Climbing out of the Bitter

"There is no remedy, no cure, for Love, no drink, no food, no spells to chant, nothing--only kisses and embraces and lying down naked together" (159). Like Jill's choice of a painting representation of Daphnis and Chloe, I chose this one because the colors of the lovers and the rocks all blend together. The pastoral lovers are a part of their landscape.

We would like to believe that imagination, when left to its own devices, produces original and fantastical work. However, this is not the case. Imagination is more inclined towards conventions and formulas than the fanciful. The actions described are external, not internal. However, these formulaic plots describing external events layer in such a way to describe our human internal structure: "The realist, with his sense of logical and horizontal continuity, leads us to the end of his story; the romancer, scrambling over a series of disconnected episodes, seems to be trying to get us to the top of it" (Frye 50) or "Perhaps literature as a whole, like so many works of literature, ends in much the same place that it begins" (Frye 51). Which seems to point to the function of romance is to lead us back to the beginning; back to our role as the wide eyed listener, the child with naive wonder and innocence. In Daphnis and Chloe, the world associated with this innocent child stage--the pastoral setting, the seasons of spring and summer, and the animals--are all associated with the innocent stage according to Frye. Daphnis and Chloe must eventually leave the idyllic for a world of conflict (and adventure, but of a less exciting variety). They endure a winter apart as well as unhappiness caused from a momentary apparent unequal birth. However, all is restored by the end with the mystery of birth solved, and the plot climbs out of the nightmare world of discontent to the top again--the happy ending. It returns to the same state of happiness depicted at the start, but innocence is lost. To fulfill the conventions of romance and complete the mandatory happy ending, the woman must lose her virginity. "That thing that they do must be something sweet, something that wipes out the bitterness of love" (D&C 179). The bitterness of love is the conflict of the romance, the loss of virginity the resolution. As Frye discusses, the stresses and plot complications associated with the virgin before her marriage are at the center of the conflict of the romance. Once she has passed out of the virginal world, we lose interest. She's happily married and having happily married sex, and I guess we don't need to hear about that. Bring back the blank white sheet and the stresses that go with it. And the pirates. I could hear about that again.