(this post title sounds more formal than this post actually is. I’m just thinking out loud.)
In The Natural History of the Romance Novel) (pp. 30-39).Pamela Regis identifies 8 essential elements of the romance novel. One of them is the “point of ritual death”, the moment when love seems doomed, when the barrier seems insurmountable, and when all hope is nearly lost for an HEA (the other 7 elements are: society defined, the meeting, the barrier, the attraction, the declaration, the point of ritual death, the recognition, the betrothal.)
Regis tells us that Northrop Frye, (see Eric Selinger’s 2006 reflections on how helpful Frye was to him in teaching romance) coined the term “point of ritual death” in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957). In The Secular Scripture: A study of the structure of romance (1976), Frye writes:
One of the most fundamental human realizations is that the passing from death to rebirth is impossible for the same individual; hence the theme of substitution for death runs all through literature, religion, and ritual. Redemption is one form of substitution, though one more satisfying to theology than to romance (p. 89)
Regis doesn’t pursue the spiritual parallels at all, which is interesting, since they seem so central to Frye’s use of the phrase. There’s more work to be done there, and someone should do it.
In this post, though, I wanted to talk a little bit about one things that attracts me to romance, namely the way it deals with moral repair, and how it’s connected in many cases to ritual death and recognition.
Moral repair is a bit of a newfangled term in ethical theory, associated with late twentieth century feminist approaches to ethics, and especially the work of Margaret Urban Walker, whose book on the topic was recently published. In modern moral philosophy (by which I mean anything after Descartes), there has tended to be a lot of focus on moral judgment and action. A lot of emphasis on how we know what the right thing is to do, and should motivate us to do it.
Feminist moral philosophy tends to be a moral naturalized moral philosophy, but which I mean many things, but paramount for this discussion is a recognition of the lived experience, or phenomenology of moral life. In contrast, traditional moral philosophy tends to be ideal moral philosophy, in the sense that it thinks of morality as more of an abstract system, and attempts to decipher what the ideal moral agent would do in various hypothetical cases. Unsurprisingly, given feminist philosophy’s insistence that the lived experience of women has been neglected and misrepresented in traditional philosophy, feminists tend to think about how real moral agents actually work, and the kinds of real moral problems they actually face.
One result of this difference in emphasis is the recognition that we often make the wrong choices, and that there is moral fallout: pain, anger, broken relationships, injustice, injury or death. “Moral repair” is the name for the kind of work we do after the moral wrong has been done. We have to go on, although you would never know that reading most traditional moral philosophy, which always takes the point of view of the moral agent at the moment of choice among a predetermined slate of possible actions and ends the discussion at the moment of decision.
Moral repair includes a cluster of concepts, concerns, attitudes, and actions that have been neglected in philosophical discourse about morality. Acceptance, forgetting, censure, public disavowal, remorse, repentance, apology, penance, pardoning, excuse, forgiveness, reparation, hostility. Moral repair is not just a response to a wrong: it is a response to a wrong as a wrong. If you accidentally step on my foot on the dance floor, I may yell “ouch”, but if you say “sorry” and I see it is a mistake, I move on. I have responded to your action, but not as a moral wrong. On the other hand, if you stamp on my toe at a political rally to stop me from speaking out, that’s a moral wrong, and I will respond to it as a moral wrong. I’ll say “ouch”, for sure, but I will follow up in other ways, too.
Some of our attitudes and responses to wrongdoing make the situation worse. Those kinds of responses are often not reparative. Figuring out how to repair relations, or whether they can or should be repaired — whether it is Tiger Woods’ marriage or race relations in South Africa after the fall of apartheid — has to be a collaborative process, to some extent, and cannot be decided in advance. Different situations call for different responses.
There are many kind of ritual death in the romance novel. It may be the result of an external problem (the hero has been kidnapped, or the heroine is near death), or it may be an internal conflict that doesn’t have a moral focus (the hero has an alcohol problem, the heroine’s past romantic failures lead her to doubt the hero’s love).
But sometimes, the estrangement between hero and heroine happens because of moral wrong doing, one or both has hurt the other in a way that is blameworthy in a moral sense. Sherry Thomas is someone who excels at writing this kind of book, and it is one of the reasons I am so attracted to her writing. In Private Arrangements, a major moral wrong committed by the heroine is responded to by the hero in s way that deepens the moral rift, and the rippling rifts reverberate throughout the book (hey, I can haz alliteration!). In Not Quote a Husband, it’s the hero’s infidelity that features as the moral wrong the couple has to repair, although it turns out to be more complicated than that, because the heroine’s response to the infidelity was not the kind that could facilitate any moral repair, whether that meant moving on or reconciling. So she compounded the problem,.
