Last Friday, over at the Lustbites blog, Olivia Knight wrote a nifty post about the differences between “erotica” and “erotic romance” in terms of the HEA ending. “With erotica sliding increasingly towards erotic romance,” she wrote, “the Happily Ever After question raises its dewy-eyed head with some peculiarly specific problems.” The problems she has in mind are structural, like “How do you keep your characters away from a romantic resolution until the end of the book while filling said book with swathes of horny sex?” and “If the Heroine’s having sex with the Main Man, why is that not Happily Ever After? If not, who is she having sex with, and why is she, when she fancies this other bloke? What is the defining moment of ‘romantic resolution’ if not the long-awaited shag and confessions of love?”
These are great questions, and her answers remind me, yet again, of just how smart and how conscious of craft any good writer, in any genre, must be. Clearly I need to read more of Knight’s work, purely for research purposes, you understand. What really hit me, though, was the opening comment about her post, from fellow Lustbiter Janine Ashbless:
Without wanting to be a bit of a downer, isn’t all “happiness” contingent and ephemeral? I mean, even the longest lasting, strongest, most passionate love affair is going to end one day in death. There simply is no HEA in the sense that romance writers mean.
Over the years that I’ve been teaching and talking about romance, I must have heard this sort of skeptical response a dozen times, from men and women both. Robert Waxler, at the PCA conference, called it a sense of the “mortal wound” that cuts short all our lives–and which, by extension, haunts and limits our happiness all along. On this theory, our desires are infinite, but our satisfactions finite, and if we were honest with ourselves, we’d never forget that sad fact.
Now, a lot of great poetry has been written with this thought in mind. Off the top of my head… Let’s see. There’s Yeats: “Man is in love, and loves what vanishes. / What else is there to say?” (“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”). There’s Dickinson’s poem 1205:
Immortal is an ample word
When what we need is by
But when it leaves us for a time
‘Tis a necessity.Of Heaven above the firmest proof
We fundamental know
Except for its marauding Hand
It had been Heaven below.
There must be three or four poems–heck, three or four books of poems–by Rilke. And, of course, there’s Auden’s great couplet, “A crack in the teacup opens / A lane to the land of the dead,” which gives you the “mortal wound” in its smallest form and its largest before you have time to blink. (That’s from “As I walked out one evening,” one of the great love poems of the century.)
Against which gloomy Tuesday musings, let me pose this question: do you suffer from HEAngst? I don’t. To me, such lines and comments make intellectual sense, but no emotional sense. Even when I think about the worst losses in my own life–deaths of close family far too young, from cancer and worse–I don’t come away feeling that happiness is “contingent and ephemeral,” and the promise of an HEA an illusion, or even (ulp!) a literary lie.
Is this just a matter of temperament? Probably. But it’s also a contrasting set of ideas, and a whole other vision of love. “Life remains a blessing, / Although you cannot bless,” Auden insists in that same poem, a few lines later, just at the moment when he turns from eros to agape, from love as desire to love as compassion, or tenderness, or lovingkindness, or whatever you want to call what salves that “mortal wound.” Don’t romance authors and romance readers know this, too, silently shifting gears as they read from one form of love to another, or maybe believing, deep down, that any lasting couple finds a way to mix the two?
In the end, doesn’t the charge that there’s no such thing as a real-life HEA radically misunderstand–maybe on purpose?–what we optimists mean when we use the term? I recently stumbled across this observation by a Jungian analyst named Donald Kalsched, or at least a paraphrase of it, that made things a lot clearer for me. (The paraphrase I’ll quote comes from The Bones Reassemble, a brilliant book on liturgy by Catherine Madsen.) According to Madsen and Kalsched, when fairy tales mean when they end “happily ever after” is
no unreal state of euphoria, to be punctured after the wedding when the prince still shows signs of froggishness, but the joy of being set at last in one’s place, beyond the adversities of bewitchment, freed for the ordinary business of living and dying. [...] [The HEA] is not a fairy-dust rescue from the unacceptable…it is the triumph of intelligence, courtesy and courage over the cruel and the loathsome (149).
