Authors: Hanne Blank
As time went on, Romantic-era novelists would come to focus on the potentially catastrophic fallout of love. The theme fuels some of the era's greatest works, including Goethe's
The Sorrows of Young Werther
and Flaubert's
Madame Bovary.
But even such dramatic critiques of the romantic-love dynamic could not counterbalance the overwhelming number of stories that pursued their romantic story-lines to an ending that could be summed up in the same way that the last chapter of
Jane Eyre
(also a Romantic-era novel) begins, “Reader, I married him.”
Some readers were aware that the novels they loved amounted to a propaganda campaign, that the love stories had a particular agenda that might or might not have anything at all to do with reality. But then as now, being a canny and independent-minded consumer of popular media did not bar one from also enjoying being manipulated by it. Thomas Carlyle's wife, the astute woman of letters Jane Welsh Carlyle, was surprisingly fond of some truly trashy novels, including Dinah Craik's 1849 potboiler
The Ogilvies.
[
8
] Of this turgid tome, complete with love triangles, rumors, and a meddling benefactress, Carlyle said, “It quite reminds one of one's own love's young dream.”[
9
] Carlyle's comment not only shows that she was quite aware of the distance between fiction and reality, but also reveals that her enjoyment of the book depended on her own experience of idealizing and fantasizing romantic love. Where did Carlyle's “own love's young dream” come from? Most likely at least some of it came in turn from an earlier reading of novels, different in their style but nevertheless dependable in terms of providing the stories Huet so aptly characterized as “amorous adventures.”
Young and poor people's access to romantic novels was seen as a serious issue indeed. Moralists typically presumed that readers, particularly young women readers, had no critical faculties whatsoever and would passively internalize the unrealistic expectations of novelistic romance with dismal results. The family resemblance between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel and the films of Walt Disney is thus not just about content. It is also about popularity, accessibility, and reception.
As early as the 1680s, Boston booksellers' records show that sales of books in the category “romances, etc.” came second only to that of Bibles and religious works.[
10
] In 1785, novelist and literary critic Clara Reeve attacked the institution of the circulating library because, with its affordable subscription rates and voluminous shelves, it made the voracious reading of novels so easy. She was, it must be said, standing in at least a partially glass house when she threw that stone in the pages of her
The Progress of Romance
(1785): her literary reputation at the time rested primarily upon her Gothic novels, including
The Old English Baron
(1777). Reeve would have been more horrified still by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century proliferation of railway book stalls, book clubs, “penny dreadfuls” and dime novels, and especially
the explosion of periodicals whose publication of fictionâoften in serial form, as in the case of many of Dickens's novelsâin cheap, mass-produced form made them accessible not just to the educated middle classes, but to the increasingly literate working classes as well. It is probably just as well that Reeve didn't live long enough to experience American-style public library systems, which made all kinds of books, including the hugely popular romantic novels, available to even the poorest of the poor for no charge.
The “love adventure” may have had its finest literary moments as a middle-class phenomenon, but the urban masses of the industrial age enjoyed the love story just as much as anyone else. Romance fiction became a staple of mass media and mass culture, training not just the well-off and educated but also the working-class and poor to expect a very particularâand historically peculiarâversion of relations between men and women. This is still true today. The romance market is consistently the top-performing category on the
New York Times, USA Today,
and
Publishers Weekly
best-seller lists, according to the trade association Romance Writers of America, and the US romance fiction market grosses about $1.35 billion yearly. Yet it is considered a literary “ghetto,” associated with the pink-collar working class, and generally not regarded as literature by the mainstream middle-class press.
Clearly, a greater tolerance of and even enthusiasm for romantic love was already in the air when the popularity of the novel began to spread. Even had the novel not become the massive force of cultural propaganda and instruction that it did, we might still suffer the same romantic effects. But as it happened, the growth of the culture of romantic love in the West was inextricable from the growth of the novel. Our culture of heterosexuality runs, in a very real way, on the repeated inscription of a fantasy of romance between men and women that gets replayed a thousand times a day with every clunk of the printing press, every whir of the film reel, and every iconic photo of Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle.
