Star-Crossed Lovers

In the latest ROMANTIC TIMES, I read about MaryJanice Davidson's forthcoming mermaid novel. Her heroine is only half mermaid and therefore can appear human and function on land. Romance between mermaids and human men isn't always that easy, though. The heroine of the movie SPLASH magically transformed into an apparently normal woman, but her legs turned into a tail whenever she got wet. The Little Mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen's classic tale made a much rougher choice. She had to sacrifice her voice for legs, and every step felt like walking on knives.

In the absence of magic to transform a mermaid to a human woman (or her lover into a merman), the two would never be able to remain together, since they couldn't survive in each other's natural environments. I've just read a Silhouette Nocturne vampire romance, FROM THE DARK, by Michele Hauf, in which the heroine is a witch. In this fictional world, witches seem to comprise a subspecies of humanity. Witch blood is poisonous to vampires. Therefore, the hero and heroine are kept apart by their biology. Naturally, Hauf devises a way to overcome this barrier.

The Romeo and Juliet scenario, of course, the theme of lovers separated by a deep-rooted antipathy arising from their different backgrounds, is a perennial favorite among romance plots. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet actually had everything in their favor, aside from that silly family feud. They grew up in the same city, followed the same religion, and sprang from the same socio-economic stratum. If their parents had renounced the enmity between their houses before it was too late, the young couple would probably have enjoyed a successful marriage. Tony and Maria in the modern adaptation, WEST SIDE STORY, have more serious difficulties, coming from rival ethnic groups, but at least they live in the same city at a similar income level. For a truly tragic example of a love affair destroyed by differences in background, look at SOUTH PACIFIC. Both Nellie Forbush and Lt. Cable initially reject the people they love because of racial factors; Nellie's rich planter has fathered half-Polynesian children, and Lt. Cable's innocent Liat is Tonkinese (or possibly half, fathered by another French planter -- the movie doesn't go into details of her background). In James Michener's original book, TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC, Nellie's quandary is more wrenching and her reaction more blatantly racist; her would-be fiance has had multiple children by several mistresses of different races, and Nellie mentally applies the N-word to the Polynesian mistress. The ethnic barrier proves insurmountable for Lt. Cable, who rejects Liat and subsequently gets killed by the Japanese. Nellie comes to realize love is more important than the prejudices she has been "carefully taught," so she achieves a happy ending. To be fair to Lt. Cable, his dilemma really is more difficult than hers. Nellie joined the Navy for adventure and will have little difficulty in setting down new roots as the wife of a planter on a tropical island. In writing home to her family and friends, she can remain vague about her husband's previous "marriage." Lt. Cable would have to choose between abandoning his career and family to "go native" or taking poor Liat back to Philadelphia to face the contempt of his upper-middle-class social circle. Michener's short novel SAYONARA portrays a still worse scenario, a tragic love between an American soldier and his Japanese wife, whose marriage makes them outcast from both cultures. Their suicide affects the protagonist, an American officer also serving in occupied Japan, so deeply that he is forced to embrace his own love for a Japanese woman despite the cultural obstacles.

But suppose a hero and heroine come from such radically different worlds, literally, that they can't possibly form a romantic union? To produce a happy ending rather than a tragedy from this kind of plot, the author has to find a method of overcoming the barrier between them that doesn't look like a cop-out. This is a difficulty I often wrestle with in writing paranormal romances: If the obstacles keeping the lovers apart are convincingly serious, how can I invent a convincing solution to bring them together without, effectively, leaping over the crisis and starting the next scene with the equivalent of "once I got out of that pit..."?