Just before Valentine’s Day, a few of our readers sent me a link to a news story about a new anthology of love stories, My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. Eugenides’ opinion about love stories and happy endings is, I think, emblematic about how most literary types approach the topic:
In the introduction to this remarkable collection, Jeffrey Eugenides warns readers that good love stories aren’t fluffy, happy-go-lucky affairs. Instead, they “depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart.”
“Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name,” writes Eugenides, the best-selling author of “Middlesex” and “The Virgin Suicides.”
I looked up the introduction on Amazon.com (lor’ bless the Search Inside feature), and here are the quotes in context:
When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims—these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.
This started me thinking about happy endings, and their bad reputation. It’s not so much that badly-written happy endings are shit on; it’s that happy endings in and of themselves are viewed as a literary faux pas—the equivalent of belching loudly at a cocktail party.
Near as I can tell, here are the most popular arguments for why happy endings, particularly in love stories, are inherently bad:
1. They’re unrealistic
2. They’re cheesy
3. They’re simplistic
4. They present an easy out for the author
5. They are inauthentic to the story
6. They’re formulaic
While these are all valid descriptions of all that’s wrong with a raging case of Terminus Sappynus (symptoms you may experience when confronted with this blight include mild nausea and an urge to read dystopian fiction just to cleanse your palate), these aren’t indictments of happy endings per se. These are symptoms of bad writing, and I can name a number of books with unhappy or bittersweet endings that have exactly these same problems.
Here’s a theory I have: people who view all happy endings with a jaundiced eye aren’t just reacting to the form in and of itself, they’re also reacting to their assumptions about the readers who enjoy and seek out stories with happy endings. After all, if these stories are mindless escapist pap, what does it say about the reader’s intellect if she genuinely loves them or, God forbid, defends them? Lingering in the back of the mind of people who consistently denigrate the romantic happy ending is the specter of the vacuous housewife in the puffypaint sweatshirt snarfing down bon-bons while clutching a be-Fabioed book. All sorts of class and gender issues are tangled up in our conception of love stories with happy endings.
Keep in mind I’m not defending happy endings across the board, either. I’ve read more than my fair share of schmaltzy, gag-inducing HEAs in my life, in which the previously-barren heroine is suddenly popping out babies because of the hero’s Super Sperm, or the deeply traumatized hero is magically fixed by the heroine’s sweetness and light (and Magic Hoo-Hoo), or everyone who’s not villainous gets to resolve their problems and it’s cake and ponies and superlative orgasms for everyone all the time (though not with the ponies, please), yay.
What I want when I read a book is a good ending. I want an ending that’s right for the book. I want a resolution that feels both logical and emotionally satisfying. If a romance novel hero has a fairly severe case of PTSD, I don’t expect him to be fixed by the end of 400 pages, though I want him to find an avenue for future healing and happiness—which is why the ending for Seize the Fire by Laura Kinsale, while unconventional for a romance novel, is deeply touching and worked so well for me. If the protagonists have Issues but are, by and large, sane people, then an ending depicting them leading fulfilled, happy lives works well for me, too. This is why the “Where Are They Now?” summary in Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie is very satisfying for me. And if a book deals with madness, the Atlantic slave trade in the late eighteenth century and the atrocities people are willing to commit in the name of pride and commerce, like Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth, then I pretty much expect an ending to be gut-wrenching and tragic. I’m even OK with books in which the author seems to be punishing the protagonist just so we can go along for the ride, like Jude the Obscure or Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
This also doesn’t mean that I’m advocating for unhappy endings in romance novels. I’ll be honest here: I’m irrationally attached to my happy endings. When I finish a romance novel, I want the protagonists to be together, and I want an assurance that they’ll be reasonably happy together. It’s part of the pleasure and assurance of reading genre fiction. When I pick up a mystery novel, I want the mystery to be solved by the end. When I read a high fantasy novel, I want the world to be saved and the protagonists to complete their coming-of-age process. These very basic frameworks provide plenty of room to play with my expectations, to delight me with the unexpected, and to thoroughly fuck my emotions over. The trick is to bring everything together so that the denouement feels authentic instead of forced.
That’s not too much to ask, is it?
EDITED TO ADD: So the central question that I’m pondering, and what I’m still trying to figure out is: Why is the happy ending viewed as something inferior in and of itself compared to a tragic ending, or a bittersweet ending? Why is a happy ending popularly viewed as a cop-out? It sometimes is, no question about that, but sometimes it isn’t, and it irritates me that people indiscriminately lump them all together. I haven’t quite figured this out yet, and I’d like your perspectives.
I’ve always been baffled as to why “Literature” hates a happy ending. Some of the contortions it goes through to ensure no one gets a happy ending are just as convoluted as the contortions done in Romance to ensure a HEA.
