May 16, 2024

Last week, we noted how Shakespeare’s romantic comedies typically end in marriage, often in multiple marriages.  Measure for Measure does its best to marry off the entire cast in Act 5, from Duke Vincentio at the top of the social ladder to a pregnant prostitute at the other, even if the Duke’s proposal is left hanging as the play ends.  In this, Shakespeare is not necessarily expressing his own opinion of marriage but is following the conventions of New Comedy, which was actually anything but new even in his time, going back to the Greek comedies of Menander, now mostly lost, and the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence.  The formula of New Comedy is expressed in the line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”  True lovers face obstacles to their love, often including a hostile parent, undergo various ordeals, but are eventually united and live happily ever after.   Or, in the popular formula, “Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl.”  As “happily ever after” suggests, a number of the most famous fairy tales follow the New Comedy formula, most notoriously “Snow White” and “Cinderella.”  The New Comedy conventions reflect a social ideology that has been dominant for centuries, and is still powerful today, in which marriage is the norm for all but a few exceptional people.  As the famous opening line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice says, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” 

However, a new truth is emerging in recent years.  Far from universally acknowledged, it seems to have crept up on us by surprise.  It caught public attention in 2019, when the Pew Research Center released the results of a study showing that 38% of adults between 18 and 54 are now unpartnered, neither married nor living with a partner, up from 29% in 1990.  The report adds that all of the growth since 1990 consists of a rise in the number of people who have never married.  Be that as it may, another research institute, the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University here in Ohio, has uncovered another new and surprising trend, what its co-director, Susan L. Brown, has termed the “gray divorce,” the rise in divorces among people over 50.  High-profile examples include the divorces of Al and Tipper Gore, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Justin and Sophie Grégoire Trudeau.  In total, including people who are divorced, widowed, or never married, the U. S. Census Bureau says that 46.4% of adults are single.  I have discovered that there are not one  but two days celebrating the unmarried: Singles Awareness Day on February 15, after Valentine’s Day, and National Singles Day, coming up on September 17, 2024, should you feel like celebrating, together or alone.  I am not a social scientist, but what interests me is whether or not the changing social picture will lead to changes in the conventions of romantic comedy, or even to their abandonment. 

You do not have to be a social scientist to figure out why more people are choosing to be single.  It is because that choice is widely possible for the first time.  Marriage has been the norm for all of human history because it has been necessary for social stability.  It is the foundation on which the family rests, and the family is the structure that enables the care and upbringing of children.  In most traditional societies, meaning societies in which collectivism dominates over individualism, marriage is strictly regulated.  Rules of kinship prescribe who may marry whom, and matches are often made by parental arrangement, at the very least with parental approval.  This is as true of Jane Austen’s society as it is with tribal societies—perhaps even more so, since in Austen’s society the inheritance of estates was decided by marriage, and parents were not about to allow some naïve and lovesick young woman to marry a rake who would gamble away the entire family estate within a week—especially in a society in which wealth was inherited, and it was not as if people could go out and get jobs to make up for the loss.

To live single as a woman at any time before my lifetime meant to be a “spinster” who was a financial burden upon the family, since it was impossible for her to be self-supporting. Those who did not or could not marry were stigmatized:  there was something wrong with them.  Either they were too ethereal for the realities of marriage, like the delicate-as-glass Laura in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, or they were emotionally crippled by having been betrayed, like Miss Havisham in Dickens’ Great Expectations, whose moldering wedding cake has been preserved intact from the time she was jilted.  Emily, the protagonist of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” does not stop with the cake.  She keeps the corpse of her lover and even sleeps with it.  There is a male counterpart in Poe’s “Annabelle Lee,” whose speaker does manage to relinquish his lover’s corpse, but then lies down beside the tomb to die himself.  More normal men could be bachelors if they were lucky enough to have an independent income, and there were traditional songs like "Bachelors Hall" that praised the freedom of the bachelor life, but in fact it would have been a celibate one unless you wanted to become a rake, seducing and abandoning girls in an era without birth control.  Still, some men seemed suited for it, substituting a social life of men’s clubs and sometimes the fellowship of an all-male faculty in universities.   Joy Davis extracted C.S. Lewis from such a lifestyle.   But for the most part there was the stereotype that the single person is wounded and neurotic, like George Eliot’s Silas Marner, who becomes a miser, substituting hoarded gold for love, again after having been jilted.  Silas is rescued from himself when a girl child with golden hair shows up on his doorstep and calls forth his hoarded capacity for love. 

