The Value of Romance Novels in Uncertain Times

I am a recovering literary snob.

I spent a lot of time being absolutely obnoxious about “the canon” and classic literature. And I will still defend all those books your English teachers made you read in school, maybe because I am now an English teacher making the next generation read those books. The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird are two of my favorite books of all time, and the incredible value of the classics is that you are almost guaranteed that if you dive deeper, you’ll discover treasures, symbols, themes, you didn’t notice on just a surface read.

But there’s also a problem with just sticking to those books. You miss — for a long time, I missed — a lot of diversity. That’s a major one, and I am all for the recent push to include more diverse literature in the idea of what is “great” literature. What we teach, what we pass on, what we as a society deem inherently “worthy” needs to broaden and deepen and change as our cultural consciousness develops. What we consider to be the goal of art has to expand and grow.

So that leads me to romance novels.

I blew through the eight sibling-centered Bridgerton books in two weeks, and I have been reflecting on what it was about those books that so caught my attention, about why I have continued to obsess. I just reread part of “The Viscount Who Loved Me,” Book 2 in the series (yes, it was a sex scene), and was instantly caught up again in every feeling and excitement and struggle. And I keep coming back to the question of why, at this moment, I fell in love, once more, with the romance genre.

I think it comes down to the world we’re in right now, the uncertainty that laces through every day. On a macro level, a pandemic, the instability and antagonism in politics, questions about the future of the planet and humanity, all make for a not-so-stable existence. On a micro, personal level, when I picked up the books, I had recently turned twenty-three, it was looking like I was going to have to spend another year in a job that was not so slowly and very surely degrading my mental health, and I was going to have to live putting off my ultimate life goals for yet another year.

So I picked up “The Duke and I” because a friend recommended it. I bought all eight at once, actually, because I am the type of person who gets a wild idea and won’t let it go until it’s completed. And I devoured the books.

The first one I certainly have some problems with (I talk about it a lot in “It’s Time to Get Real About Bridgerton” and “Call a Rape a Rape”), but it was enjoyable enough. Then I hit the second. I read it, and the third one, and part of the fourth, in a day. I could not put them down.

Reading them all so close together, I felt the repetitiveness keenly. A rakish, attractive man falls for an unassuming girl that he sees the beauty in when others do not. Repeated eight times with more or less variation (“When He Was Wicked,” the one that most strongly breaks this system while still operating in the predictable confines, is absolutely my favorite). But the reality was, when I cracked open the book, it was never some secret about what was going to happen. Even in Gregory’s book, when he spends most of the story in love with someone else, it’s no secret who he is going to end up with. She’s the other point-of-view, so it’s obvious they are going to end up together.

It’s how we get there that matters.

Twists and surprises in stories are overrated in modern society. It is, I believe, the single biggest issue with the end of Game of Thrones. They were so desperate to surprise us that they forgot the central point of why we love fiction: story structure.

There is a method to the madness of story. It follows plot structure and has set ups and pay offs. If you can figure out how the story should end in the first fifty pages, that is often a good thing. The one exception would be stories that are entirely built on the premise of a twist, things like The Sixth Sense or the first season of The Good Place, but both of those were meticulously designed so that would work. There are clues you can go back into and see that was the point all along. And those are wonderful.

But when that isn’t the goal, it doesn’t need to be tacked on just to make it interesting. Surprise is overrated, especially when the other points of the story are much stronger, such as character or theme. Predictability is not necessarily a vice, especially if the story has something new to say within that storyline.

In such uncertain times, many of us go back to things that are familiar. We have “comfort shows” that we watch because we know what will happen. The anxiety is taken out; maybe we can even quote every line.

When I read Bridgerton, it felt like a comfort series I didn’t yet know. As I was reading, I had the comfort of knowing the characters would get together in the end, of knowing the ending would be satisfying because the set up is a promise of these two people falling in love. I got the excitement of wondering how it would happen without the stress of being utterly in the dark.

Okay, I’m going to talk some educational psychology here, but stick with me (sorry, teacher habits die hard). There’s this guy Vygotsky who talks about something called the “Zone of Proximal Development.” Basically it’s like a big bullseye where the center is stuff you already know and are familiar with, your deep comfort zone. The next ring is the stuff that stretches you a little. Maybe it’s related to your previous knowledge, or it fits within an existing skillset, but you have room to grow. On the outside is the stuff that’s too out there, too strange or foreign based on your prior knowledge.

If you stay in the very center, you never learn, but if you go to the outside too fast, you also never learn. The point is to figure out how much you can push yourself, or your students, where it stretches you but doesn’t induce panic. I felt this way about the Bridgerton books, that it didn’t push out so far to cause me anxiety, but wasn’t just me watching “The Office” for the fortieth time.

It’s safe in the center circle. When I am at my most stressed, all I can do is consume old media because my brain panics at almost anything that isn’t completely familiar, The Bridgerton books helped jar me out of a depression where I didn’t want to consume anything new, where my creativity was gone. Because of these books, I was excited again, inspired again, because it was just the right amount of new.

I think the goal of romance novels is different than other books. I’m reminded, oddly, of a quote from The West Wing in the episode The U.S. Poet Laureate. Tabitha Fortes, played by Laura Dern, says, “ An artist's job to captivate you for however long we've asked for your attention. If we stumble into truth, we got lucky.”

I was enamored with these books; I still am. I think there is some truth in them, maybe even a lot of truth. There’s truth in why I read them, in why they entranced me. There’s truth in the small, human concerns about relationships. There’s truth in the simple desire to be entertained, to enjoy yourself and be invested in characters, to laugh and cry with them, because feeling, and loving, is the most human thing we can do.