Products of popular culture, romance novels have been largely devalued and scorned by cultural gatekeepers. Yet they lend themselves to a historical analysis of how societies attribute a precise place to the impulses of love and codify its manifestations.
This book is based on the premise that love is not as spontaneous and free as one would have us believe. While it is true that love exists in all human communities, not all communities love in the same way. The words used to speak of love, which simultaneously reveal and censor, inform and sublimate, channel and repress the stirrings of the heart, are chosen according to everchanging social and cultural norms.
Love stories or romans d’amourare among the most widely read and appreciated by all classes of society and have been continually revisited and reinvented over time. The capacity for renewal in such a rigidly codified genre is nothing short of amazing, as is the resulting diversity of content.
Love Stories Now and Then is the first comprehensive survey of Quebec and French-Canadian romance novels. It tackles questions that everybody asks. What is “love at first sight”? How do class, national identity, religion, and race influence choice of partners? What are the rules to flirting? What are the limits to expressing one’s desires? What are people’s expectations in marriage? What is the place of sexuality and how does it differ in French and English culture in North America?
This book challenges many of our assumptions about romance novels and offers a compelling glimpse into the dreams and fantasies of love over the past two centuries.
The book is divided into chapters on different historical periods: "Repressed Love (1830-1860)"; "Sublimated Love (1860-1920)"; "Domesticated Love (1920-1940)"; "Celebrated Love (1940-1965)"; "Serial Love (1965-2000)"; "Love Despite Everything (since 2000).
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the rise of the sentimental novel in Quebec followed a laborious path - more so than in the United States or the United Kingdom. French Canada's classic novel, Maria Chapdelaine (1913) [...] ends with the heroine mourning her one true love and marrying a good but unremarkable man. The novel teaches that a woman must wait for "the encounter with some young man, like other young men" and accept a marriage "dreary and chill as an autumn field," rather than aspire to be lifted by desire and passion. Similarly, in Gabrielle Roy's celebrated The Tin Flute (1945), Florentine Lacasse's dreams of escaping her impoverished milieu through a loving marriage are ultimately shattered, and she must resign herself to becoming engaged to a man for whom she feels only lukewarm affection.
The reason for such mistrust was that a burning passion between two people threatened long-standing, traditional French-Canadian codes. The elites accepted love of nation, love of land and, above all, love of God as honourable goals of a patriotic and Christian life. But they could not tolerate a carnal love that took the form of a fever, a delirium, and that risked jeopardizing the social norms of the time. They feared that if everyone were free to listen only to their hearts, it would become acceptable for a Catholic to marry a Protestant, a French-speaking man to marry an English-speaking woman, a farmer's son to marry a socialite! Indeed, this is what some novels hinted at, daring to defy the prohibitions of conservative elites. [...]
It is therefore interesting to analyze the conditions that enabled the emergence of the romance novel in Quebec, and how a few works, first rare, then more frequent, attempted to show that love could blossom within the French-Canadian community without posing a threat to it. To do this, the authors of these novels sought to describe how love, however "mad," could respect endogamous imperatives. (9-10)
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The history of the Quebec romance novel shows how difficult it is to build a national literature of romance, except in countries that have made exoticism an essential part of their national identity, such as the United States, where the English language already presents itself as an international language and American culture as a world culture. (11)
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the history of Quebec sentimental literature is of interest to an English-speaking audience because it tells us about the different place sexuality holds in English and French narratives. Until the 1960s, in the Quebec literary tradition, a woman had to attract a suitor by playing with a more or less subdued eroticism, while denying her own sexuality: the more a man loved, the more he tried to preserve the "virtue" of his chosen one. According to a hypothesis formulated by Anne-Marie Lugan-Dardigna, this attitude is rooted in a French romance tradition in which the woman is more likely to love before she desires, whereas in the English romance tradition, the woman is more likely to desire before she loves. [...]
Even today, there is a division between the English-speaking and French-speaking publishing worlds. Harlequin's famous clinch is frowned upon by many French-language publishers who dare not go too far in marketing their catalogues, eschewing embossing and the use of glossy paper and garish colours, as can be seen on any given day by visiting two Montreal bookstores , one francophone and the other anglophone, and comparing the French and English versions of the same novels. The more or less crude nature of the English book covers reflects a more explicit content, while the French marketing and visuals betray a way of telling love stories that calls for more ethereal, stylized and poetic descriptions. Indeed, studies on French translations of Harlequin novels have shown that passages that are too bold have been omitted or reworked to respect an approach to love that favours eroticism over overt sexuality. For instance, in Harlequin novels the term "fuck" has no equivalent in French translations. (13-14)
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This book is based on the premise that love is not as spontaneous and free as one would have us believe. While it is true that love exists in all human communities, not all communities love in the same way. One has only to open an anthropology or history book to see that different societies attribute a precise place to the impulses of love, codifying its manifestations, structuring its relations, and determining its outcomes in different ways. (17)
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This literary genre lends itself particularly well to a historical analysis of regulatory discourses and fantasized representations, since it can be read as a narrative that is both heavily codified [...] and potentially subversive (to the point of being banned from libraries). Far from corresponding to a simple leisure activity or innocent distraction, romantic fiction facilitates the internalization of models that mark out the stages from courtship to marriage. (18)
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[In the first half of the nineteenth century] The elites' mistrust toward fictional works held back novelistic production in Quebec. Over the course of the nineteenth century, less than one hundred novels were published, and they were very often accompanied by prefaces that made heavy use of rhetoric to justify the publication. The romance novel, which thrived on human passions deemed "base" or "shady," was particularly subject to this suspicion, and its emergence was subsequently hampered. Lovers abound in these stories [...] but the obstacles they face indicate that, most of the time, their primary concern is not the quest for happiness in love. (32)