Even in collectivist societies, however, the fact that the first purpose of marriage was family and economic security by no means precluded companionship as an important secondary purpose.  The imperfect yet still admirable marriage of Odysseus and Penelope in the Odyssey is a fine example of a companionate marriage of people who like each other, who are suited for each other, who face life together as a good team.  Yes, there is a sexual double standard (though only when Odysseus is away for 20 years), but in the end Penelope is the only woman for Odysseus because she is his match, personally if not socially—as she proves by being the only one in the entire poem to outsmart him, by pretending to have cut down their marriage bed, a tree rooted symbolically into the ground.  Other men tell Odysseus how lucky he is—even Agamemnon in the underworld, bitter misogynist that he is because his own wife connived with a lover to murder him.  In the Iliad, Helen of Troy, the most desirable woman in the world, is miserable with Paris, the adulterous lover for whom she has lost all respect.  Ten years later, in the Odyssey, she is back with her husband Menelaus, and they are fabulously wealthy, but they snipe at each other over dinner—though, mind you, with the exquisite manners of the rich.  Men, if you have a choice between Helen of Troy and Penelope, choose Penelope. 

But the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope is not romantic.  And in fact no relationship was until the advent of the Courtly Love tradition of the Middle Ages.  Beginning with the songs of the troubadours in southern France around 1150 and spreading across Europe, a new type of love based on the intense idealization of both the beloved and love itself transformed the way that the West thought about love, wrote about love, and in fact experienced love, all the way to our own time.  Romantic love is “love at first sight.”  The lover is enraptured upon first sight of the beloved, struck by a power that transforms not only her but the whole of life.  She is idealized as the One, to whom the lover says, “I adore you.”  The woman is “put on a pedestal” and worshipped, usually from afar, as if she were a goddess of a religion of love.  Dante calls attention to the parallel by titling his book of poems about Beatrice La Vita Nuova, the new life, usually a phrase that refers to religious conversion.  Romantic love is an ideal love that sets the lover on a quest for union in a higher state of being, a notion influenced by the “ladder of love” in Plato’s Symposium.  But that means it draws the lovers away from the day-to-day realities of marriage.  The famous Courtly Love affairs were extra-marital, love triangles that ended in tragedy, including those of Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, the Irish Diarmuid and Grania.  Dante himself had a wife, Gemma Donati, who is never mentioned in his poems. 

Eventually, however, the notion dawned of having one’s wedding cake and eating it too, of marrying your ideal love and living happily ever after.  This led, and still leads, to a pattern of euphoric happiness displayed in the imagery of bridal magazines, followed by disillusionment when “the honeymoon’s over.”  When people come to their senses, they realize they have married a very imperfect human being and not an ideal.  In Neil Simon’s Into the Woods, the happy ending occurs at the mid-point, after which, among other letdowns, Prince Charming turns out to be a philanderer.  Which brings us back to Shakespeare and his plethora of weddings.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream prompted Mendelsohn to compose the “Wedding March,” and yet underneath the humor and the lyrical beauty of its verse lies such an ironic skepticism that I give students an essay suggestion asking whether Shakespeare really believed in romantic love, or, for that matter, even in marriage.  By the “happy ending,” the underpinnings of all four of the play’s unions have been exposed as problematic.  Duke Theseus is to marry Hippolyta the Amazon more or less by coercion, because he conquered her in battle, and he seems typically male-oblivious to the possibility that she may not be happy about the matter.  After Theseus as ruler enforces the prerogative of Hermia’s father to command who she will marry, he says to Hippolyta, “What cheer, my love?”, hinting that he has noticed something not very happy in her expression.  The fairy king and queen Oberon and Titania are quarreling over a changeling boy that Oberon insists must join his train, apparently just to exercise his male will.  Titania denies the boy because he is the child of a dear woman friend who has died.  Consequently, Oberon humiliates Titania until she gives in by making her fall in love with a man who sports an ass’s head.  Of the young lovers, Helena betrays Hermia, her best friend from childhood, for the sake of a man. 

