Forbidden Love: The Romance-across-the-Divide Short Story

Abstract

One of the most popular thematic genres of the Troubles is the so-called love-across-the-barricades or romance-across-the-divide narrative. Romances across the divide explore the complexities of the conflict through the romantic aspirations of two characters from opposite sides of the political/religious divide who ‘desire sexual union’ but, in a Romeo and Juliet fashion, ‘must struggle against the centrifugal forces that pull their respective communities apart’. Joe Cleary states that this type of romance is ‘an anxious and contradictory literary mode’ which stands between what Doris Sommer calls the Latin American ‘national romance’ in Foundational Fictions (1993) and the nineteenth-century domestic novels analysed by Nancy Armstrong in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1990). Although the romance across the divide has resemblances with the Latin American national romance, the lovers’ union cannot serve as a political metaphor for national reconciliation between the opposing communities. This is because the conflict between Irish nationalists and unionists is not about the distribution of power within the state but about its very existence. Hence, the romance-across-the-divide narrative ‘cannot emerge as a full-fledged national romance […] unless it takes the form of an explicitly Unionist wish-fantasy and ignores the hostility of northern nationalists to a resolution of this sort’. According to Cleary, the possibility of turning into a national romance is therefore ‘superseded, overwritten, or finally cancelled’ by (presumably apolitical/ areligious) domesticity.