Love Potion Number Nine

The romantic tale of Tristan and Isolde dates to the 11th century and exists in many versions. The basic situation is that aged King Mark sends his nephew, Sir Tristan, to fetch the king’s bride, Princess Isolde. And on the ship back to Mark’s kingdom, the two young people fall in love and become lovers. But that’s not really what happens, according to the centuries of this story’s retelling. The key to the Tristan and Isolde love story is the love potion that Isolde’s servant gives them. It is the reason they become deaf to honor and to duty. The love potion makes them betray others, and also makes their love so strong that no arguments of common sense can penetrate it. The story continues with Isolde marrying King Mark yet trysting secretly with Tristan. Of course the lovers get caught. It doesn’t end happily. The story we know best today is that of the opera version by Richard Wagner, “Tristan und Isolde,” based on a 19th century German retelling. At the beginning, Isolde vengefully wants to poison Tristan for having killed her betrothed. She demands that he drink a potion that she also drinks. And both of them believe it will kill them. Instead, her servant has substituted a love potion. It unleashes their mad passion, a passion so consuming that they cannot contemplate a life without it. To them, love is life, and love is death. Love is both night and day, all of light and all of darkness. It’s amazing. Wagner knew what he was doing when he created the mystical, moving music that tells this intensely romantic story. It can’t be called a tragedy when the lovers achieve an apotheosis that is so intense. Of course I went home on a high from seeing this opera (inexpensively at a convenient simulcast to a movie theater in hi-def), and my significant other said the equivalent of “Bah, humbug!” He thinks that a romance in which the love happens because of a love potion is no romance at all. But I disagree with him. I think he is being too literal. When the tale of Tristan and Isolde was a big deal, 900 years ago and thereafter, the concept of individual free will didn’t really exist. People were born into a hierarchy, and they knew they had duties to perform. And beyond that, whatever inchoate urgings they had were kept to themselves. Maybe never even examined. It’s not that people were lacking in a desire to love, or in an ability to love. They just didn’t have a way to think about love, a path, if you will, for their thoughts and feelings. So what’s really happening in Tristan und Isolde is that the love potion is made the symbol of emotions for which the characters don’t know how to take responsibility. Today, careless people mess up their love lives and irresponsibly shrug and say “It just happened.” But almost a millennium ago, people said, in confusion and amazement, “It was a potion,” or “It was witchcraft.” They had no other way to explain why they were impelled to turn their backs on honor and duty in the name of love. Honor and duty, especially family duty or duty to an overlord, have ruled society for far longer than free will has. Today, most of us live our lives believing we have free will, often in spite of evidence that we are trapped in many ways. One of the reasons that romances retain eternal relevance to the human condition is that they encapsulate some of the most irrational, inconvenient, impractical, and downright suicidal yearnings of which men and woman are capable. It’s crazy for Tristan and Isolde to be in love and to act on their love. But they simply cannot resist the ineffable pull to one another. Tristan’s last words are of his endless yearning for his beloved. Even in death, there is peace for them because they will be together, inseparably in love. I don’t care if it was a love potion that started it. This is love.