In the last literary novel I read the hero spent 20 years obsessing over a lost love who was dead the entire time. My girlfriend and I held that behavior up to the “what would my husband do test ?” and decided in real life he would have been distracted from his obsession in about six months tops.
Frankly, I read fiction for entertainment. I don’t find death, loss, illness, political strife or exploitation entertaining. There is lots of that in the non-fiction section.
And yes, I also read non-fiction.
I think a lot of literary critics are children of privilege. They’ve never been hungry or had to make desperate choices. They live the happily ever after. And they’re hungry for the novelty of squalor and turmoil.
To validate their sensationalistic yearnings, stories with positive endings are trivialized.
That said, I’ve heard it said that if you tell a story for long enough it always ends badly…
My problem with the HEA is that in the Romance Novel Industry it’s not only guaranteed, it’s freakin’ enforced. [I know, I know—my issue, and not anyone else’s.]
But how can I believe the characters are worthy of the HEA if it’s a sure thing—no matter what—particularly when the Hero’s an ass-hat and Heroine is TSTL?
I require HEAs (if I wanted reality, I’d read the newspaper) but I also require realistic ones. In what I consider the Absolutely Perfect Romance (Nora’s Chesapeake Bay books), nothing really is solved. It’s acknowledged that Gloria will always be a problem, that the Quinns will always have to deal with her, but each of the brothers has found love and that gives them a strong base from which to deal with her. It’s realistic yet optimistic.
I don’t have much to add to people’s theorizing why optimism is considered less realistic than pessimism is – it’s late and I’m not that deep a thinker anyway. But if everything is doomed to end badly, why bother? I need a reason to go on living, sometimes.
Representational art, ie, “most “real”“, has not been considered a valid art form for many a year now. I use the word “representational” because terms like “realistic” or “life-like” are misnomers—every artist edits what he or she presents to the world and decides what to show their audience. Even so-called “editorial” photography is not “real”, since the photographer impresses their own world-view upon the photograph by choosing what to frame and when to frame it in a certain space in time. He/She also informs the presentation by what they choose to leave out. Since the advent of photography in the late 1800s/early 1900s, representational art of the likes of David, Michelangelo, Bouchet, etc, has been considered by the majority of the “serious” art world as passe. True representation could be achieved easily through photography. (In fact, early art photographers took pains to make their photos more like paintings through various tricks with the lens and with lighting because true representation was considered “not” art.) There is a direct correlation in the timeline with the rise of Impressionism and the advent of photography as an artform. Impressionism was followed by various forms of Modernism. Subsequent to Modernism, you find Postmodernism. At no point in this timeline has representational art ever made it back as a truly valid style.
As for HEAs and why they are not considered as valid as pain, despair, entropy, and chaos—look at our artwork from after WWI. You have art where the technique is the most important aspect and virtuosity in form is celebrated. Emotional content is considered trite. A large portion of Great modernist pieces fit into this category. Then you have the Postmodern period, specifically from the 60s on. The 60s are a time of the anti-aesthetic. To a large extent, the concept is the most important part, not the form it takes. Beauty is cheap and inauthentic.
Whether or not that’s why the HEA is also considered inauthentic and not “valid”, I don’t know, but I can certainly see a parallel for this thinking in other artforms from the same period.
This art history lecture has been brought to you by 5 years of undergrad work and 2 years of postgrad work to achieve a degree that, when coupled with two bucks, will buy me a cup of coffee. 🙂
This discussion is delicious and thoughtful and I love reading all the answers.
I never get why happy endings are so downmarket, either. I tend to think it has to do with men being in charge of literary standards for so long, but that’s just me.
Nothing wrong with a great redemptive tragedy, either, but it still should make sense, and a great many downbeat literary endings are grim beyond all belief.
I think Jasper Fforde had Thursday Next say it well:
“If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction – and ultimately, without a major resolution.”
Jasper Fforde – “Something Rotten”
I believe that anthropologists have proven that the human mind seeks patterns and will create patterns if none are available. The genre formula, no matter which genre, probably speaks to very deep seated preferences in the human brain.
I’m going to throw another theory into the mix.
I think it has something to do with the cultural mood of the times as well as the process of growing up in a media-heavy society. Children are quite satisfied with, desire and expect the happy endings in Disney movies, religion and in other settings.
However, (spoiler!)Santa isn’t real (/spoiler!) and other realities are thus discovered and questioned as you grow up. Part of the process of considering yourself an adult and serious for most people these days is simply to not believe in a happy ending. It is to become skeptical in a skeptical age, and to discard the media & trappings of childhood (cartoons, religion for some as well as viewing things in black and white).
These are the chief reasons why I believe, then, the happily ever after universally becomes much maligned.
