Romance

The super-genre defined

Romance in Art is not about Love

In French, the word roman is like ‘novel’ as a lengthy tale. But also in England and in France, at the end of the 1700s, the middle-class began to rebel against the dominant artistic style of the times, which was Classical. Classical art emphasized the form of the art, and delighted in restraint and simple elegance. As a result Classical art tended to be quite ‘cool’ in its emotional tenor. The middle class found that emotions were more appealing, and they rediscovered and fell in love with medieval tales. This gave rise to the genre we call Gothic after the Goths and the period of their ascendancy in art.

The languages of Southern Europe that descended from Latin were called the Romance languages, and this movement towards a more primitive but expressive art was also called the Romantic movement, since it wrote in the Romance languages of the commons rather than the Latin of scientists and educated men of the Classicists. The Romantic movement created tales that were called Romances as late as the 1930s.

In the latter 1900s, as Realism came to dominate not only in the critical tales but also in the popular ones, Romance came to be associated with a sub-genre of the broader, older Romance. This new Romance was a genre all about Love and was aimed at women readers. The consequence was that Romance featured a female heroine who endured various trials and tribulations in her life, and whose main story-line concerned her stormy relations with one man in particular, a man the heroine often couldn’t make up her mind if she loved or hated. In the tale’s end, love triumphed over all adversity, misconceptions are all cleared up, and the Girl gets her Man.

At first this new Romance retained many of the older trappings of the broader Romance. Models of the new Romance tales could be found in the Romantic Gothic novels, such as the great Jane Eyre.

Romance as it came first upon the stage in England, then France, then Germany and other lands, is an amorphous beast. Many have defined it in various ways.

This is my way.

The Other

I see Romance as primarily appealing to the emotions but to some emotions more than others. The idea of Adventure came to the front for the 1800s were an age of Adventure for Europeans building empires and looting the rest of the globe for raw materials and wealth and military strength.

This Adventure involves the Other, which is the key to Romance as I see it. In brief, a Romance tells of

• the Other Self leading
• the Other Life with
• the Other Sex in
• the Other World.

The Other Self is like the reader, but unlike him. We may call all these things ‘larger than life’ or we may call the whole thing the ‘fulfillment of a wish.’ The Other Self is the man the reader wishes he might be. As such the Other Self embodies the reader’s own values, and has more of those personal qualities the reader values most, and wishes he has more of.

The Other Life is the kind of existence the reader daydreams he might lead, ‘if only.’ This Other Life is not necessarily all good, but rather exists in extremes beyond the life the reader finds himself living. Failure exacts a greater price, often one’s life, and success grants rewards beyond one’s wildest dreams. This Other Life demands for success exactly those values the reader would rank as foremost, and thus his Other Self is eminently qualified to be the Winner here who takes all.

The Other Sex is the most-desired sexual partner the reader can currently imagine. She shares his values and embodies them and has all those personal qualities the reader finds most desirable in a sexual partner. Though ‘love’ is usually the term used, and the Romance ends in marriage that will last the rest of the couple’s lives, this is but a veil cast over Sex, which is what really counts. Remember this is a Dream, and Emotions come first, and the primary emotions are strongest.

The Other World is that land that forms the basis of the Other Life. It is also set in a higher key, with greater extremes of everything than the world the reader inhabits. This Other World lay, in the first blush of the Romantic movement, either in the Past or in a Foreign Land. By virtue of these exotic settings, the Other World often included elements of the supernatural made flesh in ways scoffed at in the ‘real world’ the reader dwelt in. When science led men to speculate on what life might be like on other planets (and when most of the Earth had been mapped, explored, and reported on), the Other World became Mars, the Moon, outer space, and Science Fiction developed under the broader rubric of Romance. It is only in the Other World that the Other Life becomes possible, or at least is properly valued and flourishes. It is only in the Other World that the Other Self rises to the level that he merits.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, May 14, 2008)