Marie de France’s Milun is a classic example of a typical romance. Romances have been popular throughout hundreds of years because of the way these stories make their readers feel. When reading a romance, there is usually a structural standard of some sort of separation followed by a reunion.
In the story of Milun, two lovers are secretly seeing each other and become pregnant. At the time, pregnancy before marriage comes with serious punishments, so the couple decides to send their child to the woman’s sister to be cared for. They plan on reuniting once the child is grown up.
While reading this story, I was made more aware of the reasoning behind the consistently flourishing business in romantic books and movies. The plot lines cause a wide range of emotions in the audience members, but they ultimately end in happiness and hope. In Milun, the plot causes the reader to feel a wide range of emotions. There is a certain sadness present in the reader when Milun and his mistress are so in love with each other but can not be together. The reader’s desire for the couple to be together “happily ever after” is ever-present in this story.
However, the sadness transitions to happiness when the entire family is reunited following the death of the woman’s husband. When I was reading, there was also a certain amount of relief when the messenger tells Milun and his son that the husband was already dead. This relief stemmed from the fact that I did not necessarily want the son to kill the husband in order to reunite their family.
My personal feelings became intertwined with the story as I felt pity for these three people that love each other very much but could not be together for so long. Despite feelings of sadness and pity, however, I enjoyed reading this story because of the happy ending. When the family ends up together, the “happily ever after” factor leaves the reader with only the best feelings. People tend to feel happy when seeing problems being resolved and bad situations turning to good, and the romance genre uses human feelings to its advantage.