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4 Victorian Desires and Modern Romances Pocahontas on a Bridge in Madison County I gave my family my life. —Francesca in The Bridges of Madison County, Robert Waller, 1992 When scholars have studied contemporary romances, they have often viewed them as an opportunity to examine the conservative, if not regressive, view of gender in our society. More recently, they have been celebrated as implicitly feminist and subversive. But these are not the only ways to look at the modern popular story of love. Even more interesting and useful is to see how conservative views can be united with progressive ideas, or sometimes disguised in seemingly modern forms, and to ask who benefits from that odd union. As a case study, I would like to compare two enormously popular romances with wide distribution in the same decade: the hugely successful novel by Robert Waller, The Bridges of Madison County (1992), which remained on the New York Times best-seller list for three years, and the Disney animated children ’s film Pocahontas (1995), based on a legendary American heroine. Their audiences were very different: Bridges was aimed at romance-loving women, but particularly older women like its heroine, while Pocahontas appeals to children of all ages, as they say, but was particularly designed for and marketed to very young girls. The Bridges of Madison County, the novel and the 1995 film of the same name directed by Clint Eastwood, concerns a repressed middle-aged housewife who has a brief romantic encounter with a passing photographer, or what Amazon. com calls “an experience of uncommon truth and stunning beauty that will 70 Victorian Desires and Modern Romances 71 haunt them forever.” The figure of Pocahontas, of course, is an icon of American culture who does seem to have been haunting all of us forever. Waller’s novel is a “romantic classic” of the 1990s; Pocahontas draws on historical narrative, centuries old. The plot, characters, and settings of these two appear to have nothing in common. What connects them, however, is their direct ancestry in a very old story about women that was still being told over and over, under the cover of contemporary issues and views: a story about female desire, where it may be directed , and when it is imperative that it remain unfulfilled. For example, that best-selling Victorian arbiter of female taste and morality Sarah Stickney Ellis, writing in one of her many manuals on the subject of proper womanhood, rhetorically asked, “For what is she [Woman] the most valued, admired and beloved?” promptly answering herself, “For her disinterested kindness. Look at all the heroines, whether of romance or reality—at all the female characters that are held up to universal admiration—at all who have gone down to honored graves, amongst the tears and the lamentations of their survivors. Have these been the learned, the accomplished women? No, or if they have, they have also been women who were dignified with moral greatness” (The Women of England, 1839). And how do women best achieve “moral greatness”? By pursuing a goal “unconnected with their own personal exaltation and enjoyment,” said Ellis, related only to “some beloved object, whose suffering was their sorrow, whose good their gain.” In a word: self-denial, for loved ones or for the larger good. How, then, has our idea of female desire changed over time (or not), and how does this supposed change appear so that it may be enjoyed by a modern mass audience? The story of female desire denied and therefore ennobled is a traditional one in the genre of the novel, but after the Second Wave of feminism and the social transformation in attitudes and practices concerning sexuality in the sixties and seventies, one would expect a change in popular narratives preoccupied with female passion. You would think that novels and movies would treat this subject with far more frankness and openness, a greater range of possible endings, and, not least, a more progressive social agenda.1 Instead, these two contemporary stories astonishingly remind me of nothing so much as the high Victorian novel, in which passion is always at war with duty. As in Victoriana, female desire is presented as so dangerous to a stable moral, social, and familial order that it must be contained by conversion to domesticity or utterly renounced in some way. Think of Jane Eyre’s marriage to the crippled would-be adulterer Rochester, or Catherine Earnshaw’s death before she dare consummate her forbidden love for...

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