Art and Craft: Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep (2)

Laura Vivanco

Michelle Douglas is a pseudonym used by Therese Michelle Dryden, who recently completed a Creative Writing Masters at the University of Newcastle (Australia). Her thesis has two parts. The first was Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep; the second

discusses the conventions and constraints of the popular romance genre. It explores the challenges presented to a writer in creating and maintaining emotional intensity in a popular genre romance and the need to provide a satisfying and credible ending to that romance. Five well-known romance novels – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Rebecca, The Grand Sophy, and The Republic of Love – are analysed for the manner in which they portray romantic love and for the narrative strategies that may be of use to the writer of category romance. Finally, the exegesis discusses how the conventions of the popular romance genre and the narrative strategies employed have combined to shape the creative work.

It can be downloaded from here. I'm very pleased that Therese has agreed to be interviewed at Teach Me Tonight.

Laura: You already had an undergraduate degree in English. According to the biography included in Bachelor Dad you "enrolled in an English master's program for the sole purpose of indulging [your] reading and writing habits further." I'm sure there would have been simpler ways to get indulge your "reading and writing habits"; why study for a Masters in Creative Writing?

Therese: I didn’t mean for that comment to sound quite so flippant. It certainly glosses over the hard work and angst involved in a Masters, but, that said, my Masters did allow me to indulge my love of reading and writing further, just in a more directed fashion. My undergraduate degree was 14 years prior to my enrolment in the Masters course and, as such, seemed like a whole lifetime ago.

But my reasons were bigger than that too. I had been submitting manuscripts to Mills & Boon on a fairly regular basis and, while said manuscripts were being rejected, I knew that I was getting closer and closer to being accepted for publication. But the process is so long and I started to wonder if I had the right voice and whether I was wasting my time etc. Enrolling in a Masters in Creative Writing seemed a good way to continue doing what I was doing while forcing me to spread my wings a little. Romance wasn’t actually my topic when I first enrolled (I wrote a loose and baggy monster of a novel), but when Mills & Boon bought my first book early in the second semester of my enrolment (February 2007) it seemed wise to focus all my energies on romance instead.

Laura: Re writing romance novels, you say that "The level of emotional intensity that needs to be generated quickly and maintained over the course of the story, and the credibility of the happy ending are two elements I find most difficult and challenging in my own practice" (193). I found that interesting because I recently read the following in a post by Magdalen, whose romance novels have not yet been published:

I don't know yet all the ways to convey emotion in my writing. If I'm managing to evoke emotion in my readers, it's a happy accident. That's why I'm off in January to coastal Maine to start an MFA program.

Yup, I'm committing two years and a lot of money to get a degree I don't need and won't likely use just so that I can write a scene that plays that most beguiling trick: it makes the reader feel.

Did studying for your MA help you perfect "that most beguiling trick"?

Therese: My initial response is to say no, as I still think the best instance of “that most beguiling trick” in my own work is in my first novel, which was written a good twelve months before I enrolled in my Masters. But that is too easy an answer. During my enrolment I was exposed to writers – excellent writers – whom I wouldn’t have studied otherwise and they have no doubt influenced me in untold ways.

More importantly, perhaps, I discovered other writers’ guidelines and maxims about writing that explained some of the techniques I was applying instinctively. A specific example being the idea that if you allow a character to cry in a story then the reader doesn’t have to. I knew that a particular scene in my debut novel worked well, but I’m not sure I could’ve satisfactorily explained why. Knowing the why is valuable because it gives a writer a place to look when an effect they are trying to create isn’t working.

Interestingly, though, I think the biggest benefit I’ve gained from my Masters has been the greater understanding I’ve developed for the romance genre. That has been invaluable.

Laura: Ken Gelder, whom you quote in your thesis, states that "The entwining of entertainment and information is a key feature of much popular fiction. Readers can quite literally learn from it" (62):

Crime fiction is often informational, and technical - although it is by no means the only genre of popular fiction that relies on the provision of often intensely researched details: even romance can do this. (Gelder 62)

In your thesis you focus on love and

the conflict romantic love seems to trigger between intellect and emotion. As Blaise Pascal declares: “the heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing” (qtd. in Lewis, Amini, and Lannon 4). The internal discord this can engender in a heroine and/or hero can generate tension quickly within a story and help amplify the narrative elements of internal and external conflict while heightening the emotional tone of the story. (193)

Do you think readers can glean useful information, whether about relationships or about other topics, from romance novels?