Becca, that’s a really nice point. The Quinn stories have resolutions, and a promise of happiness, but that promise isn’t without complications, and I think that’s part of what made it feel so real.
This made me think of Atonement (the film, not the book, which I haven’t read). When it ended I wanted to effing die I was so sad. STOP READING HERE IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS. (Sorry for yelling.) The capriciousness of the lie and the havoc it wreaked made me angry instead of sad, and I just wanted happiness for Cecilia and Robbie. (And for James McAvoy. James, call me.) I like the central thrust of the story, that Briony is giving them their happy ending, but I wanted it to be real goddamn it!
This is probably a weird example, but I view the end of I Am Legend (the movie again) as an unhappy one, but like the end of one of my favorite movies, West Side Story, the tragedy of the ending feels different to me. It feels earned. You can see where everything just goes off the rails, where the tragedy begins and spirals out of control. That feels like it serves the story to me, which isn’t to say that Atonement is unclear or hard to follow, but it feels different and unsatisfying to me.
I’m not sure what this says about why I, or we, like happy endings (HA – except the obvious) but maybe it’s that great authors make you care for the characters. You invest a few hours and 300 pages and you want to know they’re taken care of when you leave. This is part of why I hate Thomas Hardy. Because everyone’s just dead.
What sara said. When I invest lifespan and attention on a book, get involved with the story and the characters, I want to enjoy the experience. I don’t want to read 700 pages and have everyone die, because then I just want to add the author’s body to the pile for wasting my time in getting to care about the characters.
I guess I liked sad endings as a twenty-something, but now I find some of them pretentious, and since I’ve had children, I’m a little more invested in the HEA. Besides (as another poster said) life is a mixture of good and bad, why focus on the latter? In fact I’ve spent abt 5 hours tonight trying to convince a sister that she can have some HEAs in her life, and that all of our lives can have purpose and joy. That is the truth, and all those literary killjoys want their HEAs just as much as we do.
blue45—maybe sometimes, but not always!
Charlene:
I think that’s being quite unfair to men in general, and male authors in particular. Most of the Western literary canon (which is, in turn, largely dominated by Dead White Dudes) deals with all sorts of emotions: love, sorrow, happiness, regret and anger are probably the big ones, and even the anger doesn’t tend to be rage, but something colder and more directed. Besides Othello, what other major Western literary figures are angry? The other name that came to mind was Ahab, but he’s more nutty and obsessed, and not so much angry.
Bibi:
I agree that happy endings aren’t necessarily denigrated across the board, but they are quite consistently denigrated for love stories. You bring up Austen, but notice how she’s pretty much the sole exception here, and even then, I know of many scholars who view her works as fluff and not especially worthy of inclusion in the canon precisely because they’re love stories with happy endings.
It’s funny that you brought up Eliot and Hardy, because I associate them mostly with bittersweet or tragic endings. Admittedly, I haven’t read much Eliot. I have read most of Hardy’s work, however—I think I only have The Mayor of Casterbridge. I think the fact that Tess, Jude and Return of the Native were the first few works I read by him have affected my view of his work.
Dickens and Shakespeare are probably the two big names in the Western Literary canon (at least, the bits that deal with fiction) who have consistently written comic works that are highly regarded. Mark Twain, too. But I’m trying to think of the other big guns, and to be honest, I largely associate them with tragedy/bittersweetness. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hugo, Flaubert, Hardy, Joyce, Faulkner, Milton, Hawthorne, Melville, James….
I’m attempting to come up with modern literary fiction titles that have happy endings, and I’m not really suceeding. This is especially true of the major prize-winners. And I love me some Booker and Pulitzer winners. Anyone have suggestions for modern (late 20th and early 21st century) literary fiction with happy endings?
I have a theory about the preponderance of bleak literature and art—I’d completely forgotten about it until I read Tina’s little capsule summary of the rise and fall of representational art. It has to do with WWI and WWII happening so close together, and the atrocities perpetrated during those wars (the appalling conditions of trench warfare, the Holocaust), and the modern mass media enabling, for the first time, the wide dissemination of photographs and stories of what went on. The Cold War certainly didn’t help things—actually, just earlier tonight, some friends of mine who grew up in military bases talked about how nuclear war was a very real, very present possibility with none of the grim humor or irony or post-apocalyptic stylishness of Mad Max or a zombie apocalypse. Big bomb go boom, and if you were lucky, you died in the blast; if you weren’t so lucky, you’d linger for a few days or weeks in agony as your skin sloughed off and all your teeth and hair fell out.
xatya:
Now I think that’s REALLY unfair—and inaccurate. Besides being just a bit too sweeping with the speculations about the backgrounds of literary critics, I’d argue that much of literary fiction, especially modern lit fic with urban settings, doesn’t necessarily deal with squalor (unless you’re talking about moral squalor), and turmoil is pretty much a given for ANY form of fiction, because turmoil makes for entertaining conflict. If anything, the modern fiction genre that most frequently deals with actual squalor would be street lit, with its focus on the lives of people growing up and dealing with the ghetto, and this is a genre not especially beloved to the literati.
