Last week I attended a great Rose Cafe hosted by our GRF Sara. Sara’s studies are on romance in literature and how the policing and treatment of romance literature reflects upon modern society’s values. Although I have not done in depth research on romance, I definitely saw where Sara was going with her research question.

Currently, I am enrolled in a class about the medieval romances. This cafe got me to think about how these medieval romances have somehow stuck around for thousands of years after their initial conception. Although I tend to read them skeptically, due to the fantastical and unlikely occurrences within them, I’ve begun to realize this might be the appeal of the genre. No real life romance plays out the way they do in the epic romances, just as no one will really embark on a quest to save the world because they were born the chosen one. I think romance is fantasy, in both senses of the word. Modern day fantasy novels incorporate many of the tropes seen in medieval romance, and fulfill our fantasies at the same time. Whether this is a fantasy of a perfect, epic romance or of vanquishing evil singlehandedly.

This cafe got me to thinking about the reasons I had once used to profess my dislike of the romances in the romance genre. I now realize there is no real reason to think of them poorly as unrealistic ideals of love, when they were always intended as unachievable ideals of love that are simply meant to fulfill fantastical desires. Overall, it was a great cafe that has opened up my perspective in reading the romance era of literature.