THE ROMANCE AND THE NOVEL
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THE ROMANCE AND THE NOVEL
The word romance has a long history. It originally identified a specific
language, Old French, and then came to mean any work written in
French. Because medieval French literature consisted mainly of stories
about knights and their exploits, the meaning of romance narrowed
further to mean tales, written in either prose or poetry, about knights.
Over time, the word came both to refer to the novel and to be
distinguished from the novel. Used in the latter sense, it usually denoted
fiction that disregarded the limits of everyday life in action and
characterization, emphasized the mystery of life, was remote in time or
place, used extravagant settings, and relied on coincidence. It tends to
present extreme experiences, contradictions, complex feelings, disorder,
and disunity, often ending in ambiguity.
The distinction between the novel and the romance is in fact somewhat
slippier. For one thing, there is not general agreement about the
characteristics of the novel itself. In addition, the same work may be
called a novel by one critic and a romance by another; this is particularly
true of Gothic fiction, with its use of magic, mystery, and horrors.
Further complicating the debate of novel versus romance is the practice
of combining the romance and the novel in one work, so that it contains
elements of both. Sir Walter Scott, whose novels influenced generations
of novelists and formed the taste of generations of readers, sharply
distinguished between the novel and the romance but at the same time
allowed for the categories overlapping:
We would be rather inclined to describe a Romance as ‘a fictitious
narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous
and uncommon incidents;' thus being opposed to the kindred term Novel,
which Johnson has described as ‘ a smooth tale, generally of love'; but
which we would rather define as ‘a fictitious narrative, differing from
the Romance because the events are accommodated to the ordinary train
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Used by permission. Page 1 of 5of human events, and the modern state of society.' Assuming these
definitions, it is evident, from the nature of the distinction adopted, that
there may exist compositions which it is difficult to assign precisely or
exclusively to the one class or the other; and which, in fact, partake of
the nature of both. But, generally speaking, the distinction will be found
broad enough to answer all general and useful purposes (1824).
Generally, the romance was regarded with disfavor in the eighteenth
century, primarily because it appealed to imagination over judgment or
reason and because its extravagances and exaggerations were unnatural.
As the century proceeded, however, tastes began to diverge and the
romance found defenders. Bishop Hurd asked: "May there not be
something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a
genius, and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns
have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it?" (1762) .
Horace Walpole justified The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel in
English, in part as a new kind of romance, a blending of the ancient and
the modern romance. The ancient romance, he explained, was all
"imagination and improbability"; heroines and heroes alike acted and
spoke unrealistically and had unrealistic emotions. The modern romance
or novel, in contrast, successfully copied nature but was prosaic,
unimaginative. Walpole asserted that he was giving his fancy free rein to
invent interesting situations at the same time that his characters, who
acted as moral agents, behaved and spoke the way "mere men and
women would do in extraordinary positions."
Clara Reeves succinctly distinguished the two genres: "The Novel is a
picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it was written.
The Romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what has never
happened nor is likely to." In her view, the goal of the romance was
"first, to excite the attention; and secondly, to direct it to some useful, or
at least innocent end" (1778). In her romance she included only "a
sufficient degree of the marvellous to excite attention; enough of the
manners of real life to give an air of probability to the work; and enough
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Used by permission. Page 2 of 5of the pathetic to engage the heart on its behalf." Following Walpole's
lead, the early Gothic writers tended to call their fiction romances, e.g.,
Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest and A Sicilian Romance. The
Gothic romance was the most popular form of fiction from the 1790s
through the early 19th century.
The debate about whether the novel and the romance are different genres
and if so, what that difference might be, continued through the
nineteenth century into the twentieth century not just in England but in
the United States also. Hawthorne regarded The Scarlet Letter as a
romance; as a romance writer, he had crossed the boundary of ordinarily
opposed states, reality and imagination:
Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and
showing all its figures so distinctly–making every object so minutely
visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility–is a medium the
most suitable for a romance writer to get acquainted with his illusive
guests. There is the little domestic scenery of hte well-known apartment;
the chairs, with each in separate individuality; the centre-table,
sustaining a work-basked, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp;
the sofa; the bookcase; the picture on the wall–all these details, so
completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem
to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is
too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity
thereby. A child's whose; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the
hobby-horse–whatever, in a word, has been used or played with during
the day is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness,
though still almost as vividly present as by daylight (1850).
Henry James concisely abstracted the type of experience presented by
the romance–"experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged,
disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt form the conditions that we
usually know to attach to it" (1877). Using this criterion, he classified
The American as a romance.
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Used by permission. Page 3 of 5For Robert Lewis Stevenson, the distinction between the two genres was
a matter of a work's imaginative appeal and reader response to the work:
We are always aware that we are reading a story or are in a theater
watching a play. The romance, in contrast, actively involves us
imaginatively.... Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it
is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; and when
the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with all his heart,
when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves to recall it and
dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction is called romance
(1882).
The relationship of the romance and the novel took a different form for
Conrad, based on the connection between life in general, his life, and his
fiction. He was conscious of the problematic nature of his vision and
material, and he struggled to express his sense of the romantic nature of
reality, "of romanticism in relation to life, not of romanticism in relation
to imaginative literature.' His own life, which he acknowledged did not
follow conventional patterns,
was very far from giving a larger scope of my imagination. On the
contrary, the mere fact of dealing with matters outside the general run of
everyday experience laid me under the obligation of a more scrupulous
fidelity to the truth of my own sensations. The problem was to make
unfamiliar things credible. To do that I had to create for them, to
reproduce for them, to envelop them in their proper atmosphere of
actuality. This was the hardest task of all and the most important, in
view of that conscientious rendering of truth in thought and fact, which
has always been my aim.
In contrast to Hawthorne, who strove to transform through imagination
the ordinary, the familiar, the everyday into the strange, the ideal, the
magical, Conrad strove to make the strange, the outrageous, and the
enigmatic into the familiar and the everyday so that it would be
believable to readers.
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Used by permission. Page 4 of 5The debate about the two genres is ultimately a debate about the nature
of reality as well as about the presentation of that reality and conformity
to society's rules and values.
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