When I taught the very first version of this course one year ago (it was a Modern British Literature course), I started a conversation with a student that extended beyond the end of the course. This student loved the romance genre and would proudly defend the value of her favorite books in arguments with fellow English majors. When I created the assignments we’re going to be using this semester, I showed her the revised assignment and asked her what she’d do with it. She said she’s still write about the same romance novel she chose the first time, but she’d share much more about her experience of it. What she shared about her experiences was very helpful for my thinking. She described taking great pleasure in a happy ending for a character she identifies strongly with—and occasionally being terrified that a story she’s deeply invested in won’t have a happy ending, which would leave her emotionally distraught. Our conversation made me want to think more about a story that I had that experience with.
I’ll admit that I haven’t read the romance novels that are all the rage on BookTok, but I have certainly enjoyed some romance novels that I loved for all the same reasons I hear from my students who love the genre. And so I want to think about one of those stories as we start this class, because I haven’t yet taken the time to think about why I connected so strongly with the stories I did. There are lots to choose from—all that came out right when I was finishing up high school and heading off to college (I could actually start with Anne of Green Gables, which I loved in middle school, or My So Called Life, which I was obsessed with in high school, or I could talk about Felicity, Gilmore Girls, or even Grey’s Anatomy, which I loved in college and graduate school. All of these stories are female coming of age stories and they all include very dreamy romantic interests. But I can’t do them all, so I think I want to start with Felicity, because I just heard Keri Russel interviewed on Smartless the other day and it’s top of mind.
Describing My Experience
Okay, so to start. What was my experience of watching Felicity? I imagined myself as Felicity, which I realize now means I was experiencing identification. I felt like every problem Felicity dealt with was similar to problems I was dealing with. The experiences glossary on our course website defines identification as “recognizing, in a character’s experience, a conflict that you have experienced.”
I also was in love with Ben (and a little bit sometimes in love with Noel—Felicity’s other love interest). So another emotion I felt was love. The experiences glossary defines this as “affection, attraction, and emotional attachment.”
I also felt really confused when it wasn’t as easy as I wanted it to be to map my own experiences onto Felicity’s experiences. Of course, my first boyfriend in college was a lot like Noel…but there was no guy at the start like Ben (the one she followed to college…because I didn’t do that). I guess my point is, I felt like I wanted to see what would happen to Felicity because my life was SO SIMILAR, the same thing would maybe happen to me. I was thinking of this story as a sort of guide to my own life, which I realize now in retrospect was treating it a bit like a parable when it wasn’t that (why did I do that?). It’s interesting to me that I gave it so much power. I think this is something our brains do naturally with story and I want to understand better how that works. I don’t think I’ll figure it all out for this draft, but I’ll be thinking more about this before the revised version.
Features of the Story
Okay, so what were the features about the story that made me identify with Felicity? I’m going to start by sharing things from memory and then I’ll go back to the story and check what’s really there.
What I remember
Felicity came into college and was awkward and pre-med and then she changed her major to art. She had a HUGE crush on Ben (they went to high school together) and basically follows him to New York because of a brief conversation they had at their graduation. All we know about Ben at first is that he’s handsome. And he doesn’t really know who Felicity is when he realizes she’s come to his school and yet somehow as the show unfolds, they wind up together (this part is what kept me watching…It seemed just too good to be true that he actually liked her back when he was seemingly oblivious to her existence at the start).
What’s actually there
Okay, so I went back and watched the opening scene and there are so many things I’d forgotten!
First, Felicity doesn’t know Ben at all…she’s quiet and studious and an only child of two parents who have very big dreams for her to become a doctor. At her graduation, she feels dread because she can tell she’s been doing what other people want her to do and she’s afraid that will continue into college. And I am certain that even though that wasn’t exactly my situation, I identified with that feeling of wanting to be something other than what my parents wanted me to be. I was a junior in high school when the show premiered, so the show prompted me to imagine what it would be like to go away to college and make my own decisions.
Finding the Narration Technologies
So…why did I identify so strongly with Felicity? Did the show do something to make that happen or was it all me? I realize now that I didn’t just watch her have a look on her face during her graduation and map my own experiences onto her. The show presents her graduation as a kind of montage with her narration over the top (the show opens with her talking to someone named Sally, telling the story of her graduation, which happened in the past). And this I think is how I was instantly hooked. Because this was a soliloquy, which our “technologies by element” page defines as “a narrative technology that “allows spectators or readers to hear or read the inner conflict of an individual character.” And Felicity’s soliloquies were a regular feature of the show. She uses a tape recorder to make recordings that she sends to a friend (Sally is an older mentor figure) and those recordings are regularly incorporated into episodes.
