(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.