Authors: Research Scholar Ms. Nancy
Abstract: Love has long been idealized as an authentic and spontaneous emotion and never existed in isolation; it is an idea continuously shaped, interpreted, and performed across generations. Embedded in myths, literature, and cultural practices, the experience of love is passed on not only as an emotion but as a narrative that people learn to inhabit. In contemporary fiction, these inherited scripts often influence how characters understand and enact their relationships.This paper investigates such performative dimensions of love in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, arguing that the novel portrays love not merely as authentic feeling but as a culturally constructed spectacle . It explores love, illness, and mortality through the lens of teenage protagonists, Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, this study analyzes how the characters consciously enact their love within the narrative’s tragic framework. Their romance becomes a self-aware performance, influenced by their awareness of terminal illness and the literary archetypes they seek to emulate. Augustus, in particular, embodies a hyper-idealized lover, crafting moments of grandeur that blur the line between genuine affection and theatricality. Furthermore, the novel engages with metafictional elements, where characters navigate their own literary fate, reinforcing the theme of love as a scripted experience. By deconstructing the novel’s romantic and tragic tropes, this paper explores how The Fault in Our Stars simultaneously critiques and reinforces the expectations of love and loss in contemporary fiction. The study ultimately argues that the novel presents love as a performative act, wherein characters and readers alike participate in the spectacle of tragedy. Through this approach, the research sheds new light on Green’s work, positioning it within broader discourses on love, literature, and cultural scripting.
