Conclusion: The Ends of Romance
The first big ruse of romance is that it is ubiquitous because it is natural, and it is natural because it is ubiquitous.
1 yingchen and yingtong, An Aromantic Manifesto (Calaméo, 2018), p. 7 <https://en.calameo.com/read/0056336139d7e661d8f3c> [accessed 21 February 2021].What are we consenting to, if or when we consent to happiness?
2 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 1. Whom and what we desire are perennial human concerns that play a central role in fiction through the ages. As
the genre of secular fiction in medieval England, and one particularly focused upon the concerns and wishes of the individual, romance offered a crucial space for medieval readers to encounter, think through, and negotiate these issues. Some romances suggest that love and desire are overpowering forces that operate outside and sometimes in violation of societal norms and expectations, but the works discussed here show that romances also construct desire within and in service of these norms, organising it ‘into legible and socially acceptable forms’.
3 Nicola McDonald, ‘Desire Out of Order and Undo Your Door’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 34 (2012), 247–75 (p. 247). Middle English romance celebrates love and marriage, and desire and sexuality within them, endorsing these as normal and natural things to want. In itself, this is not surprising. What is more unexpected, though, is the lengths to which the genre goes to achieve this. The repeated reliance on coercion to resolve resistance to love and the integration of coercive practices into romanticised relationships point to the need to construct love and marriage as natural and thereby reveal that they are
not natural. They are always shaped by and contingent upon societal, cultural, political, and literary perspectives.
The first half of this book highlighted that romances celebrate (heterosexual) love itself as normative, exploring how the genre anticipates the resolution of romantic a(nti)pathy and mandates this for women in particular. Women’s resistance, consent, and desire are perceived as more problematic than men’s, both in works where two mutually unwilling protagonists are directly contrasted and in the broader development of the proud lady in love as a specific motif, compared to the more sporadic representation of men’s resistance. This gendered difference – which also constructs ideas of appropriate gendered behaviour – highlights the political, economic, and dynastic implications of women’s desires in this period. While resistance to love marks dissent from normative expectations, and some romances allow more space for alternative desires and protest, even these tend to adopt strategies to (re-)assimilate queer alternatives to normative models, from the association of Guigemar’s asexuality with adolescence in Marie’s
lai to Dynadan’s performance of a comic role in Malory’s
Morte Darthur. These strategies are not always effective, but they do illustrate how romance tries to contain queer desires within its dominant structures. Taken together, the first two chapters of this book highlight the ways in which romance adopts and endorses a ‘horizon of feeling’ that approximates heteronormative expectations.
4 See Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 18–19. While some characteristic features of medieval sexualities are different to those of modern heteronormativity, recognising the restrictive aspects they share may offer an important way of advancing our understanding of all sexualities, including queer desires, in the medieval period.
5 I am influenced here by Lucy M. Allen-Goss on the importance of confronting ‘ugly emotions’ and pejorative views, in Female Desire in Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’ and Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. viii–ix; Tess Wingard, Unclean Beasts: Sex, Animality, and the Invention of Heteronormativity, 1200–1550 (forthcoming); and the turn in medieval trans studies to examine transmisogyny, transphobia, and pessimism, discussed in ‘Revisiting Romances from Trans and Genderqueer Perspectives’ (organised by A. E. Brown at the 57th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 2022).Chapters 3, 4, and 5 drew attention to the ways in which romances do not just celebrate (heterosexual) desire itself but define whom their readers
ought to desire in accordance with dominant cultural perceptions of social status, race and/or faith, and morality. The romances discussed in Chapter 3 suggest that interclass relationships are undesirable and dangerous, implicitly cautioning readers against
mésalliance, while also offering guidance on how, when, and by whom such relationships might be pursued. Chapter 4 demonstrated that desirability is bound up in political perceptions of race and religion in romance writing: the tendency to view love and sexuality as purely personal matters, which remains dominant in the modern world, obscures the fact that racism and prejudice infiltrate every aspect of our lives, including whom we desire. Chapter 5 showed that rather than endorsing adulterous desire as demonstrating the power of love to overcome social constraints, Middle English romances often reject infidelity, asserting the importance of loyalty to marriage even in the face of temptation. The romances I have explored thus shape their readers’ desires in accordance with contemporary norms, constructing desirability in terms of status, race, religion, and morality. Romance’s celebration of ‘desirable desire’ might well often be a positive motif that endows women in particular with agency over their own lives, but its definition of what is desirable can also act as a restrictive force, limiting what desires are possible.
