I am afraid that I am going to stick to my guns, however much my view of romance is contrary to the long history of romance in world literature, I thinking that, Ovid and Chaucer to the contrary, love is understood until Jane Austen as it was with Dante’s Francesca and Paolo, who resided in the second circle of Hell because they were people separated by a mad passion from social life rather than integrated with one another and into society. Romance is not part of human nature and so there as long as there have been people. To the contrary, it was invented much more recently, even after the American and French revolutions. What Jane Austen invented in the second decade of the Nineteenth Century was that real romance meant that the couple would find their mutual devotion by coming to deeply understand their characters and would also find a way for the lovers to find the social situation that suited them and that the couple could emotionally prosper by being part of social life rather than isolated from it, which is also the idea that marriage counselors will say. This revolution was so powerful that the previous dispensation was suffused in its light even if Twentieth Century critics reinvent the Dante idea of love as the real meaning of love, but such are the avenues and lanes whereby cultural adaptations evolve, ever tracking back on themselves as they claim to be doing something new, as happens when politicians think they are inventing new ways to be free when they are repeating cliches of previous generations.
There are, of course, claims that the ancient world understood what we mean by love, though Dido is not taken with Aeneas because the two are intertwined with their characters, whatever may be the reasons for why people are connected with one another emotionally and, in Aeneas part, to inevitably separate because his fulfillment in society inevitably means to push aside personal emotional allegiance as somehow not worthy of his calling, even if Humphrey Bogart might well consider running off with Ingrid Bergman even if it put the fate of World War II in danger. Love means the opposition of social cohesion and moral proprieties. If you consult one of the most learned of the poets, “The Art of Love” is a misnomer because what he means by “art” is what we would call in the modern world “The Mechanics of Love'' because Ovid is trying to find the reasons for love, what are the circumstances and processes by which it happens, rather than regarding love as mythological or fated or in some other way as causing people to regarding one another as inextricably emotionally entwined even if something very special, it must seem, to have created that connection. Ovid, who was thinking of long term relationships and not just flirtations, uses any number of metaphors whereby he shows the reason for the love connection. He speaks of the charioteer leading his horse and the pilot of a ship, or the person who oversees his fowl, all so as to show how it happened rather than how it had to happen, and so dismisses the mythological world of “Metamorphosis”, which is properly devoted to myth because the stories reveal that there are changes in feeling, which is always mysterious and seems magical, instead to deal with the secular world of “The Art of Love”, where coincidences abound and where people should come to realize that the main mechanism are social customs whereby a person can flirt with a woman without first declaring the person to be committed to another person. Ovid is suggesting that the practices of the social world are themselves a set of mechanisms, an invention that has to be invented and reinvented until it sticks in the Nineteenth Century, and so Ovid is onto an even bigger game than the idea of love.
David Konstan, the classicist, has referred me to Menander and to Catullus to see ancient ideas of love. But neither of them reveal what Jane Austen reveals, but instead reveals the Dante line. Menander’s “The Old Cantankerous One” opens with a stock figure: a man smitten with love at first sight, and therefore forgetful and without good sense, out to get others to help him appeal to the hand of an old hermit’s daughter for marriage. The plot widens so it is about the hospitality all people should offer to one another, and the old man softens because a stranger has rescued him from a well and so agrees to the wedding, offering a bride to a gift as he had previously refused to give a pot so as to carry out a ritual meal. The theme is humane but the bridegroom to be is a ninny who knows nothing about his bride other than that she is innocent and of good family and intriguing, Nothing about the meeting of minds.