My students understandably protested against the couplings at the end of Measure for Measure, but it is a “problem comedy” only in the sense that it brings the marital ironies out in the open.  Mariana is going to marry Angelo, who jilted her and then tried to extort sex from Isabella. Claudio and Julietta have been secretly engaged and will now get their wedding, but not before Claudio has humiliated himself by begging his sister to sleep with Angelo to spare his life.  The Duke enforces Lucio’s marriage to the prostitute he has impregnated, but merely as a provision for spousal and child support.  And he offers himself to Isabella, who has after all demonstrated that she does not have a religious vocation by speaking to her terrified brother with self-righteous hatred.  All in all, it’s quite a mess. 

Shakespeare is rather hard on romantic love’s true believers, like Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night, who sits around mooning in love melancholy.  Rosalind in As You Like It is scathing about the nonsense of romantic love: 

The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love cause.  Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love.  Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun if it had not been for a hot midsummer night, for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos.  But these are all lies.  Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.  (4.1.89-102)

And be careful what you wish for, she goes on, cataloguing a list of the kind of thing that you are free to condemn as sexist stereotypes—or laugh uproariously at how the shoe fits:

No, no, Orlando, men are April when they woo, December when they wed.  Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.  I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more newfangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey.  I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry.  I will laugh like a hyena, and that when thou art inclined to sleep.  (4.1.139-49)

Orlando is actually trying to live according to the rules of Courtly Love, which, as its name discloses, was an upper-class game.  Rosalind has to hit him in the face with what  it’s really like to be in a relationship with another human being, a reality that transcends social classes:  the sentiments here are the same as in hundreds of African-American blues songs, by men and women, and the same as when white working-class Ralph Kramden, in the significantly named 1950’s sitcom The Honeymooners, makes a mock fist and says in exasperation to his wife, “To the moon, Alice, to the moon.” 

Make no mistake, Rosalind will end up marrying Orlando in the end.  All the skeptics do.  Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing, after having been anti-marriage and anti-Beatrice for most of the play, gives up and admits that he loves her, giving as an excuse, “The world must be peopled.”  But what price is paid for peopling the world, what price not to be lonely?  So long as society was set up to favor collectivist necessity over individual fulfilment, marriage was as inevitable as death and taxes.  But that began to change in the late 19^th century, when women began to register their restlessness at being confined to the roles of mother and homemaker.  In literature, this became the “woman question,” and one of the places it was thought through was in the plays of Ibsen, such as A Doll’s House (1879), whose protagonist Nora leaves her doll house, closing the door behind her.  Such plays were called “problem plays,” the term that got applied retroactively to Measure for Measure.  The image of the New Woman began to challenge the old image of the woman as the angel in the house, as women began to agitate for suffrage, for the right to attend university, for political involvement, for freedom of divorce.  The New Woman was independent and refused to comply with the social pressure to be passive and dependent.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a feminist utopia called Herland that was in a way a precursor to Barbie.  Outside of utopia, the attempt at nonconformity was likely enough to end in tragedy, as in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). 