Mr. Darcy, Perennial Romance Hero

I finally broke down and watched the British miniseries adaptation of Jane Austen’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice. On romance blogs, people are always sighing over Colin Firth, the actor who played Mr. Darcy in the series. Of course, my own prior knowledge of Colin Firth comes from seeing him wear that hideous Christmas reindeer sweater in the movie version of Bridget Jones’ Diary. And I can’t get the stupid reindeer out of my head. But now I understand about Firth’s Darcy. He’s handsome in that lush, curly-haired manner that is so much the epitome of romance novels. In a prior movie version in 1940, Laurence Oliver did a wonderful turn as an extremely genteel yet manly Darcy opposite Greer Garson, quite civilized and restrained. I’ve always thought that Olivier was extremely handsome and sensitive looking, just perfect to play Darcy. But thinking about his version of Darcy, I realized that it is missing the genuine male mulishness that Colin Firth manages to convey. And mulishness is really what Darcy is all about. Darcy is the annoying guest who shows up at the party but is above being pleased. He makes it clear that he’s not having a good time, but still he hangs around, a visible downer to others. Darcy is in fact typical of many young men who act like silent boors in social situations where there is no woman present with whom they want to have sex. (I know; that’s a rather crude and cynical statement. But true, I believe.) Darcy can’t be bothered to do his share to oil the social waters. He wanders around the fringes of the party instead. The heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, overhears his too-loud, slighting estimation of her lack of appeal—the 19th century version of “No, I wouldn’t do her,” although couched in polite language. She spends most of the rest of the story resenting his attitude, and rightly so. It’s bad enough not to be invited to dance. It’s worse to be both dismissed and insulted by a stranger without ever having exchanged a word with him. But I’ve noticed that—at least in romances—when a woman meets a very handsome, rich young man who is also insufferably arrogant, she doesn’t just forget about him. She wants to make him change his mind about her. I’m not so sure about the guy wearing the reindeer sweater, but Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy does inspire that kind of female aggression. And that’s the secret of his appeal. He makes few overt moves. But he’s around, and he’s watching, and he won’t reveal what he’s thinking or feeling. Isn’t that just like a typical man!? How horrid and frustrating. And what a shock when he does open up and he admits that he’s in love with Elizabeth despite all her vulgar relatives and her personal lack of fortune! Pride and Prejudice is most convincing when Elizabeth Bennet tells off Darcy. She says out loud the kinds of things that Jane Austen herself wasn’t likely to be able to say out loud to the young men who dismissed and ignored her because of lack of looks or of fortune. And where Pride and Prejudice is most contrived is where Jane Austen gives Elizabeth and Darcy a second chance despite their hostile and openly expressed opinions of each other. Because in real life, they would never have met again. Or worse, if they had, he would never have broached the marriage topic again, and she would never have dared to reopen it. But in a romance, the mulish, unobtainable, handsome, and rich hero not only falls for the poor but charming heroine, and gets told off by her, he comes back for more as soon as he sees her again. In Pride and Prejudice, this happens via a contrivance so thin as to be the kind of situation modern editors would immediately reject. Elizabeth just happens to be touring his mansion and he just happens to show up there. Oh, come on. But that’s how they meet again and how he comes to do her such a service that her whole opinion of him changes. Not just her attraction to him, which was present from the moment they met despite her denials, but her estimation of him as a man. So in the end, despite Darcy’s mulish manners in company, he proves that he’s a hero. And he and Elizabeth Bennet marry and live happily ever after, even though he probably still has very little to say much of the time. Kind of like a stereotypical real-life husband, come to think of it. Which may account for the story's long-lasting appeal. The attractive, unknown man becomes the known, and his faults become a minor issue because he is revealed as a hero after all. Many of us marry men because we see their noble hearts. Like Darcy's.

