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364 “Misty Water-Colored Memories of the Way We Were . . .” Postfeminist nostalgia in Contemporary romance narratives Katie, the female protagonist played by Barbra Streisand in the 1973 romance film The Way We Were, is presumably the subject speaking the lines from the film’s theme song, from which this article takes its title. The lyrics to the song express ambivalence about the role that time plays in the process of making sense of romance and suggest that events from the past—in the case of this film, a romance from the past—can only be seen via hazy memories that obscure the clarity of the events as they actually occurred and diminish the intensity of the emotion that accompanied them. The song goes on to question, “Could it be that it was all so simple then, or has time rewritten every line?” which suggests a muddled distinction between recalling the past as it really happened, and the sort of revisionism inherent in recollection that transforms the historical and personal past to fit one’s own present subjectivity. The setting of The Way We Were in the oft-romanticized World War II and postwar era, the film’s basic flashback structure, and the lyrics of its prescient theme song are examples of how issues of temporality, history , and subjectivity often become inextricably intertwined in romance texts. In fact, since the release of The Way We Were in 1973, a subgenre of contemporary film and television romance texts has emerged in which “timelessness” is no longer just a thematic element but serves an increasingly prominent and explicit narrative function. Some groups of texts of this type include the “what if” narrative, such as The Family Man (dir. ratner , 2000) and Me Myself I (dir. Karmel, 1999); the forking-path narrative, such as Sliding Doors (dir. Howitt, 1998) and Groundhog Day (dir. ramis, 1993); and the “time travel as matchmaker” narrative, such as Somewhere 05 Chapters_17_20.indd 364 1/13/10 12:02 PM 365 Postfeminist Nostalgia in Contemporary Romance Narratives in Time (dir. Szwarc, 1980) Kate and Leopold (dir. Mangold, 2001), The Lake House (dir. Agresti, 2006), and The Time Traveler’s Wife (dir. Schwentke , 2009). Here I will focus on another of these groups of temporally engaged romance texts—the nostalgia narrative, which is a contemporary text that features characters who revere a classic fictional romance text and seek within it insight into their present-day romantic trials and tribulations . I will argue that in the texts Sex and the City—specifically the final episode from the series’ second season titled “Ex and the City”—and the film Sleepless in Seattle (dir. Ephron, 1993), nostalgia is representative of a broader postfeminist cultural trend—seen in other media forms and neoconservative “feminist” writing—in which the reflection on, or imitation of, the prefeminist period (both real and fictional) is implicitly (and often explicitly) encouraged as a means of resolving complex postfeminist quandaries , specifically those related to female identity and romantic relationships . Both texts illustrate how nostalgia functions as a sort of therapeutic discourse through which women, individually and collectively, negotiate their ambivalence about their role in contemporary culture—wanting to be autonomous, professionally successful, and economically independent individuals while at the same time desiring traditional love narratives in which their identity becomes subsumed by the promise of heterosexual coupling and marriage. The nostalgia of the female characters in Sex and Sleepless reveals how much women’s roles and courtship rituals have changed over the course of recent history (in the case of these two texts—since the World War II and postwar period) and imply that inherent in women’s postfeminist identity is an impulse to reconcile the past, present, and future simultaneously. However, the fact that nostalgia here is completely disconnected from a genuine recollection of, or longing for, the actual, lived historical past (and its accompanying sociopolitical ramifications) but rather is predicated on a desire for the seemingly purer, tidily packaged vision of romantic relationships represented in fictional texts produced in, and/or depicting, past historical periods, is suggestive of a collapse of boundaries between fiction and reality, subjectivity and objectivity. I will explore how the language of nostalgia in these two texts is a way of understanding postfeminist culture’s conflation of the history and politics of feminism with fictional discourses. Two main areas will be addressed . First, I will consider how nostalgia allows women (both inside and outside of the text) to fulfill their desire to “have it...

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