“ENCIRKLED IN THOSE BLESSED ARMS”
Heaven, preached seventeenth-century Calvinist Thomas Shepard, was a “Celestial Bride Chamber and Bed of Love.” Unlike in earthly life, where even the saints could only occasionally catch a glimpse of
God or steal a kiss from Him, in Heaven, he claimed, “there shall be that intimacy that there is between the most loving husband and most beloved wife, and transcendently greater . . . they will not be interrupted Caresses which they shall have from him. . . . There will be no more Coyness on their parts, nor Anger on his, but the delights which they shall enjoy, shall be both full and uninterrupted . . . the reciprocal ardors of Affection between him and us, shall break over all Banks and Bounds, and we shall be entirely satisfied, both in Soul and Body. Then shall we come to our Rest.”[
11
] Just as literature was learning to detail the twists and turns of the “love adventure,” religion was also learning the language of love.
Even in the seventeenth century there was, of course, nothing particularly new about love imagery in religion, particularly in Christianity. The Song of Songs had, after all, been around for a good long time. Since the Reformation, Christian iconography also included a heavy dose of Christ as the Bridegroom, come to join metaphorically with the believer, who took on the role of the vulnerable, eager Bride. What was new to seventeenth-century Protestantism, particularly as it was practiced in North America, however, was the notion that individual Christians might, and perhaps even should, have personal experiences along the same ardently emotional lines.
Some American Protestants, like minister Cotton Mather, drew a distinct line between vivid metaphor and appropriate Christian practice. But others, particularly as the eighteenth century wore on, did not make such a clear separation. The evangelical approach to Christianity did not view God's grace as something that worked primarily through reason and learning, as earlier Protestants and Catholics had, but as something one experienced directly with the emotions. Evangelicals came to see emotional experiences as one of the ways in which God worked on humans, appealing directly to their soft hearts instead of struggling to get through their hard heads. This approach to faith had many manifestations: revival meetings, the ecstatic dancing of the Shakers, “speaking in tongues,” swooning or trembling during worship, and even the relatively sedate Quaker practice of “waiting on the Lord.” The idea that a Christian's proper relationship to God was internal, emotional, and profoundly personal became increasingly commonplace.
Along with this came a slow but seismic shift in the ideology of
emotions. Difficult to control, maddeningly changeable, and suspiciously close to the unruly agendas of the animal self, strong spontaneous emotion was redeemed by the fact that it could also be a conduit for God. Particularly in North America, where evangelical approaches to religion were common (and in some places dominant), the experience and expression of emotion became elevated and spiritualized. For many, the more intense the emotional experience, the more intense the spiritual experience. Metaphors of love, passion, and ecstasy were not just metaphors; they were the best language these Christians, who so carefully cultivated their emotional relationships to God, had to describe their experiences. When believers described feeling “ravished” by God, or “melting” into a state of spiritual “rapture,” it both was and wasn't just a figure of speech.
In time Christians began to attribute a similar spiritual meaning to those emotions when they felt them in regard to other human beings. As historian Zsuzsa Berend argues, evangelical Christian emotional practices provided a way to legitimize the potentially anarchic force of romantic love between human beings. “Attraction became the sign of a God-ordained union, oneness a spiritual ideal deemphasizing sensual and sexual implications, and self-forgetfulness the epitome of selflessness,” Berend writes.[
12
] “True love,” the epitome of an emotional and erotic romantic love, was redeemed from suspicions of sensuality by Christian interpretations of spontaneous passionate emotion as pure, noble, moral, and (paradoxically enough) selfless. If a man and a woman felt such powerful internal stirrings for one another, it was interpreted as a sign from above. God approved, that was why they felt so strongly.
