On Romance, Morality and Respectability

[gehayi]

Romancingtheblog has a rant about how impossible the writer finds it to read and enjoy books featuring adulterous heroesHer reaction, when added to a great many other attitudes I've seen on various romance sites, message boards, lists and Yahoo!Groups over the past year, annoyed me. I responded, but I'm going to expand on my response here

Comments

[gehayi]

Thank you!

[ani_bester]

Wonderful rant

[gehayi]

Yeah, I think it's the "it has to be this way or no way" thing that causes problems in fandom and original writing alike. Everyone doesn't agree on what love is, but very vocal groups have a habit of decreeing what it is and why it can't be anything else. It's not that simple.

It's not impossible to have loved someone and then love someone else if that first person leaves/dies/(or heck is still alive) but it's like the feel his love for Starbuck would somehow be tainted if, god forbid, he'd actually been in love with the woman he married. *head desk**sigh* That's something else I see a lot, both in amateur and professional romances--the concept that the person in love could never POSSIBLY have loved before. Even if they've been in love with or married to someone else, that has to be disregarded. I don't know where the whole "I can only love one person and that person must be my true love/soulmate/whatever" bit came from. Most people do love more than one person in their lifetimes. The person you love at sixteen isn't usually the

[rabidfangurl]

See, one of the problems with the "cheaters can never truly love again" is that Jane Eyre one of the great-grandmamas of the romance genre is focused entirely around a love that is technically adulterous for most of the book. The first Mrs. Rochester is alive for a good portion of the book while Jane and Rochester are sighing over each other. Yeah, she's batshit insane, but that doesn't stop the fact that she and Rochester are married. I wonder what your blogger would say to that.

[gehayi]

You know, you're right. Jane and Mr. Rochester don't have sex, but they're definitely in a relationship, to the point where Rochester tries to commit bigamy to keep her around.

The Brontes seem to have made a habit of writing extra-marital entanglements. In Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the "widowed" heroine, Helen Graham falls in love with Gilbert Markham, despite the fact that Helen isn't a widow at all, but a wife fleeing her abusive husband, Arthur Huntingdon. And in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff spend most of their time sighing after each other, despite the fact that they're married to other people--Edgar Linton and Isabelle Linton, respectively.

[quinby]

fart sparkles and sunshine

.... I think that would scare me. And probably hurt.

[gehayi]

I think so too!

[greyladybast]

What would happen if you tried to light it?

[hekatelesedi]

Rock. How is it that, even when you're ranting, you sound so reasonable? Granted, what you're asking is entirely reasonable, anyway, but still. You make sense. You take the argument and strip it down to its basics, and then you totally obliterate it in an explosion of logic.

In other words, you kick major ass.

[erastes]

I said to her earlier. I wanted to rant about it, but I'd just end up getting angry and not making any point at all except going red in the face...

[erastes]

"said THAT to her earlier..."

*headdesk*

[gehayi]

Considering that I've heard you rant about subjects with great lucidity, I don't believe that for a minute. But thank you.