R.:
Yeah, I have somewhat mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I love me my happy ending! On the other hand, it makes me uncomfortable when Big Industry attempts to regulate genre conventions.
Gwynnyd:
I was just thinking about that—that narrative is a way for us to create order and sense out of randomness and chaos, and that even the most chaotic, non-linear fiction has a recognizable arc, even if you have to hunt around a little bit to find it. Narrative non-fiction tends to deal with arcs, too, because they frame the snippets of information as arcs. We are supremely adept at finding patterns, and the narrative tradition is yet another way to do that.
This has wandered a little way away from happy endings, hasn’t it? Heh.
I do want to examine further why people keep equating grimness with greater realism. People keep saying “If I wanted something realistic with an unhappy ending, I’d turn to the news.” I find that attitude fascinating, that escapism involves happy endings, and that returning to reality involves dealing with unhappy outcomes.
We have visiting writers who speak at my school for the Creative Writing Department. My teacher said to my class that she thought one of the books was not good, and one of the few reasons she gave was that the man and the woman get together in the end.
My immediate reaction was WTF?! Why does that make a book not good?
There’s some kind of stigma that it’s more “real” for characters to be miserable. Now, I’ve had my share of rough times, but am I consitant pile of angst who feels no hope for the future? No. And I consider myself pretty real…what with the way I exist in the universe and all.
I’m also on the staff of a magazine, and when looking over poetry submissions, I came accross a well written love poem and immediatly gave it my vote for print. We ended up sticking it right in the middle of all the angst poetry, so our readers would have a chance to catch their breath and not blow their brains out.
When it comes to Romance Novels and the people who hate them there is usually three things I believe: that a) they haven’t read one and are just relying on that stigma that its whoopi all around and that it won’t be a satisfying read or b) they read one but it was one of the badly written one with rediculous sex scenes and bad dialogue that further build on the stigma and finally maybe c) they’ve read some but they haven’t read the right romance novel for them. The Fantasy reader isn’t going to enjoy a contemporary romance set in one City with a secretary and a billionaire.
On the happy ending note I think that a lot of the times in our postmodernist world view anything that is traditionally happy like Jane Erye or (in some cases) stuff by Dickens, or other such books that are literature but also the beginnings of the genre book are considered too traditional and safe. Today in our mind sets of constantly searching for the new, we want books that contemporary in nature and comment on contemporary issues of lost and real love. With books like those by Nicholas Sparks we’re treated to this world were the love between to people isn’t perfect its damaging but also provides growth.
I think a lot of times people view romance novels as books without real contemporary suffering to validate the happy ending. That they are too much like the ancestors of literature to be considered valid reading for today. I believe that this is wrong. That romance novels have become varied some more happy then others.
I’ve noticed some people who diss the HEA are dissatisfied or bored with their own lives but either don’t know or won’t try to make married life/family life fun.
My husband and I get out for a date every week or so. We play Scrabble with the kids and take them skiing. We have some rough patches but most of the time, we’re having a blast. Yet we know too many couples who can’t be bothered to call sitters, and who let their kids get addicted to TV, Webkinz, etc… We see them bored, bickering, vaguely disappointed with life and yet unwilling to break out of the rut.
The idea that you could create your own HEA is very threatening. So much easier to just say it’s unrealistic, isn’t it?
I can tell you that drama in general is seen as more serious, even when it comes to movies. I don’t see why. There are plenty of obvious, stupid dramas like The English Patient that are a complete waste of film stock; there are wondrous, complex comedies like Cold Comfort Farm that show them up. It’s harder to be funny, I think. It’s relatively easy to be sad. Everyone knows what sad is.
A few months ago, someone recommended an author to me, saying she was “funny.” She wasn’t…well, at least in my eyes she wasn’t. Humor is very personal and very hard to do across the board. Maybe that’s why happiness is looked down upon, because so many people find drama easier to identify with. Personally, I’m more likely to think someone’s a good author/director if they do a good, believable upbeat story than if they go for the cheap dramatic angst.
Too lazy to read through this whole thread, but someone mentioned the advice given to Anne Shirley—only geniuses can write sad endings.
I disagree. I think it takes a better and more interesting writer to write the happy ending—and make it *believable*—than to write the sad ending. How easy would it be to end Jane Eyre with Rochester dead? Instead, Bronte managed to give us a happy ending that is bizarrely satisfying and believable—even though it really shouldn’t be.
A fan-fic writing friend of mine writes only happy stories that get categorized as “fluff.” A while back, she wrote about why she does that. Her life has not been all sunshine and rainbows, and for her, writing the happiness is actually more challenging and more fulfilling.
I think we have this idea that writing tragedy is harder, but I disagree. The world can be a bleak, horrible place. Finding joy in those horrors, and making that joy believable, is the true strength of a good writer. And that’s why I love happy endings. They make me believe that, even in the face of a world like ours, there is some possibility for joy.
Snarkhunter said,
That’s perfect. That’s beautiful. That’s it, exactly.
I think Tina brought up a valid point. (sorry I haven not figured out how to quote yet!). It’s about the “modernist” concept of art. Basically, around 1900, the modern movement wanted to renew art in all its form. In literature (I use this term to denote “arty” writing), that led to a deconstruction of narration, to a focus on form over plot, a playing with tradition, etc. Novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplace are examples of “modern” writing. Part of the problem, however, is that a huge part of the public did not follow the writers on their search for new meaning and new form. They prefered to read stories with a conventional appeal – a conventional story arch, plot, characters developement. That’s where popular fiction is coming from. The rub is that people want different things from their books. The HEA is really no issue in the literature of the 20th century and later because plot is not as important as in popular fiction. A literary novel is more about the way it is written and also about the irritation factor as I call it. It is about challenging your view of the world but also your conceptions of how to use language, how to think, how to describe. It’s not that a positive ending is impossible per se, but a lot of time the characters described make it impossible. How to end on a positive note when writing about people without redeeming qualities? So a lot of people just have an open end, which is usually seen as a negative one. Someone posted that they did not like books without closure and I think that is part of this devide again. Modern literature does not believe that it can picture the world any more, it just shows fragmented and incomplete shards of reality so there cannot be closure. Of course, the paratigm might change again and actually I have seen signs that it is changing already.
I could go on about this forever and get very theoretical, but I am going to spare you…
“Why is the happy ending viewed as something inferior in and of itself compared to a tragic ending, or a bittersweet ending?”
Children’s stories have happy endings. Perhaps that’s it? With people who are against HEAs, you often get this sense of how grown-up and sophisticated they want to be. If a story is tragic, then it’s realistic, and if it’s realistic, that must mean it’s grown-up and sophisticated.
Both these conclusions aren’t really sensible. I can think of several tragic endings I found very unrealistic. One of my pet peeves is the tacked-on tragic ending. Those endings where you almost hear the writer go: “Uh-oh, if I don’t watch out, my hero and heroine will live happily ever after, so… she GETS RUN OVER BY A CAR!” How sophisticated and grown-up is that?
First-time commenter here… this discussion has fascinated me, because the comedy/genre/HEA vs. Serious Fiction debate comes up frequently in my life. My freshman year of college, my Lit professor said, point blank, “There’s genre fiction and then there’s good fiction.” Direct quote. That and a couple of similar conversations with my advisor was enough to make me switch my major to Art and never look back. Since then, I’ve mostly had to deal with this debate in terms of film, and I always cite Sullivan’s Travels, Preston Sturges’s brilliant movie about a comedy director who wants to make a Serious Film, as a good argument in favor of comedy/HEA. And it was made in 1941, so the debate has been raging for quite some time!
My personal theory about anti-HEA sentiment is twofold: firstly, that while sexism is a factor, class is a larger one—if the “common people” like it/it’s popular, then it must be bad, much like how in the fine art world, oftentimes if you can understand the piece easily then it’s not considered Real Art. Secondly, I think for some people, adulthood is automatically associated with obligations, doing things you don’t want to do. Childhood = Fun, Adulthood = Eat Your Vegetables. And since HEAs are prevalent in kids’ stories, they’re one of the childish things one must put aside when accepting the yoke of adult life and grim reality. The more Serious you are, the more grown up, etc.
Candy asked for prizewinning literature with happy endings. I can think of two offhand—A.S. Byatt’s Possession [Booker Prize, 1990] and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay [Pulitzer, 2001]. They aren’t perfect HEAs, but definitely end on an “up” note.
Response to Candy’s question about literary fiction with a happy ending.
The first one to come to mind is flight by sherman alexie.
I don’t know if I agree that the happy ending in itself is popularly viewed as inferior. What I think most people object to is the push for the happy ending, requiring the ride into the sunset, the mad dash to the airport/bus station/troop transport, the I love you passionate embrace fade to black moral imperative inevitability of it all. I believe that what ends up feeling unreal is the cookie cutter predictability of a happy ending, slapped on to appease some focus group or draconian publisher requirements. Nothing pisses me off quicker than someone slapping an HEA on the movie Brazil, for example. Personally, I love a good wallow in the tragedy of Hamlet, or the bittersweetness of Casablanca. But I certainly don’t think they’re superior to the moment when Phillipa realizes it’s not Lymond who’s been shot.
