1. Romance: A Definition

A fictional story in verse or prose that relates improbable adventures of idealized characters in some remote or enchanted setting: or, more generally, a tendency in fiction opposite to that of REALISM. The term now embraces many forms of fiction from the GOTHIC NOVEL and the popular escapist love story to the 'scientific romances' of H. G. Wells, but it usually refers to the tales of King Arthur's knights written in the late Middle Ages by Chrétien de Troyes (in verse). Sir Thomas Malory (in prose), and many others (see chivalric romance). Medieval romance is distinguished from EPIC by its concentration on COURTLY LOVE rather than warlike heroism. Long, elaborate romances were written during the RENAISSANCE, including Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532), Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590-6), and Sir Philip Sidney's prose romance Arcadia (1590), but Cervantes's PARODY of romances in Don Quixote (1605) helped to undermine this tradition. Later prose romances differ from novels in their preference for ALLEGORY and psychological exploration rather than realistic social observation, especially in American works like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852). Several modern literary GENRES, from SCIENCE FICTION to the detective story, can be regarded as variants of the romance (See also FANTASY, MARVELLOUS). In modern criticism of Shakespeare, the term is also applied to four of his last plays---Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest--- which are distinguished by their daring use of magical illusion and improbable reunions. The Romance languages are those languages originating in southern Europe that are derived from Latin: the most important of these are Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. In Spanish literature, the term has a special sense, the romance being a BALLAD composed in OCTOSYLLABIC lines.

2. Bloom on The Eve of St. Agnes

In The Eve of St. Agnes, Keats comes close to so prodigious a conception. His lovers are completely physical in a physical world, and their sensuous concreteness is emphasized by an ironic interplay with worlds that fail to be completely physical, whether by an extreme resort to spirituality or by a grossness that abolishes the individuality of the atoms of perception which make up Keats's human reality. The "spiritual" that seeks to establish itself by denying life and "life's high meed," death, is the more important of these juxtaposing realms in the poem(p. 370).

At the heart of the poem (stanzas 29-36) Keats strives to suggest a supreme intensity by particularizing a wealth of concrete sensuous details, which not only deliberately confuse and mix senses, but tend to carry the other senses over into the tactile. Salvation, according to The Eve of St. Agnes, is only through the intense manifestation of all phenomena as being truly themselves. The lovers are saved by surrendering themselves to a world of objects, and to one another(p. 371).

(From The Visionary Company)

3. Eros and Romance

Yet Keats moves beyond irony, including the historicizing irony that distances the beliefs of "old Romance." His impulse, indeed his devotion, is to discover a new eroticized romance, with eros not as a power of dubious enchantment but as a means of connecting with the physical world. The quest of Keats's lovers is not for any world of wish-fulfillment(Frye), nor for the powers of the wishing self(Harold Bloom), but for an erotic reality that fulfills even as one strips away the self's illusions. As Porphyro proclaims to Madline in The Eve of St. Agnes after they make love, "this is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!"(326)(p. 58)...

Sexuality offers Porphyro and Madeline a way to heal the splits in their world, ¡°saved by miracle¡± (339). Having framed their erotic romance in opposition to life-denying religion (the Beadsman), to the riots of the merely material (the foemen), and to fairy-fancy ¡°all amort,¡± Keats wants his lovers to discover a physical reality that has the value of an ideal, that offers earth as heaven. The lovers escape to another realm – ¡°o¡¯er the southern moors I have a home for thee,¡± Porphyro promises Madeline (51)– leaving this cloven world to collapse into nightmares and death(p.65).

Together, Lamia, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes combine a critique of society's mishandling of desire with an argument for the erotic as a power of social transformation. Beyond Lamia's triangular of desire and Isabella's privatized emotion, The Eve of St. Agnes reclaims the immediacy and power of erotic pleasure, fulfilling, on the far side of irony, the liberatory, salvific promise suggested in the preceding poems. As McGann writes of Shelley, "Eroticism[...] is the imagination's last line of human resistance against [...] political despotism and moral righteousness on the one hand, and on the other selfishness, calculation, and social indifference(p. 66) (Jeffrey N. Cox  in The Cambridge Companion to Keats)

4. "Romance as Wish-Fullfullment" by Stuart Sperry

Although it is often taken as such, St. Agnes is not primarily a glorification of sexual experience or even, for all the condensed richness of its imagery, of the human senses. It is, rather, an exceptionally subtle study of the psychology of the imagination and its processes, a further testing, pursued more seriously in some of the poet's later verse, of the quality and limits of poetic belief. More than anything else, perhaps, the element most central to the poem is its concern with wish-fulfillment, a fundamental aspect of romance...There is no need for elaborate  Freudian analysis to see that the major action of the poem is essentially a drama of wish-fulfillment, a testimony to the power of human desire to realize itself...Such formulation enables us to see the poem plainly for what it is, and yet paradoxically could cause us to miss its real artistry. For if within the literature of English Romanticism The Eve of St. Agnes is a supreme example of art as wish-fulfillment, it is nevertheless, as we have party seen, a wish-fulfillment of an exceptionally practiced and self-conscious kind that gives the work its essential character. The poem, that is, achieves its magic, but only in such a way as to dramatize the particular tensions that oppose it and the kinds of device it must employ in overcoming them-repression, anxiety, disguise, censorship, sublimation.

(Keats The Poet, pp. 202-205)

5. The Wasserman-Stillinger-Sperry debate

Earl R. Wasserman argued for the essential seriousness of The Eve of St. Agnes, constructing an elaborate reading of the poem as a profound allegory of the soul's ascent. Porphyro's progress through the castle and up into Madeline's bedroom symbolises a pilgrimage to 'heaven's bourne' and the sexual union of the lovers represents 'a mystic blending of mortality and immortality'. Jack Stillinger replied to Wasserman in 'The Hoodwinking of Madeline'(1961) which rejects both the rhapsodic eulogies of the 'Eve' and what he saw as the over-extended metaphorical readings of 'metaphysical' critics such as Wasserman. Stillinger's provocative reading sees the poem as an anti-romance. Porphyro is a 'peeping Tom' who achieves his desires through deviousness, and the sexual encounter between Porphyro and Madeline, echoing as it does Lovelace's rape of the unconscious Clarissa in Richardson's novel of that name, is sordid and close to violation. On the other hand, To Stuart Sperry, the 'union of the two lovers in no way resembles rape or even a seduction of the ordinary kind'. Instead, when Madeline 'awakes, or half-awakes from her dream, she recognises Porphyro, after a moment of painful confusion, not just as a mortal lover, but also as a part of her dream, a part of her vision and her desire, and she accepts him as her lover. There is an accommodation, one that is neither easy nor untroubled, between imagination and reality'.