Romance and Repetition: Testing the Limits of Love

Following on from my previous work in Romance Writing on the “deep structures” of romance, this article speculates further on the temporality of romantic love: in particular, the problems posed by repetition. In the course of my discussion, I move from a consideration of how the various schools of theory that inform our understanding of romantic love deal with repetition, to some suggestions of how romantic literature has negotiated (or, more typically, side-stepped) the issue, before closing with a reflection on the further insights provided by Sarah Waters’s best-selling novel, The Night Watch (2006). The complexity of the relationships featured in this text enable us to probe deeper into how the human subject’s notional compulsion to repetition (Freud) both generates romantic relationships and tests the limits of our more ideal definitions of love.