Romance revisited: transformations of the marital love triangle in women’s fictions.

Abstract

First paragraph: Introduction The triangle is a model of a sort, or rather a whole family of models. [...] They always allude to the mystery, transparent yet opaque, of human relations. (Girard, 1976: 2-3). The graphic schema and the theoretical frame of analysis of this study is what David Lodge has aptly described as a familiar novelistic situation: the ‘eternal’ love triangle (Lodge, 1981: 143). As a structural literary device, the love triangle artificially stabilises impulses of desire into a fixed set of erotic positions. In other words, it is a ‘figure by which the “commonsense” of our intellectual tradition schematizes erotic relations’ (Sedgwick, 1985: 21). From the legendary Tristan and Iseult to the American soap epic Dynasty1, from Jewish mythology to postfeminist fiction, triangular models have always engaged the interest of generations of listeners/readers/viewers and, over the centuries, the notoriously enduring and seemingly transhistorical appeal of the love triangle has affirmed itself. Narratives abound with love triangles and triadic configurations construct standard and paradigmatic narrative situations that, using Umberto Eco’s terminology, could be termed ‘intertextual archetypes’ (Eco, 1988: 448).3 Triangular constellations of human interaction are not only inscribed within Western culture but are also formative erotic models that are 2 embedded in a shared socio-cultural script and that, as a result, contribute to the ideological construction of the iconography of love.