The conditions for the big sweeping love story have begun to fade away
The conditions for the "big, sweeping" love story have begun to fade away.Look, for instance, at the royal story that swept through so much of the press this week. Apparently Fergie and Prince Andrew, who divorced in 1996, are still living together very happily in their marital home and even thinking about getting married again. Their broken marriage vows, their respective adultery, seem to matter little to them - after all, why should they let such a chequered past get in the way of what looks like a perfectly happy family life? They don't rule out remarriage, but according to Andrew, they "are determined not to make a nonsense of it again".Andrew and Fergie may not exactly be the norm, but their guilt-free life together, centred around their children, looks pretty functional, especially taken in the context of the family to which they belong. And they are not as exceptional as you might think.Sure, not many divorced couples actually live together, but most divorced couples with children now manage to build up civilised ways of seeing one another without holding each other eternally accountable for a crime against holy matrimony.In this guilt-free age, it's hard to see where the big narratives of thwarted love would come from.
Indeed few serious writers are prepared to take on what might be seen as a classic romantic tale any more. Romantic fiction, a term that might once have encompassed most literature, is now confined strictly to junkier books with pink and gold covers. And even though they don't have an investment in being strictly plausible, these novels often have problems setting up sufficient obstacles to their lovers' consummation to keep the pages turning.You can see Amy Jenkins struggling, in her novel Honeymoon, for ways to keep the plot moving until the heroine finally makes up her mind which of the two great-looking guys who adore her she will choose. In place of social stigma, God and guilt, she has only her own twittering indecision to contend with. It doesn't necessarily make for very memorable fiction.Does this sense that romantic fiction has lost its way mean we are actually losing faith in love? It was once seen as a plausible aim for feminism that women should cease to be blinkered by romantic myths of the perfect man and unending matrimony.Jill Tweedie's funny and trenchant polemic book, In the Name of Love, first printed in 1979, has just been republished. In it she makes all those irreproachable arguments for why women should learn not to hold on to the idea that love is always just around the corner. Her vision of the future has pretty much come to pass: "As the material benefits of the fight for equality make themselves felt, giving women financial independence, better education, more chance to fulfil career ambitions and more control over reproduction, women are rejecting the false role romantic love demands of them." Yes, most women have rejected the old false role, in which a woman was expected to invest her entire life in a single attempt at great love, whatever it cost her.
Instead, both men and women are altogether more clear-sighted.Even Bridget Jones and her ilk, for all that they are scorned for being old-fashioned and moony, are in fact thoroughly modern. They would no more think of giving up their families and friends and jobs and lives for a man than they would contemplate giving up shopping. In our sceptical world it has become much more embarrassing to say that you still believe in one great love and fidelity unto death.Yes, all these cool heads and clear eyes and thick skins make classic romantic fiction a lot harder to come by. But that doesn't mean that good writers never deal with love now - some do, but they do it in their own peculiar and fragile ways, which won't fit into the traditional moulds.And it certainly doesn't mean that we should assume people live their lives any less passionately than before, with any less investment in their own kinds of romance. After all, art is not life, and just as what makes for the most moving art doesn't necessarily make for the happiest lives, so what makes for the best lives doesn't necessarily make it into great art.. The doings of "Albion perfide" have become the stuff of French nightmares again. The French senate was told last week that we probably poisoned Napoleon.
New evidence apparently shows that the great man died not of stomach cancer, as believed for over 100 years, but from arsenic. And the British governor of the prison island of St Helena is supposed to have finished him off, as he lay dying, with a dose of bitter almonds and a mercury rich compound, calomel. The doings of "Albion perfide" have become the stuff of French nightmares again. The French senate was told last week that we probably poisoned Napoleon. New evidence apparently shows that the great man died not of stomach cancer, as believed for over 100 years, but from arsenic.