Another writer whose books attract me is Susan Elizabeth Phillips. When I think of Jane Darlington tricking Cal Bonner into getting her pregnant in Nobody’s Baby But Mine, or Molly sexually assaulting Kevin in This Heart of Mine, or Sugar Beth Carey’s reconciliation with Colin in Ain’t She Sweet, I can see SEP excelling at telling this kind of story.
Paranormal romance has its share of ritual deaths that involve moral rupture: Colin and Savi in Meljean Brook’s Demon Moon, Irena and Alejandro in Brook’s Demon Forged, Clay and Elena in Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten, etc.
I need to do some more thinking, and ask you what you think, about connecting ritual death to moral rifts. It seems that the catalyzing moral wrong and thus the moment of ritual death in novels like Private Arrangements and Bitten took place before the action of the novel proper. Is that even possible? does the point of ritual death have to occur late in the novel? Here’s where my lack of training in literature serves me ill.
We talk a lot about “the grovel”, and sure enough, these books have some of that. But “the grovel” doesn’t begin to get at the complexity of what is going on, morally, in books like those I have named. “The grovel” brings to my mind something superficial, chocolates and roses, profuse apologies, one sided actions designed to achieve the end of reconciliation. I think the grovel has its role, but it’s either the last step or the first – not the journey.What happens in good romances in which the conflict is around moral wrongs, is the achieving of new moral insight and sensitivity, deep character change, a complex process of reconciliation that is just an integral to these union as the good times. It makes perfect sense to me that this would be the case, because romance novels are about love, and one of the most loving things we can do for someone is to forgive them, or to do what it takes to be forgiven.
I think there is work to be done connecting this aspect of some romance novels to the goals of feminist ethical theory, especially as related to the neglected but crucial topic of moral repair. And I’m trying to do a little bit of it right now.
I think the rest of us are in much the same position, with the exception of Pamela Regis, since no-one else has done much work on romance and the idea of “ritual death.”
It seems to me as though when you bring together ritual death, the grovel, and moral repair, you end up with parallels to sin, contrition, confession, penance (“satisfaction”), and absolution.
How about orgasm/sex? It seems to me it’s one of key elements–if not the core–of ‘moral repair’, rightly or not. (That’s unless I misunderstood all this.)
[I need to apologize in advance: I have just enough philosophical theory in my distant past to be dangerously ignorant, and not nearly enough to be approximately smart. But I'm going to stumble around nonetheless.]
In real life (more than in romances), infidelity is a grievous moral wrong in a romantic relationship. Dr. Phil (hey, he occasionally says useful stuff) had counseled unfaithful husbands that they will not repair the rift with their wives until they can actually demonstrate that they (the husbands) “get it.” I take that to mean not merely expressing sympathy (our feelings of sadness and regret toward a victim) but showing true empathy: our ability to show that we identify another person as having the same moral significance as ourselves.
Thus, I could see one act of “moral repair” as the demonstration of empathy, i.e., showing the other party that they register on the wrongdoer’s moral map. It may be too little too late — why was the wronged wife *not* on the cheating husband’s moral map to begin with? — but if it can actually be accomplished (and not merely faked), it can be significant.
That’s what the Golden Rule is about, isn’t it? I personally am suspicious of the Golden Rule because it seems rather narcissistic. I will do under others what *I* want for myself. So, what, I’ll give other people the diamond earrings I want myself? No, of course not. What the Golden Rule should mean is “I will recognize others as having the same moral weight as I myself have,” or “others are on my moral map and so I will treat them accordingly.” And you don’t sleep around on a wife whom you can see is the same as you qua moral actor. (Unless the whole this is self-sabotage, but that’s back to being narcissistic and putting your own need to self-destruct ahead of anyone else’s need to have you keep your shit together.)
In romance novels, some couples have a problem with communication of preferences and wishes. In “The Beast of Belleterre,” Mary Jo Putney’s Beauty & the Beast novella, the hero sends the heroine away because he believes it is the kindest thing to do for her. She goes because she believes it is right to obey him, not because of adherence to marital vows but because she wants to give him what he says he wants. Putney uses imagery (which could be magical in origin, or merely Jungian dream analysis) to slap the heroine awake and get her to see that the hero had not put his interests first and so her obedience is actually the worst thing she could do.
