Scholars have found other times and places to set the origin of romance than at the dawn of civilization. Each of these theories has a certain attraction because each does capture certain aspects of the experience. But none of the alternative theories explain why full blown romance appears by the time I have suggested, which is with Samson and Delilah. The theories for a later time of origin, rather, are add ons in that new features are included in the basic formula for romance, which is dedication, even beyond self-interest, to the emotional needs of the partner, as that is associated with the exchange of sexual favors. Moreover, all the theories have to deal with the problem of how to relate cultural changes to structural changes, which means what actually happens in social life.
Famously, C. S. Lewis, in “The Allegory of Courtly Love” (1936), placed the origins of romance in the medieval practices of courtly romance. A knight would go out on a quest, whether to slay a dragon or to settle a score, at the behest of or in the name of some noble lady with whom the knight might have no actual contact and certainly no hope of sexual union. This was in imitation of the devotion of people to Mary, the Mother of God, as an intercessor who could get things done in heaven and have things done on earth in her name.
The secularization of this vision is that ordinary people will undertake brave efforts to make the world safe for a loved one by providing them with material comforts in exchange for spiritual, psychological and sexual comfort. Putting a woman on a pedestal in this way might be seen as a great revolution in social structure because it meant that men had to act in a gentlemanly way towards women and so no longer take them with brute force but, rather, through sweet talk and persuasion, even if women were better than men at such arts and so could get their way in the negotiations. So love gets extended from the nobility to every person who is moved by popular music to view a courtship as a test of the capacity of a male to be true to his vows to place the wellbeing of the beloved as the central concern of his life.
There is some truth to or residue from this view of romance. Boys still buy flowers for their girlfriends and take the initiative in pursuing their amatory adventures and every couple can see itself as having emerged on the other side of the contentious world of courtship, having triumphed in finding their appropriate soulmate, and so everyone as heroic as a knight in shining armor at least in this one aspect of their lives. But it may well be that the pursuit of women by men is not a construction at all, but the inevitable consequence of the biology of sex, testosterone running after estrogen, men inevitably the pursuer, the one who does the looking, while the woman is inevitably the one who gives the appearance of having been chased as well as being the one looked at. Moreover, the hierarchical relation of a pursued woman waiting for her suitor to triumph may be a reflection of Lewis’s religious understanding in that people, to his mind, are always after a God who stands above them and orders their lives rather than a more egalitarian relationship where men and women contest for one another behind barriers made up of personality requirements, each compelled to find what suits them, that not always happening, but otherwise equal in their ability to come to a meeting of minds and feelings.
A case can be made in favor of Lewis’s theory in that the Catholic Church, at least in its heyday, was able to serve as a transmission line between the elite or aristocratic perception of knight and lady and the rest of the population. People attended churches and heard the messages that were spoken there and also viewed in church the statues and other art that glorified the Madonna, and so the idealization of womanhood had a purchase on the popular imagination. Moreover, the Lewis theory does supply an add on to what was already established as the romantic model in that it accentuated the role of the woman as noble rather than merely manipulative and that the role of the man was to be a more civilized sort of person than when he was simply out to satisfy his own needs or, to put it another way, would trade influence or engage in immoral action so as to gain a woman’s favors, as was apparently the case when David behaved despicably by sending her husband, Uriah, to his death so that he could secure Bathsheba to himself. Less plausible is the idea that a religious image is enough to transform courtship, which is a long ongoing and fundamental feature of social life.
Another theory of romance moves up the date of its origin to the English Eighteenth Century. As Lawrence Stone sees it in his “The Family, Sex and Marriage in England” (1977), romance set in with the construction of the bourgeois family, each family serving notably as a unit of conjugal fidelity, and also, not coincidentally, as an economic enterprise which was interested in increasing its wealth in property and other forms of wealth. A family was on the make, and men and women threw in with one another so as to accomplish their ends. Families lived in larger houses, with more rooms, and so had more privacy and they were more emotionally related to the people in their families than they once had been, the family previously having no greater call on emotions than did friends and relatives.
The point can be made more rigorously. Marriage is a compact in which people agree to share things in common. They agree to share their lives, their beds, their wealth, their emotions. Some of the things that are shared in common get cut off. Work gets separated from family life in that the peasant does not labor anymore on a plot of land to which his wife can bring him his lunch. Rather, he goes off to a factory where he spends his day, only to return to the domestic hearth in the evening. The education of children also gets separated from family life, children going off to school for the day or the semester. What family life seems to retain are caring for people in their illnesses and their infirmities, and one another’s sexual and emotional needs, people jealous of any extramarital affairs, sexual fidelity coming to be the sign of a good marriage.
One can modify the Stone thesis by suggesting it goes a hundred years farther back, to the Seventeenth Century in France. Natalie Zemon Davis’ “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1983) shows how a prosperous farm family tries to make its way to becoming even more prosperous even at the risk of exposing the husband to have been a fraud in that he was a friend of a husband deceased in the wars who hooked up his life with his friend’s spouse by pretending to be the deceased and that she accepted the impersonator so as to have a husband and an economic helpmate.