Therese: Yes, I do, but I would also caution that romance novels are not self-help books or encyclopedias. I know the Smithton women in Janice Radway’s Reading The Romance cited facts and instruction as one of the benefits and enjoyments they found in reading romance, and while it’s true that, like them, I’ve learned interesting facts through the pages of a romance novel, it’s not one of the main reasons I read romance. Also, I don’t consider that passing on of information a romance novel’s primary goal, though it can certainly be an entertaining by-product.

I recently read Sarah Wendell’s Everything I know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels, which I enjoyed immensely. While I’m not sure I would make all the claims that she does, I do think romance novels generally portray characters who work through their fears and relationship problems and encourage each other to communicate, which I think has a positive import.

Laura: John G. Cawelti has suggested that

In earlier more homogeneous cultures religious ritual performed the important function of articulating and reaffirming the primary cultural values. Today, with cultures composed of a multiplicity of differing religious groups, the synthesis of values and their reaffirmation has become an increasingly important function of the mass media and the popular arts. (388)

Catherine Roach would appear to be in full agreement, at least with regards to the romance genre:

To the ancient and perennial question of how to define and live the good life, how to achieve happiness and fulfillment, American pop culture’s resounding answer is through the narrative of romance, sex, and love. [...]

I argue romance novels are so popular partly because they do deep and complicated work for the (mostly) women who read them—work that derives from the mythic or religious nature of the romance narrative that serves to engage readers in a “reparation fantasy” of healing in regards to male-female relations. Romance novels help women readers, especially heterosexual women, deal with their essentially paradoxical relationship toward men within a culture still marked by patriarchy and its component threat of violence toward women.

In Bachelor Dad you put a bookshop in conflict with a bakery. Jaz's mother, and then Jaz own the bookshop while "Mr Sears owned the '[...] bakery directly across the road" (11):

Mr Sears had never actually refused to serve Jaz and her mother in his 'baked fresh-daily' country bakery, but he'd let them know by his icy politeness, his curled lip, the placing of change on the counter instead of directly into their hands, what he'd thought of them.
Despite Jaz's pleas, her mother had insisted on shopping there. 'Best bread in town,' she'd say cheerfully. (12)

Is it entirely fanciful to think that this choice of shops might serve as a reminder that "Man shall not live by bread alone" (Matthew 4:4)? There's nothing overtly religious about the books Jaz sells, of course, but perhaps there's something of a spiritual nature to be learned from the fact that the conflict is removed because love overcomes hatred?

Therese: Oh, you have no idea how much I want to say that I intentionally did all that! My reasons for choosing a bookshop and a bakery were far more prosaic, I’m afraid. When I visited Leura, which is the inspiration for my fictitious town of Clara Falls, I fell in love with the bookshop there (Megalong Books if anyone is interested). So when I decided that I wanted to write a novel set in the Blue Mountains it only seemed natural that the bookshop would feature prominently. For plot reasons, I needed Mr Sears’ shop to be one that a person would go into on a regular basis. Hence, the bakery. However, the book does feature art and artists – in part to reflect the Blue Mountains which abounds with art galleries – and I wanted Mr Sears to be an artist in his own way as well (though, baking as art may indeed be fanciful). I wanted his art to hint at the fact that he could be redeemed (baking/bread = nurturing). Because a romance is focused so closely on the heroine and hero it wasn’t possible to show Mr Sears’ journey and I didn’t want his redemption coming completely out of left field (though I fear it probably still does).

That all said, though, this is a story that is primarily about forgiveness and redemption, and, of course, ideas of forgiveness and redemption do have significant religious overtones. I wanted echoes of Jaz and Connor’s journeys in the characters of Mr Sears, Mrs Lavendar and Boyd Longbottom too. I think that as a general rule romance novels do portray love as a much more positive emotion (ie, an emotion that can give one happiness) and a smarter choice than holding onto hatred, fear and prejudice. As Pamela Regis points out in A Natural History of the Romance Novel, the society defined at the beginning of a romance novel is flawed in some way. In Bachelor Dad, when the rifts are finally healed, old grudges settled, and Jaz and Connor are free to declare their love for each other, those fractures in the society are mended and that, hopefully, indicates not only a better future for Jaz and Connor, but for Clara Falls as well.

