The World's Desire - Adventure Romance

Adventure Romance

This novel is of the “romance” genre often associated with authors such as Haggard, Lang, and Stevenson. The term “pure romance” offered male writers of the time a refuge from women’s fiction, but also from an England that they imagined Queen Victoria had feminized. In The World’s Desire, Haggard and Lang envision Odysseus (Ullysses) dying for love of Helen of Troy, a death that culminates a lifelong search for “Beauty’s self.” Odysseus illustrates an unending pursuit of adventure as a mark of his devotion to imagination, spirit, and the wilderness and also key attributes to adventure romance- stormy, savage, bestial, passionate, uncontrolled, unknown, magical, and deadly. Wendy Katz says that the most significant conclusion to be drawn from the examination of romance at the time this novel was published, is that romance as a genre is immune to the ties of actuality. This means that it is a literary form characterized by freedom and expansiveness. These two attributes of romance mean that romance characters can be set free from time, place and history. Especially in Haggard’s writings, the restraints of time are subverted by any number of rebirths, doubles, reincarnations, or returns to former lives. While Odysseus is not fortunate enough to experience this type of freedom from time and place, in The World’s Desire the ability to surpass such restrictions is illustrated in the end when Helen and Meriamun both vow that Odysseus will see each of them again.