It may be true that, as Janine Ashbless said, “even the longest lasting, strongest, most passionate love affair is going to end one day in death.” But it’s just as true that couples can face that “unacceptable” fact, and all the others, with intelligence, courtesy, courage, and love. They do it every day, all over the word. And in many romance novels–maybe not all of them, explicitly, but in an awful lot of them, at least implicitly, and I’m betting in most of the best ones–isn’t that what the HEA ending allows us to remember?
No related posts.
I sometimes get the feeling that the cynics do not believe in HEA in this lifetime, and pass it off by picking on the immortality of “ever after.”
But I’ve never seen the HEA as a fairy tale ending wher the couple never encounters strife or worry ever again, by sheer virtue of the fact that they found each other.
I can only “believe” in a HEA when it seems as if the couple is realistic with each other, understands each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and has expressed a commitment to one another. Why is that not an HEA? Because they’re not immortal? Because they’ll get old and arthritic?
Beautiful, Eric. Thank you.
Two thoughts. One: I’ve got my HEA with my husband. We’ve been together since I was 16. Part of what makes me so happy with him is getting old with him, watching the lines on his face deepen, knowing I’ll be with him until death separate us. The knowledge of the “mortal wound” makes my love deeper and more abiding.
Two: Suzanne Brockmann, in her The Defiant Hero, has an older character who tells her HEA with her husband. She helped at Dunkirk and her husband was with the British tank regiment captured by the Germans. They both survive the war, live HEA, but he dies two years before the story. She’s in her 70s, living a wonderful life, missing her husband desperately, but she still feels his presence and uses that as her strength. Brockmann’s Out of Control does the same thing, although I think the husband died a lot earlier than that, but the character still expresses explicitly that she lived HEA with her prince. That’s what I want and what I think I have. And even if one of us dies today, terrible as that thought is, even though the fates will be railed against, we know that we’ve lived together and loved each other with all of our hearts and that makes all the difference. No regrets.
So, there’s no happily ever after because eventually we all die and if you find an out for that, there’s the eventual heat-death of the universe to worry about? Sounds like existential angst to me. Just because we all die someday doesn’t mean life is meaningless. I’d say exactly the opposite.
Life and love are precious commodities, things to celebrate. I don’t close a romance novel and think, “You poor duped idiots, how can you be happy when one of you could get hit by a bus tomorrow?” I close it and think, “how wonderful to see what matters in life affirmed.”
As for sex=happily ever after, sex doesn’t mean the characters have worked their way to emotional connection and commitment. It’s that process that’s filled with meaty conflict and tension and drives the story to a romantic resolution. The sex drive might bring them together, but hitting the sheets is far from The End!
The appeal to me of the romance HEA is not the realism but the safety. I feel safe reading about the perils and the fights and the conflict knowing that at the end of the book, everything will turn out okay. I can throw myself into the book knowing that the author will catch me at the end.
As for love lasting forever, I think that depends on your faith. My personal belief is that it does.
Here’s an example: Last October I had a miscarriage. There are several ways of coping with this. One is to *decide* to believe that it’s a simple bodily malfunction and loss of tissue. Choosing to believe this relieves the woman of the agony of grief. And if that’s how she needs to cope, then I’m supportive of her. I decided to believe that a brand new human being with an eternal soul had begun to grow inside me, the result of the enduring love my husband and I – even though the pregnancy was unplanned. And I chose to name the baby and believe she went to Heaven. I knew the grief would be intense believing this. But, I knew the joy of new life and love would also be intense.
The point is I believe in Happily Ever After, but I do not believe that means no problems and no pain. What I do believe is that the love forged provides the strength the couple will need to endure and overcome the problems and pain they will face, thus enabling them to live happily ever after.
This is probably why stories with a lot of hot sex, but very little or no real love underlying it hold no interest for me.
Clear as mud?
The problems she has in mind are structural, like “How do you keep your characters away from a romantic resolution until the end of the book while filling said book with swathes of horny sex?”