Laura: You write in your thesis that "Genre fictions are created for the purposes of enjoyment and pleasure" (219) while Ken Gelder suggests that

Two key words for understanding popular fiction are industry and entertainment, and they work firmly to distinguish popular fiction from the logics and practices of what I regard as its 'opposite', namely, literary fiction or Literature. Literary fiction is ambivalent at best about its industrial connections and likes to see itself as something more than 'just entertainment', but popular fiction generally speaking has no such reservations. (1)

In presenting Harlequin Mills & Boon romances as novels which are highly constrained by the publisher and emphasising their authors' wish to provide entertainment, do you accept that there is a great divide between Literature and popular fiction? And is this a question you meant to address in Bachelor Dad through the depiction of Jaz and Connor's art?

Therese: I don’t accept that there is such a great divide between Literature (with a capital L) and popular fiction. That seems to me too artificial. I think that Literature and popular fiction do privilege different things, but it doesn’t mean other elements are completely ignored. Literature often privileges truth, or beauty of expression in language, or experimentation with language and/or structure, but on its own head be it if it ignores a reader’s desire for entertainment and pleasure. Popular fiction privileges elements of fantasy, and romance novels idealize romantic love, but if there is no truth or honesty, or if it is poorly written, likewise, it won’t hold a reader’s attention for long. There are numerous works that are compelling, emotionally engaging, truthful and beautifully written in Literature and in popular fiction. I believe there are instances in which category romances are all these things too. Category romances are constrained, but that doesn’t mean there is no room for innovation, and within the form there is a wealth of diversity.

Can you tell that prior to writing Bachelor Dad I had been reading John Carey – specifically What Good Are the Arts, and The Intellectuals and the Masses? I do believe that Jaz’s tattoos and Connor’s wood-turned furniture are valid art forms – as valid as their drawings and paintings. I dislike any kind of art that attempts to deliberately exclude a large segment of the population. I come from a working class background so cultural elitism is an anathema to me. I don’t know if they were issues I deliberately meant to address in Bachelor Dad, but it is inevitable that a writer’s own prejudices and beliefs will make a mark on their fiction.

---------

• Cawelti, John G. "The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature." Journal of Popular Culture 3:3 (1969): 381-90.
• Douglas, Michelle. Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009.
• Dryden, Therese Michelle. Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep. MA thesis. Faculty of Education and Arts, School of Humanities and Social Science
  University of Newcastle, Australia, March 2011.
• Gelder, Ken. Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2004.
• Roach, Catherine. "Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).

Insights Into the Taste and Manners of a Nation

Laura Vivanco

John Ryley, writing about early nineteenth-century Leeds, commented that

Public amusements, especially those of the Drama are calculated to give us an insight into the taste and manners of a nation; in popular Tragedies, we trace the refinement of the passions; Comedies are often satires on existing follies and fashions of the times; and even Pantomimes generally exhibit caricatures of the frivolities of the day. (61)

Although Ryley focuses on drama, the idea that cultural works in some way respond to, or give insight into, the "taste and manners of a nation" is one that has been widely accepted. Here's what John G. Cawelti had to say about the issue in his Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (1976):

Certain story archetypes particularly fufill man’s needs for enjoyment and escape. [...] But in order for these patterns to work, they must be embodied in figures, settings, and situations that have appropriate meanings for the culture which produces them. One cannot write a successful adventure story about a social character type that the culture cannot conceive in heroic terms; this is why we have so few adventure stories about plumbers, janitors, or streetsweepers. It is, however, certainly not inconceivable that a culture might emerge which placed a different sort of valuation or interpretation on these tasks, in which case we might expect to see the evolution of adventure story formulas about them. (6)

Now maybe I'm going to be guilty of making some generalisations to go along with the assumptions, but it seems to me that although I have come across some romance heroes who are carpenters and builders, they're usually depicted as small business owners (even if these are one-person businesses). I don't recall having read a romance which featured a hero who worked in a foundry, down a mine, or on an assembly-line. The only janitor hero I've encountered is to be found in LaVyrle Spencer's Then Came Heaven (here's an AAR review which gives an overview of the characters and setting). I suspect this novel is one of the exceptions which proves the rule that romance heroes are generally not employed in the kinds of proletarian jobs which would be celebrated in socialist realist statues of the kind pictured above.¹ I'm fairly sure that socialist realist art also has professions that the artists "cannot conceive in heroic terms."