6 Helen Cooper, ‘Desirable desire: “I am wholly given over unto thee”’, in The English Romance in Time: Transforming motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 218–68.The types of ending typical of romance also serve this restrictive function, closing off the possibility of other endings and thereby delimiting the kinds of desires that are (and are not) deemed worthy of reward in this genre. While romance’s drive towards happy resolution may seem an innocuous means of wish fulfilment or fantasy, positive reinforcement of this kind can play an important role in endorsing particular kinds of wants as acceptable and achievable. As Sara Ahmed writes in her interrogation of happiness, ‘there is no doubt about the power of the “no words”’, but ‘it might be harder to hear the “yes words” […] because the words seem to “go along” with or affirm what we are already doing’.
7 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, p. 48. Yet ‘to encourage can also be forceful’; it ‘can be a way of being directed toward somebody else’s wants. The generosity of encouragement can hide the force of being directed somewhere’.
8 Ibid., pp. 47–8. Romance’s endorsement of particular kinds of happy endings may be both more
effective and more difficult to observe as a means of control because of its positive focus. The narrative trajectory romance shares in common with the
bildungsroman, the growth of a protagonist into a new identity, highlights the aspirational qualities of the genre – its focus on possible identities, discovering new skills and new inheritances, its celebration of what people can become. But romance aspirations also fix particular
kinds of becoming as desirable. The predictability of romance plots – including the frequent, though not inevitable, transformation of resistance to love into willed commitment – further contributes to this effect. In thinking about the role ‘the happy family’ plays in shaping desire, Ahmed writes that ‘happiness involves here the comfort of repetition, of following lines that have already been given in advance’.
9 Ibid., p. 48. The same is true of romance’s happy endings, which offer both their protagonists and their readers the ‘comfort of repetition’. In doing so, they etch in more deeply those ‘lines that have already been given in advance’. The many examples of resistance to love being transformed into romantic commitment discussed in this book therefore have a cumulative effect. Chapter 1 explored how pairing together two people who resist love not only anticipates their eventual coupling from the start but sets out a normative trajectory for the other protagonist to follow when one partner is shown transforming from resistance to willingness to love. This pattern is echoed more widely across different works within this genre: for each instance where resistance is transformed into acceptance, the drive towards love becomes a stronger generic expectation and is thereby further normalised and made to seem inevitable. As aromanticism theorists yingchen and yingtong argue in the epigraph to this chapter (though they are writing about romantic relationships, not romance as a literary genre), ‘the first big ruse of romance is that it is ubiquitous because it is natural, and it is natural because it is ubiquitous’.
10 yingchen and yingtong, An Aromantic Manifesto, p. 7.Yet romance, as I have argued repeatedly throughout this book, is not and never can be solely a restrictive force. Its projection of happy fantasies shapes its readers’ desires in particular ways, but the very strategy by which it does so also holds the means of escape. While Nicola McDonald has argued that desire itself is ‘inherently disruptive’ and romance’s capacity to contain it ‘never assured’, Ahmed (writing specifically about the ‘feminist killjoy’) suggests more broadly that ‘imagination is what allows women to be liberated from happiness and the narrowness of its horizons’, ‘what allows girls to question the wisdom they have received and to ask whether what is good for all is necessarily good for them’.
11 McDonald, ‘Desire Out of Order’, pp. 253, 273; Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, p. 62. Imaginative fiction plays a crucial role in shaping horizons of desire and possibility; as I have argued, the fantastical nature of romance should not lead us to overlook its power in this respect. But in inviting its readers to imagine, to fantasise, romance also opens up the potential for new horizons, new desires, new possibilities that cannot be contained. The motif of resisting love both reveals the socio-political shaping of love and desire and at times offers opportunities to challenge it, opening out onto alternative and sometimes queer possibilities. Romance may have lessons to teach us that its writers might not have anticipated or desired.
This book has argued that the motif of resistance to love permeates medieval English romance writing, but in doing so I have tried not to homogenise it. It takes varied forms and serves diverse functions in different works, sometimes operating more conventionally and at other times raising more subversive questions about the representation of gender, consent, and desire in romance literature. While I have brought together the questions it raises and the ideologies it upholds within one framework, I hope to have preserved a sense of the generic diversity to be found within Middle English romance. Romance – and its discourses of love, marriage, and sexuality – is not a monolith, and resistance to love opens up dissenting perspectives and alternative possibilities. Such possibilities are often closed off or reintegrated into a normative ending, offering valuable evidence for how dominant perspectives co-opt or silence queer and dissenting voices, including the repression of asexuality into normative sexual scripts for desire and marriage. However, normative endings do not and cannot entirely close off earlier expressions of resistance and dissent. Romance protagonists’ resistance may fail, but perhaps by looking more closely at their resistance, ours may not. By attending to dissenting voices and acknowledging attempts to negotiate romance expectations, we are better placed to critique the ideologies romance endorses, to express our own resistance to the coercive fictions of heteronormativity, and to construct better futures to the past and the fictions it leaves behind.