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I'm interested in looking at the dynamics of love stories in novels (and movies too) where one is a Poc and the other white. Two things occured to me:
-- in contemporary love stories, the interracial thing may be not an issue at all, just an irrelevant detail. Their being of different races is not a plot point or the difficulty they have to overcome. Can you name such novels/movies?
-- in historical stories, the race thing is likely to be the crux of the matter. Yet still, iin most cases it is the man who is white and the woman who is PoC. In all of my own novels, published and unpublished, this is the case. I know of several other novels with this set-up.
-- there are very few stories the other way around: white woman, PoC man. At the moment I can only think of one movie, Far From Heaven with Julianne Moore as the white woman who falls in love with the black gardener, Dennis Haysbert.
At the moment I can't think of a single novel with such a scenario. Help me dig up some!
I think the reasoning behind this is that it is far more taboo for a white woman to be with a black man than the other way around. Traditionally, the woman is supposed to marry "up" -- her husband lifts her into his social class. And of course men having sex with their black servants was always condoned and accepted -- he wasn't supposed to actually marry her, of course, but still, if he did that would be far more socially acceptable than a woman moving "down" in the world by falling in love with, and marrying, a black man, usually of a lower class.
Your thoughts? Examples?
-- in contemporary love stories, the interracial thing may be not an issue at all, just an irrelevant detail. Their being of different races is not a plot point or the difficulty they have to overcome. Can you name such novels/movies?
-- in historical stories, the race thing is likely to be the crux of the matter. Yet still, iin most cases it is the man who is white and the woman who is PoC. In all of my own novels, published and unpublished, this is the case. I know of several other novels with this set-up.
-- there are very few stories the other way around: white woman, PoC man. At the moment I can only think of one movie, Far From Heaven with Julianne Moore as the white woman who falls in love with the black gardener, Dennis Haysbert.
At the moment I can't think of a single novel with such a scenario. Help me dig up some!
I think the reasoning behind this is that it is far more taboo for a white woman to be with a black man than the other way around. Traditionally, the woman is supposed to marry "up" -- her husband lifts her into his social class. And of course men having sex with their black servants was always condoned and accepted -- he wasn't supposed to actually marry her, of course, but still, if he did that would be far more socially acceptable than a woman moving "down" in the world by falling in love with, and marrying, a black man, usually of a lower class.
Your thoughts? Examples?