I don’t get this statement. Maybe I’m being dense, but if you build the right conflicts (internal and external) characters can shag like mad through the book but the “ever after” part can still hand in the balance.
[...] Eros is Eros is Eros? One of Robin’s comments on Laura’s last post–specifically, her observation that “most Romance is related to the process of domesticating the erotic in one way or another”–reminded me of the lively debate at the PCA convention earlier this month over the nature and definition–or, rather, the competing definitions–of “erotic romance.” (Sarah’s summary is here; scroll down, as it was the last paper; I have posted on related matters over at Romancing the Blog this morning.) [...]
I think maybe her argument would have been more convincing had she said-there’s divorce! I have my HEA too-it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Some think that the bitterness makes the sweet all the more precious.
Well, if we’re getting cynical about the long-term… I tend to consider that a novel only covers a certain span of time in the characters’ lives. Looking at real life, how many people have you known that fell in love and married — only to be divorced ten years down the line, for whatever reason? Maybe the husband cheats, or the wife. Maybe they decide they’re not really compatible. Maybe a disaster happens, and they can’t weather it together.
In context of a novel, we only really know about the time frame the author chooses to tell us. Who knows what could happen after that point? (Considering as in most books, the same characters do not appear again as anything more than brief cameos.)
Romance is, at its core, a fantasy. The “promise” of the genre is that the book will be about the romantic relationship between the two main characters (or more, if you want to open to polyamorous romances) resulting in an emotional commitment between them at the end of the book. That is what the HEA is: That emotional commitment.
When books are published as romance that end with the heroine deciding that she isn’t ready for a relationship and leaving the hero to find herself (actual example, though I don’t recall the book title) … that’s breaking a promise to your readers, and that is what (IMO) most romance readers have a problem.
Thanks, everyone! I agree that this issue plays out differently for writers / readers of inspirational romance, since the “mortal wound” means something quite different in a Christian context, where death is not an end. (I’m humming St. Francis’s prayer, as sung by Sarah McLaughlin, as I write: it’s in dying that we are bo-ho-horn / to eternal life…” Poor Willow. Poor Tara.)
Anyway, I’m also very glad have that Suze Brockmann recommendation. I haven’t read Defiant Hero yet, but my wife has a copy at home, which I’ll try to sneak in over the weekend. One other romance novel that talks about this stuff directly, if memory serves, would be Julia Quinn’s “The Viscount Who Loved Me.” Anthony, the hero, refuses to fall in love, even with the woman he marries, because he saw the heartbreak that he and his mother suffered when his father died suddenly of a bee sting. As I recall, the end of the novel features lots of discussions about love in the face of loss and death: I should reread it!
Any other novels that deal with such matters directly? Maybe I’ll send the list to Robert W., for his ongoing research–I don’t think he’s done with this project yet!
Hmm. Can we be more critical about what these HEAs actually look like, and how ‘happiness’ is always defined through monogamy, and specifically marriage?
Erotica’s slide toward HEA/erotic romance is of concern to me mostly because it makes erotica so much less sexually radical. I mean, part of what makes erotica great is the way that characters can have lots of freaky sex with multiple partners, and NOT have to be ultimately contained in a HEA that’s dependent on monogamy (which, in erotic romance, usually means normative marriage — although Emma Holly’s Menage comes to mind as a fabulous exception to this).
I can’t add much to the discussion of the structure of romance novels, but I did have immediate thoughts about the identification of permanence with being meaningful — along the lines of Charlene Teglia’s comment. Basically, who decided that only things without end are of value? If it is contingent, then it is nothing. Says who?
One answer is, as always in the Western tradition, Plato. Plato frequently identified permanence with meaning. But even he was not consistent on the matter, and he was always in “combat” with another tradition of his own culture, namely Herodotus who “never stepped in the same river twice”. However, Plato’s notion continues within us to this very day, and it can be seen in some Christian theology where only what is eternal has true worth. But even here, it isn’t exactly clear what eternal means. Does it mean going on and on in time forever? Or is immortality and immortal happiness (and God) somehow outside of time?