Just out of interest, and because I want an excuse to include the following portrait, has anyone written a novel about a hero who's a tailor? I don't count The Tailor of Gloucester, as the tailor requires the assistance of some very compassionate and hardworking mice, and I'd consider them, rather than the tailor, to be the heroes of that story.

Romance heroines, in contrast to romance heroes, are not infrequently lowly members of the working classes (they may work as waitresses, secretaries, low-paid providers of care to infants and the elderly etc), but rather than setting up a workers' co-operative or joining a union, a downtrodden heroine will generally be freed from exploitation in the labour market by marrying her boss or some other male who will be able to support her and their children in relative comfort. Of course, many heroines do have professional jobs, enjoy their work and continue working after marriage, but they couldn't be romance heroines if they didn't give a higher priority to their romantic relationships and, often, children. In part that's due to the demands of the plot. After all, a romance wouldn't be a romance if the protagonists decided that their idea of "happily ever after" consisted of walking off into the sunset in opposite directions in pursuit of their careers. That applies to both heroes and heroines. However, I suspect the characterisation of heroines also owes quite a bit to social expectations of women, and character traits and behaviours which may be permissible, or even deemed admirable and/or sexy in a hero, may not be seen the same way if demonstrated by a heroine. Abby Green, in a description of her The Spaniard’s Marriage Bargain, writes that she

can’t remember exactly where the idea sprang from originally, but I know that I was thinking something along the lines of: what would be one of the most unforgivable things a woman/mother could do? For me, it would definitely be to walk away from her baby, or child.
Men seem to get away with doing that a lot easier than women in many cases, but for a woman to turn her back on her baby? It’s extremely hard to forgive, after all, women are all hardwired to be the nurturers aren’t they?
Well, of course we all know it’s never as black and white as that.

We may know it's "never as black and white as that" but judging by the characterisations of romance heroes and heroines a double standard does seem to exist around the issue.

It's not just characters who are affected by underlying social assumptions. As Cawelti observed, "for these patterns to work, they must be embodied in figures, settings, and situations that have appropriate meanings for the culture which produces them." This passage from The Seduction Business (1999) by Charlotte Lamb seems to me to reveal some of the settings "that have appropriate meanings" in romance:

The sound of his voice made her heart sing, but she was still afraid. When he'd begun making love to her in her bedroom the other night she had lost control within seconds; had been going crazy, burning up with desire as he touched her.
She wanted him now, in the cold light of day, in her office, sitting at her desk. It wasn't necessary to have moonlight, or music, or for her to have been drinking wine ... The desire she felt was constant, instinctive, deep. (157, emphasis added)

I think it would be safe to assume that the heroine is listing here some typical components of what might be considered the kind of truly "romantic" setting that is deemed particularly conducive getting a woman in a receptive mood for sexual activity. Phillip Vannini has observed that

Romantic love is one of the defining sentiments of our culture. [...] As production and consumption have expanded, mass communication has been transmitting to the public a visual idea of love as a spectacle. The romanticization of commodities occurs when media portray certain products and services as romantic. A cheap fast-food meal is not romantic, but the consumption of a candle-lit three-course meal at a French restaurant is. [...] Beside self-expression, romance allowed those who had learned to consume it properly to feel liberated from the drudgery of work. This is the image of the "date" as an outing to a restaurant, a movie theater, or a romantic getaway at the seaside or at a luxurious (and romantic) hotel. (171)

Again, I think there tend to be gender-related assumptions about the efficacy of romantic gestures and settings. The romance genre, and ideas about women's sexuality, have moved on since Germaine Greer wrote that "Flowers, little gifts, love-letters, maybe poems to her eyes and hair, candlelit meals on moonlit terraces and muted strings. Nothing hasty, physical [...] Mystery, magic, champagne, ceremony, tenderness, excitement, adoration, reverence – women never have enough of it" (173) but there is perhaps still a lingering impression that women need to be coaxed and wooed into having sexual feelings, or may be very occasionally overwhelmed by immense passion if they meet The One, whereas the common misperception, debunked by Snopes, is that "men think about sex every seven seconds" and, presumably, have no need of romantic music, wine, moonlight etc in order to get in the mood.

