Romance: the endless revolution

This article appeared in the July 2005 edition of ROMANCE WRITERS REPORT in the US and formed the basis of a workshop I gave with my then agent, Kristin Nelson, at the RWA conference in Reno, Nevada. I was inspired to give it when I heard a very successful author complain about the ‘cringe factor’ she was made to feel when she first started writing love stories. My academic research into the origins of romantic fiction uncovers a truth that should not surprise us – the love story is not only a great tradition, but a powerful and subversive voice for women.

Part I below gives the history of romance up to the 16th century. Parts II and III take it to the present day in further Blogs.

I’d like to take you into the past in quest of two things: first, the meaning of the word ‘romance’; second, romance as a form, as a way of telling a story.

What is the point of this quest? Because as writers of novels that contain love stories, we are part of an endeavor that is hundreds of years old that will continue long after you and I are gone. Humankind does not seem to be able to live without the love story. And since that is the case, we might as well know everything we can about this age-old endeavor. So from now on, if someone is condescending enough to ask you, ‘Romance! What on earth are you writing that for?’ you’ll be able to answer, ‘Because I’m a revolutionary.’

The root word of the term ‘romance’ is ‘roman’, which is a Latin word, and some of the earliest novels were written by the Romans -- such as the fourth-century novel, Apollonius of Tyre. The old word ‘roman’ indicated something quite democratic -- for those early novels were written not in classical Latin, but in the language of the people, the vulgar Roman language of the time. From the beginning, then, the word ‘roman’ meant a form of story-telling that was accessible to people from many walks of life. These novels would have been recited or read aloud to ordinary people: soldiers around a campfire, or friends gathered to wine and dine in someone’s house.

This root word ‘roman’ travelled through Europe and into Middle French and Middle English, when we first meet the word ‘romanz’. In those early days, and later in the Middle Ages, a ‘romanz’ was a tale in verse, often about marvelous deeds of chivalry, or the adventures of a dashing hero, or a pair of star-crossed lovers. And the word also came to mean a prose narrative on similar subjects -- again, not in Latin, the language of scholarship and the church, but in the vernacular, the language of the people. By the fifteenth century we find ‘romanz’ used also to mean an extravagant fiction, invention or story, a picturesque falsehood, a wanton exaggeration. Well, if romance is wanton exaggeration, I’m all for it! In 1530 we find the lovely variant ‘romaunt’, usually a fabulous tale about a knight and his lady. In the seventeenth century, in France and England, the term ‘romance’ was used for a fantasy, a long inventive story remote from real life. For the first time, in that century, it was also used specifically to mean a love story, written to be accessible to a wide audience, and we see this meaning carried through right to our own day.

So much for the history of that venerable word. What of romance as a literary form? Within Western culture, its first flowering was in the days of the troubadours. Something revolutionary happened to poetry in France in the twelfth century -- there was a huge swing towards the canso d’amor, the song of love, which in its turn influenced the roman, the long narrative poem. This trend was inspired by elaborate and beautiful Arabian songs and tales of love which came to the south of France via the Moors in Spain. And it was a movement that neatly suited its time, when the kings, queens and high nobility were refining the art of living in their gracious and sophisticated courts. Most of the troubadours, men and women alike, were aristocrats. They were highly educated, with a curiosity for fresh ideas, and they also loved the antique past, the mythical, the fantastic. They were writing in a form that required great wit and technical skill, and they turned all this learning and ingenuity to the development of a new concept -- courtly love.

So seductive was it that we are still familiar with it today. In courtly love the knight, the poet, the lover, woos his mistress gradually and gently, with respect and obedience. It is the woman who calls the tune and the man who sings it. The woman dictates each stage of the man’s approach and of all their passionate exchanges. In return for his worship, she tenderly and expertly shows him her loving mercy.

In their form and their themes, many of these long works resemble the epic poems of chivalry or the religious poems that people were familiar with at the time. Nonetheless, the new lyrical and narrative poems of love mark a great difference in story-telling. Epics and religious stories present human life through action and description, and concentrate on putting across a strong plot, with a message or moral. The romance, on the other hand, explores character and relationships. Dialogue, the exchange of thoughts and sentiments, self-commentary and emotional debate are central to this new form. The roman may still contain tales of valor for the sake of a sovereign, or a sovereign lady, but the focus has altered -- the real battle is fought not on far-off fields, but within the woman’s ambit: the court, the castle, the mansion, the hearth and home where the woman holds sway.

There were hundreds of troubadours to sing and convey these stories around southern France, and hundreds of trouvères to spread them across northern France and into England. These poets and musicians might be great ones themselves, like Guilhem VII, Duke of Aquitaine, or Béatrix, Countess of Die in Provence; they might be warrior poets like the noble Bertran de Born of Périgord; or they might be patronized by the great. Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen first of France and then of England, was a grand patroness of troubadours, the most famous of her protégés being Bernart de Ventadour. He was not nobly born: he was brought up in the kitchens of Ventadour, and fell in love -- and into bed -- with the mistress of the castle.

These complex, adventurous romances gained currency and found a hearing not just in the courts but in society. Ordinary people, like the citizen-poets of Arras, embroidered on the new forms. Talented women like Béatrix drew about them other women in schools of poetry that developed the new themes. Romance took a strong hold on the popular imagination, and it was actively promoted by women. We can see that, in more than one sense, romance was subversive. It freely examined the woman’s point of view. It put love above violence, and it put understanding above possession. Romance ran directly counter to the everyday brutalities of the feudal system, in which warfare and territory were the primary concerns.

In the following two centuries, love pervaded European literature, in prose and verse. This was before the invention of printing, so these popular works were spread by performers and in manuscript. One of the international bestsellers then was the love story Floire et Blanchefleur, which was translated into German, Dutch, Norse and English. Once printing came along, different versions spread across state borders, and they were reissued again and again, in embellished or condensed forms. Geoffrey Chaucer started his poetic career with a translation of the Romance of the Rose. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late fourteenth-century romance, helped to inspire Thomas Malory’s Arthurian romances in the fifteenth.

[Parts II and III will follow soon. The unique print from my collection shown here is 'Inner Sea' by Australian artist Madeleine Winch.]