Princeton Romance Conference

Sarah S. G. Frantz

I'm going to do things backwards and post about the Princeton Conference first, then go back and post about PCA. I want to do Princeton before the 31 pages of Twitter stream for #romcon disappear. I will link to about where the Twitter stream starts for each of the papers. It is listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent posts (ie: later in paper) at the top of the screen. Go to "newer" posts to progress in the paper.

I'm also going to talk about Friday's papers first, then go back to Thursday evening's panel. I've got to type that one up--I took real, hand-written notes because I didn't have my computer! :)

Romance and Religion: SB Sarah has already blogged this panel in detail.

What fascinated me about this panel was how well it interacted and intersected with my own research into BDSM romance. The catch phrases of BDSM (bondage, discipline, domination, submission) kept coming up again and again through these papers. I'm going to have to hunt down Lynn's book, especially, to see if there's anything I can use.

Lynn S. Neal: What is Inspirational Romance? Twitter starts about here.

Redeeming Love: The love is between man and woman and the couple and God. Conflicts are about God and represent a deeper spiritual malaise. Transformation that seems magical in other books are brought about by the power of God’s love. Neal interviewed 50 female readers of Inspirational romance. It was the readers’ religious choice to read these books. IR represents entertainment and escape and a redemption of popular culture that affirms the values of the readers. IR is an attractive option for both fun and upholding boundaries of faith. It is “wholesome entertainment: pleasing to God because it has scripture and it’s clean. It is a Godly way of self-entertainment, of sacrilizing all of life. They are able to forget about impure books that offer danger rather than safety and instead have an opportunity to combine love of reading and love of God. It’s a “Brain break.” However, the drive may well be escapist, but its fulfillment may not be. Instead, it’s a way through which readers achieve spiritual change. They gained little realizations that helped foster everyday piety. The effectiveness of inspirational romance comes from its utility. How does it establish an emotional connection between the heroine and the reader? It transforms hearing into knowing, doubt into certainty, and a vague sense of God into everyday reality. A Christian romance novel helps readers envision and encounter God’s love and care. Christian romances are a filter for interpreting God and the Bible. The Bible becomes a romance.

Pam Regis: Writing the History of the American Romance Twitter stream starts about here

Regis is trying to put Inspirational romance in larger context of American novel. Inspirational romance is one of the foundations of the American romance writ large. In fact, the form endorses one of the highest forms of freedom: Christian liberty. In romance in general, when characters choose to overcome the barrier, it’s an expression of freedom and the reader feels joy. Regis is writing “The History of the American Romance.” Issues: Have to figure out who is American and who isn’t. Is the form “invented” by M&B and HQN. Is the “form” merely a marketing tool. There are also so many books and such different books—it’s impossible to choose a representative book. There is no bibliography. What was first romance, how far back does it go? Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is first romance novel in America, it was abridged early and often in ways that usually put moralizing at end. Holding an old early-US copy of Pamela feels like holding a HQN romances: that’s how big they are. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s book Vivia: secret of power is faith—definitely inspirational. Regis trying to do books that aren’t covered by everyone else. Highsmith’s The Price of Salt: first popular lesbian romance. Beverly Jenkins: AA romances write very different ending to and are in conversation with previous AA writers or about AA characters (Harriet Jacobs’s Life of a Slave Girl and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Elements of Form: What do barrier and ritual death say about faith in the American romance? Ritual death: mythic moment when union seems least possible between courting protagonists (dark moment). EDEN Southworth’s Vivia: or, the Secret of Power: sentimental romance. Sentimental values: home, affection, connection, family, kinship, sympathy, emotion especially love, Christianity. Part bildungsroman. Barriers (especially between secondary characters) include melodrama, class, disability, separation, deceit. Values of the American romance, both secular and inspirational: Freedom, Individuality, life eternal vs. Death and perversion. Christianity is not on list. Life eternal does mean Christian values in Vivia, but in romance novels it’s the promise of children in epilogues. Inspirational romances are purest form of American romance. Faith—religious, secular, or both—suffuses the American romance (even atheists have faith in love). Freedom and faith are not in conflict in the American romance. Religion is not a tributary of American romance, it’s a source.