Most people know about the Japanese art of flower arranging, which is considered high art in Japan and not “merely” a craft. Part of the value of this art comes precisely from its impermanence. I also recently discovered another form of Japanese art which I do not know the name of. However, the artist had a sort of black picture frame with a backboard – like a thin tray or box. Inside it was a white powder that looked like sugar or salt. She then shaped the particles carefulling with a file into mountains and rivers and people and all sorts of things. But one little bump and the art is gone. It’s just sugar on a piece of wood.
One reaction to this art might be: What a waste of time. She’s creating art that – until cameras – no one would ever see for very long. A wind comes through and all her time ceating is wasted. She should be spending her time painting or doing sculpture that can last for a few hundred years. Another reaction might be: Wow! I was so amazingly lucky that I got to be here for this brief time with her and see this work she has created. Only a few will ever see it, but I had that chance.
Maybe romance HEA is more like the latter. One day the universe will either collapse or darken to a lifeless shell, but right now I got to be in love with him, and that is an experience that can never be taken away from me – ever.
Good point, Chicklitter! That is, I’m pretty comfortable with “betrothal” (and or marriage) standing for the HEA in a romance novel, both because I’m a traditional sort of guy and because it helps to define the genre, even when the betrothal / marriage includes more than two people, of whatever mix of sexes. Part of the thrill in erotica, though, often lies in the lack of that (or other) safety-net for the reader: the sense that anything could happen. “I want the tightrope,” says Erastes in a comment on that same Lustbites post. “I don’t want to pick up a book and know that – no matter how many arguments the MCs have, no matter how often they say they hate each other, no matter that one of them thinks the other one is dead/diseased/married, whatever, that they are inevitably going to get back together. [...] I want the fear that they might not.”
Pacatrue, you’re dead on about the dead hand of Plato here, although I’m sure he’s not the only one who thought that eternal things were more valuable than ephemeral ones. (I think you mean Heraclitus, by the way, rather than Herodotus, who was the historian.) The Japanese art forms you describe derive from a contrasting Buddhist tradition in which NOTHING lasts: no self, no soul, nada de nada. “Anicca,” impermanence, is right up there with dukkha (suffering) and anatta (the lack of substantial, permanent selfhood) as a central concept. Yet out of this trio, or in the midst of it, compassion (karuna) and lovingkindness (metta) can certainly flourish.
Or as Leonard Cohen says, in lines I’ve always loved, “There is a crack, a crack in everything; / That’s how the light gets in.”
It’s fiction! I’ve never heard it called immortality romance before, although that might be a good idea with the upswell of immortals populating romances. Romances are rarely imbued with the gruesome nuances of everyday life as a mortal, are they? The “feeling fat” days, the fender-benders, the putting off a mammogram for fear of the result, the loss of a pet, the child who’s shooting up, the loss of a factory job.
I don’t really think the real difference between erotic romance and erotica is simply the HEA. Two characters, falling in love–that’s romance (whether the curtain is drawn or the language is graphic). Two or more characters having sex because they want to–isn’t that erotica?
It may be true that, as Janine Ashbless said, “even the longest lasting, strongest, most passionate love affair is going to end one day in death.”
My reply to Janie Ashbless is to question if the death of someone negates the happiness you had while the person was alive. Yes every one dies so there is no ever after. However, as intelligent human beings we all know that we are not immoral so ever after doesn’t really mean until the end of time. So while you were alive were you happy? If your the one left living then while your partner was alive were you happy?
My other opinion on this topic is that sex does not equal love. Love is a decision, sex is an act. You can decide to have sex but you don’t have to love the person you are having sex with there for you are performing an act and not making a decision to love the other person. Even when the sex is so hot that you pass out from it, that doesn’t mean that you love that person.
Love means more than wanting to achieve a pleasurable sexual experience. The decision to love someone, even with all their faults is what makes HEA’s possible. Love is more complex and deeper than our desires and physical needs. The romance writer understands that there is more to love than insert prong ‘A’ into slot ‘B’. There the emotions and thoughts that make up a person which makes HEA work in an erotic romance.
