ESC: English Studies in Canada

R O M A N C E AND THE N O VE L J U L IE T M C M A S T E R University of Alberta I shall begin with a little anthology that might be called “Novelists on Romance.” The extracts are familiar enough individually, no doubt, but when collected they make an interesting chorus.1 First Smollett, from the preface to Roderick Random: “Romance, no doubt, owes its origin to ignorance, vanity, and superstition. .. . Cervantes, by an inimitable piece of ridicule, reformed the taste of mankind, represent­ ing chivalry in the right point of view, and converting romance to purposes far more useful and entertaining, by making it assume the sock, and point out the follies of ordinary life.”2 Then Fielding, in Tom Jones: “Truth distinguishes our Writings from those idle Romances which are filled with Monsters, the Productions, not of Nature, but of distempered Brains.”3 And now Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey, speaking of her heroine’s hour of enlightenment: “The visions of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened. Henry’s address, short as it had been, had .. . thor­ oughly opened her eyes to the extravagance of her late fancies. . . . Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for.” 4 Charlotte Bronte has been generally assumed to have a special skill in combining a realistic tale of a plain little governess with the traditional motifs of romance and fairytale. Jane Eyre, as we know, is a version of “Cinderella,” a story of a put-upon younger child who is bullied by her ugly siblings and wicked mother surrogate, and who finally marries her prince. It is also “Bluebeard,” about a man who keeps a relic of a former wife in a secret chamber of his mansion. Mr. Rochester’s emphasized ugliness, and his ability to recall his love from afar by supernatural means, are elements from “Beauty and the Beast.” The roundup of analogies is not complete without “Rapunzel,” in which the witch causes the prince to fall from a tall building and become blind, until his reunion with Rapunzel restores his sight — j'ust what happens to Mr. Rochester. All this unashamed borrowing would lead English Studies in Canada, ix, 4, December 1983 one to expect that Charlotte Bronte would not be so harsh on romance as her colleagues. But she too joins the chorus.5 At the beginning of her next novel, Shirley, she is severe on the reader with expectations of romance: “ If you think . . . that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something as unromantic as Monday morning.”6 The refrain continues: Thackeray emphasizes his choice of a stockbroker’s family as his subject-matter, “who are taking walks, or luncheon, or dinner, or talking, and making love as people do in common life, and without a single passionate and wonderful incident to mark the progress of their loves.” 7 Trollope’s first successful novel, like Don Quixote and Northanger Abbey, is mock-heroic, making fun of the “heroes,” John “Bold” and the Archdeacon, who conduct their storm in a teacup as though they were epic warriors: “As the indomitable cock preparing for the combat sharpens his spurs, shakes his feathers, and erects his comb, so did the archdeacon ar­ range his weapons for the coming war.” 8George Eliot announces her artistic principles in Adam Bede, and like all the other novelists insists that she will not delineate saints and monsters, but real human beings and creatures such as we find in life: “Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin — the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake...