We Love Our Star-Crossed Love, Plus a Contest!!
Clichés, I think, are only clichés if you’re older. If
you’re younger—say the target audience for YA novels, then they’re not so much
clichés as they are patterns. Or maybe just plot ideas and character types that
you really, really enjoy even—or especially— if they’re familiar.
I was chatting just a few days ago with author Jennifer
Mathieu (The Truth About Alice and the forthcoming Devoted) about the cliché,
if you will, of star-crossed lovers. Jen teaches junior and senior high English
when she’s not writing (and possibly sometimes when she is!) and next up was
Romeo and Juliet and she was looking for some fresh ideas. (Let me add that as
a classroom teacher for a number of years, I seriously question the subliminal
message of teaching R&J to 8th graders. Because really, what are
we telling them? Fall in love fast and if it doesn’t work out, you can always
off yourselves? The snark aside, it’s a serious issue if you’re a career
secondary school teacher. Some years it feels like the death curriculum. R &J,
Antigone, Caesar, Hamlet (they all die in a heap in that one!). Or 1984. I
began wondering aloud a few years back what would happen if Katniss Everdeen
wandered over and showed Winston Smith how to fight back. Although even Katniss
would have trouble with the whole ‘we’re going to put your head in a cage of
rats’ thing. Or whatever.)
Anyway, back to Jen and star-crossed love. Have them write
about THAT, I told her. Why are we so devoted to that cliché? Why is it so
satisfying and pervasive? And not just when we’re teenagers, although that’s
prime time. Because let’s face it. When you’re sixteen, you feel that everybody
but you is controlling your life. You’re powerful and powerless all at the same
time and one of the few things you at least think you can control is who you fall in
love with. And if it’s someone your parents disapprove of, then hooray, all the
better. Nothing makes one happier at sixteen than having a reason to feel
misunderstood—mostly because we often ARE misunderstood at sixteen. And adults
don’t always respect our ideas and our personhood. Even when they think they
do, we still don’t feel that way.
As the queen of star-crossed love, Buffy Summers once said
of her vampire boyfriend Angel, “You can hurt me, you can send assassins after
me, but nobody messes with my boyfriend.”
Buffy, of course, was star-crossed angsting over Angel long
before a certain Bella Swan fell for sparkly Edward. (okay, you can see which
side of that battle I’m on. Because seriously? Vampires Do. Not. Sparkle.) But
whether Twilight or BTVS, we love the star-crossed love. (Okay, another thing.
That easily won happily ever after at the end of Twilight. It bugs me. Sorry.
It does. Now if Bella became a vampire and then ate her parents like Angel did,
now that would be cool.)
So clichés. Not so much clichés as much as patterns we love.
I’d have to brush up on my Jung to tell you if this takes us into archetype
territory. (I confess, I’m a lazy academic these days.) But let’s face facts.
We love it. Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles; The Mortal Instruments series
by Cassie Clare; the aforementioned Twilight; the ‘everybody who isn’t under a
rock has read it’ Fault in Our Stars;
Almost every dystopian novel out there; a bunch of
Shakespeare; a bunch of Greek myths like Pyramus and Thisbe; Joaquin Phoenix
and his cell phone; that couple in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; every
Jennifer Lopez romance; Reese Whitherspoon and the guy who looks exactly like
Matthew Mcconaughey in Sweet Home Alabama. John Cusak and Kate Beckinsdale in
Serendipity. And a million trillion others.
So yeah. Don’t mock my true love for the star-crossed lovers
cliché!
And in honor of Valentine’s Day next week (which has very
unromantic roots in the Festival of Lupercal, which begins Shakespear’s Caesar,
a play which has no romance whatsoever, just a bunch of idiots falling on their
swords and ignoring portents), I set the following challenge:
Discuss star-crossed
love using only Candy Conversation Hearts.
Take a picture of your efforts and
post it on your social media and Tweet me the link. I’m at joypreble
The best one will win
the entire DREAMING ANASTASIA trilogy, my homage to star-crossed love! (Domestic US only)
Contest open until 2/15/15. Winner announced on my own blog.
I think we like star-crossed lovers because "A meets B, they fall in love and have a smooth courtship and nothing goes wrong" is too boring to read about. ;-)
ReplyDeleteGreat post, Joy and you've got me remembering my own high school English teacher days. It IS all about death in that curriculum. Thantatopsis and The Crucible and Emily Dickinson and Gatsby-- and that was just American literature. One of my students asked me once, "Why do these people only write about death?" I said, "I guess because we all die." Thank God there's some love in there--even the cliche kind-- to keep us going on our way to the grave : )
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