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5 For the Love of Mermaids, Beasts, and Vampires (and Ghosts, Robots, Monsters, Witches, and Aliens) Romancing the Other There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. —Carson McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Café, 1951 Who is lovable and who is not? What sort of person deserves love, and why? Many stories turn on the matter of whom we may love, which is often another way of asking what kind of love is forbidden or out of bounds. When love stories address these important questions, what they answer gives us a yardstick for how we readers measure up. In the weave of their narratives are instructions as to how to locate ourselves within the social order, where we fit or how we stand out against the framework of society. Either way, these tales are expressions of value, inevitably our own worth measured against others. Comparison is suggested by difference, and it’s the nature of stories themselves to organize the world by focusing our gaze on a stated or implied asymmetry or aberration—one that often narrows down to Us (normal, ordinary, human) and Him/Her/It as Other, as if all shades and nuances are dissolved in the distinction. To play along, which is to say to enter into the story, we must forget the arbitrariness of the dividing line. Just as almost any two phenomena can appear to have a family resemblance, nearly anything can appear to us as the Other. The world can all too easily be made over into opposites and oppositions —alien and familiar, East and West, animal and human, black and white, or masculinity and femininity—if we invent and believe in the categories. And categories may be subdivided into warring factions: some women are treated as Other to other women, as is the heroine of The Scarlet Letter.1 For this reason it’s often the boundary between subject and Other that is meaningful: the limit where Otherness begins, and the reason it’s a boundary at 79 80 the glass slipper all. It usually turns out that the boundary of Otherness is what is left over when we have established what is “normal.” Stories about love for the Other have no singular function: they may seek to affirm that limit, undermine it, or evade the question by seeming to erase the border of difference. Flirting with dissolving the boundary by merging (as a couple) can be subversive or, paradoxically, can affirm the social need for difference (as when the tale of Cinderella celebrates the idea of privilege even while uniting its cross-class lovers). When this difference serves our purposes, it’s emphasized; when it serves us to imagine that we are all alike, or all one, it disappears. In the modern era, with its ideal of individual worth, we love the idea that the Other is really just like us under the skin (as in a cross-cultural romance like West Side Story). One way a story of boundaries provides us with meaning is that difference itself may stimulate romantic attraction. Conversely, one way to give meaning to romance is to make Otherness the narrative problem that drives the story. Modern romance ideology takes two opposing sides on likeness, namely that a) opposites attract, and b) we love others because we have so much in common with them. Oddly, no one seems bothered by this conceptual paradox. Furthermore , lovers who are too different may be threatening to social harmony (such as interracial couples until fairly recently), but lovers who are too much alike (for example, of the same sex) can be equally threatening. A complication of investigating heterosexual Otherness in romance is that gender itself is commonly conceived as the pairing of opposing forces, as in the familiar rhetoric of “the opposite sex” or Mars and Venus.2 “Hetero,” after all, means other/different, though not necessarily opposite, and gender itself is a system of social difference. Love stories of the gendered Other often explain and justify the “inherently” different nature of males and females by upholding the concept of sexual complementarity in love, illustrating the theory with successful couplings of super-feminine women and super-masculine men. Heterosexual romances thrive on the idea of the Otherness of the sexes as first an attraction, then a problem, and finally a union or meshing of “opposites.” “Tale as old as time”: Loving a Stranger/Superhero/ Wild Man/Monster/Enchantress From traditional folktale to modern film and...

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