Preventing Grace
Picking up from yesterday—here is a whole world I didn’t even know existed. I don’t read romance novels, unless they are hundreds of years old and written by Jane Austen, or really funny and written by Grace Livingston Hill, and therefore didn’t know how much the descriptions of interiors are a key element of the genre. Here are some great bits from the piece:
Romance has a serious décor problem. Contemporary romance novels, my pandemic escape of choice, provide a wide variety of settings, pairings, relationship dynamics, and even kinks. But the world of romance has settled, it seems, on a default style of interior design for its heroes. Every time I read about yet another “modern minimalist” living room—let’s just say it kills the mood.
And:
“People too rich for, like, rooms,” as Hall’s mouthy narrator Arden St. Ives so aptly puts it, gets to the heart of romance heroes’ whole nonaesthetic aesthetic, which impresses through sprawl rather than any stamp of personality. What Roni Loren’s Kincaid and I see as a deal-breaker, far too many romance protagonists see as a challenge: If his house is chilly, he just needs me to warm up his living room—and his heart.
And:
In truth, all of the above are signifiers of traditional masculinity. If the man with a sledgehammer is strong, the man with the big apartment is rich. Despite the recent rise of the “cinnamon roll hero” (care-taking, gentle, and supportive), the world of romance is still rife with status professions and athletic prowess, along with fashion notes that are as basic as this type of décor. Bad boys wear leather jackets, boys next door wear henley shirts, billionaires wear bespoke. There’s nothing wrong with wanting that fantasy, as long as you’re also aware of its limitations. The mattress on the floor of despair is one thing, but these examples are all rich men, which makes it difficult not to read the blankness of their houses as representative of the blandness of their souls.
The whole thing is pretty great (bit of a language warning). I guess it should be no surprise that the “minimalist” idea of home interiors has worked itself not only into so many television programs–the one that caught my attention being the Good Omen’s version of Heaven which looked like a Mari Kondo orgy, an on-purpose visual effect made to indicate that Heaven isn’t really nearly as great as Azirophel’s lovely bookstore on Earth, which is, of course, heavenly–but into piles of romance books as well.
Anyway, that article caught my eye because Governor Cuomo is still trying to figure out how to fight the ‘rona, and, while waiting for the appalling numbers to work their way through from all the small Thanksgiving gatherings (we were allowed to have ten people in one place at a time), and the Governor of New Jersey saying this (hat-tip Sarah Hey)…
“I worry right now about somebody’s living room, a private setting where no amount of enforcement can get into every living room or private setting in our state,” he said. “That, to me, is where our biggest challenge is, that’s where the pandemic fatigue is at its height. That’s where people are letting their guard down,” he added. “And I would just plead with people, not just do the right thing when you’re in a restaurant or a gym, but do the right thing when you’re in your own home.”
…I’m just curious how the ideal living room will emerge in the coming years. Kon Mari, at least in my own life, has been debunked as a useful way of sorting everything out. The only thing I’m throwing away anymore is actual garbage. I’m committed to keeping things and repurposing them, of mending them if possible, and–in fact–going out and getting more stuff, more comfortable places to sit, more dishes, more flower-holding-receptacles, more larger pairs of trousers.
But I’m also curious about the living room as private sanctum. I like the underlying contradiction coming into the bright light of the new puritanism, this culture’s astonished discovery that one’s home is not actually a morally neutral place. What happens there matters not only in cosmic terms but also in the smaller worries of day to day life. Walls don’t keep out illness, nor despair, nor any of the other kinds of bad things we are all afraid of.
Anyway, if I am a hateful, wicked person for, as a Christian, meekly suggesting that who you “sleep” with on your minimalist couch in your blank and whitewashed salle de sejour, should the governors of various states be allowed to come in and tell me where to breathe and when? I mean, don’t worry, I’m not inviting over the whole world into my living room, even though I have a house perfect for “Social Distancing”–that’s literally why we bought it. I just don’t agree that one kind of wickedness is “embraced” (cough) and the other is repudiated for the public good. Let’s really be the pluralists we’ve all pretended to be and admit that people have different kinds of moral calculations and those of Christians about sex are no more insane than all the other ones. Because really, if you’re worried about staying alive in this life, imagine the terror of the next when you discover that God cared about everything you did with your body–who you breathed on, what you said, what you thought, who you had sex with, what you bought with your hands, what you typed with your fingers, what you looked at with your eyes, and what you nurtured in your soul. Maybe 2020 can be the year we are making Judging Great Again…gosh I hope not.
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