Don’t be so hasty, young lady.
Romance novels may seem frivolous to some.
Materialists would argue that sexual need is elemental, so why add a layer of unnecessary mysticism?
Why create unrealistic expectations of ‘happily ever after’ that often comes with a wedding or at least the expectation of marriage?
The hook-up culture which seems to be the dominant paradigm amongst today’s twentysomethings is apparently a cause to be celebrated:
To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.
The reduction of love and romance to its physiological basics has been so pervasive over the past 50 years some feminists (both male and female) are now askance at the ‘hook-up culture’ which seems the dominant paradigm amongst today’s twentysomethings.
You watch these scenes and other examples of the zeitgeist-y, early-20s heroines of “Girls” engaging in, recoiling from, mulling and mourning sex, and you think: Gloria Steinem went to the barricades for this? Salaries may be better than in decades past and the cabinet and Congress less choked with testosterone. But in the bedroom? What’s happening there remains something of a muddle, if not something of a mess.
Donna Freitas, the author of The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy discusses just this past weekend the emotional toll it is taking on young people.
When I interviewed students at seven universities, almost all of them said they wished that they could go on an old-fashioned date or that someone would ask them out. I was often tempted to say something like: “I know you think nobody dates here, but they want to. When you leave this interview room, there will be someone else outside waiting to see me. If you think they’re cute, ask them out.”
Of course, I couldn’t say that; it would distort the study. But the interviews showed that students were looking for permission to date and felt that the culture didn’t allow it.
In other words these young men and women are looking for permission to pursue romance. So why is that important? As novellist Nicole Hurley-Moore points out in this introduction to Romanticism, the concept of romance is inextricably tied to the noble ideal.
The Romantics were repelled by the ideals of the Enlightenment, such as the rise of Empirical science and that we are no more than the sum of our experiences. For the Romantics, inspiration and intuition were more important than experience. So while the Enlightenment wished to reduce everything to physical matter, dismiss innate ideas and find logical, scientific explanations for all things; the Romantics countered this with a return to the beauty of nature, inspiration, intuition, exploring the unseen forces (the supernatural), bliss and dreams.
And a straight line can be drawn from the 18th century Enlightenment movement to the neo-Darwinian materialist movement today.
The most famous, most succinct, and most pitiless summary of the manifest image’s fraudulence was written nearly 20 years ago by the geneticist Francis Crick: “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”
Yes you do you idiot, get a ring on that girl’s finger!
That’s a bit depressing, isn’t it?
And perhaps more than just a little untrue as reductionist neo-Darwinism proves to be philosophically unsatisfying explanation for the universe at large says philosopher Thomas Nagel in his masterwork Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
It is a thought which is also shared by English Philosopher Roger Scruton in his book Modern Philosophy.
“This worry is not just philosophical, it is also spiritual. The meaning of the world is enshrined in conceptions that science does not recognize: conceptions like beauty, goodness and the soul which grow in the thin top-soil of human discourse. This top-soil is quickly eroded when the flora are cleared from it, and nothing ever grows thereafter. You can see the process at work in the matter of sex. Human sexuality has usually been understood through ideas of love and belonging. … The sexologist clears all this tangled undergrowth away, to reveal the scientific truth of things: the animal organs, the unmoralized impulses, and the tingling sensations. … The meaning of the experience plays no part in the scientific description.”
As you can see nothing much has changed in the 300 years since the Enlightenment philosophy took root in the fashional salons of France before and during the French Revolution.
So what does this have to do with the romance novel?
The short answer is ‘everything’.
As every publisher’s submission guidelines will tell you, your novel has to have a HEA – a happily ever after. This is because every reader has invested time with your characters.
As an author you have engaged in a courtship with the person who has opened your book and through it you have introduced two other people – your hero and heroine who have not just come together in a one-night stand, a hook up or a booty call and separated alone the next day, but have gone through the trials and tribulations of a relationship together and have emerged from the other side ready to continue their lives together.
Romance novels show no sign of abating in popularity. In fact it can be argued that the demand is increasing:
Affection for the genre hasn’t faltered even as the rest of the book industry has struggled since the economic crisis began. Sales of romance novels have held steady at about $1.4 billion every year since 2008, according to Romance Writers of America’s 2011 Romance Book Consumer survey.
A large part of the genre’s enduring appeal? The happy-ever-after endings.
Human beings yearn for relationship and crave love. It is as strongly imprinted on our DNA as our eye and hair colour.
What romance novels demonstrate is the ideal – the exclusive life-long emotional, spiritual and physical connection between two lovers.
And that ideal builds a better, healthier and happier society at large.