What is the difference between a romance and a novel?
A romance is not a novel
Sir Walter Scott, in his “Essay on Romance”, established a basic difference between romance and the novel. While he viewed the former as a narrative consisting of rare and wonderful incidents, he viewed the novel as a work that reflected society; which explains why he wrote so many historical novels.
Literary romances
Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his preface to The House on the Seven Roofs, writes: “When a writer calls his work a romance, it is not necessary to observe that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both in fashion and material, that he does not he would have had – he felt entitled to assume, if he had professed to be writing a novel. “
By latitude, Hawthorne means that the author takes the liberty of managing his “atmospheric environment” and also injecting wonder. While in a romance, the writer can create an atmosphere of enchantment, magic, or even a haunting or mysterious environment that bears little resemblance to reality, in a novel that is nearly impossible, unless the genre allows such freedoms. Novels like García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or even JK Rowlings’ Harry Potter series of novels are plagued with events so implausible that they defy suspension of disbelief. But this is allowed since the novels belong to the genre of magical realism.
Hawthorne adds: “The ultimate form of composition [the novel] it is presumed that it points to a minuscule fidelity, not only to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. “
In fact, readers expect “fidelity” or realism of what we see, feel and experience in the material world, and this can only be translated into a novel. When Herman Melville wrote his short story or novel, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which he put on Wall Street, he knew he was writing a romance. In this work we find so much an atmosphere that is haunting, ghostly, and characters that cannot be expected to be real. In particular, it can be argued that the protagonist Bartleby looks more like a being from another world (ghost or spirit) than a real person.
Canadian critic Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism writes: “The essential difference between novel and romance lies in the conception of characterization. Romance does not attempt to create ‘real people’ so much as stylized figures expanding into psychological archetypes (304 ). “
what’s more Bartleby, Wrote Melville Billy budd, another novel in which the characters are ‘stylized figures’ with which Melville explores the depths of the human psyche.
Formula and trashy romances
When we read “formula romances” or junk romances we know that the characters – the lovers in particular – push credulity by dealing with the insurmountable barriers they encounter before they can discover love. Readers don’t care about bumps, obstacles, and other impediments; in fact they welcome them as benign frustrations that will ultimately be overcome.
However, by today’s standards, artistically, the romance is a bit lower than the novel. Rarely will readers view romances as serious artistic works, or as literature, unless they are the product of such genius writers as Hawthorne and Melville. And unfortunately, contemporary romantic writers don’t come close to any kind of literary genius.