George Bernard Shaw began as a disciple of Ibsen, and his early plays were “problem plays” about social issues, some of them, like Mrs. Warren’s Profession, having to do with the “woman question.”  Mrs. Warren is a former prostitute who has financed her daughter’s emancipation with proceeds from the oldest profession.  Shaw loved to prick the bubble of romantic love delusion, yet he was puzzled as to why the delusion was so stubbornly persistent despite its obvious irrationality.  He finally decided that romantic love was an ideology disguising a biological imperative.  Something in us genetically says that “The world must be peopled,” a Life Force that drives men and women together even when they know that they are basically acting insanely and against their best interests.  His central play, Man and Superman (1903), is based on the Don Juan story, but follows Byron in making the comic twist that the Don Juan figure is actually the pursued, not the pursuer.  Women relentlessly pursue men, even as they pretend that it is the men who are the pursuers, because they have some biological clock ticking.  All the high-flown romantic talk is a way of beautifying a rather ruthless drive to reproduce.  

For most of my lifetime, the going ideology in academia has been that of a “social constructionism” that categorically denies any innate drives, despite works such as Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene which updates the idea of a Life Force by saying that we are driven by our genes to reproduce and thereby pass them on.  Social constructionism argues that compulsions that feel as if they come from some place so deep that they must surely be innate are actually the result of social conditioning that sinks into levels below consciousness.   What we need is therefore deprogramming.  The role of the arts is of a ruthless unmasking of what really goes on in a marriage of trapped people, which at its worst degenerates into a marital pit bull fight.  Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night shows a marriage imploding into madness and alcohol.  Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf show marriages exploding into verbal and occasionally physical violence.  Noah Baumbach’s recent Marriage Story (2019) with Adam Driver and Scarlet Johansson, is the tale of two good people who try not to replay Scenes from a Marriage as they divorce but end up screaming at each other anyway.  Another deprogramming device is revisionism.  Feminist rewritings of sexist fairy tales have burgeoned almost into a mini-genre in itself, in parallel with a revisionism in cartoons and children’s films.  Merida in Pixar’s Brave does not end up with any Prince Charming for the same reason that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie does not end up with Ken.  Merida is not anti-male: there is simply no man in the film who is remotely worthy of her. 

The first step towards liberating women from the marriage trap was access to divorce.  The second was the birth control pill, which became available in 1960 and eliminated the bait in the trap, namely, sex.  Men no longer needed to get married to have sex, and the disgrace of unmarried pregnancy no longer pushed women to get married.  That was, however, not sufficient in itself. The sexual revolution of the 1960’s also tried to deprogram women of their conditioning to feel guilty about sex, signified by the title of Erica Jong’s novel Fear of Flying, as its female protagonist tried to achieve the “zipless fuck.”  The third liberating factor, beginning in the 1980’s or so, was women’s entry en masse into the job world.  This had been resisted by men for many years, but they finally had to acquiesce because middle class families could no longer get by on a single income.  The result was a wave of divorces as women, especially those who children were old enough to be at least somewhat independent, left conventional marriages in mid-life and struck out on the adventure to find out who they were and what adventures they might have.  To my mind, the greatest chronicler of such female adventures was Alice Munro, who just died at the age of 92.  There had always been women who, enabled by social status and financial security, refused to be adjuncts to men and became remarkable figures in themselves:  George Sand, Alma Mahler, Anais Nin, May Sarton.  But such women were exceptional.  We have only now arrived at a situation in which large numbers of women get college degrees and are self-supporting.  They do not need a man to support them, and if a man mistreats them, they may leave.  It is absolutely this that is causing the backlash against abortion and birth control, in an attempt to turn back the clock and return women to the kitchen. 

There was a joke phrase in the feminism of my youth: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”  Are we at the end of a centuries-long tradition of romantic comedy ending in marriage?  Is there another type of love story, another type of happy ending, and, if so, what would it look like? Understandably, the early phases of feminist liberation saw a good deal of separatist sentiment on the part of long-trapped and alienated women.  The impulse towards sisterhood, Women’s Studies, and the like, was, I suspect, a contributing factor to the next step in the liberation from traditional romantic love and marriage.  If anatomy is not destiny and sexual orientation is a choice, it is left open for both women and men disillusioned with heterosexual politics to explore becoming lesbian or gay or bi.  Around the turn of the century, there were a fair number of what were called “college lesbians,” most of whom did not remain lesbian after they graduated.

