Awakening to the classic romance theme
Boy meets girl in the fairy tale
It’s a given that the heroine must be equal to the hero in taking an active role in their story. Our current culture dictates it, and it’s expected in the structuring of classic ‘boy meets girl’ romance themes. The allure of this theme is not found in a syrupy, ‘you complete me’ message, but one that boldly asks ‘what is it about you that makes me realize my own completeness?’
This is the awakening to love process, and it works whether she* or he initiates it. This is what reveals the essence of true love, that ephemeral something that flows between the lines of romance novels we love.
Revolutionizing the classic fairy tale
In the romance novel as revolutionized fairy tale, romantic love inspires spiritual completion by staying true to current standards and the fairy tale’s classic appeal. One of my favorite examples is Sleeping Beauty.
It’s fair to argue that its premise just doesn’t fit our framework. Who needs to be rescued? Who wants to bear the weight of responsibility for someone else? But there may be no way around that; traditional fairy tale plotting can have embedded twists and turns through fate that demand a rescue.
My great great-grandmother’s portrait hung in the monastery up until the Revolution. By then, the truth of the rumors had dissolved into a simple fairy tale. And, while Cinderella and her prince did live happily ever after, the point, gentlemen, is that they lived.
Wendy Loggia does this well in the treatment of the ‘boy-meets-girl’ theme in Ever After, her retelling of Cinderella. You find that these lovers stood on equal footing in her novel. The film version carries it off as well.
Maybe someone will be inspired to recreate Sleeping Beauty with a spiritual motif. There’s plenty of inspiration in the classic tale, which builds around the point of the prince and princess’ meeting. They fall in love the moment he wakes her with his kiss.
Many creators including film directors in other genres use this theme, the dream preceding love. In the opening scene of Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock uses it to heighten suspense in his masterful rendering of ‘the kiss’.
Awakened by Love
In the spiritual enlightenment process, the initiate is ‘asleep’, lulled by the outer demands and rote familiarity of her surroundings. When she begins to pay attention, to look at life as it truly is, she opens herself to the ‘awakener’.
Who is this awakener? He can be a person, though more often it comes through as an experience. Her focus on what’s truly happening in the moment reveals the depth of her expansion. Suddenly her senses are sharper, heightened. In this way the initiate’s spiritual awakening process is like romantic love.
Or is it the other way around?
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*My use of the personal pronouns ‘his’ and ‘her’ is to convey my sense of the character’s role, especially as it relates to the structuring of the romantic fairy tale and it’s boy-neets-girl theme development.
