One defense of HEA (Happily Ever After) M/M (Male/Male) romances is that too many movies and books kill off the gay couple, and it's time for that to stop!E.M. Forster makes a similar gleeful point in his notes to Maurice when he points out that if he'd ended the book with a suicide pact, it would have been embraced as great literature.
He's right though I must point out two flaws with this argument:
1. A huge amount of romance art ends with the death of the young wife from a wasting disease (Steel Magnolias, Terms of Endearment, Love Story, A Walk to Remember, everything by Poe and the Pre-Raphaelites, etc. etc. etc) and nobody is starting any petitions (so far as I know) to Save Pretty White Women! Okay, maybe when Buffy was on the air but other than that . . .
2. Unfortunately, and sadly, sometimes death does reflect reality. All writers are faced with the conundrum How do I make this story real but right? Yes, I prefer God's Own Country; that doesn't mean Brokeback Mountain doesn't happen.
However, generally speaking, I am not an advocate of death in stories, mostly because I consider it to be a big writing cop-out. It is far more difficult to solve a problem without killing people off.
Besides, the defense of HEAs in gay literature led me to ponder Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. When they wrote their seminal romantic works, namely Pride & Prejudice and Jane Eyre (Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is more old-school), they marked a profound social shift in the nineteenth century world. People were marrying for love--successfully--without apology or death.Nowadays, we take this kind of statement for granted. We are even somewhat derogatory about it (since some people are still foolish enough to think sad endings are more realistic than happy ones).
In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi explains why reading Pride & Prejudice in a dictatorship would be considered subversive even though the work itself rarely mentions the politics of its day. The existence of a proliferation of voices--speaking over and under each other, surviving side by side--is democracy in action. Austen allows Mrs. Bennet to exist alongside the Bingleys; Darcy to exist alongside Mrs. Reynolds; Wickham alongside the Gardiners. They all have different attitudes and characters and desires and opinions. Yet Austen doesn't kill them off. The novel is inherently tolerant.
Romance literature falls into this category. Yes, some of it can be rather shallow and silly. And some of it can be rather badly written. But hey, I know so-called great works that fall into both those categories. What sets HEA romances aside from everything else is that their ends are inherently constructive, pro-people, pro-individualism. It isn't just that the good guys win--the good folks let other people win too.
