It's the pursuit of love and happiness that is the driving force of the romantic novel.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Romance novels satisfy a very specific fantasy of romantic love that seems to be a powerful part of the female psyche.
A romantic novel is an adult fairy story, repeating the recurring symbols and images which can explain life to a woman and satisfy a powerful need within her. The need to love and be loved is vital to all human beings, but especially to women.
Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.
Any kind of novelty or excitement drives up dopamine in the brain, and dopamine is associated with romantic love.
Love is simply the name for the desire and the pursuit of the whole.
Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.
I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it's not part of a sensible way of living. It's a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it's a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive.
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.