“Your virtue!” said the lady, recovering after a silence of two minutes; “I shall never survive it.
Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
Academia puts a high value on the ability to read critically; to deny the text our heart and view it with an analytical, objective mind. From the early of the 20th Century onwards, we have made a practice of withholding our commitment to the narrative lure novel and called it an intellectual virtue. The subtext here is that really ‘bright’ people don’t suspend disbelief when they read. So it’s hardly surprising that literary theorists have, for the most part, looked down on the readers of genre fiction – especially romance – and it’s hardly surprising that they find little value in reading them. If they could ever drop their ultimately jaded eye and fully indulge in a well-written piece of erotic romance, what they’d find was that Barthes was not entirely correct in his assessment on the death of the author.
One thing I have learned from my recent research into how the happily ever after convention affects the reading experience is that, for erotic romance readers, the writer is very much there through the text. Not as a part of the narrative, but as a silent partner in the reading experience. Because it seems pretty clear that these readers feel, very strongly, that in picking up a novel, before they even start reading, they’ve made a deal with the writer: “I’m trusting you with my heart. Don’t let me down.”
To truly enjoy a good romance, you cannot read it with your head. You can’t be permanently on the lookout for lapses in political correctness or offensive gender role modeling. You can’t play spot the narrative devices or play Where’s Wally with the stock characters. Romance is about love and, in a way, it requires the reader to be willing to fall in love with this journey of love. Erotic romance readers commit very deeply to being emotionally open to the text. They give themselves over in a way that is spectacularly uncritical.
But they aren’t stupid. They won’t give over with no safety net. The Happily Ever After (or Happily For Now ending) is not just the way the story ends. It is there as a promise at the very beginning of the reading experience as a gesture of good intention on the part of the writer. Erotic romance readers have a very high tolerance for narrative conflict. Characters are routinely and gleefully put through horrific trials – both physical and emotional. And readers will sink into the story unflinchingly with the one sacred understanding that, no matter how rough the going gets, it will be worth all the suffering because, in the end, there will be happiness. The ending is not only redemption for the characters, but also for the reader and ultimately for the writer.
And when writers, for any number of reasons, are felt not to have kept up their part of the bargain – offering the reader a less that solid happy ending – romance readers get furious. They feel emotionally abused because, in a way, they have been emotionally abused. Yes, that abuse was consensual, but it also came with a solemn promise attached and that promise was not kept.
There was a time, at the height of the traditional modern romance boom, when the definition of what constituted a happy ending was extremely clear. The story had to end with a betrothal at the very least, if not a wedding. Sometimes stories offered postscript chapter of a portrait of wedded bliss that included babies. But in erotic romance, the definition of the ‘Happily Ever After’ closure has changed quite radically.
Most readers have not escaped the pressure to acknowledge that no believable story can ever end ‘Happily Ever After’. They acknowledge that they have no model for what that looks like because it doesn’t exist in the world. Consequently, the expectation of the level of the lovers’ commitment varies enormously. No readers I interviewed required a wedding. In fact, many of them scoffed at the proposition. Some only required that the couple mutually acknowledge their couplehood. Some required words or a gesture that signified a deep and unbreakable bond through life. What seems to be satisfying to almost everyone is that the story end with the couple having acknowledged their emotional commitment to each other and signaled their heartfelt intention to stay together.
This, it seems, makes the reader feel that whatever travails have happened through the story, it was worth it. Many of them remarked that the more harrowing the conflicts and hardships in the narrative, the more valuable the emotionally secure ending.
Learning these things, it’s hard for me not to find the metaphor of an S & M relationship appealing – with the writer as sadist, the text as scene and the reader as masochist. Erotic romance readers give their sadistic writers a lot of leeway to take them to incredibly painful places, but there must be aftercare in the form of the HEA. Any writer who withholds it is going to have a hard time finding playmates.
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