BTW, I don’t think it’s quite fair to equate modern experiments with narrative structure to literary snobbery. Earlier writers, even classical writers, were just as interested in narrative experimentation as Modern and Post-Modern writers. They simply went about it quite differently, or perhaps less intrusively for the average reader.
While it’s true that literary movements are naturally reactions to the literature that precedes them as well as to the social realities which surround and inspire them, I don’t think that the happy ending per se has ever completely fallen out of favor, even in the midst of horrendous social upheavals: the Plagues, the Inquisition, WWI and WWII, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, Apartheid, the Khmer Rouge, the Desaparecidos, and on and miserably on. All inspired art and literature which celebrated hope and redemption in the midst of great evils.
As far as the Romance HEA goes, what I sometimes react negatively to is the lack of realistic balance, when the h/h haven’t *earned* their happiness. Within the classic dramatic structure of the Romance genre, if the necessary conflicts and obstacles are either insanely easy to resolve (for anyone not TSTL) or realistically unresolvable (requiring some equally stupid deus ex machina), the climax will be weak. The falling action will be brief, uninteresting or unconvincing. And I’m not buying the resulting HEA at all. The entire structure falls apart either because the resolution is set in concrete or the writer is not skilled enough to create a structure which relies on Romantic tropes without using them as crutches.
Bottom line: Fiction is written for many reasons, not always to just tell a story. In Romance, the HEA is sometimes problematic for me because the expectation breeds predictability, which breeds laziness and thus boredom. I don’t hate a good HEA, but I don’t respect a brainless conclusion any more than I like pointless suffering.
Ahem. That last line *should* most definitely have read:
…I don’t respect a brainless happy conclusion any more than I like pointless suffering.
Because all HEAs are not brainless. Got it? Good.
I have questioned my need for the occasional HEA in the past. Your post managed to strike a real chord causing a near epiphany for me today. I self medicate for depression with trashy books! When the world gets to be too much of a slime pit, instead of reaching for Xanax I reach for Nora Roberts and her colleagues. Somehow, immersing myself in someone else’s super happy funland blunts the edges of whatever wretched BS life has pooped on my shoes. (sorry about the severely mixed metaphors) Now I just have to figure out if this is a problem…
I think it may be the “EVER AFTER” that gets people. no one is going to be happy forever and ever, no matter how much in love you are.
But throughout a good book both characters have realistic growth with each other and you know if they can overcome the book conflicts they can resolve future problems.
That’s what makes a good book for me. Realist conflict that makes characters grow and become better people and make me believe that the rest of the world could be like that too.
I think there could be a HEA that ends with death with the same elements. Death is too often viewed as a terrible event to be avoided for as long as possible.
I hope that all makes sense.
I really enjoyed the article, thank you. I think part of the problem (though I could never attempt to wrap my arms around this mysterious phenom) is that ‘looking down the nose at romanticists’ (meaning anything that wasn’t good, hard supposed “truth”) has been going on since the neo-platonists. History and the world consciousness looms large.
More importantly for me was reading about your objective study of the issue and proud statement of what you liked in your reading and why. Great blog.
Thanks,
Beth Kery
http://www.bethkery.com
P.S. I loved J. Eugenides books, but I look for my happy endings, too, when I’m in the mood for them.
asral quoth:I think there could be a HEA that ends with death with the same elements. Death is too often viewed as a terrible event to be avoided for as long as possible.
Agreed. “The Little Prince” [children’s story] and “Pan’s Labyrinth” [film] both end in the death of the protagonist. But neither is a bad death, because in both stories death is the only viable ‘portal’ to the ‘reality’ where the Happy Ending awaits the protagonists.
Literary fiction with happy endings (more or less):
The Translation of Dr. Apelles: A Love Story – David Treuer
Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (Not really happy but it’s optimistic.)
The Good Fairies of New York – Martin Millar
The Angel of Forgetfulness – Steve Stern (I think so. I remember it being pretty up and up for one story strand anyway.)
I think the prejudice against HEAs may have to do with the kind of reading discussed in an earlier post as “reading pornographically”. When you’re reading pornographically, often part of the big payoff you’re aiming for is the HEA. It’s rarer for a sad ending to be satisfying in that way. Usually, you identify with the protagonists and don’t want them to come to harm. So I think the “logic” is: a happy ending could just be serving the “lowest” kind of pleasure reading, whereas you wouldn’t bother with a sad ending, which goes counter to your affection for the characters, unless you really felt it was necessary. Obviously that’s shaky logic: just because there’s one more stupid reason to write happy endings doesn’t mean there are fewer smart reasons to write happy endings or dumb reasons to write sad ones. Plenty of happy endings are necessary to the plot, and plenty of sad endings aren’t, as several folks have said above.
