‘try-error-try-it’: Love, Loss, and the Subversion(?) of the Heteronormative Romance Story in Will Grayson, Will Grayson
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2017vol25no1art1097Keywords:
queer, Will Grayson, John Green, David Levithan, romance, young adultAbstract
“and that’s how you find it . . . you know, it” (268). Romances stories are often about finding happiness and true love, about finding it. In these novels happiness is both privileged and equated with love, and more often than not these love stories are about heterosexual happiness. Sara Ahmed, in The Promise of Happiness, describes the necessity of queer love stories when she explains “there are of course good reasons for telling stories about queer happiness, in response to and as a response to the very presumption that a queer life is necessarily and inevitably an unhappy life” (p. 94). My article explores this presumption by examining John Green and David Levithan’s Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2010), specifically the way the novel encourages empathy for the queer characters by playing with the readers’ generic and social expectations of the romance story.
Will Grayson, Will Grayson follows two teenage boys named Will Grayson, whose paths cross serendipitously. The chapters of this novel present simultaneous love stories by alternating between straight Will (who ends up in stable monogamous heterosexual relationship, and therefore has a normatively happy ending) and gay Will (whose future is not so certain). This paper contrasts the hetero- and homosexual love stories and analyses how the interplay of these stories engenders empathy in the reader. I argue that in this way, Will Grayson, Will Grayson challenges heteronormative expectations of the romance story.
Metrics
References
Abraham, Julie (2008) Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ahmed, Sarah (2014) ‘Queer Feelings.’ In The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 144-67.
– (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
Cart, Michael and Jenkins, Christine A. (2006) The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969-2004.Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Demory, Pamela and Pullen, Christopher (2013) ‘Introduction.’ In P. Demory and C. Pullen (eds) Queer Love in Film and Television: Critical Essays. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1- 9.
Doty, Alexander (1993) Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Green, John and Levithan, David (2010) Will Grayson, Will Grayson. New York: Dutton.
Hemmings, Clare (2005) ‘Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn.’ Cultural Studies 19 (5): 548-67.
Juhasz, Suzanne (1998) ‘Lesbian Romance Fiction and the Plotting of Desire: Narrative Theory, Lesbian Identity, and Reading Practice.’ in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17 (1): 65-82.
Levithan, David (2015) Hold Me Closer: The Tiny Cooper Story. New York: Penguin Group.
Pattee, Amy (2008) ‘Sexual Fantasy: The Queer Utopia of David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy.’ in Children’s Literature Association 33 (2): 156-171.
Roof, Judith (1996) Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1993) ‘Queer and Now.’ In Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1–22.
– (1993) ‘Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (1): 1-16.
Selinger, Eric Murphy and Gleason, William A. (2016) ‘Introduction: Love as Practice of Freedom?’ In W. Gleaon and E. Selinger (eds) Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom? New York: Routledge, pp. 1-22.
Torgovnick, Marianna (1981) Closure in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Trites, Roberta Seelinger (1998) ‘Queer Discourse and the Young Adult Novel: Repression and Power in Gay Male Adolescent Literature,’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 22 (3): 143-51.