I think in that instance (which I picked because there’s no external actor or deus ex machina in the denouement), the heroine actually has to find herself on her own moral map. She needs to see that she counts enough that perhaps she actually *is* important to the hero’s happiness. There, the moral wrong was collusive: both the hero and the heroine have subverted their own individual moral standing and “sacrificed” their own happiness believing it to be in the other’s best interest. Silly buggers.
So moral wrongs can be committed by an actor who is selfish (childlike, it seems to me), “wants what he wants when he wants it,” and who conveniently demotes his partner or spouse from equal moral weight to some lesser status, one that can be discounted in the moral analysis — if there even is one! — before action. But I think they can also be committed through moral self-denigration (the martyr complex) that falsely views the beloved as more morally worthy than the self.
What really gums up the works is that so many of us in real life, and so many characters in romance fiction, have problems seeing the big picture accurately. We’re inundated with internal and external messages that can over-emphasize our moral deservedness or deflate our moral profile. If we believe that we’re really so morally worthy that no one else shows up on our moral map, that’s a form of moral conceit that perhaps society, our parents, whomever encouraged. If we can’t find ourselves on the moral map because people tell us we don’t count (or we internalized earlier messages to that effect), then we can’t or don’t assert our moral claims adequately.
A morally selfish person needs to recognize the moral weight of others, redraw the moral map and then act accordingly to redress moral wrongs. A moral self-denier also needs to redraw the moral map to include him or herself, and then demand moral repair accordingly. I think it’s easy to see more men being morally selfish (“kings of the universe” and all that crap) and women as moral self-deniers (“oh I just couldn’t; that would be pushy”) and society has a lot to do with that. (This is where feminist theory is helpful; am I getting that right finally?)
But I happen to know that generosity can mask moral wrongs (e.g., the gift that puts the recipient at a disadvantage) and thus be selfish, and sometimes letting another have more prominence on a moral map can be a very healthy thing to do.
I have a Sandra Boynton mug with a cartoon cow caught on a sickle moon; the caption reads: “Nothing is ever simple.” I think the other side should read: “But try anyway.”
And back to read slowly in just a second, but another word that I have heard repeatedly during the Olympic coverage: redemption. Athletes looking for/seeking/receiving redemption. Which seems so hard to understand since they operate on such a rarified scale where everything they do is well, Olympian!
I’m a former Catholic myself and I often think fondly of a Saturday night sinner/Sunday church goer time with the bridge of confession
“I personally am suspicious of the Golden Rule because it seems rather narcissistic.”
Yes, and it’s a complete perversion of what Jesus actually taught, which is “Love one another, as I have loved you.” Completely different mindset and motive from ‘Do as you would be done by’.
But speaking of narcissism, I can only talk about this from the personal perspective of my own writing (and this ties back to the post on DA recently about irredeemable traits.) I’ve twice had characters who commit what many would consider the ultimate crime – murder – and their path to redemption and healing involves them dealing with the impact of their crime both on the victims and *on themselves*. It’s not a ‘ritual death’ in the way you’ve described it, Jessica, but the end result is a ‘rebirth’. Only at that point, new, healed and redeemed, can they accept and receive the love they have been offered, even though that love is offered before they redeem themselves.
The path to awareness, understanding, acceptance of their own flaws and forgiveness of themselves, if not from their victims, provided for me, as a storyteller, a powerful and rewarding framework for the relationship and other themes, and for me, it’s much more satisfying when the couple in love truly earn, not just the happy ending, but the happy ever after. A truly happy future has to have very solid foundations and one built on a proper moral basis seems to be to be the strongest of all.
Are Regis’ essential elements listed in plot order? I’m interested in your question about whether the moment of “ritual death” can come late in the novel. Since I haven’t read Regis or Frye, I’m not sure how useful my comments are, but. . .
In the Frye quote you included, he suggests “redemption is one form of substitution” (I think he means redemption is a kind of rebirth–but your old self has to “die” first). If that’s the case, I wonder whether Regis has missed something by not pursuing the spiritual implications. I’d see the point of “ritual death” as not the point when the moral wrong is done, but the point where it is recognized, where the person realizes they need to change and begin the work of moral repair.
So, to take the example of Nobody’s Baby But Mine, since that’s the one on your list I’ve read:
I’d see the “ritual death” not as the moment where Jane tricks Cal into impregnating her, but as the moment where she recognizes him as a real person that she’s harmed (and here I’m totally in agreement with Magdalen and her point about recognizing another as an equivalent moral actor, a fellow subject, not an object). But the novel’s point of “ritual death” in Regis’s sense would seem to be the moment near the end when Jane finds out that Cal plotted revenge (especially if Regis’s elements are meant to come in order). Of course, that could be the moment when he recognizes the moral wrong he’s done–but does he, right away? I don’t think so.
