Literary ecstasy for yer mind!! / Courtship is easy / Verileah 14 years ago

Courtship is easy

So the other day I was channel surfing, trying to find something to zone out on while exercising, and I saw that blond girl from ER, who I’ve always liked, and so I ended up watching part of a movie on Lifetime.

Okay, so now that all but the most dedicated have left the thread () – it was called The Jane Austen Book Club, or something like that, and it seemed to follow the personal dramas of a book club that reads Jane Austen. Coming in on the middle of the movie, I didn’t really follow everything, and I was kind of spacing anyway, but one line stood out to me, with regard to Jane Austen.

“Courtship is easy.”

The follow up, I suppose, would be that “Relationships are hard”. Now I’m sure we could go back and forth on these statements as they apply to the real world, but I put this in the lit forum because I wanted to talk about them within the context of fiction.

It seems to me (and I’d love to be more enlightened on this point) that a majority of stories that involve a pairing up of some kind take the reader up to the wedding/consummation/acknowledgment of a relationship, slap a happily ever after on the end, and call it good. Are stories about committed relationships just not interesting? Not marketable? Or are they just plain hard to do? (Not that these are the only choices – again, enlighten me, please). Why all this emphasis on the ‘mythic power of love’ in folk/fairy tales when really, most stories are dealing with early attraction through 90 percent of the book?

Oddly enough – I don’t think this rant really does Jane Austen’s books justice. Yes, she deals mostly with courtship and the book ends at marriage, pretty much, but she doesn’t slap on a happily ever after like a lot of romantic stories seem to do. And she really puts her female characters especially through a lot of growth and learning about themselves and the man they fall in love with – painfully, at times. But – is even the process of falling in love with someone ‘easy’ to write? Or ‘easier’ than writing a committed relationship? Any good examples out there that deal with people in love, and still make a compelling story?

pharren 14 years ago
Any good examples out there that deal with people in love, and still make a compelling story?


No, because:

all this emphasis on the ‘mythic power of love’ in folk/fairy tales when really, most stories are dealing with early attraction


I don't even want to start ranting on this subject again; it will be like a revival of the duckface thread with its innumerable tangents spiraling off like fractal whorls of irritability and general angry gnome-ness.

So, in short, I think that, no, it would not really be interesting. That sort of thing is for sitcoms. Can you imagine Seinfeld as serious literature? Or even as an entertaining novel? No. The formation of the relationship is the end. A new joint entity is created, and the relationship sort of rides in the background. There's no real goal, so there's nothing to write about. You can only write about other things that happen to people who just happen to be in a relationship. They can be affected by it, but its in the background, like weather.

Unless something revolutionary comes along, like Seinfeld was, I don't see it happening.