Romance, romantic love and the ‘want of a fortune’

The English novel arose in the mid-eighteenth century as a cultural expression of a new middle class, a class that absorbed contemporary philosophies of individualism and democracy, and emerged within societies anchored in both representative government and capitalistic economies. Contemporary reality television gives us versions of the modern novel. Sometimes reality programmes, like the earliest novels, are episodic: each episode is linked by a single narrative voice or character and tells us about some issue. Sometimes these programmes present a season of episodes shaped by conventions of character, theme, conflict and resolution: together the episodes of each season form chapters in a story of ordinary lives so the audience can eavesdrop on others’ lives and draw life lessons. The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are typical of the latter kind of reality television. Generically, the programmes are related to the modern romance novel – they recount the story of finding ‘true love. Across nine months of staged presentation and accompanying interviews, they portray individuals looking for love, despite hostile adversaries, personal misunderstandings and disappointed expectations. This narrative arc leads to a climax where love is either found or missed, but either way it is represented as a complex synthesis of sexual frisson, friendship and respect. And all this occurs within the (occluded) context of someone winning $250,000. This article takes Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice ([1813] 1995) as a touchstone for understanding the appeal and meanings of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette as contemporary versions of the romance novel in order to explore how the idealization of love remains tied to not only notions of women’s individualism/liberation, but also to capitalism.