Why Romances Are Worth Reading

Re-post from Votaries 2007 (with edits):

1. Romances allow for happy endings.

Literary analysis [and these days, depressing collectives] like to argue that only negative art with hopeless, nihilistic endings is valid because reality is saaad. The argument often goes something like this: "Reality is not the simplistic good versus evil narrative that shows up in those books I don't like where everybody gets what they want!" 

Romances end happily; therefore, they are unrealistic. 

At the back of the argument is an exceptionally odd assumption that happy events and endings are somehow not as true-to-life as unhappy events and endings.

C.S. Lewis tackles this weird human assumption in one of his apologetics. He compares the birth of a child to war. He points out that when one is talking about the happiness surrounding birth, literal-minded we-like-relativity-because-we-can-use-it-to-make-everybody-else's-lives-miserable types (bullies) will say, "But that's just subjective" or "That's just your emotions" or "That's just what our patriarchal, pro-child society has taught you to think."

But if one mentions the trauma and horror of war, the miserable ones will instantly agree that yes, absolutely, "That is what war is REALLY like."

Anything good is relative. Anything bad is "reality."

Balderdash! Emotion is emotion, good or bad or otherwise. Granted the sappy sweetness of Hallmark cards can grate after awhile. But the angst-ridden chest-beating of the miserables isn't much better and a lot harder to ignore. Unhappy endings are no more likely than happy ones and although everybody eventually dies, not everybody invests death [or illness] with terror, foreboding and glum faces. The tendency to do so is as much an emotional construct as smiling glibly, quoting bad poetry, and making everybody watch the end of Ghost (good movie, by the way). Dead is dead. Life is life.

I'm not saying that death and murder and war and a thousand other tragedies are supposed to be met with a shrug, any more than I am implying that birth, weddings, new jobs, great movies, good books, a new dress, a nice walk are supposed to be met with a grumpy "whatever." To move this from relativity into the territory of eighteenth-nineteenth century classicism, I'm enough of a Jane Austen fan to believe in appropriate responses to appropriate events. And I believe those appropriate responses are, to a degree, taught. The body reacts. But the how of that reaction depends on our nature, our nurture and our choices within the confines of a civilized society. (And I happen to believe in civilization.)

If emotions are just emotions, and the "how" of emotions is taught, then writing books where people get married and are happy is no more or less "real" than writing books where people get divorced and hate each other and fight over the kids. In fact, I've read plenty of the latter that struck me as ridiculous beyond belief--everything was so conveniently assembled.

My computer screen wallpaper.

2. Romances are constructive. 

I've written elsewhere about how much of a cop-out I consider death (and instant breakups) in a story. I've killed off characters myself, but in general, I prefer to keep them alive because in general, I prefer to work out how my characters are going to solve a story's particular problem. To a degree, that's the fascination of all fiction for me. I've always wanted to know what will happen next: after the prince kills the dragon, after the Beast turns into the prince, after Cinderella fits the shoe on her foot, after Rahab helps the spies. Getting there can be fun but how everything is going to work out later is part of the fun too. So it isn't that death and divorce aren't likely; it's that they are so dull. 

3. Romances provide story. 

We live in a post-Victorian world where all literature/art must apparently have a MESSAGE that teaches people proper values and the purpose of life while it enlarges their minds and helps them feel better (or worse--it rather depends on whom one is talking to).

Most perfect movie ever made.

Art for its own sake is an old argument, and in all honesty, I'll often argue against it--except for these days when I feel sometimes that I'm the only one arguing for it. The satisfaction of story, of a good pay-off with well-developed characters that achieve organically, naturally, through the constructed narrative, a decent climax--all these things have value unto themselves. Artists who take themselves too seriously on this score can be tiresome, but the lack of these artists--those who prostrate themselves instead on the altars of politics or MESSAGE--are infinitely worse. 

Romances tell a story. Art still exists.