The Stone theory takes on plausibility because farming in Western Europe as well as in North American settlements were made up of family farms, each one cultivated by a single family living on its own land, rather than through communal farming or corporate farming, as might have developed out of the monastery movement had it taken a mind to move in that direction, or from the strip farming system that had been in use in the Middle Ages, where people cultivated plots that might be distant from one another but assigned by inheritance to that farmer. Something new had been invented by the family farm and people trusted to one another to engage in that enterprise, so who you hooked up with was important, and so something of a choice even if one had been arranged by parents. Today, people ponder whether the person to throw in with has the class or educational or ethnic requisites to make of it a good ongoing and successful relationship.
The add on to romance provided by the Stone theory is that romance gets domesticated. It takes place within the confines of stable domestic institutions and so is open to everyone who comes to decide, as in “Fiddler on the Roof”, that they love one another even if they have not called it that. And so, in this yet another way, everyone becomes a hero of their own romantic adventure even if there had been an arranged marriage, everyone treating their connubial bliss as their own creation. Moreover, while it is difficult to say how cultural matters were either spurred on by structural changes, or visa versa, it is possible to say that culture was working in parallel to social structural changes. Dr. Johnson suggested that when people contracted marriages, they should not only consider what fortune they come into but how well they can get along with their impending spouses because that will take over so much of their lives. The French were particularly adept at noting the complexity of emotional relationships and, of course, Mozart, in his triptych of operas about fidelity, “Don Giovanni”, “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Cosi Fan Tutte”, sorts out the meaning of the new ideal and how it contrasts with the more lenient view of infidelity that had preceded it.
A third theory of romance moves its initiation even closer to the present day, this time to the Romantic Period at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, when truly romantic motives take over because a romance is always to be regarded as a transgression against custom, the two people flaunting custom in order to satisfy feelings which know no social boundaries. So every couple in love is like Young Werther agonizing over his feelings, and like Jane Eyre in somehow coming to conquer a nobleman even though she begins as an orphan, whatever are the vicissitudes of that conquest, the fire the blinds Lord Rochester, fortuitously arranged to have been no fault of her own.
As Lionel Trilling put it in “The Last Lover” in 1958, which was his review of Nabakov’s “Lolita”, all love is transgressive and so strikes out on its own against convention. What is true of Romeo and Juliet is true of all interethnic romance or interracial romance, of May-December romance, of people negotiating different religions or amounts of wealth, the parlor maid impressing the son of the millionaire, or the gardener attracting the lady of the household, as in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. The reader or audience member knows that these are true loves because they go up against the conventions which dictate what romances are socially acceptable. To break the taboo is proof of love.
Well, that might be true in literature, and we might all think that our mates are a bit inappropriate in contrast to what our parents would have thought to be proper mates, but, in fact, most marriages are created through a matching of traits that would be expected in one or another social class or other social structure, so that people of considerable intellectual ability or considerable wealth or considerable religious feeling, will seek out people who share one or more of those traits. It is easy enough to see what people have in common and that doesn’t mean they don’t find their courtship to have been an adventure and their lives self-chosen rather than dictated to them.
If Trilling is right, then romance is mighty scarce, limited to a few heroic people, while the rest of us just manage with the taste of romance provided by date movies that make our love lives seem more intriguing than they really are. In that case, culture does not lead social structure, which is C. S. Lewis’s theory, or culture parallel social structure, which is Stone’s theory. Rather, culture provides an aspiration and a substitute for what is not happening in the social structure. How is that possible, that there should be such a disparity between culture and social structure, one denying what the other propounds? Maybe, one could argue, that is always the case, that culture is always subversive of the social structure, undercutting, given its wonts, either capitalism, nationalism, or usual family relationships, and Trilling, a student of Modernism as well as Victorian literature, did indeed see culture in that light, as almost always subversive of the way life was actually lived. but that would still not resolve how it is that the two come to terms with one another, co-existing in the same ethnic group or nation or civilization.
There is a way of saving Trilling’s theory that romance is always transgressive by showing that there are significant occasions when the cultural ideal is reflective of what people are actually doing in their lives. That happened as part of the immigrant experience in America. Young people brought up in families where customs of arranged marriages lingered on from the old country found themselves in a new world where courtship was voluntary, where parents didn’t even know about it until the relationship was well advanced, and so each of these young couples were identifying their new life in America as what are the lives of Americans, their sense of the freedom that comes with American life, as happening when they engaged in romantic relationships, Frank Sinatra and any number of torch singers confirming culturally that this is the way life operated: a sudden seizure of delight followed, possibly, by heartbreak before a reconciliation that would lead to unending joy. Bobby soxers were social revolutionaries without knowing it, knowing instead only that they were following their own hearts, even as, once they settled down, the bobby soxers were as conventional in their private lives and their public ambitions as anyone else.
That perception that culture and social structure get unified over romance can be extended beyond immigrant girls finding their own boyfriends to all of those girls from whatever part of the country they came from who identified the new ideal of romance with their becoming modern, part of the cosmopolitan culture that was putting village life behind them everywhere, that fearlessness in the face of conventions that might draw them back to an older way of life part of the motivation and substance for women coming to think of themselves as independent actors who could do what they wanted with their lives. The romantic revolution in America preceded the sexual revolution and the movement of women into the ranks of the professions, and was contemporary with the fight for the women's vote. Sometimes politics is just the most visible and late effect of a deep churning of consciousness.