Reclaiming Romance

When A.S. Byatt, that most erudite and distinguished fiction writer, titled her 1990 novel Possession: A Romance many of us hard-core romantics rejoiced. She opened her book with a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s preface to The House of the Seven Gables which included, “The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in an attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us”.

I loved those words and I loved that she had called her novel “A Romance”. When I finished (or so I thought) my first novel I titled it The Old Mermaid’s Tale: A Romance of the Great Lakes in homage to Byatt and also to support the effort to reclaim the word romance to its rightful meaning.

Much of early American literature was written as romance in the original sense and gobbled up by Europeans who savored the blend that Hawthorne defined, the connection of a bygone time with the present. James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville wrote richly of a mysterious new world that was both confounded and enriched by the past. The American Romantic Novel was a fresh and exciting form.

When I first began marketing my novel to potential agents and publishers I was astounded by how many replied with a curt, “We don’t handle romance novels.” I was stunned. What were they talking about? Hadn’t they read my synopsis? How could they call my novel a romance novel? But it was the subtitle that they saw and they went no further - A Romance of the Great Lakes = romance novel = automatic rejection. I had failed to take into consideration the power of the contemporary romance novel which is a formula genre with very specific rules, a very specific audience, and which is dismissed by many publishers outside that genre. Like other specific genres - mysteries, science fiction, westerns – romance novels have their place in the publishing world and that place is carved in stone.

I’ve never knowingly read a modern romance novel but I know a little about the form - fiesty, ambitious, and beautiful woman struggles against daunting odds to find love and success and, after overcoming a variety of roadblocks, achieves both with the man of her dreams. The End. It’s a depressingly trite evolution of an ancient literary form.

The original romance novel grew out of the medieval romantic tradition of the adventurer setting out on a quest. In the pursuit of his goal he encounters challenges that test his virtue, his resolve and the very fiber of his being. It is what Joseph Campbell called The Hero’s Journey. When the romance novel moved to America it was given a fresh new face in a world that was mysterious and fraught with dangers and all the more exciting for it. Now the hero had to not only test his mettle but do it in a setting where there were no guideposts, where fresh dangers were uncharted.

Over time, as the New World became tamed and more familiar, novels with a romantic theme evolved but still retained that lush, sensory timelessness where myth and reality merged, and love and adventure existed in tandem, characters were faintly archetypal and their quest was plagued by moral dilemmas that tested their virtue and their ethical resolve. It is an honorable form.

Maybe the challenges of virtue and ethics are problematic for contemporary readers. Maybe a simple form like the contemporary romance novel is as much a challenge as they want. Its predictability is comforting. But I still believe there is a place for the other romance novel, the traditional romance novel. I want to take that word back from its current definition and restore it to its earlier meaning. Not an easy task, I realize, but traditional romantics have never been interested in what is easy.

Thanks for reading.