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The story of love, as a noun, reduces down in its essence to a verb. In its most condensed form the story is a command, a verbal imperative: "Love!" Connect, outside yourself, in a positive and fruitful way.
Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture, Catherine Roach
Love in all its forms can be a trap. Any sane person knows that. Any newborn baby knows it: The mother or care- giver will not always be there, exactly when needed, to satisfy all your de- sires for love and warmth and food and security and pleasure. The one you love will inevitably fail you to some degree. And you’ll screw it up yourself by being unable to intuit or articulate your own needs, because who truly knows their own heart, let alone the heart of someone else? It’s the first Noble Truth of Buddhism: All is suffering or dissatisfaction, imperfectly fulfilled desire. Even on a good day, in a good life, the underlying truth is that love and its goodness are not perfect and unchanging but unstable. Even if the one you love and lust after does prove worthy, one day that person could still dump you and, if not, that person will ultimately die. So really it’s heartbreak ever after. Life and love are a time bomb waiting to blow up in your face. Even if you are happily in love.
Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture, Catherine Roach
Mobility Assessment Tool May Help Predict Early Postoperative Outcomes for Older Adults
Mobility Assessment Tool May Help Predict Early Postoperative Outcomes for Older Adults
A quick, reliable and cost-effective mobility assessment tool may help to identify elderly patients at risk for adverse post-surgery outcomes, according to Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centerresearchers.
In their study of 197 men and woman over age 69 who underwent elective, non-cardiac, inpatient surgery at Wake Forest Baptist over a 20-month period, the researchersfound that the participants’…
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Reading DOES cause harm. And so it should. Books should unsettle us.
Catherine Roach: Happily Ever After
Currently reading: Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture by Catherine Roach
The controversy around romance novels is partly explained by the fact that these are books about women wanting and getting great sex from partners who know how to deliver. This is an anxiety-provoking message indeed for a culture more comfortable with male arousal and satisfaction than its female counterparts.
Catherine Roach: Happily Ever After
Notes on Happily Ever After
(Reading Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture by Catherine Roach)
Roach talks about romance as the cultural imperative for women, the be-all end-all (she also argues the point, mind you, she’s not going Second Wave on it), and it is giving me a thought.
It sort of comes back to people who say Pride and Prejudice is about getting married. Which it is not, not really. And by extension, I’d say in lots of romances that’s not the end goal for the heroines (unless there’s a trope in use, or they want something other than the hero and the marriage provides it, see marriage of convenience).
The thing is, I would call a romance where the whole story concentrates on the heroine wanting to get married and where the remains unchanged a very bad one. To me at least, it’s about the heroine’s journey and self-discovery and finding out who she is and accepting herself. Yeah, she has a relationship with the hero and she wants her and they get a HEA or at least a HFN, but it seems... accidental, you know? Because it wouldn’t happen if the heroine (and hero) didn’t overcome the external and internal barriers, and that can’t happen without some sort of personal growth and reflection. My absolute favourite romances are where the heroine grows into herself with some support from the hero – the less he has to help out the better, but he’s there if she needs a hand occasionally – and he loves her for the growth she’s getting through and the potential she has in her. Do you know what I mean? And she’s not going to end up with him just because she needs someone to hold her hand and walk her through life. She falls for him because he, too, does some growing (and this is a thing I think is vital, see Darcy) and fully supports her growth and who she is.
Elizabeth Bennet would have married Mr Collins if she just wanted to get married. If she just wanted a hot rich guy, she would have married Darcy when he first proposed. But she wants respect, and she wants affectionate companionship, and she needed to do some self-realising and growing (as, again, did he) before they could be well matched and actually enter into a strong, loving, equal marriage that the readers can have faith in.
Idealizations can mask and even encourage aggression; conscious idealization easily conceals unconscious devaluation. Thus, in public discourse the role of mother is not only valued but also defamed. Notions about mothering in the cultural imagination are in fact deeply divided: they both praise and punish women for the mothering they do. These notions accord mothers high status while relegating them to narrow and compulsory roles.
Catherine Roach, Mother/Nature: Popular Culture and Environmental Ethics (2003)