In an NPR interview, Jeffrey Eugenides makes this interesting comment:
“The stories in this collection are by no means tragic, but in order to even get to a measure of happiness, the characters usually have to go through a lot of difficulty.”
To me, that sounds exactly like good romance writing—characters face obstacles, they meet the challenges thus represented, and then they can be together. It isn’t easy, which is what makes it satifying when they succeed.
Is it less satisfying if you know (because of the “rules” of the genre) that they will succeed? Maybe for some readers, but there is a long tradition of genre in literature—following the rules well is an achievement in itself. Tragedy, comedy, melodrama all have rules—is a Greek tragedy less exciting because you know who is going to die at the end? Not so you’d notice, given centuries of their popularity. Is a sonnet less enjoyable than free verse, because you know there will only be fourteen lines and the last two are gonna rhyme? Not according to a lot of us.
I do think that the association of happy endings with children’s literature is a part of the perception problem that the romance genre faces. The rest is, I fear, the willingness of some people to judge the genre by its worst examples, specifically some bad category writing. That’s one difference between romance fiction and “literary” fiction—there’s no market for a whole lot of the novels that get written for the literary market, as compared to the sheer volume of category romance publishing.
I agree with others here that it’s the “ever after” part that bothers people, even though most romance novels don’t really say that. The characters overcome the obstacles that kept them apart, but obviously would face other obstacles and challenges in the future. They’ll just be facing them together. Is that not “real” or true-to-life? It’s sure a lot like MY life!
The choice to stop the story at a happy point isn’t a weak one—if anything, writing characters who believably solve problems and defeat obstacles is a bigger challenge than just writing characters who fail. I admire those writers. Moreover, in my experience, the people who read and enjoy those happy endings are by and large people who are caring, compassionate, and willing to work hard to make life happier for themselves and others.
Note to self: margaritas make me garrulous and sappy. Time to stop.
I think the main question is the worth of the reading experience. But really…
So what if I read to escape?
I don’t do it to the detriment of my real life; I have traveled extensively, accomplished many of my life goals and have a fulfilling career and relationship.
Why should I eschew reading books purely for enjoyment? I don’t read to challenge myself, or better myself, or enrich my mind; I do it to have a good time. If everyone dies at the end, or nothing gets resolved because “OMG real life is like that” I don’t have a good time.
What’s wrong with that?
Sorry for all of the quotes, but I wanted to keep straight for myself what I was responding to. Fair warning—this is long and kind of meanders. Enter at your risk.
megalith states that it isn’t quite fair to equate modern experiments with literary snobbery and to a certain extent, that’s true. Yes, there was a desire to experiment with something new and break away from the stylistic constraints of the past, but there has to be some consideration with why there was such a wholesale rejection of earlier styles and why it shifted in such a bleak direction. I believe that Candy is right that you can see the anger, fear, and despair of the artists born and reared in the period encompassing WWI to WWII in the art and literature of the time. That said, I think that bleakness and/or a certain opaqueness has become codified, academically, as the standard for “serious” work. I know that with visual art, there is a definite line between “serious art” and “pretty pictures” and that line tends to be whether or not it is easily accessible to the general public, as opposed to the sophisticated, learned art critic. It is, after all, easy to see the beauty of a pretty picture and any bourgeouis housewife or average joe in the street can point it out. It’s harder to find the beauty in something abstract and/or raw or something the average person would see as ugly. You have to be very sophisticated and intellectual to appreciate the beauty of something that goes against the established aesthetic. To see the beauty in exquisite pain, sorrow, and suffering. To grasp the beauty of the Concept instead of focusing on the rendering of it. So, em dash was right, too. (Before anyone blasts me for the condescending, blatantly intellectual snobbery above, I’m just presenting the argument, not advocating it.)
This idea of what is Art has created, simultaneously, an idea of art that is very inclusive and very exclusive. Yes, it’s irritating and, in my opinion, intellectually dishonest to disregard anything beautiful as simplistic, unsophisticated, and not-art. Obviously, there is beauty (and happiness, joy, lightheartedness, and love) in the world, just as there is ugliness. However, since the idea of what is beautiful is entirely subjective and based upon cultural norms, anyone not of that culture was excluded or marginalized as the exotic Other. Groups that were previously marginalized or not represented at all now have a much stronger voice in the art world—a voice they were denied when the aesthetic was one based entirely on Beauty.
