ENG 112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Courtly Love, Utopia, Clotel
16 Feb 2017
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Document Summary
It is possible to change a man, good things happen to good girls (chast) Contemporary romance novels imply that heroine is under constant scrutiny. How do metaphors such as those on p. 236 imply that rhine helps eddy overcome her self-consciousness. Remember- the reader is smarter than the heroine, who often must remain ignorant of all things sexual for most of the story. On the one hand, the genre is anti-mimetic but on the other hand, because the reader lives in the real world she does not simply embrace the fantasy uncritically. In our culture traditionally the male hero has the active role. Expected to take on a passive role, the heroine cannot directly take control of the forces that oppress her. Instead she can bravely endure the world as it oppresses her. As such towards the end of romance novels, often as a result of these forces the heroine will almost die.