Or Pride and Prejudice: I’d say Darcy’s “ritual death” is when Elizabeth says his behavior was ungentlemanly (the first proposal) and shatters his image of himself; from there he begins the work of repair (and I’d say he has done a moral wrong by seeing her as unworthy). When she reads his letter, she starts the same process. But the “Regis ritual death” moment would seem to be, again, near the end, when Lydia elopes and Elizabeth thinks “he’ll never marry me now.”
Perhaps the fact that there’s a central couple complicates all this–there may be more than one moral wrong to repair. But I think because she cuts the idea of ritual death off from Frye’s notion of sin and redemption (if I got your summary right), Regis might be less useful to you than Frye in the kind of reading you’re doing.
No, Regis doesn’t think the elements have to come in any specific order. You can read part of what she has to say here, on page 30. She also says that “A single element can also occur more than once.”
I think the reason that Regis didn’t go into the moral aspect of the elements more deeply is that she was working very hard to establish that these elements actually existed in the modern romance genre, and had also existed in precursors of the genre. Her book’s called A Natural History of the Romance Novel and I think that implies that it’s the literary equivalent of a work of Linnaean taxonomy.
@Maili:
This is so far afield of what I was thinking about, that I will have to ponder it. Off the cuff, is having sex with someone you morally wronged, or were morally wronged by, a part, in some cases, of moral repair of the relationship? Hell yes. This is why I got into the ethics game in the first place! (kidding!)
@Magdalen: I agree with you that empathy can be one attitude that is necessary in moral repair. After all, it is hard to repsond properly if you don;t have any concept of what the other person is feeling.
I also agree with your interpretation of the golden rule, and with its possible misuse. Actually, my dissertation director wrote a book arguing that empathy was just the ticket to avoid elf-serving interpretations of the golden rule (not the golden rule, precisely, but Kantian ethics).
I agree with everything you say. And your mug pretty much sums up my attitude to ethics in theory and practice.
@Janet W: I never thought of that before, but you are right: “Redemption” language is very common in narratives about athletes. And thank you for correcting my misspelling of Northrup … er Northrop!
@Ann Somerville: You’ve encapsulated why I don’t think there is any irredeemable trait or act.
@Liz:
This is a salutary emendation to my argument. Thank you!
I think there often is, and that’s another way in which the genre is realistic.
I guess it is a key question whether the ritual death is perceived by the reader or the characters (obviously the moment of insurmountable trouble is experienced by both the reader and at least one character, but I wonder if the reader/character difference needs to be taken in to account).
@Laura Vivanco: Thanks for that. It helps my thesis a lot to know that ritual death can recur.
I hope I am not coming off as a critic of Regis in this post! Far from it. As you say, she had a specific and very important goal in the book, and met it. It’s for others who come later to build on her framework, as I am trying to do a bit here.
I love best the books that do this well, that show the characters acting badly toward each other and then show them having to deal with that and grow from it, individually AND as a couple.
My favorite book that does this is Matthew Haldeman-Time’s Off the Record. One character has a Big Secret and is Hollywood “royalty.” The other character is a journalist who figures out Big Secret and it gets out. Both characters have to deal with the wrong and then learn from it, like I said, individually and together. It’s brilliantly done.
I also just read a book in which one character wronged a character in the past and spent most of the story trying to apologize. But the apology was very self-serving. He wanted his apology accepted and then the relationship to start over, and he didn’t accept that the other character had “accepted” his apology until the second character agreed to a resumption of the relationship. Which seemed so intensely selfish to me that I couldn’t get past it. “Oh, I’m so so sorry but I’ll only accept that you’ve forgiven me if we can start over and if you don’t want to, I’ll hound you to ‘accept’ my apology in the way *I* want it ‘accepted’ b/c otherwise ur doin it wrong, b/c it’s my place to say whether you’ve forgiven me.” Ah, no, not so much.
[First, double ditto on Magdalene's apology (which was unnecessary on her part and is doubly necessary on mine.) ]
I know I’ve pitched this book before but this discussion brought back to mind Megan Chance’s A Candle in the Dark. (Jessica, It is this book I’d be happy to lend you to read since its out of print.)
