The 2005 film Pride and Prejudice ends with Mr. Darcy striding across the dewy morning marshes, shirt unbuttoned to strategically expose chest hair, and taking his lady love (played by Keira Knightley) in his muscled arms. Such a florid ending is not to be found in Jane Austen’s novel. The characters of her books experience romance in a structured relationship within familiar bounds, “experienced not as a rupture or a break in one’s everyday life,” a far cry from the dime-novel romance that many modern fans look for in her work. Necking in the mist wasn’t in the playbook.
The rigidities and dignities of Austen’s world are a favorite example in Eva Illouz’s new book Why Love Hurts, as a reminder that our contemporary experience and understanding of courtship is very much embedded in our historical moment. Why Love Hurts is an in-depth analysis of the reasons our contemporary understanding of romance fails to satisfy so many of us. The book attempts to properly contextualize our unique experience of love, presenting a counter-narrative to simplistic psychological (“what’s wrong with me?”) and socio-biological (“men are just naturally like that”) explanations that dominate our modern understanding of romance.
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