This book is divided into two halves, which address different kinds of resistance to love. The first two chapters consider what I term ‘romantic a(nti)pathy’. I coin this phrase to refer to romance representations of single characters who actively express indifference (apathy) or hostility (antipathy) towards love. The reception of romantic a(nti)pathy often differs according to gendered constructions: Chapter 1 therefore considers men who express romantic a(nti)pathy, while Chapter 2 turns to a particular type of woman who resists love, whom I term ‘the proud lady in love’. This gendered division is provisional and is not intended to be essentialising. It offers a practical means of focus and allows me to think about how gender is constructed by, as well as is an influence on, representations of romantic a(nti)pathy. The first two chapters demonstrate that women’s resistance to love is usually presented as more transgressive than men’s romantic a(nti)pathy.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 take a different approach to resisting love, turning to characters who resist particular relationships because of social factors. This reveals how romance constructs not only love and marriage themselves as desirable but celebrates particular kinds of love and marriage that are defined by intersecting axes such as status, race, religion, and morality. Chapter 3 explores how resistance to mésalliance, relationships between people of different social status, illuminates anxieties about social mobility and the potential for coercion. Chapter 4 considers resistance on the grounds of race and/or faith to argue that constructions of racial and religious difference are entangled with and implicated in perceptions of desirability. Finally, Chapter 5 examines how resistance to adultery or infidelity offers opportunities to challenge the tenets of rape culture and the idea of love as obligatory. This might seem like quite a different kind of resistance to love, not least because it primarily takes the form of resistance to sex. However, it opens up perhaps surprising connections with, as well as differences from, the other forms of resistance I discuss, facilitating new perspectives on the romances discussed so far and thus providing a fitting conclusion to this book. A brief overall Conclusion draws together some of the key ideas traced throughout this work and reflects on the kinds of desire romance constructs as normative. Some of the chapters within this book offer a comprehensive discussion of the particular kind of resistance to love upon which they focus, while others focus on selective examples: resisting adultery, for instance, is a very popular motif and so I discuss only a few representative works. While broad lines of argument are advanced across each chapter, resistance to love serves different purposes in individual works and I therefore leave room for precise arguments about its particular function in each chapter’s sub-sections. The combination of breadth of material and nuanced discussions of individual works in this book is crucial to allow me to make claims about the place of resistance to love in medieval English romance as a genre, while also preserving a sense of the diversity within both the motif and romance writing itself.
Just as resistance to love does not first appear in English romances, nor does it disappear from literature after the decline of medieval romance. Resistance to love is a common feature of the works of William Shakespeare
1 For example, in The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure. and recurs in literature from Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice to Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women, Thomas Hardy’s
Far from the Madding Crowd to contemporary romance novels; the hit Netflix adaptation of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels also springs to mind. The ongoing popularity of this motif demonstrates the enduring relevance of this topic: while human understandings of and attitudes towards sexuality and love vary according to their cultural contexts, the resonance of resistance to love across literature and society over time provides evidence for queer orientations like asexuality and aromanticism as an innate part of the diversity of human sexualities. I do not argue, then, that resistance to love is an exclusive preoccupation of Middle English romance, but I do suggest that this motif had particular resonances within this tradition. It complicates the genre’s normative celebration of love and marriage and offers new perspectives on its representation of consent, coercion, gender, and desire, revealing the subtlety and nuance with which romance writers approached these issues through the lens of imaginative fiction.