Goddesses of Love: How the Romance Genre Has Embraced Feminine Myths and Archetypes PART 1
© Suzette L. Mako
PART 1/SUITE 101
by Suzette L. Mako
He hated to admit it, but she had a power over him that he couldn't, didn't want to, resist. He had travelled through time, from modern-day Manhattan to the side of a medieval maiden on the brink of womanhood, and he never wanted to return.
With her, he felt as though he were part of a great adventure, as if every fairy tale he'd ever scoffed at could be true. Though young, she had shown him wisdom, and a hope he'd denied he'd lost.
But now his hope was shattered again, for she had been taken from him. The man they called The Dragon held her in his lair. It was almost laughable: the fair damsel in distress, at the mercy of an evil dragon. But he couldn't laugh; he'd lived in Manhattan, after all, and knew what evil things men could do.
For the first time in his life, he reached for the Knight within him. As he fumbled with his armor - damn, but it was heavy! - and managed to strap on his sword without losing a finger, he thought of the last time he'd seen her. It seemed both moments and years ago.
"You must be a kind of goddess," he'd teased her, and she had just smiled.
"Of course I am," she'd said. "I'm a woman."
His woman. Riding not too well on his mighty destrier, he set forth on the quest to reclaim her.
Detractors of the Romance genre will say, "the stories are all the same. The same old themes and plots, given new faces and sent out as new." I couldn't agree more, and Bravo! to Romance for retaining a purity in storytelling that other genres deny.
In their simplest form, every story contains the elements of introduction, conflict, resolution. We meet the characters; they may be man and woman, man against man or woman against woman, even people against the forces of nature. The detail doesn't matter. They are presented with a problem: internal, external, it makes no difference. Somehow, they work toward a resolution, through quest, discovery, revelation. Resolution does not mean a happy ending; sometimes, in some genres, characters fail. Through myths and metaphors, stories are vehicles for exploring identity and emotion.
Remove any one of these elements and there is no story. At most there is an image, a feeling evoked. But in storytelling, whatever the mode, there is "nothing new under the sun." To deny that is to deny an ancient heritage that, over millennia, has created the Jungian "collective unconscious," a trove of themes and archetypes that resonate in the human mind and heart.