Heraclitus. Oops. Yeah, those traditional philosophers Herodotus and Thucidides…. I do agree that Plato is “not alone” in the thought. I am sure that much / most of what Plato wrote were simply current ideas in his locale that he was a part of. We only get to blame Plato because he wrote it down. Or perhaps he spoke it and his students wrote it down.
By the way, Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne just ended on my iTunes. I suppose “she touched your perfect body with her mind” is a bit long for a romance title.
Getting back to the romance part of this, it is interesting to see so many agreeing that it isn’t true permanence which makes the happiness real. However, my understanding is that a wonderful romance in which people find total fulfilling happiness for much of the book, but then it ends with someone sacrificing themselves for some noble cause, tragically, would never fly in the romance genre. It might be a wonderful novel that is the most romantic thing ever for millions of people, but if it ends in such a manner, it is specifically excluded from the romance genre as RWA and publishers define it. It’s sort of like we all know the HEA is not truly forever, and even that being forever isn’t necessarily desirable, but we want the end to be far enough way that we can ignore it.
This isn’t a criticism. I don’t want my favorite character to die in all the books I read either. It’s just an observation.
I’d have loved to have taken part in this discussion. You’ve come up with some wonderful comments and given the subject some very deep thought. You may like to know that I don’t think that either love or happiness are worthless because they aren’t immortal.
But I didn’t know this discussion was going on. You simply took an off-the-cuff sentence of mine, out of context, from a different blog, and put it up for a public trashing. Without giving me a chance to say anything.
Gee, thanks.
Janine Ashbless
As I said over on LB’s you can only end with the ending of a book, and if you hero(ine) is in the hero’s arms, or walking up the aisle or clambering into bed, then that’s all you can do, and the curtain falls.
What happens then is entirely up to the reader, unless you obsessively write sequels until the characters are old and grey and die together in each others arms.
I’ve just finished The Charioteer by Mary Renault and the last line is “I had to come back” (misquoted, i think it’s slightly longer than that) as the gay man decides to be with the man he loves, and that’s your HEA, but you’ve got then to imagine what happens next, in 1941 England, for two gay men.
Similarly, Cinderella had a heck of a job to take on when she became queen. Running a kingdom ain’t all waving and scoffing bread and honey.
I’m just happy with “Happy for Right Now” as that’s all we can be certain of, after all.
I’m sorry you feel like your sentence was taken out of context and “trashed,” Janine, and that I didn’t invite you to the discussion. Clearly I need to brush up on my net-etiquette–although I did at least link back to the original post, so anyone who wanted to see the full comment could do so, so I’m not an utter cad.
In fact, if you’ll take a second look, you’ll see that I never said you thought that love and happiness were worthless because they weren’t immortal. Rather, I quoted you as saying that there “simply is no HEA in the sense that romance writers mean.”
Which romance writers you had in mind wasn’t exactly clear. Nor was it clear that you meant by HEA what those writers (or their readers, or critics) meant. Certainly you meant something by it that I don’t, when I say “HEA.” Hence the post.
For the record, everyone, here is the full text of Janine’s original comment. I leave it to you to judge whether I was quoting out of context, or whether she went all Emily Postal for some other reason.
“Janine Ashbless said…
Without wanting to be a bit of a downer, isn’t all “happiness” contingent and ephemeral? I mean, even the longest lasting, strongest, most passionate love affair is going to end one day in death. There simply is no HEA in the sense that romance writers mean.
“Real happiness isn’t something you can achieve by getting anything – not the bloke, not married, not money or kids or fame or whatever it is you crave. Real happiness is something that has to grow inside and alongside you throughout your life. Like the empowerment you were talking about, Olivia.
“(I think I’m actually talking about Actualisation rather than an emotional high that we normally call happiness.)
“Sorry! This is so not the sort of thing I should be posting on this blog. It’s all Olivia’s fault for making me think.
“I’ll come back later when I’ve strimmed a few brambles and am in a less complex state of mind.”
–EMS