It might be that a perverted idea of love begins with what we might call the Christian romance, whereby people become entranced by a figure who died and to whom is obligated total veneration, the reward for which is that this supposedly loving figure may decide not to consign you into permanent torment. Mariolotry means the partial love that is similar to profane love. There is adoration to an idealized figure who provides abundance of emotional satisfaction though, of course, there is no sexual congress or even sexual flirtation between the two, the mortal and Mary, and there is the strict hierarchy whereby the beloved, whether Mary or a courtly figure, has no individuality or character, only the representation of idealization. When Dante meets the Mary-like Beatrice in the first canto of the Paradisio, all those elements are present and what Beatrice offers is a bit of wisdom through a metaphor that is very much similar to pagan or earthly love. She says that the relations of people are natural in that they ascend to a purer level because arrows are flung out to people, which seems to me to be cupid like. Some of those arrows, however, meet with the unintelligent, in which case they have no impact or sting, while others, the ones who are intelligent, which means quick to appreciate rather than merely smart, are elevated by having been stung by the arrow. So erotic love is also part way to understanding spiritual love, and is inferior to it because spiritual love is so deep and transforming.
This spiritual connection is halfway to romance because love is alluring even if the relationship is not consummated. And in Jane Austen, with the exception of Lydia, men and women do not consummate their love until they are married, the courtship having been accomplished because people overcome their impediments or, in some marriages, do not, or lose their connection, as happens with Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. That remains, however, a limited notion of a relationship, the spiritual rather than the actual one found in Austen, and should not be confused with it.
There is another partial love that is accomplished in the same period of Dante. It is Chaucer, who is premodern in that spiritual forces are invisible, immanent in worldly or profane feelings and ideas, while Dante is late medieval in that the spiritual world is embedded in the natural architecture of the world. Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde'' is properly appreciated for the subtlety of the emotions displayed by the two lovers, but remember what Chaucer says at the beginning about his long envoi about the tale he will tell: “,,,pray for those who are in despair in love and will never recover.” Love is like a disease and what befalls from it is a tragedy in that bad things will almost certainly happen. People are cursed rather than blessed by love; it crazes them rather than gives them serenity.
Remember that Shakespeare was of the mind that lovers are separated and tormented by the world. Romeo and Juliet were delusional and self destructive however much people reread it as a modern romance than a tragedy because the poetry is so pretty. Also remember or discover that the bandiage of Beatrice and Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” do not mean that the barbs are ways for the two to come to understand one another but are simple insults remarkable to others only in that they are so uncourteous to one another. Romance is something that people take seriously for the moment, but it is really much ado about nothing, while people do more serious things, like go to war, but maybe even warfare is, like love, a charade, a posturing for grandeur when, after all, all people die. Lightness is a distraction.
Even if you claim that positive love does emerge in the history of literature, it is certainly the case that in literature at least romance is submerged from the English Revolution until the time of what I have rightly identified as Romanticism. During that century and a half, love is just a species of commerce, women like Moll Flanders, finding just the best deal they can to sell themselves into property. Jane Austen, on the other hand, is very clear to say that the couples find themselves by finding the suitability of the pair to one another as well as to their social surroundings. Elizabeth gets Pemberley and she and Darcy deserve one another for each of their infelicities of character, and Fanny Price, in "Mansfield Park", finds a comfortable roost with her cousin when he becomes a clergyman, a calling Austen thinks is a very limited way to be. Despite Lionel Trilling, who said that love was the breaking of social barriers, having “Lolita” in his mind, I think Jane Austen thinks that satisfying love means that a couple finds its place in society, finding ways to affirm one another's social identities.
Sandra Bullock and Jenifer Aniston movies are like that. The charm in the comedies is that the two characters meet for cute circumstances and in the course of their growing relationships they come to understand one another, The same is true of Nora Ephron movies. In “You’ve Got Mail”, whose technology seems antiquated because big box book stores have come and gone, and using e-mail is hardly a departure on things, Tom Hanks come to understand and appreciate one another in spite of the fact that Meg ryan doesn’t know that her correspondent is the Tom Hanks who did his little bookstore in. Even in “Sleepless in Seattle”, Meg Ryan fortuitously hears about Tom Hanks’ true soul on the radio all the way from Baltimore and so chases her to find if he is the one true love, and as she, he and his son leave the Empire State Building when they have finally met, she offers an expression and a posture that says the three have become a family. She is anxious and wary and she is wondering how the Tom Hanks figure will lead us together. At those moments and in a part of our lives, we are all Janeites.