It is a story of two morally flawed characters. Their flaws are moral by the standards of 1850 rather than 2010 (he’s a drunk and she’s a prostitute.) Today, of course, we see these not as moral flaws but rather the result of their experiences of abuse and life’s hard knocks. One of the things I like about this book is that the characters do not; each sees not only his/her own actions but the other’s as moral flaws. They don’t forgive so much as they believe they are not in a position to judge. They also don’t blame – they don’t blame their own abusers and they don’t urge self-forgiveness on each other because of an abusive past. They live in their own moral time.
But each also takes advantage of the other’s weakness in an attempt to solve his or her own situational dilemma – a moral failing then and today. They start out as strangers. Their journey towards love is a journey that is intertwined with each’s separate journey towards recognizing his/her self-centeredness and selfishness. In other words, they don’t overcome their moral flaws because they fall in love, they fall in love because they’ve overcome their moral flaws. It is because they achieve their new moral insight and sensitivity that they can stop judging and using each other and start loving instead.
It seems to me that this is unusual in a romance. More commonly, it is only because of love that a character comes to see the beloved as an equivalent moral character and develops a new moral sensitivity. And, as much as I enjoy romance, I always struggle with this. I want the characters to stand on their own two feet, morally speaking. I like to see the characters become capable of love because they’ve undergone a character change. It’s why I enjoyed Linda Howard’s Death Angel. Both characters have to change their behaviour without any hope of love from the other, without even much awareness of being in love.
What I wonder about is how much this diminishes the romance. In both A Candle in the Dark and Death Angel, it takes the forgiving actions of a near or truly angelic third party to open the eyes of the hero and heroine to their moral failings. Is it integral to a romance that it is because hero or heroine sees that he/she has inflicted pain on the beloved that the ritual death occurs and the moral repair begins? I have to admit that the romance was a long time coming in A Candle in the Dark and Death Angel because the character changes had to take place first.
Jessica, it is these discussions that make your blog so interesting. They also give me a new perspective and so a new reason (as if I needed one) to go back and re-read old favorites. Thanks.
P.S. I really struggled with the “he/she” and “they” usage in this comment. In the future, I may stick with using m/m romances as examples. So much easier to stay in the third person singular.
I am new to the phrase “moral repair” and am now fascinated by it, but in a writing sense. Must go away and ponder now.
Jessica, what a terrific post. And now I understand why I return over and over again to Sherry Thomas’s books, even though I am one of the teeny tiny minority of readers who aren’t in love with her writing style. I also don’t love the characters always. And yet, the books stay with me and make me go back to them over and over. The idea of moral repair captures it perfectly. When I read Sherry’s books, I watch and experience the process of a relationship being brought back to life. Even when I don’t always believe the characters will have an HEA, the fact that they come so far and get so close is really rewarding. And the books, the characters, and the plots are all different from each other. What an amazing gift to have as a writer, and to share with readers.
Every time I think I’ve got it figured, I read more and am confused: Is the “ritual death” when something happens to separate the couple, like one lies or there’s a Misunderstanding, or something? And then the “moral repair” is when that separation is resolved? Usually to include Sexy Times in Romance?
@RStewie:
Yes, it is the moment when something happens that seems to doom the relationship. And there may be more than one such moment.
Yes, but only when the separation is caused by moral damage done by the h. to the h. And moral repair is a process, not a moment. It might involves many steps, on both parts, including actions, attitudes, and, yes, Sexy Times.
I often think that the redemptive arc is the most important element of a romance story for me because of the need to know yourself and the role of the consequences of your actions in creating that self and the possibility of relationship… This makes me think of the beast slouching towards Bethlehem because we are on our own individual journeys and in the end we can’t expect or deserve forgiveness. Forgiveness is a blessing someone else gives us while redemption comes from within ourselves. I also thought of ‘Bitten’. One of the things to like about the story between Clay and Elena is that there is no easy resolve. They take over a decade and several books to work out their relationship after ‘the event’. The same with Josh Lanyon’s character’s Adrien English and his Police Officer sometimes boyfriend (can’t think of his name). It takes five books for them to get to the point of relationship HEA and involves a pair of journey’s driven by events but also through events triggered by the inner stuff that leads to the ritual death and in the 2nd last book almost an actual death. It’s interesting that given the description of the SEP books in this article I am not sure that I could read them. Why can we tolerate books that are about females sexually assualting others? Does the relationship that ensues wipe out the meaning of the initiating event? There is a thread on DA today about dubious consent/rape in a Harlequin that everyone is in clear agreement about as a romfail. This ties in the Gaffney, ‘to have and to hold’ discussion of a few months ago. There may be no one who is irredeemable but there are things and actions that make a person unforgiveable.