Modern lovers, Eva Illouz proposes, inhabit an “ironic structure of romantic feeling” built from the interplay of “enchanted” and “disenchanted” discourses of love. Although popular romance novels are known for sincerity, not irony, this chapter argues that they, too, often display this ironic structure. The first half of this chapter outlines three versions of romantic disenchantment – scientific, socio-political and semiotic – and shows how each appears in selected American and British popular romance novels. Drawing on cultural historian Michael Saler, the chapter then demonstrates that these novels respond to disenchantment through upbeat strategies of provisional “as-if” thinking. In the strategy of disenchanted enchantment premodern discourses of love are recast or reinterpreted so that lovers can enjoy their emotional extravagance and utopian promise without any loss of reason or critical purchase. The strategy of enchanted disenchantment, by contrast, reframes feminist inquiry, therapeutic discourse, and technologies of choice as enabling romance protagonists to experience full-hearted passion, unstinting commitment and a sense of providential design, rather than as undermining those experiences. This chapter concludes by showing how these two strategies may overlap in a single novel, producing a virtuosic harmony of ironies that deftly balances faith and doubt in romantic love.
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Compare, for example, these two moments of a romance protagonist first laying eyes on their beloved-to-be, the first from Francine Rivers’ historical romance Redeeming Love (1997), the second from the contemporary romcom Bet Me (2004) by Jennifer Crusie. The Rivers scene is explicitly and quite literally enchanted. (386)
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Socio-political disenchantment takes memorable form in Crusie’s post-divorce romance Fast Women (2001). (387)
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Crusie’s Fast Women offers a limit case of socio-politically disenchanted romance, waiting until the final sentence to say “I do” to its genre’s demands. Other romance novels [...] integrate disenchantment in a less estranging, more consoling way. Consider, for example, the opening of Alisha Rai’s Hate to Want You (2017). (389)
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In Glitterland (2013), British romance author Alexis Hall braids semiotic disenchantment with the biological and socio-political modes. The novel is narrated by “Ash” Winters, an upper-class, Cambridge-educated detective novelist whose ability to love and be loved is threatened both by his bipolar disorder and by his having internalized hierarchies of sophistication in which things linked to mass culture – from the “genre tat” he writes (Hall 2013: 49) to the generic tropes of romantic love – are to be treated with self-lacerating irony. (391)
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Three invitations to ironic consciousness recur in romance novels. The first, following Saler, I call invitations to a disenchanted enchantment. In these, enchanted discourses of love are recast or reinterpreted so that lovers can enjoy their emotional extravagance and utopian promise without any loss of reason or critical purchase: a move we may witness in Crusie’s Bet Me and its deployment of fairy tales. The second are invitations to enjoy enchanted disenchantment. Here, the discourses that Illouz associates with reason and critique – that is, feminist inquiry, therapeutic and other scientific discourse and technologies of choice (Illouz 2012: 158) – are re-imagined as enabling us to experience full-hearted passion, unstinting commitment and a sense of providential design, rather than as undermining those experiences. Rai’s Hate to Want You exemplifies this strategy. Finally, returning to Glitterland, we may see how these two strategies overlap to produce a virtuosic harmony of ironies that leads the reader to something the novel, or at least its narrator, calls “joy” (Hall 2013: 199). (393-394)
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The Romance Writers of America’s definition of the genre explains that every romance novel will contain “a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending”; that the love story will describe “individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work”; and that “the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship” will be “rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love” (Romance Writers of America 2000: n.p.). There is much to unpack here, from the disparate discourses soldered together in that phrase “falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work” – the first from the centuries-old discourse of romance, as David Shumway uses the term; the other from what Shumway calls the discourse of intimacy, which dates to the 1960s (Shumway 2003: 21; see McAlister and Teo 2017: 212–214) – to the most ingenious paradox where “unconditional love” is something that lovers receive only conditionally, as their reward for risk and struggle. One telling choice, however, lies in an absence. Who or what, after all, does this rewarding?
Romance novels give various names to the hand that shapes their ends. Some are religious [...] Elsewhere, “destiny”, “fate” and “kismet” take their nondenominational bows, and of course there is always a more or less personified “love”. (394)
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The two mental health plots in the novel, Nicholas’s fight with his father and Livvy’s battle with depression, are thus juxtaposed, and the reader is invited to think doubly of them. We see them rationally as practical, messy dealings with a disenchanted world of “reality”, as Nicholas calls it, but we experience them emotionally “as if ” they were the sort of noble, heroic, enchanted struggle that “only happens in fairy tales” (Rai 2017: loc. 3649), a genre to which this romance novel thus does and does not belong. (398)
Here's the abstract:
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