Interestingly, the idea that the romance novel was suspect more than any other genre because it distracted readers from reality, immersing them in a world of dreams incompatible with everyday needs, is a recurring theme in the romance novels themselves, more than in other literary genres. These works frequently contain passages denouncing the unrealistic worldview of characters who imagine being able to experience the passions they read about in books, and [...] just as many excerpts recounting how the characters portrayed are living a real-life romance novel. (50)
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Fearing the anarchy that could result from ill-considered unions, the whole art of nineteenth-century French-Canadian novels consists in trying to channel the romantic intrigue into acceptable goals, without denying the characters their free will. (54-55)
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novels published in French Canada between 1860 and 1920, seen through the sentimental lens, reveal a tendency to disguise historical novels as romance novels, probably in order to seduce a larger pool of female readers. By including the romantic dialectic in their titles, these books appear to promise various adventures involving two protagonists who are unjustly separated but will be happily reunited in the end. And this is more or less what happens in these works, except for the fact that love does not play a determining role but serves, instead, as a pretext for reconstituting the saga of the French-Canadian people. (68)
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In the first section of this chapter, we look at an English-Canadian female author who was strongly influenced by British-American literature, Rosanna Leprohon. As Montreal's [...]Jane Austen, she opened up perspectives on mixed marriages that the majority of French-Canadian authors were quick to close down, convinced that only people who resembled each other could form a union. In the second section, we examine the novel Les Ribaud, which focuses even more on the sacredness of passion. In the third section, we analyze one of the greatest forms of resistance to the romance novel at the end of the nineteenth century, the idea that human love must be abandoned or discouraged in favour of the more venerable love of God. In the fourth section, we discuss a novel that flirts with the rural genre, without really being a roman du terroir: in Marie-Anna, La Canadienne, the heroine [...] has not completely renounced her love. The fifth section ends with a veritable American-style success story that stands out from the rest of the corpus: Amour vainqueur (Victorious love) (1915), whose title speaks for itself. (69)
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To defuse the subversive power of love, always susceptible to confusing social relations through "impetuous" and "rash" unions, nineteenth-century novels adopt two strategies: they either make the lovers orphans or depict them as belonging to the same family. In other words, the solution consists in not having a family or remaining within one family. (99)
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unlike the previous period, human love now wins out over divine love in these novels, but we will see that in French Canada, love in the so-called Roaring Twenties and Dirty Thirties remained sensible and unemotional. Novels from the first period often take place in an idealized rural setting and serve to promote the triad of work, family, and fatherland. Those of the second period, from 1930 to 1940, depict main protagonists who are doctors and lawyers from fine families in an urban context and make love a pretext for maintaining social status. However, the change in the characters' locations and occupations should not obscure the essential theme, which is that the victory of love now comes at the price of domestication. The authors were indeed too preoccupied with patriotic lessons, Catholic morals and practical concerns to bother too much with sentimentality. (123)
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This type of romance novel, which glorified the heroine's role as mother and wife and made women the guardians of Christian values, was perfectly aligned with the program of "prescriptive censorship" that dominated at the time in Quebec. It celebrated passion, but within marriage itself, because it was in the unhappy union that conjugal bliss became possible for a wife who thought herself condemned to a life of boredom and abuse. In the vale of tears of her marriage, she had to bear her cross before seeing the doors of an absolute comfort open before her, where she would be queen ... of the home. It is easy to understand why this line of thought had such an immense impact in French Canada during the interwar period. Belittled in life and law, women found themselves at the mercy of their husbands once the marriage was celebrated. (126)
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Though mixed marriages had hardly been encouraged in the past (with the exception of a few happy outcomes), "foreigners," defined here in ethnic terms, were never more absent from the romance and broader literary landscape than during this period, which took an even more marked racist and xenophobic turn with the consolidation of the regionalist novel.
The plethora of works denouncing mixed unions testifies to this dread of the foreigner: only three of the "chosen" in the corpus of romance novels from the period are not French-Canadian. Roger in L'amour et l'épreuve (Love and ordeal) (1940) is French, and two heroes are of Indigenous origins in Un de Jasper (One from Jasper) (1933) and in Mon sauvage (My savage) (1938). These two novels are interesting insofar as they justify mixed marriage precisely through the two heroes' belonging to a familiar milieu. (130)
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During the interwar period in French Canada, the notion of love was more than ever linked to family responsibilities, understood in the broadest sense. To love is to love through children that the spouses have together. [...] The old adage of French-language tales ("they married and had many children," which already contrasts with the English version "they lived happily ever after") can almost be inversed [sic] and reformulated as "they had a lot of children and loved each other." In sum, in the romance novels of the interwar period, a couple who loves each other is a couple with children, something that the corpus of the preceding period had not yet introduced. (151)
in the 1970s, Quebec novelists appropriated the typical British-American narrative structure to produce "rape sagas." Following this chronological progression, we will examine the huge success of the Harlequin romance novel which seems to occupy the entire space of romance fiction in the 1980s. Returning to our central theme, we end by observing a relative resurrection of the romance novel in Quebec just where we might least expect it: young adult novels. This last section allows us to set the stage for the last chapter, where we postulate that "chick lit," which ensures the survival of the Québécois romance novel in the 2000s with a renewed narrative structure, owes its popularity in part to the rise of youth literature twenty years earlier. (222)
Here's the abstract:
This is an English-language translation of L’amour comme un roman. Le roman sentimental au Québec d’hier à aujourd’hui (2022).
The book is divided into chapters on different historical periods: "Repressed Love (1830-1860)"; "Sublimated Love (1860-1920)"; "Domesticated Love (1920-1940)"; "Celebrated Love (1940-1965)"; "Serial Love (1965-2000)"; "Love Despite Everything (since 2000).
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