R. Marie Griffith (Princeton Religion Dept.) Twitter stream starts about here.

Everything she knows about inspirational romance comes from Lynn Neal. Instead, her research is on evangelical self-help manuals, diet and fitness manuals, and sexuality and marriage guides and she’ll be talking about this today. Evangelical women’s self-help literature: goes back all way into 19thC. Feminism 2nd wave: Friedan’s Feminine Mystique shows us how difficult to it was to be a woman. Friedan’s solution was to stop conforming to the traditional picture of womanhood and to enjoy life. This was seen as women’s rejection of biological roles of wife and mother and destroying all good things about America. Equality between sexes was not a Christian ideal. True liberation is found in submission to husband because of the ideal of a submissive feminine subject and all powerful masculine God. Woman’s relationship with God is shown as father/daughter relationship or marital relationship. God is/as perfect husband, which may compensate for his earthly partner’s imperfections. Can refresh and heal even the most broken marriages. God gets something out of relationship too. Following God’s commands, and flattering him fulfill women’s visions of perfect love relationship. It is a literature of hope and faith and upholds sentimental values. Christian diet and fitness lit: Human body’s fitness affects relationships between god and people—those who are thin and healthy exemplify God’s grace and reward. They caution readers against vanity: not main reason for diets. The main reason to diet has to be keeping bodies under subjection to God’s will. Happiness is found through submission: loving and pleasing God. The image of God as divine lover or husband used as tool to compel Christian women to get thin: “Slim for Him.” “More of Jesus, less of me.” There is an erotic fulfillment through getting thin for god (God as the ultimate HQN billionaire tycoon). One gains one’s happy ending through disciplining the body. There is an eroticization of the power differential. Evangelical sex and marriage guides: Christlike sex and lots of it, selling promises of love and romance. Sexual purity and bodily discipline lead to most sumptuous bodily pleasures and emotional connection.

Beth Patillo (romance author) Twitter stream starts about here.

Beth gets up and says of Griffith's research, "Dude, that's messed up!" Patillo has always kept the romance author part of her life and the minister part of her life separate but her agent said that she could sell a Christian book like that *fingersnap*. Patillo herself has a very low level of interest in personal purity. Heavens to Betsy: 25,000 copies printed in trade paperback, but because Lifeway refused to carry it b/c it was a woman minister, probably about 21,000 were remaindered, because they were trying exclusively for the Christian audience, not the romance audience. Patillo is a non-evangelical Christian writer. The Christian Book Association (CBA) is such a specialized market, but a very vocal market. Miss California: sure, she’s standing for “traditional” marriage, but there’s no comment on Fox about her parading across stage in bikini. Evangelical books: no eroticism. All physicality is about emotions, not eroticism. Christian faith must be depicted as normative but as over and above popular culture. As an author: how do you create journey for two characters who are so squeaky clean to begin with? There is an intense focus on certain pietistic practices designated as “Christian.” Hasn’t had emails about “why didn’t your characters work for justice?” Small Christian book stores are closing at the rate of 100 per year. Only 400 left. What are CBA publishers going to do when they’re dealing with Walmart and not Christian gatekeepers. What’s going to happen to Inspirational fiction when personal piety is not going to be the only definition of Christianity? There might be possibility for happy ending in Inspirational market for romance authors who are not evangelical or pious.

Eric Selinger Twitter stream starts about here. Eric discussed his path to this paper at Romancing the Blog.

Polhemus discusses erotic faith: romance as religion. Eric’s Facebook profile lists “Married” under Religious Preference. In 1990s, literary and cultural commentators announced the death of love. Allan Bloom claimed that one has to have a tin ear to describe one’s greatest love as a “relationship.” Bloom inadvertently points out where erotic faith continued to thrive: “cheap” romantic love. How did we get to be as we are? In Flowers from the Storm, Kinsale plays with long history and conventions of historical romances. Christian, Duke of Jervaulx is a mathematician, so let’s think geometrically: Chiasmus: Maddie is Christian, Christian is mad. Christian is soul trapped in body, Maddie is a body trapped by her soul. Eric is not using Milton just to show off as poetry professor, Kinsale makes the use of Milton as a motif explicit. The novel makes a fetish of Maddie’s long hair, which mirrors the view of Eve in Paradise Lost. Maddie is Eve, Jervaulx is Satan and the means of salvation is mutual human love. How does this novel layer history? Maddie and Jervaulx are 19thC couple with very 20thC conversations about freedom and equality, but those debates range back to 16thC and 17thC views of marriage. Quaker brides explicitly do not say that they will “obey” husbands. “No rule but love between them,” from William Penn. All of these historical contexts have to be kept in mind and this novel is very aware of this. It puts traditions of popular romance fiction right next to 16thC-19thC contexts and conventions.

Mary Bly's question of Pam: Mary’s uncomfortable with faith in romance that’s NOT inspirational being put together with evangelical type of romance. The burst of imagination that makes marriage work in inspirational romance is very very different from the imaginative relationship with another entity. Faith that the relationship will work out is very different from faith that we need another entity to make a relationship work. So conflating the two types of faith is very vexing.

The panel was a great start to the day and an example of all that is good and wonderful about romance scholarship today.

Romance and Religion

Eric M. Selinger

I've been thinking recently about the ways that romance novels relate to religion, and more specifically about the ways that they deploy religion and religious discourse, whether or not they are "Inspirational" romances per se. Here's what I've come up with so far--and if you can give me any help, I'd be mighty grateful!

1) First off, and most obviously, romance novels can use religious discourse pervasively, in order to advance a particular religious agenda: e.g., Christian inspirational romance. Books like this explain the coincidences, transformations, and other events of the novel in religious terms (they’re providential, quite literally) and they name the type of love that the novel endorses in specifically religious terms (i.e., as an expression of God’s love for us).