But it wasn’t just that I identified with her journey of self-discovery. I also had a crush on the same person she had a crush on—because I experienced him as a mystery through her perspective and I fell in love with him a little too. And I see that there was something in that first scene that created that connection. First of all, we see Ben having an argument with someone (maybe his mother?) and then, when Felicity asks him to sign her yearbook, he writes this long entry about how he was always curious about her but never got to know her. This, I see now, is a classic secret discloser, which our “technologies by element” page defines as “a technology in which a narrator shares an intimate secret about a character. Sometimes the narrator is revealing their own secret and sometimes another character’s secret.” In this case, the camera shows us the first secret (the fight with someone) and he shares something directly with Felicity by writing in her yearbook. And she falls in love with him a little bit in that moment and—because I was so strongly identifying with her b/c of her soliloquy—I fall a little bit in love too. And I have to keep watching to see how all of these things play out. And what I want most in the beginning is for her to wind up with Ben (and find out who she wants to be separate from what her parents want…that too!).
It turns out, this is a pretty potent combination of narrative technologies that has been used for centuries to draw readers in to literary romances. Angus Fletcher talks about this in chapter eleven of his book Wonderworks (the book that inspired this course), and our library has made it possible for you to read this book for free. The basic combination of the secret discloser and identification is powerful and I’ll just say for myself that it prompted me to care deeply about what happened with this Felicity and Ben romance. But what isn’t immediately part of my experience is wish fulfillment, which Fletcher describes as a typical part of romance (“This chronicle of wish fulfillment does more than show Odysseus getting what he hungers for; it seduces our own brain into believing that our desires will be similarly fulfilled”). What I like about the show is that Felicity and Ben each had many other relationships and at times I didn’t even want them to wind up together. There are some romances where the character you most care about does get everything they want (the happy ending). And this, again according to our list of technologies, would be a plot technology called wish fulfillment. But that didn’t happen, and that felt very healthy.
Wait—I wrote that and then realized that Ben and Felicity DO wind up together in the end. I rewatched the final scene of the show and I’m going to have to do a little more rewatching before I revise this post, but Ben had done something that most people think was unforgivable (I have no idea what it was at this point so I’m going to have to a few episodes). Felicity forgives him, though, and it seems like they do wind up together in the end (interesting that I didn’t even remember that? I think that means wish fulfillment wasn’t as much a part of my experience of the show). I also think this means I should add into the mix the fact that there is a lot of cheating and apologizing in this show. And that this final scene made me realize that these apologies are another narration technology. The apology, according to our technologies by element page is “an expression of regret for wrong actions; a recognition of the harm done,” and one of the things I like about Felicity is that all of the characters do pretty terrible things and the people who love them forgive them (it’s not that they’re revealed to be “the bad guy” and then cast aside—that would be a bit more like poetic justice, which is a common in Disney movies—think Hans in Frozen, here adapted by Olaf). The flawed people and genuine apologies in Felicity feel real and healthy (but I’ll see if I still feel that way after rewatching).
As I wrap up this rambly draft, I’ll share a warning with all of you. I think many of you are planning to write about written texts, but those of you who are going to write about shows you loved in the past and look for scenes on YouTube to try to remember certain moments, beware. YouTube will recommend clips of these beloved actors being interviewed and you will get sucked into a rabbit hole of celebrity adoration. I pulled myself out after a few (30) minutes.
You’ve been warned.
Works Cited
Experiences Glossary – Story & The Brain. https://unewhavendh.org/story-and-the-brain/experiences-glossary/. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.
Felicity – Opening Scene. Directed by ABC, 2016. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxrHlPOn6RM.
Felicity: Series Finale, Final Scene. Directed by Daniel Spruill, 2011. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scxq4OQaDfs.
Fletcher, Angus. Wonderworks : The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. Simon & Schuster, 2021. EBSCOhost, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=11cdd9c8-997f-35b5-aa73-a59746cef42e.
Olaf Becomes the Bad Guy | Kids Cartoon | Frozen. Directed by Disney Princess, 2022. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZWNYSeia60.
Technologies by Element of Narrative – Story & The Brain. https://unewhavendh.org/story-and-the-brain/technologies-by-element-of-narrative/. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.
Featured Image
Poster for Felicity. Warner Brothers. All Rights Reserved.
