Tag: not a love story

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Love Stories That Aren’t – Part 2

Continuing the theme from last week, I want to talk about another faux love story that’s still pretty ubiquitous. Twilight. If you read my review of Renée Ahdieh’s The Beautiful, you’ll know that I hate the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. I. Hate. It. I’ll admit that I sometimes watch the movie to make fun of it because, let’s face it, no one did their best work in that film. Every part of that movie was terrible, except for Billy Burke, who successfully played the only likeable character, Charlie Swan.

But I digress. It’s not just the movie that’s bad. It’s the book. It’s the story, and more particularly the love story. You guys, the romance between Edward and Bella is twisted. It is, in no way, a depiction of a healthy relationship.

Can we start with the fact that Edward sneaks into Bella’s room and watches her sleep? I cannot get over how creepy that is. I’d be weirded out if my husband watched me sleep for more than a few seconds, and I go to sleep already knowing he’s there! Let’s be honest. If Edward wasn’t oh-so-handsome, the thought of him (a 100 year old man) breaking into a teenage girl’s room to watch her sleep would give everyone the heebie-jeebies.

Edward is also super controlling. He tells her what she can do, where she can go, and who she can be friends with, all “for her protection,” of course. Gross.

Their whole relationship is based on this weird animal attraction that they have for one another. They’re invested in one another before they even have a decent conversation. All that Bella seems to care about is that Edward is super hot. No one has yet been able to explain to me why Edward likes Bella, because she has zero personality. To quote Bob’s Burgers, “If she was a spice, she’d be flour.”

The entire series is literal garbage. In the second book, Edward makes the executive decision to leave Bella “for her protection.” Gag. Bella literally curls up in the fetal position and refuses to move. Then she spends the next year of her life moping. She decides to take life-threatening risks because somehow she hears Edward’s voice telling her not to be stupid. Seriously, it’s so messed up. Girls, for the record, if a boy dumps you, you cry to your friends and eat a bunch of ice cream. You don’t crash a motorcycle and jump off a cliff. Also, Edward is so upset by not being with Bella that he tries to commit suicide. None of this is healthy.

And to top it all off, once they finally do get married, Bella is left with bruises after the first time they have sex. That’s abuse, people. “Edward is just so strong, he can’t help it.” Sorry, that’s not gonna fly with me. Then she gets pregnant and dies.

The Twilight franchise depicts obsession, abuse, depression, and suicide attempts. It doesn’t depict a healthy, loving relationship. The end.

I want to touch on another topic that really grinds my gears. Can we talk about Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy? Their story is a love story, by the way, but it’s been distorted and turned into a trope that is really gross. Allow me to explain.

Elizabeth and Darcy meet and she overhears him say that she’s not good-looking enough to entice him to ask her to dance. She decides that he’s a jerk. He kind of is a jerk.

He eventually realizes that he loves her and wants to marry her, but his proposal is filled with backhanded compliments and he basically tells her that he loves her so much that he’ll condescend to marry her. Elizabeth, who has some dignity, rejects him and calls him out on being an enormous bonehead.

He accepts her rejection. That’s it. He doesn’t try to convince her that she’s wrong. He does write a letter to explain a circumstance about which she’s misinformed, but he doesn’t continue to pursue her. He understands that no means no. He also takes her rejection as an opportunity to reflect on his behavior. He grows up a little, learning how to be kinder and less pompous.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth has some growing up to do, too. She discovers that her faith in Mr. Wickham was misplaced. She struggles with self-reproach when she discovers that her secrecy led to her sister, Lydia, running way with Mr. Wickham. Mr. Darcy ends up saving the day and ensuring that Wickham and Lydia get married, (mostly) sparing Elizabeth and her family from humiliation and ruin. He does this with no motive other than love.

When Elizabeth and Darcy are reunited, they have both changed. He has learned to treat people with respect, and she’s learned to look beyond the façade to see the man. They’re ready for one another now.

That, my friends, is a love story. It’s about two imperfect people who are made better by their association with the other. But tragically, all some people have taken from this story is “Handsome man treats woman like garbage but really loves her.” So many Young Adult books seem to follow this trope and it’s really starting to grate on me. Off the top of my head, I can think of several YA books in which the love interest is a huge jerk: The Cruel Prince by Holly Black, Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge, and Uprooted and Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. Can we all agree to just stop this? It’s not cool, and it sets young people up to believe that it’s okay for your partner to treat you like trash. Can we not?