So, what does this have to do with HEA in literature? Well, in my opinion, just as the anti-aesthetic has become codified in the art world, I think that bleakness and suffering has become codified in the literary world. It’s considered easier to like (write, read, etc) a happy book about happy people who have a happy ending and more sophisticated to find the beauty in a bleak book about unhappy people who all die or live on the rest of their days in quiet desperation and misery. Frankly, I think it’s all a bunch of hooey. People are many things at different times in their lives and to say that the only “good books” are ones that end badly is what is trite, not the happy endings. If the characters are fully formed and the plot moves them along in such a way that tragedy is the only way the story should end, then fine. But if the plot moves them along in such a way that happiness is a perfectly valid choice, doesn’t it make the literary book just as formulaic as any genre book if it ends in tragedy just to fulfill some idea that it has to in order to be considered serious, good, and well-written?
Zadie Smith’s marvelous White Teeth is a fantastic modern literary novel with a happy ending—it’s not a perfect ending, but it’s happy, and it’s fulfilling.
I could be wrong, but I feel like the British literary establishment, on the whole, tends to do nuanced happy endings better than the American literary establishment.
I blame Hemingway. Of course, I blame Hemingway for a lot of things. Still working out how to pin global warming on him.
Snarkhunter: Think of all the pictures of Hemingway holding up carcasses of creatures he’d killed. According to Bill Maher, our insistence of chowing down on animal flesh is the main cause for global warming. Could you pin global warming on Hemingway because he was clearly a macho carnivore?
Just trying to help. 🙂
Also, as an English teacher: I can tell you that our school system definitely encourages the “Gloom and Doom” portrayal of literature. God forbid you teach an Austen novel in K-12. Or that the Shakespeare play you pick up is (gasp!) a comedy. And this is actually a problem, because students (a) assume that canonical literature is always depressing and (b) don’t know how to read for tone. You hand them a satirical or humorous piece to analyze on the AP test and they’re all like, “Comedy? What is that?”
Sad, sad, sad.
Tryst by Elswyth Thane.
I think happy endings are seen as unrealistic because the only real ending to a life is death (and most of us aren’t particularly happy about death). So any ending which doesn’t have a metaphorical echo of death strikes us as unrealistic. I doubt most people think it through that much, but that’s what I think is behind it.
Margaret Atwood has a wonderful story about this called “Happy Endings” – she provides a bunch of possible endings for a story, and then she says:
The only authentic ending is the one provided here:
John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.
So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’d the hardest to do anything with.
That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
Now try How and Why.
I agree with Tina – the idea that you can’t have “literary” fiction with a happy ending is a lot of hooey. It reminded me of something Sue Monk Kidd said about writing the ending of The Secret Life of Bees. She pondered over her ending, not being able to figure out where Lily would end up, “influenced, too, by my impression (right or wrong) that ‘happy endings’ in literary novels were often sneered at.” Fortunately, she overcame that, ending with an entirely satisfactory and (I think) believable resolution to Lily’s fate.
I read literary novels. But it’s like food. I couldn’t survive solely on salad and whole grain bread – I need a little chocolate too. And chocolate is good for me. It makes me happy. The dark stuff has antioxidants.
Happy endings are my chocolate. After a day of dealing with the job, the house, the kids, and the bills, I need to know that life, for at least a select few characters, will turn out just fine. Maybe there are no antioxidants, but I’m sure the relaxation helps lower my blood pressure. Just a little.
I think that, if people do view the happy ending as inferior, it’s simply because of the very things you object to in this post – the contrived stories that inexpertly shove everything toward a happy ending, where everything is predictable and goes step by step through their formulaic points. And the ones that maybe aren’t formulaic, but that are forced to wobble around in the shallow end of the pool because the author doesn’t know how to deal with real emotions and real life issues and still have the happy ending that they are determined to get to.
Also, I LOVE this:
“If a romance novel hero has a fairly severe case of PTSD, I don’t expect him to be fixed by the end of 400 pages, though I want him to find an avenue for future healing and happiness…”
SERIOUSLY. I really love books that deal with abuse, addiction, and recovery, books where the author is emotionally intelligent and understands cause and effect and the psychology of experience, and how to show people developing in their life. And I hate it when the author seems to be fumbling around and attributing every character aspect to “that’s just who she/he is!” and has no interest in exploring that or bringing them toward healing and happiness.
A lot of chick lit has trouble with this stuff; like, I love the giddy acting-out and chaos in the Shopaholic books, but at this point in the series I am DYING for the author to make something else happen with it, let us see how she deals with her spending addiction and how that changes things and what stays the same, instead of just writing the same basic book over again and only changing relationship details.
I’m probably crazy, but I seem to remember that Eugenides’s own Middlesex ended on a less-than-tragic note (something about Cal and a girlfriend).
I have to be in a particularly weird mood to want a non-happy ending. I have no interesting views as to why HEAs are not usually considered ‘good’ or ‘real’, but you all seem to be doing awfully well on your own.