For the past six years, I’ve been living my own romance story with my boyfriend. We met online, decided to meet in person and have been inseparable – first as friends and later as a couple. Still waiting on that walk down the isle though.
Reflecting on my love story, I sometimes think of the ones that I’ve read over the years in books and as short stories. And there is a trend for what we’re reading when it comes to love and romance.
If you would have asked me 10 years ago what came to mind when you said “Romance Novel,” an image of a bare-chested Fabio holding a woman in his arms, dressed in period clothing comes to mind. You know what I’m talking about… the trashy novels with a limited plot line and steamy lines of text that made you blush in the lunch cafeteria.
These novels are still being created today, but the trend in the romance genre has definitely shifted a bit. Front-runner in the shift would be famous author Nicholas Sparks, who made his debut in mainstreamAmerica with the addition of The Notebook that was later to become a movie.
Instead of focusing on the physical aspect of love and lust, this author has decided to take a different route and focus on the development of love. The Notebook, mentioned earlier, is a story about an elderly couple in which the woman has dementia and has forgotten her life and those she loves. Every day the husband spends his day telling his wife their love story, from the day they met until the day they marry, hoping for a glimmer of recognition by the audience of one. Finally, at the end she remembers and two die that night, not a storyteller and audience, but as husband and wife.
Other of his novels have similar themes in which two people meet by happenstance, often in a vulnerable place in their life so they’ll be open for starting a new connect with someone else, and we, as the audience, follow the story as their love progresses, overcoming many conflicts along the way. Inevitably, someone dies, and leaves the other to grieve and reflect on the short-lived (or long-lived love story).
I think the reason these stories are becoming so much more popular is because of the sentimentality that story line provokes in the readers. We understand because all of us have experienced a first love and some of us are still living the story of that first love.
What do you think? Are the housewives of American swapping their trashy, lust-filled novels for more sentimental stories of true love?
Note-to-Self: Re-read Memoirs of a Geisha. One of my favorite books.
Memoirs of a Geisha is one of mine too.
The Tudour Court Novels, By Phillipa Gregory-The Other Boleyn Girl-The Constant Princess [so sad!}-The Queen’s Fool-The Virgin’s LoverThe Twilight Series, By Stephenie Meyer-Twilight-New Moon-EclipseThe Luxe, By Anna Godbersen – Set 1899Atonement – Ian McEwan [I bought it a few days ago as I’m a big fan of the movie, and I wasn’t dpiisoanted] Set 1930 s, 1940 s and PresentNorth and South Elizabeth Gaskell Erm, during the British Industrail Revolution, in the mid-1800 sPride and Predjudice Jane Austen Early 1800 s, I think. I may be wrong.
You bring up some great examples. Thanks!
I think you’ve got the basic outline right. One thing I’d add, usaully in a romance the hero (it’s more usual that it’s the hero, but you can have it be the heroine) is somewhat tormented. There’s something in his/her past that has wounded him emotionally (like his wife cheating on him; his girlfriend dumping him for his best friend). To be together, the heroine has to break through the barriers the hero has put up to keep himself from being hurt again.BTW: When it seems that the protagonists are going to get together, a usual plot device is to have some misunderstanding occur between the two of them. Sometimes it’s caused by a third person perhaps even the man’s wife/girlfriend coming back into the picture and trying to get him back something like that. Or it could be that’s there’s been some hidden agenda on the part of one of the two. For instance, the man knew the woman had possession of a certain artifact that he’s been after but when he met her he never let her know that. Then, after she breaks through the wall he’s built around his heart (and they seem ready to get together), she finds out about the seeming betrayal another obstacle must be vanquished!