Modernist romance, love and writing: The heroine who knows her worth

There's a reason I was completely absorbed with the Santangelo saga when I was fifteen years old. (See for example Chances by Jackie Collins). Lucky Santangelo was (and still is) the ultimate heroine; she had class, style, sophistication and many male admirers. She didn't teeter in her heels, she strode with purpose, she played business roulette and won because she had balls. She knew what she wanted, and most of all, she knew how to get it. I love heroines who are fearless in the face of death, and can expertly turn the tables on those who attempt to manipulate her. But does this mean in the good old-fashioned romance-kind-of-way the girl will always get the guy?

Oh no. Not in my romantic reading or in my writing. I don't want to see 'boy meets girl, end up together'. Crafting the story word by word, letting the lovers meet, fall in love, yet keep their own independent lives is modernist chic. If the hero of this story has a use for the heroine for a while, she can play the game with him, and maybe even better. Of course, when he realises he truly does love her and tries to stop playing the games he created, the dialogue would go something like this:

Him: 'I'm sorry I broke your heart.' 

Her: 'Don't fret it honey, you were never really worthy of it in the first place.'

And that's what Lucky would have said too. 

Nightmare, Love and Gothic: Sometimes your knight in shining armour is just a retard

The Gothic sub-genre is normally deemed to be the opposite of the realist;  it's a nightmarish vision of reality. Gothic conventions include an imposing castle, creaking doors and subterranean passages, monstrous beings who wish to kidnap the maiden and lock her away. The Gothic fiction novel is merely an extension of the Romantic era story where the knight always rescues the fair maiden from the clutches of evil.

In the Gothic novel, however, the 'knight' may just be a little slow and the heroine may have to wait a while for her knight to appear, or she may decide to roll up her shirt sleeves, take charge and go to the hero's rescue. See for instance the character, Jonathan Harker in Dracula.

What is nightmarish in the Gothic is reflected in the subconscious or the unconscious mind, and usually resonates with us deeply. We all want to avoid facing our fears, our inner demons, the uncanny and unexplained because really all we want is familiarity around us - the idiom 'better the devil you know' springs to mind. In any case, the happy ever after may or may not happen. Sometimes, the knight may turn out to be a retard, whereupon, the maiden, sensing her knight's abandonment sets out to find a different knight in another story altogether.

Fiction, love and realism.

Most of my study of literature has been about constructing a sense of reality from setting, buildings and objects around a person, of forming, making and breaking relationships, showing family ties, and bringing in from society everything that seems plausible.

Only sometimes, real life doesn't take on the form of realism, even though the content may be similar. Who would read a Mills and Boon if the hero and heroine didn't end up together. Expectations are everything in fiction, and it has less to do with life as we know it than we think.