Beautiful as it may be, romantic love can be a way of blinding people, especially women, to the problematic nature of marriage.  Because it is an idealizing tendency, romantic love can also repress those aspects of human sexuality that are not aesthetically beautiful.  It moves towards sublimation, that is, a rechanneling of the sex drive away from the physical towards a distanced and disembodied ideal.  Dante will only be united with Beatrice in heaven.  The Courtly Love poet’s love is either unrequited or distanced.  But full human sexuality is physical, sensual, not always beautiful, not always tender and loving and lyrical, and not always directed towards socially approved objects.  Freud said that the sexual impulse was, without socialization, “polymorphous perverse,” defining as perversion anything that did not further the goal of reproduction.  One out of two isn’t bad, I guess:  his real insight lay in the word “polymorphous.”  Human beings are polymorphous until conditioned otherwise, and people who grew up in the white middle class, as I did, often have little idea how wide the range of the polymorphous may be among fully functional, non-neurotic human beings.   

Here again, literature has a job to do.  The counter-genre to romance is satire, and satire in any age violates the decorum of the “normal,” meaning the respectable, clear back to the Satyricon of Petronius, made into a wild film by Fellini.  Satirists are the bad boys and girls of literature, the Trickster figures—and in past newsletters on the Trickster we saw how anti-conventional the Trickster may be.  The characters in Rabelais are giants because giants represent physical appetite.  I remember how refreshing it was, many years ago, when I read in an interview with Samuel R. Delany, one of the great sexual explorers in contemporary literature, when asked about the relationship of sex to love, said simply: “Sex is an appetite.”  How does honesty about the polymorphous get incorporated into the picture of romantic love and marriage?  Given the hysteria of the culture wars, it is hard to get any true information on what experiments go on behind closed doors, but we can be sure that the experiments do take place.  Leopold Bloom’s fantasies about a dominatrix come out in the drunken “Nighttown” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, and I remember a golden-shower episode in one of John Updike’s Rabbit novels.  Then there is the publishing phenomenon of Fifty Shades of Gray.  I think there is a nervous compulsion to talk about how badly written those books are in order to avoid the question of why, in that case, tens of millions of people read them anyway, most of them women.     

In other words, romantic comedy is only one kind of comedy.  Even if we decide it no longer fits the modern condition, there are other kinds.  Satiric comedy is certainly alive and well, both the sexual kind spoken of above and the more sociopolitical kind whose “happy ending” consists in the unmasking of evil as evil and idiots as idiots.  We do not think of it as “comedy,” but there is also what we might call the literature of individuation, tracing the development of an individual to the climactic discovery of the protagonist’s true identity.  This may sometimes, in fact, involve a rejection of the more collective happy endings of romantic and social comedy.  In St. Joan, Shaw’s greatest female character shows that being in the grip of the Life Force may take other forms than the compulsion to marry and breed.  Joan is a soldier and a visionary, a figure of capable imagination, as Wallace Stevens would call her, and her drama is still a comedy notwithstanding that she is burned at the stake because she triumphs on another level.  In this she is imitating Christ himself.  In Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus’s last temptation is to renounce his vocation, get married to Mary Magdalen, and settle down happily ever after.  But that is not the kind of happy ending he is destined to. 

The Küntslerroman, or fictional biography of an artist, often ends in an epiphany that is a discovery of vocation.  A famous example is Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, at the end of which Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s fictional counterpart, sees a young woman wading in the water with her skirt tucked up.  But she does not inspire him with romantic love, rather with a desire to record such moments in writing, which means to fly, like Daedalus and Icarus, above the labyrinth of conventional society.  Not everyone identifies with the figure of the artist, but coming-of-age stories may end in a new freedom symbolized by leaving family and society behind and “lighting out for the territories” in some sense or other, as Huck Finn does.  D. H. Lawrence claimed that that escape was practically the paradigmatic narrative of American literature, from Moby Dick to works after Lawrence’s time such as On the Road and, in film, Easy Rider.  Lawrence actually disapproved of the pattern, regarding it as immature adolescent evasion of the alternative adventure of serious adult relationships such as he wrote about in The Rainbow and Women in Love. 