God's love reconciled romance, and even “romantic adventure,” to middle-class society. The most private emotions and spontaneous surges of feeling could now be interpreted as being eminently respectable. Especially if they led to formal courtship and marriage, there was no gap between passionate love and responsible participation in all the obligations of adulthood. But the spiritualization of romantic love created new obligations, too. As the nineteenth century progressed, it became apparent that it was no longer enough to find a partner for whom one could feel affection and sympathy, or even enough to find a partner one could love. One had to find a very specific and demanding
kind of love. This love had to have a core of spontaneous passionate emotion but also encompass “true unity,” a perfect and scrupulously mutual balance of the emotional, the erotic, and the spiritual. As Mrs. John Farrar wrote in her 1837
The Young Lady's Friend,
“[T]he great end of existence, preparation for eternity, may be equally attained in married or single life; and that no union but the most perfect one is at all desirable.”[
13
]
Finding such a perfect union was not easy. Indeed, for some, taking the task too seriously meant that they could never assure themselves that they had truly found the “one who could be all things to the heart,” and they ended up without any union at all. To be sure, this may have come as a welcome escape for some men and women who had no interest in marriage and possibly no interest in the other sex. But for others, like pioneering physician Elizabeth Blackwell, it was a self-imposed prison sentence. For her, the extraordinary steps of attending medical school and pursuing a life of singlehood and service were her way of coping with an attraction to a man whom she felt could not measure up to the standard of perfect union. Medicine was a productive place to channel the feelings she “could not wisely yield to, but could not otherwise stifle.”
The process of getting to a perfectâor at least perfect enoughâunion could be complex. Men typically made the first move by declaring their interest. Whether the woman would respond in kind was by no means assured. Women often played their cards very close to their chests, frequently going so far as to test their suitors' sentiments in various ways, because once a woman reciprocated a man's interest it was assumed that she would most likely agree to marry him. Men often appealed to the families of the women they hoped to court in advance of talking to the women themselves, an illuminating practical example of how the shift from traditional to companionate marriage manifested in everyday life. Men sometimes even wrote their love letters not
to
the women they hoped would become their sweethearts, but
about
those women to their siblings, parents, and other relatives who might be able to influence the young lady's opinion.[
14
] Courtship proper began when a woman reciprocated a man's interest. Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, middle-class courtships became increasingly verbose affairs, replete with confessional and philosophical
explorations of emotion. In face-to-face conversation as well as in the pages of voluminous letters, courting couples scoured their histories and their consciences for the sake of ascertaining whether theirs was, or could be, a perfect love.
In doing so, they forged paths through tricky and sometimes treacherous realms of sexuality. In the letters shared by historian and novelist Charles Kingsley and his intended, Fanny Grenfell, Kingsley in particular became deeply involved with the question of how physical desire and a spiritualized love could best be reconciled. “Our animal enjoyments must be religious ceremonies,” Kingsley wrote to his bride-to-be, setting the bar quite high from the start. Drawing a sharp and profoundly religious distinction between sensuality and true love, the vocally libidinous Kingsley went so far, in his correspondence with Fanny, as to propose that since he wished “to shew you & my God that I have gained purity & self-controlâthat intense as my love is for your body, I do not love it but as the expression & type of your spiritâand therefore when we are married, will you consent to remain for the first month in my arms a virgin bride, a sister only.”[
15
] The proposition was extreme, but not too far out of keeping with the priorities of the era. Self-control and the strict management of sexual activity were crucial to the ability to spiritualize romantic love. Sexual activity was acceptable as an expression of that spiritual love, but the desire for it could not by any means be allowed to gain the upper hand. Negotiating this was central to Kingsley's ongoing conversation with the woman he loved. Finding the right way to have a sexual relationship, he hoped, would “give us more perfect delight when we lie naked in each other's arms, clasped together toying with each other's limbs buried in each other's bodies, struggling, panting, dying for a moment. Shall we not feel then, even then, that there is more in store for us, that those thrilling writhings are but dim shadows of a union which shall be perfect?”[
16
] That a husband-to-be would write with such frank expectations of joint emotional and physical ecstasy shows just how far the idea of mutually companionate marriage had come.