End of romance
Posted by Hil on October 29, 1997 at 21:19:31:
In response to Does the End of Romance Mean the End of the Narritive?, written by Cassia on October 25, 1997 at 16:45:38
] One of the things that annoyed me when reading Possession for the first time were the assumptions: that there is no 'self', that roamntic love is an illusion, that narritive no longer matters because things don't have beginnings, middles and ends.
I actually think Byatt gives us the opposite conclusions. Its true she paints that environment for her modern characters, it is their background:
'Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desireable.'
'They were children of a time and culture which distrusted love, 'in love', romantic love, romance in toto, and which never-the-less in revenge prolifereated sexual language....'
But through Roland and Maud we see them regaining their important sense of individual self,
'They felt that in some way this stately peacefulness of unacknowledged contact gave back their sense of their separate lives inside their separate skins. Speech, the kind of speech they knew, would have undone it.'
and in time, love, which we hope will be the kind of egalitarian relationship where both individual selves can blossom and be recognised.
So we get cohesion and closure, both narratively, and romantically?
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