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Love Stories That Aren’t – Part 1

There is something profoundly irritating to me about books being mislabeled as love stories. I relish a good love story. A true love story. But some of the most famous romances in literature are not love stories at all. Why does that irritate me? Why should it matter to me if people want to call Wuthering Heights a love story and swoon over Heathcliff? I think because literature informs so much of popular culture and popular thought. The books we read become the movies we watch, the television shows that are produced, and the quotes we pin on Pinterest. They become the tropes that are reused by future authors. They’re the stories little boys and girls grow up reading, the romances they are told they should aspire to. If we as a society mislabel stories of obsession and abuse as stories of love, we’re sending a damaging message to the girls and boys, women and men who read them.

Today, I’m going to discuss two stories that are not love stories. I’ll be doing a part two of this post in which I’ll talk about one more non-love story and one love story that’s been grossly distorted and turned into a terrible trope. But for now, let’s dive in.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is NOT a love story. It’s not. For those of you who need a reminder, Wuthering Heights is about Heathcliff and Cathy. Cathy’s dad adopts Heathcliff, a parentless vagrant child, brings him home and raises him as one of the family. Cathy and Heathcliff immediately connect and, over the years, fall in love.

Cathy eventually befriends Edgar and Isabella Linton, their neighbors. They’re kind to Cathy as the daughter of a wealthy gentleman, but they reject Heathcliff. Edgar proposes to Cathy, and even though she loves Heathcliff, she feels that she can’t marry him because of his low status. So she marries Edgar, and Heathcliff disappears. He returns years later as a wealthy gentleman and attracts the attention of Isabella Linton. He encourages Isabella’s love for him as a way to get back at Cathy and Edgar, and elopes with her. Cathy, cut off from Heathcliff and pregnant with Edgar’s child, dies. Heathcliff begs Cathy’s ghost to haunt him forever.

Heathcliff, of course, doesn’t care about Isabella at all. He treats her terribly, and she leaves him, giving birth to his son on her own. When she dies, Heathcliff brings his son home to live with him, and he encourages a connection between his son and Edgar and Cathy’s daughter. He forces them to marry, even though his son Linton is ill and Cathy (Edgar and Cathy’s daughter) doesn’t actually want to marry him. When Linton dies, Cathy is stuck at Wuthering Heights along with Heathcliff. He goes increasingly crazy, admits that he dug up her mother’s grave after she died, and dies himself in her mother’s old room. In the end, the people in the village say they’ve seen the ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy walking the moors, together at last.

I’m sorry. What part of that was a love story? The part where Cathy doesn’t think the man she supposedly loves is good enough for her so she marries someone else? The part where she wastes away because she’s parted from the man she rejected? (Come on, Cathy, have a little dignity.) Or maybe when Heathcliff gets revenge on Cathy and Edgar by destroying Isabella’s life? The part where he continues to try to get revenge by forcing Cathy’s daughter to marry his son? The part where he digs up a woman’s grave? (That part always just creeps me out.) This is a story about obsession and abuse. Obsessive love can seem romantic, but it’s not healthy and it’s not something that anyone should aspire to. Read this book for the prose. Read it for the commentary on class, revenge, and madness. Read it for the vivid descriptions of the moors. Don’t read it looking for a love story, because you won’t find one.

Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare is NOT a love story. I might get a lot of heat for this, but I said what I said. I’m assuming we’re all familiar with the story of Romeo and Juliet. Two families, the Montagues and the Capulets, hate each other. Romeo Montague sneaks into a Capulet party and sees Juliet Capulet. They “fall in love” (read: are attracted to one another), have that famous love scene on the balcony, and get secretly married by Romeo’s pal Friar Laurence.

Romeo carries on the feud, kills Juliet’s cousin, and is banished from the city. But don’t worry, he pops by her place first (again, after killing her cousin) to consummate the marriage. Can’t neglect that, after all.

Juliet’s parents, who know nothing of her marriage to Romeo, want to marry her off. She pretends to agree, but arranges with Friar Laurence to fake her own death to get out of it. Romeo is supposed to be in on the plan but misses the memo, thinks she’s really dead, and commits suicide by poison. Juliet, seeing Dead Romeo, stabs herself with his dagger.

The feuding families come together to find their dead children and get a stern lecture from the priest about how their endless fighting caused the death of their kids. (Maybe it was actually your really terrible plan, Friar Laurence.)

While this is supposedly one of the greatest romances in literature, what I see is two hormonal teenagers who have a few days of puppy love followed by a few days of angsty separation followed by a weird and needless double-suicide. That doesn’t negate the beauty of Shakespeare’s writing, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the play has no value. But it’s more of a cautionary tale than a love story.

Again, I get it if you like these books. They have literary value. Romeo & Juliet has some of the most beautiful lines ever written. But these two stories are often held up as examples of true love, and that’s not only inaccurate. It’s damaging.

They’re not love stories. The end.