Romance with a Message

Maybe you think that the romances we all consume are completely without any agenda other than boy meets girl. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are plenty of social messages in romances. Probably the most visible message in recent years is about women who are in abusive relationships or running from them. Wife-beating, as it used to be called, is an historically longstanding behavior. It is only in the last quarter century that our culture has cried out to stop it by promoting a zero tolerance reaction to it. As mentioned in a previous post, Jealousy, even as late as the 1970s, spousal abuse was something that wives (the chief sufferers) were supposed to accept without complaint. No more, and along with all the public discussion of it today, there are scores of romances that specifically encourage women to recognize and flee abusive situations. But what about other social messages? By now it is well known that romances in the 1950s promoted the idea that a woman’s place was the home. Career girl romances always ended with the young woman quitting to get married. And any woman with an actual talent, such as art or music or dance, was forced to give it up. There was no acceptance of a heroine who wanted to keep on dancing, or playing the piano for anyone but her husband and children. Today’s romances have long since finished fighting the career wars. It’s not even an issue anymore, but it was the major issue in romances of the late 1970s and early 1980s. And guess who won? You might think that romances are written merely to entertain, and the writers just use socially relevant themes as part of being current. And of course that is true. But all writers hold certain personal beliefs that inevitably come through in their stories. And at least some writers actively craft their stories to showcase their beliefs. Today, we attend classic plays such as George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara” and “Pygmalion” for sheer entertainment, as period pieces, even. They’re extremely witty and amusing. When we go to “My Fair Lady,” the musical version of “Pygmalion,” we laugh at Henry Higgins’ theories about how an educated tone of voice determined class perception in Edwardian England. But Shaw was a founder of the Fabian Socialists, and he was deliberately crafting his comedic and romantic social tangles of plays believing that playwriting was “the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world.” And talking about romances with an agenda, there’s the entire panoply of evangelical Christian romances being published today specifically with a religious message. They have a crucial requirement: The success of the romantic relationship must hinge on the born-again Christian faith of the protagonists. A roundup of the publishers’ guidelines for writers of these books makes this clear. Yes, the suppression of sexual behavior is extremely important to these romances. Even kissing must not be portrayed as passionate in carnal detail. But the sexual elements take a back seat to the issue of religious faith. It’s not enough to be a practicing Episcopalian or Roman Catholic (and forget being Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist) in these romances. Evangelism is viewed as the only true Christianity, and Christianity as the only true religion. That’s quite a burden to put on a romance. The grande dame of such romances of the 20th century was Grace Livingston Hill. In the dozens of books she wrote, she covered many situations that related to happiness with Christianity, always drawing the line very distinctly. If the hero or heroine’s love was not a true Christian by her definition, they were as damned as Satan (they might even be Satan) and must be rejected until they repented and came to the fold. There was no room for compromise, or for opposing views of the proper relationship to God. As much as romances have changed over the years, this is still the agenda of evangelical Christian romances. Ironically, the next most frequent religion covered in any detail in romances is wicca. Yes, wicca, the nature-based religion whose practitioners hold a wide variety of beliefs, sometimes including paganism, priestesses dancing around in the nude, moon goddess worship, and just about anything any sect happens to want. Many fantasy and paranormal romances include wicca elements or characters, often as misunderstood, flaky, or outcast figures, but sometimes as establishment figures in fantasy worlds. But there aren’t any major publishers putting out entire lines of wicca romances. Any proseletyzing for wicca is on an author-by-author basis. Generally, the non-wicca hero or heroine is not required to join a coven by the story’s end in order to win the true love. But learning to respect a different religious view of the world is often a significant element of such stories. Are there other messages in the romances you’re reading today? Of course. Even a book about The Tycoon’s Pregnant Mistress promotes the idea that money is power, and yet that true love linked to middle class morality can conquer tremendous worldly inequities. You don’t have to look for the message behind every romance you read. But it’s there.