In a way, this first use of religious discourse is implicitly dialectical, or at least engaged in an implied argument. It reclaims the strictly Christian meaning of terms that are also used in the quasi-religion of romantic love: salvation, redemption, forgiveness, worship, even "love."

Books like this let the text minister to its reader, or make itself of use in a community of believers in a way that a "secular" or "worldly" romance would not be. But even within such a novel, we can sometimes find moments of tension or counter-discourse, in which the "worldly" meanings of terms reasserts itself. (I think here of the wonderfully romantic moment in Beth Pattillo's Heavens to Betsy where David, the hero, admits that he "worships" the heroine. In the religion of love, the one that Robert Polhemus calls "erotic faith," that makes perfect sense, but in Christian terms it's problematic, even idolatrous.)

2) Romance novels can use religion / religious discourse in order to give a deeper resonance or meaning or importance to the story by recalling the religious roots of Erotic Faith, the Religion of Romantic Love.

They can do this without worrying about or rejecting its potentially heretical nature, as though there were no particular difference between them: e.g., Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s novel Dream a Little Dream, set in a town called Salvation. It's been a while since I read it, so perhaps I'm misremembering, but my recollection was that this was a deeply Christian novel, but not specifically an "inspirational" novel, in part because the book seemed to equate its theology with romantic love.

They can also do this in a way that brings our attention to the potential tension between Christianity and Erotic Faith without resolving the issue in either direction, leaving the tension unresolved. What do I mean by this? Maybe that romance novels sometimes use religious discourse as one of many explanatory frameworks or languages in the book, thus putting it into dialogue with the other ones without choosing among them or endorsing one over another.

They can also exacerbate that tension in order emphasize or play with the heretical nature of the Religion of Romantic Love, putting the novel into dialogue with previous Christian texts precisely in order to highlight the heterodoxy of the new book. (I think here both of something like Crusie's Welcome to Temptation, which alludes to but inverts various Christian topoi, like the Fall, and also of fantasy novels like the first Kushiel trilogy by Jacqueline Carey, which offer a new, imagined religion in competition with Christianity.)

3) Romance novels can use religion and religious discourse to give a deeper resonance or meaning or importance to a particular scene or moment, letting the novel open onto vistas of meaning without guiding the reader into them throughout. Thus Mary Balogh's Slightly Dangerous ends at Easter, which suggests a number of symbolic possibilities, but the novel doesn’t develop them at any length (or so I remember); likewise Joey Hill's Natural Law invokes the language of body and soul, and speaks of Wicca, at crucial moments, but the novel as a whole is not invested in those references. Does this make sense? Is this really a separate category? I'm not sure.

4) Some romance novels offer an imagined or recovered religion as a counterpart / contrast with Christianity. I've mentioned this already, in point two, but I'm wondering if maybe it isn't a whole separate category.

I think here of various Goddess novels that echo the pop-cultural idea of a "Goddess in every woman," from Nora Roberts to P.C. Cast to the Crusie collaboration, Dogs and Goddesses. These are variously serious and comic, but they seem to me connected, not least by a sort of self-help theology.

I also think of novels that imagine a whole pantheon that allows the author to explore issues of gender, etc., on multiple levels in the novel (mythic, superhuman, human, etc.), reclaimic the mythic dimension of romance. The Scribe Virgin & Omega in J. R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood novels and the religion of Elua in the Kushiel books by Carey set each of these novels into dialogue with Christianity, and perhaps in the process they do to Christian discourse what Christian inspirational romances do with the religion of Erotic Faith, contest and revise it?

What am I missing here? Any categories that you can think of that are not in the list? Do any of these overlap so much that they really aren't distinct in any useful way? Any novels that come to mind that use religion or religious discourse in a way that doesn't fit into any of these?

Optional Romance Exam

Laura Vivanco

Eric's written an end-of-term report on his romance fiction class.

Whatever the life-skills they learned or missed, students came away with more respect for the genre, and most had at least one author, sub-genre, or series they planned to read after graduation. This afternoon I’ll order the books for my next romance classes. Some new ones will join the mix: Gwyneth Bolton’s Sweet Sensation, Beth Pattillo’s Heavens to Betsy (my first in-class Inspy), and Devil’s Cub, by Georgette Heyer, comes back into print in August, just in time for the fall survey. While I get the next round of syllabi in order, you might have some fun with this: the optional final exam for my senior seminar. I gave it on Tuesday, and guess what? Nobody came! All too busy working on their papers, I guess.

If you'd like to take the exam, the questions (on Linda Howard's Mr. Perfect, Loretta Chase's Mr. Impossible, J. R. Ward's Dark Lover, Laura Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm and Joey W. Hill’s Natural Law) are up, over at Romancing the Blog!

The picture isn't of Eric's students. It's from Wikipedia.