How Romance Reverses Determinist Naturalism
“What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A Beast, no more.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 4.
Romance is partially known for its reliance on tropes, more as a means of driving marketing and informing character, but these can sometimes catch criticism of their own that feeds into the general disdain for the romantic art form. One of the more controversial is the “fated mates” trope which seems to rob characters of agency, moral choice, or even their own emotions.
From a literary point of view, this smacks of rank naturalism the metaphysical aspect of which is determinism. But when you examine the trope when it actually plays out in a novel, or a series of novels, this criticism doesn’t actually hold up.
A Beast, No More
Naturalism in literature was a response too the introduction of Darwinian thought in science. Hitherto, there had been a sort of positive pseudo-Christian humanism ruling the arts: the idea that humans may be imperfect but improving the world was possible through conscious effort.
In other words, humankind was more than merely animal and possessed something other that set them apart. This was the view in both Romanticism and Realism. Naturalism, took a very different view:
“The naturalistic view of human beings is that of animals in the natural world responding to environmental forces and internal stresses and drives, none of which they can control or understand.” (Harmon and Holman 342)
In short, human beings are nothing more than animals—advanced animals, granted, but the victims of their responses to external and internal stimuli. This fatalist view is known by another name too: scientific determinism, and determinism is, according to G. K. Chesterton “the worst chain that ever fettered a human being” (30).
Determinism posits that everything that happens is either fated or fore-ordained to happen.
Scientific determinism is therefore, in a sense, the forerunner of both the modern-day disaster movie and the science fiction genre. It’s the total opposite of both the Enlightenment and Romantic Movement where humankind has the capability and agency to make choices and to live in a way that is not determined by chance but by reason.
Morality in naturalism/scientific determinism ultimately has no meaning—making choices also meaningless. This means greatness has no meaning, nobleness has no meaning, and love has no meaning—all of those things are the result of impulses.
Ayn Rand perhaps describes naturalism the best in The Romantic Manifesto. Now, I want to frame the quote I’m about to present because I know Rand herself is controversial, but while you may disagree with her virulently on other topics, her theory of aesthetics is one of the most robustly pro-genre fiction of any theory I’ve come across. Take the quote below, and you’ll find that everything she names is basically what makes genre fiction popular:
“Naturalists consigned the exceptional man to unreality and presented only the men who could be taken as typical of some group or another, high or low. Then, since they saw more misery than prosperity on earth, they began to regard prosperity as unreal and to present only misery, poverty, the slums, the lower classes. Then, since they saw more mediocrity than greatness around them, they began to regard greatness as unreal, and to present only the mediocre, the average, the common, the undistinguished. Since they saw more failure than success, they took success to be unreal and presented only human failure, frustration, defeat. Since they saw more suffering than happiness, they took happiness to be unreal and presented only suffering. Since they saw more ugliness than beauty, they took beauty to be unreal and presented only ugliness. Since they saw more vice than virtue they took virtue to be unreal and presented only vice, crime, corruption, perversion, depravity” (125).
What Rand is saying here isn’t that things like misery, failure, mediocrity, ugliness, or suffering aren’t worth writing about—Victor Hugo whom she practically idolized wrote about all those things. Dickens wrote about the slums and the poor but he wasn’t a Naturalist either. So, while it may be tempting to see much of Rand’s class bias in this passage, you have to temper it with what she is actually attacking: she isn’t attacking authors who write about the poor, the ugly, or the failures to show us how there is dignity and greatness in those people. No, she’s attacking the writers who portray those people without anything to suggest they have innate dignity even in their mediocrity, failure, suffering, misery, or ugliness.
Rand is actually putting her finger on why novels like The Count of Monte Cristo and A Court of Thorns and Roses are popular bestsellers and why romance itself is now a multi-billion-dollar industry. Romance takes that which we would reject and makes us see the inherent dignity in those characters. It gives us a world that has love, reverence for fellow human beings, for the natural world, and it gladly tells the tale of how the son of a poor glover could become the greatest writer who ever lived.
Naturalism gives us a world devoid of love, reverence for the natural world, the sublime, the supernatural and replaces the genius of Shakespeare with an algorithm. Not entirely unlike today’s AI-driven tech companies.
Romances do not and cannot operate in such a world because if human beings are nothing more than the victims of their own impulses, then nothing becomes admissible and nothing anyone does has any moral value for good or for ill. Even love becomes meaningless in such a world. Romances both in the literature tradition and in the genre operate in worlds that demand morality and demand that characters make choices in spite of any “natural instincts.”
A Beast No More
The whole premise of the “fated mates” trope is the idea that there is exactly one person in all the world who is meant, if not entirely made for you and that once the “bond” is activated, it is permanent, irrevocable, and inexorable.
To all appearances, this is determinism at its most complete and the fact that the “fated mates” trope also often goes hand-in-hand with shifter romances emphasizing the animalistic naturalism that seems to be at play.
Yet, the overwhelming majority of these “fated mates” stories don’t fall into either the trap of determinism or naturalism because they emphasize choice.
In fact, the presence of choice in these fated mate stories often leads to another trope—the “rejected mate” which undercuts any notion that there are stories that rob characters of all agency.
Let’s take, for instance, Rhysand’s choice in A Court of Thorns and Roses to not reveal his mating bond with Feyre until about three quarters of the way through A Court of Mist and Fury. At the time, she was in love with Tamlin, and Rhysand chose to honor that instead of forcing himself on her. He even reveals that he was going to quietly dissolve the bargain he’d made with Feyre so that he would have no claim on her whatever. It’s when Feyre uses the bargain unwittingly to cry for help at her own wedding to Tamlin that Rhysand calls in its terms. Feyre actually has to make the final choice to allow the mate bond to solidify.
Another bonded pair, Elain and Lucien don’t even act on their bond. Lucien uses it once—and only in an effort to help Elain in A Court of Wings and Ruin but neither allow it to develop. Elain refuses to speak about it, and Lucien doesn’t press. Their bond is deferred rather than rejected.
So, yes, there is still “fate” involved, but the presence of fate doesn’t make choice irrelevant. If anything, it makes the choice more important. Both Feyre and Elain have to choose the bond. Rhysand even explicitly states in A Court of Wings and Ruin that the bond can be rejected. So, while you can’t choose the pull, you can choose whether to accept and act on it—just like any other “animal” instinct you may have.
This is not naturalist. This is not determinist. This is not reducing any living sentient being to a higher animal that behaves at the whim of it’s own instincts without knowing why. These are conscientious beings who, despite all cries of fate and prophecy, use their reason to make decisions.
The fated mates trope as it plays out on the page, is a complete reversal of the naturalist and determinist claims that all things are set in stone and that humankind is nothing but an animal acting on instincts. I gave Maas as an example for this essay, but she is not alone in her depiction of choice within the fated mates trope. So, the next time you sit down to read a novel and the trop shows up, I challenge you to look for how choice and agency are actually presented. Then, ask yourself if the author is presenting these characters as animals responding to instinct and stimuli or if they are truly beings with choice and agency.
My bet is that if it’s a romance you’re reading, the choices will still be there and still matter more than fate.
Did you spot it?
I chose to do something with the headings in this blog post: did you spot what it was? Let me know in the comments below.
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