Torn Between Two Loyalties

In many romances, the heroine is torn between two loyalties. She initially identifies closely with her family. She sees the hero as an interloper. She sides with her wastrel brother or manipulative father, for instance, even when he’s doing things that impact her life negatively. Like selling her to the hero in marriage to wipe out a debt. Or gambling away the family estate. Or doing something criminal that would leave her holding the bag or in dangerously reduced circumstances. And many contemporary romances still contrive to use this plot situation, even in a time when most heroines have careers of their own and plenty of self-determination. Loyalty to their family drags them into a jam anyway. Think of the classic twins plot, in which the wallflower/nerd heroine has to pretend to be her glamorous model/actress sister. The heroine isn’t participating in the elaborate masquerade out of self-interest. She’s doing it out of family loyalty. Our story, “Shipboard Masquerade,” by Amanda Miles, is about a twin who enacts this classic storyline. Exactly how the heroine changes her loyalties is an important dynamic in a romance. Sometimes, the hero smashes her loyalty to her family and forcibly drags her into his camp. This is most typical of historical romances or old-style contemporary romances in which the heroines are controlled by their families, either physically or through extensive emotional blackmail. They don’t have the independence to be able to view their families with dispassion. They identify closely with them, often irrationally. The hero sees the heroine’s family for what it is. He may choose to disillusion her about her family, or to demand that she forget her family, or he may pay them off. In historical romances this is often explicit; the rich hero literally gives an income to the heroine’s black sheep brother, or nagging mother, or avaricious father. The hero’s goal is to get the heroine to reassign her loyalties to him. But his efforts don’t succeed until the heroine actually switches her loyalties, and that has nothing to do with his paying off her relatives or forcing her to marry him, and everything to do with her willingness to commit to him completely. Usually, as long as she believes he does not love her, or that she does not love him, she won’t take this step. The other method is for the hero to persuade the heroine. He opens himself up to her and reveals his admirable character or lovable personality, convincing her that he is worthy of her loyalty. But at various points in the story there will be tests of loyalty and setbacks. Our recently published story, “Love’s Redemption,” by Niambi Brown Davis, features a heroine who has been burned by previous loves and is reluctant to hand her faith to her new love. At a key moment, with evidence that perhaps the hero is a bad guy after all, she simply cannot make the shift. The hero has to prove his worthiness to the heroine before she finally gives him her loyalty. Sometimes, things don’t work out. Loyalties don’t shift. An example of this from a classic Gothic novel would be The Bride of Lammermoor, by Sir Walter Scott (1819), in which the heroine is so torn about the arranged marriage her family wants that she kills her husband on their wedding night. Her loyalty is still with the man she really loves (the story is better known today in its operatic form as “Lucia di Lammermoor”). Georgette Heyer’s April Lady, a Regency romance (1957) depicts a heroine whose marital problems all stem from her failure to shift her loyalty from her family to her husband. Certainly the loyalty conflict is most obvious in a story of an arranged marriage, but the plots of contemporary romantic suspense novels, especially secret agent tales, often pivot on the issue of where the characters have placed their loyalties. Of course this works both ways. A hero with a mistress or girlfriend must give her up for the heroine. And, yes, his mother, too, must recede to second place in his family life. He must re-order his loyalties so the woman he loves comes first. Nowhere is the importance of switching loyalties better illustrated than in old Gothic romances. Numerous Gothic romances start with the heroine arriving at a new home as a new bride who scarcely knows her husband. He becomes a suspect during the mystery that follows. Because symbolically he’s usually under a curse, he has not given his own loyalty to the heroine yet. He leaves her alone to solve the mystery, to dodge the murder attempts, to discover his own family’s secrets, and more. By the story’s end, he finally proves his loyalty by saving her life, just as she has proved hers by identifying with his interests and solving his long-festering family problems. She is the person who discovers what happened to the wife who supposedly ran off with a lover, but who actually was murdered, for instance. Only when her husband (or husband-to-be) shakes himself out of his own former way of thinking and saves her at the end does he make the loyalty switch that turns them into a team. This change of loyalties is crucial for the success of a permanent, committed relationship. (Let’s call it a marriage, shall we?) For a marriage to work correctly, both the woman and the man have to realign their loyalties to be loyal to each other first and foremost. They create a new unit, a new team. If they pull together, they get somewhere. If they remain torn between two loyalties without choosing, they are in lifelong hell. Proof of that is any advice column, with its readers desperate for help because their own spouses won’t stand up for them against in-laws, step-relations, bosses, friends, plain bad luck, or whatever. In romances, if not in real life, heroines and heroes learn to make the switch. That’s because so much is visibly at stake for them. But in real life, just as much is at stake. All the future years of their happiness and contentment are based on making a binding loyalty commitment and honoring it.