Finally, the extraverted romantic comedy has an introverted complement, simply called “romance,” of which fantasy is the modern representative.  Again, the hero or heroine leaves the world of love, marriage, and society and embarks on a quest, but the quest is inward, into a realm of wonders and marvels that I have called the Otherworld.  The Otherworld has an association with the dreaming inwardness of childhood, and many of the great fantasies are or began as children’s literature, including The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series.  The happy ending here is the successful conclusion of the quest.  The Odyssey splits into two halves, the first part of which, the Wanderings, is the quest of a hero in a world of wonders, the second part of which, the return to Ithaca, is a romantic comedy with the twist that the lovers are married and middle-aged. 
So, if changing social conditions render romantic comedy a historical curiosity, that does not mean we have outgrown our need for happy endings. 

But are we done with romance, even if half the world is now single and alone?  My honest answer is, sorry, but I don’t have the slightest idea.  But I do find myself wondering.  The articles I have read about the new singleness interview quite a few people who feel that living unpartnered is their form of happy ending, and are glad that it is becoming more socially acceptable to admit it.  But for others, I wonder about a yearning for the kind of intimacy that romantic comedy’s happy ending signifies—whether or not it seems possible now. John Donne said that no one is an island, but in fact contemporary society seems like an archipelago, and I also encounter articles about an unprecedented degree of loneliness.  A few years ago, because I have a Millennial woman friend in London, I watched Love Actually, the 2003 romantic comedy full of English stars like Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, and Alan Rickman.  It is a feelgood Christmas comedy, so of course sophisticated reviewers at places like the New York Times looked down on it, but it seems to have been an important film to some Millennials.  Its message is that love is actually all around us, and love, Eros, is the power of connection, represented in the film by a clever interweaving of the love stories of 9 couples.

And then there is the category of romance fiction, which I thought a woman’s genre but find that 15% of its readership is supposedly male.  I have never actually read a “category romance,” as they are called, but I have read about them, and, from a literary critical standpoint, the verdict is that New Comedy lives.  What is new is perhaps that they are invariably from the woman’s point of view.  This type of fiction began with Harlequin Romances in the 1970’s, right when women were being urged to stop thinking of themselves as fish longing for bicycles.  It is still thriving post #MeToo, and its audience is apparently not all unsophisticated people.   There are lesbian romance novels, and I suspect there are trans romance novels in the offing.  There are historical romance novels, science fiction and fantasy romance novels (including the Twilight series) and BDSM romance novels (including Fifty Shades).  They are popular, not “literary fiction,” but I grew up in popular literature, and did not read much literary fiction until I was practically old enough to drink.  Popular literature is naïve in the way that the “rude mechanicals” are naïve in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Shakespeare has us howling as we watch the way those working-class blokes butcher the romantic love story of Pyramis and Thisbe.  High culture literature is like the characters in the play watching the Pyramis and Thisbe play.  It is self-conscious, ironic, skeptical, afraid of illusion, of being sucked in.  But sometimes I enjoy reading or watching something without all that defensive armor.  Silly sitcoms from the 1960’s can be a relief from the relentlessness of modern and postmodern irony.  When Shakespeare reached his culminating achievement, the final four romances, he began with Pericles, in which he took the fragment of a primitive play by a clunky poet and transformed it into something rich and strange.  Something about romantic comedy still calls to us, like a lighthouse beacon in the darkness of our solitude. 

Reference

Shakespeare, William.  The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington.  Fourth edition.  HarperCollins, 1992.