This is old article from 1993 , and while it is quite bleak , cynical even , I think it contains many truths.
It also contains an element of hope ( in bold ) ....and that is quite a challenge
What takes their place when the fairy-tales fail ?
by Joyce McMillan
Scotland on Sunday 29 Aug 1993
At the Traverse Theatre this Edinburgh Festival there is an interesting
show called Night After Night, by Neil Bartlett's Gloria company. It
promises a little more than it can deliver; but there's something
haunting about the questions it raises. For what it tries to do is
examine the strange, intense relationship between some gay men working
in the theatre, and the big romantic musicals many of them once worked on,
and continue to adore.
On the one hand, these men love the whole business of the musical, the
romantic curve of the storyline, the happy climax, the sense of the
characters finding their true destiny in one another.
But on the other, they are inevitably excluded from the boy-meets-girl neatness
of the plot, with its final sense of a family founded, and the happiness of the
hero and heroine stretching on into a boundless future; so that their
intense appreciation of the form is shot through with a sense of
sadness, and hopeless yearning.
And as I watched the show, I realised that it's not only gay men, these days,
who must feel a sense of permanent exclusion from this kind of romantic story.
A few days later, I was in the Assembly Rooms, watching an exquisite,
joyful Midsummer Night's Dream from Georgia, and found myself
weeping with sheer nostalgia for the life-affirming exuberance of it all;
at this point, Shakespeare was so confident of the idea of erotic,
heterosexual marriage as a key to social harmony that he made the whole
world of nature reflect the temporary row between Oberon and Titania -
summer buds in midwinter, green corn rotting in the fields - and come
back to itself only when they were together once more.
And how can any of us now watch this kind of romance without a
profound sense of loss ?
Of course, the number of people who actually achieved great long-term happiness
through the conventional pattern of marriage was always small.
But today we are constantly showered with facts and images that rob us
even of the faint hope of a traditional happy ending.
Last week's Scottish Office report on divorce, wanly titled Untying The
Knot, shows that marriage is fast becoming an explicitly provisional
contract, with no strong expectation of permanence on any part.
The stream of media stories about the stresses on single mothers
emphasise the ugly truth that parenthood often divides men and women
more than it unites them. And last week, the Mothers' Union itself
published an article arguing that conventional marriage is overrated, and
we ought to re-institute some kind of ''clan'' system of extended family living.
And in a sense, all of this can be seen as a healthy development, a
final rejection of the big lie that conventional families equal happy
families. But the collapse of all these old assumptions has also utterly
robbed us of our fairy-tales, our dreams, the stories with which, in our
culture, we used to attempt to make sense of our lives.
We have seen, rightly, that it is nonsense to bring up a modern little
girl on a diet of Cinderella, and the assumption that some day her
Prince will come to resolve her life.
But the trouble is that we have no alternative that offers anything like the
same sense of magic and coherence.
We can parody the original story; we can make Cinders marry Buttons,
or set up a menage-a-trois with the Ugly Sisters.
We can commit ourselves to the militant shapelessness of modernism,
which defies narrative and questions the very idea of meaning.
But we cannot work the magic those old stories worked.
We cannot take the common stuff of life and link it confidently to a whole order of the
universe; we cannot imagine the deep, hard-won, richly-patinaed joy that
came from the simultaneous fulfillment of individual needs, and those of
a whole society.
As individuals, we probably experience far more moments of happiness
than our ancestors did.
But our happiness has a thin quality; it lacks social resonance.
We marry, but it is a private matter.
We have children, but no one takes pleasure in their existence except ourselves
and the odd grandparent. We see fine sights and beautiful things;
but when we get home, no one looks at our holiday snaps,
and the journey becomes meaningless.
Now of course the suspicion that life may be a tale told by an idiot,
signifying nothing, has always plagued people who survived into middle
age; Dante in his dark forest, Shakespeare who lost the will to write
those joyful comedies, all those who know the sense of stasis that comes
when the long drive towards adulthood and parenthood slides into the
past, and the only big ''life-event'' left is death.
But now it seems that even young people must share this sense that there
is no shape, no point, no storyline, as if the whole culture had become
a victim of mid-life crisis.
Romance ? Don't make me laugh.
Fulfillment at work ? You'll be doing well to get a job at all.
And kids ? More trouble than they're worth; just treat you like a cashpoint,
and remind you of your ex.
And the point about all this - the shapelessness, the cynicism,
the entropy, the rejection of old dreams, the inability to develop new
ones - is that it is not sustainable.
Human beings crave meaning and need dreams.
We need to know what to hope for;
and very few are loners enough to draw the whole map for themselves.
The rest of us like to feel part of some rhythm, some order of things;
and the more we mouth the inadequate rhetoric of ''do your own thing''
and ''it's nobody else's business'', the greater becomes the danger of
an hysterical lurch back towards a sexual politics that is strict,
secure, authoritarian, and ultimately fascistic.
The seeds of it exist already, in the alarming macho imagery of video games and
science-fantasy movies, in the screaming tabloid campaigns against lone
mothers.
And those of us who fear that kind of backlash must face the
fact that knocking down old stereotypes is not enough.
If we tear down an old patriarchal civilisation with all its myths and
legends, then we must begin to build a new one, with new templates of
joy and fulfilment, new romantic visions; and we have to make those
visions as erotic and magical as the old ones.
When an artist like Neil Bartlett asks the right questions,
there is a faint flicker of hope that we may be up to the task.
But most of the time, the only answers I can see on the horizon are
those of the reactionaries, the ones who want to get back to some lost
paradise of ''normality'' in which papa rules, and women, children, and
homosexuals know their place.
They fill me with dread.
But their creed has a terrible clarity, in a time of growing confusion and fear;
and that makes them dangerous indeed.
The rest of us like to feel part of some rhythm, some order of things.