Jealousy

Romances reflect the state of our society. Not very long ago, we used to think that a man proved his love by showing jealousy of his girlfriend or wife. He loved her so much he wanted her all for himself, and so on. That was common in an era of men who were strong and silent, who simply didn’t have the tools to communicate their love openly. They were expected to act out their feelings, not talk about them. But only aggressively. Thus in romances, jealousy was acted out by anger. And softer feelings were hardly ever admitted except on the very last page of a book. Today, men in our society are expected to be more articulate. No more violence substituting for words. No more going on drunken benders as proof of manliness. (Smoking and drinking, once the hallmarks of the sexy male, also are long gone fashions.) But as acceptable behaviors by men have changed, so have behaviors by women. Today they are expected to be more direct. No more coy denials of affection. Certainly no more manipulative ploys to make their man jealous in order to prove his love. We now recognize jealous behavior as usually stemming from insecurity, not love. Further, we believe that a jealous husband or boyfriend is being abusive when he acts out his insecurity by showing rage. If the man tries to dictate or restrict the heroine’s life, or if he touches her with violence, he’s not even cast as the hero anymore. He’s the villain. These days, a lot of romances start with women fleeing abusive men, men who won’t accept being escaped, let alone rejected. This now common romance plot reflects the rise of the stalker ex in our society. Such stories end happily in romances. Instead of the estranged ex husband killing his former wife as so often happens in real life, in romances she learns to fight back, finds a hero to help her, and finally routs her jealous, insecure, sore loser nemesis. You might be surprised to know that not so long ago, authors were writing romances in which the men not only threatened violence against the women they claimed to love, but meted it out, too. There were lots of marital rapes in old Harlequins, for instance. These usually occurred in relationships in which both the hero and the heroine were totally unwilling to communicate honestly. Often a clash of cultures helped exacerbate the conflict. But it was the unwillingness of the hero and heroine to talk truth that got them into hot water. In fact, they often were in such denial about their feelings that they deliberately incited rage by treating each other poorly, making each other jealous by clinging to rivals, saying mean things to each other, and more. Marital rape is a classic weapon in the arsenal of marital combat, especially in societies in which the social and legal position of women is unequal to that of men. These stories were highly combustible and everybody in them behaved badly. And afterwards, they both were ashamed and eventually admitted fault. Our opinion of intimate behavior like this has changed, thankfully, and romance writers simply aren’t writing these kinds of stories anymore. We no longer think it is thrilling in a good way if in order to rule over her, a hero grabs a heroine and shakes her, or threatens to spank her, or just threatens her with force. We no longer confuse violence with sexual desire, or rage with love. We’re not even convinced that either person should rule over the other. Mostly the dynamic of romances today is that of achieving equilibrium, not beating the other person into submission, whether the weapon is physical violence or mean words. The sheer level of violence threatened and acted out in romances has dropped off substantially. But if you’d like to search out a few romances written decades ago that are amazing apologies for marital violence, just to see how much romances have changed, here are some examples: Sheila Bishop is a British writer known mostly for many Regency and historical romances, but she also wrote several contemporary romances. One of them, Desperate Decision, is long out of print and justifiably so. It featured a heroine married to an insecure guy who jealously beat her up so much he drove her to contemplate infidelity. But eventually, her social world pushed her to reconcile with him and to accommodate his tendency towards rage. It became her fault because she provoked him by daring to talk to other men. Even at the time, long before domestic abuse became a topic for public discussion, I thought it was a lousy ending. As an astute reviewer on Amazon.com’s listing of another Sheila Bishop novel, Consequences, notes, “her heroes sometimes have a disturbing abusive streak.” American author Amii Lorin, better known today as Joan Hohl, wrote a story of violent abuse, Morgan Wade’s Woman, in which the macho, inarticulate hero who voluntarily agreed to a marriage of convenience suffers from such outraged masculine pride that he constantly beats the heroine black and blue during punishing sex, as a way to subdue her own pride and apparently equalize their relationship. That’s my opinion of his motives, anyway. Jan Cohn, in Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-market Fiction for Women, claims that their battle is one of sheer sexuality. But if that’s so, then I still think the so-called hero cheated, because he used superior force and the heroine ended up physically bruised for all to see. I had an opportunity to meet the author soon after reading the book and I remonstrated with her about how the hero treated the heroine. I said his treatment of her was not fair—that he was punishing her for a situation that was not her fault. The author replied that life was unfair. Ouch. Curiously, Wikipedia’s Amii Lorin/Joan Hohl entry does not list this abusive romance as part of her oeuvre. Sally Wentworth wrote a Harlequin Presents in which the heroine lies to the hero about who she is as a person, but by the time he discovers this, they’re stuck far from England. Then he proceeds to totally treat her like dirt. I don’t recall physical violence, but the psychological abuse was intense. Utterly destroyed, she considers infidelity with a sympathetic other man. But she finally finds personal redemption by turning instead to helping others during a natural disaster, thus also winning some respect from her abusive husband. I’m going to say that this was Betrayal in Bali, although it might have been her earlier novel, Candle in the Wind. Like other readers who discover that they own a repellent book, I got rid of my copy. Reading how the heroines were treated in these books will probably make you seethe with rage. We are not used to such casual acceptance of violence towards women anymore. But the cruel lies the women tell will probably make you angry at them, too. We expect more kindness between the sexes these days. Maybe that’s as much a societal fantasy as the prior mislabeling of jealousy’s meaning. Only time will tell.