The range of personality traits embodied in heroes and heroines, and the aspirational aspect of romance reading, shape the types of settings, characters, and outcomes we tend to find in the genre. Some jobs, some social groups, some settings, are not ones that are seen as socially desirable. They're not aspirational. Ancestral mansions and white picket fences are aspirational, ballgowns and candle-lit dinners are romantic, strong rich men are desirable, virginal-yet-sexy-and-beautiful-yet-not-vain women are aspirational, but men who stack shelves in supermarkets and non-white women are generally not considered aspirational. At least, having read quite a lot of romances, that's the impression I'm left with.

Black heroines can, of course, be found in the African-American romance sub-genre, but they're not at all common in romances aimed at non-African-American readers. I wonder if this is because while black women are expected to be able to identify with a black heroine, and it's thought understandable that a black heroine can represent an ideal for a black woman, it's somehow not expected that a white women would find it easy to think of a black woman as the embodiment of an ideal she should aspire to. I could be wrong about that, but I'm offering it up as a hypothesis. It was certainly the case that in the nineteenth century

people sometimes spoke of civilization as if it were itself a racial trait, inherited by all Anglo-Saxons and other "advanced" white races.
Gender, too, was an essential component of civilization. Indeed, one could identify advanced civilizations by the degree of their sexual differentiation. [...] Civilized women were womanly - delicate, spiritual, dedicated to the home. And civilized white men were the most manly ever evolved - firm of character; self-controlled; protectors of women and children. In contrast, gender differences among savages seemed to be blurred. Savage women were aggressive, carried heavy burdens, and did all sorts of "masculine" hard labor. (Bederman 25)

This stereotype does not seem to have entirely disappeared:

According to essayists in “Critical Studies in Media Communication,” one of the things that reality television producers tend to do is to choose contestants, manipulate situations and use editing to reinforce racial stereotypes.
In an October 2008 issue devoted to the subject, theorist Robin Boylorn argued that black women are recruited and their content edited to conform to images through the history of movies and television. One predominant stereotype is the black woman as “aggressive, loud, rude and pushy. Other negative images include divas, hoochies, weepers, waifs, antagonizers, shrills, welfare queens and freaks.” (Cummings)

-----------

• Anreus, Alejandro, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg. The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere. Penn State Press, 2006.
• Bederman, Gail. Manhood & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. 1995. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1996.
• Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.
• Cummings, James. "Commentary: Reality TV reinforces racial stereotypes." Dayton Daily News. 22 August 2009.
• Greer, Germaine. 1970. The Female Eunuch. London: Paladin, 1971.
• Lamb, Charlotte. The Seduction Business. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 1999.
• Ryley, John. The Leeds Guide; Including a Sketch of the Environs, and Kirkstall Abbey. Leeds: Edward Baines, 1806.
• Vannini, Phillip. "Will You Marry Me?: Spectacle and Consumption in the Ritual of Marriage Proposals." Journal of Popular Culture 38:1 (2004): 169-185.

1 I haven't done a comprehensive search for art and literature celebrating "plumbers, janitors, or streetsweepers" but I have come across a reference to a work in the American social realist style, which perhaps challenges a few preconceptions about which jobs are heroic:

Cesare Stea's 1939 relief Assembling for a sewage-disposal plant in Queens [...]. It shows four men working together on a length of sewage pipe. Their shirtsleeves are rolled up and their pants are tight, so that their muscular frames are accentuated. [...] Such an image is clearly meant to celebrate the New Deal's emphasis on putting Americans back to work, and its egalitarian rhetoric. (Anreus, Linden & Weinberg 121)

The first image is a cropped version of William Bell Scott's painting, Iron and Coal, which can be seen in its entirety at The Victorian Web. The photo of the "construction and industry statue on the Green Bridge, Vilnius [...] Lithuania" is from Wikimedia Commons, though again, I've done a bit of cropping. The third image is Giovanni Battista Moroni's The Tailor,

The portrait is a late work, probably around 1570, and the most famous of Moroni's portraits [...].
The colourful costume of the tailor is contrasted with the black material marked with chalk lines that he prepares to cut. Most of the sitters in Moroni's later portraits are dressed in black in the Spanish fashion that persisted into the following century. The tailor's head, lit from above to the left, dominates the painting, the eyes, as in the majority of Moroni's portraits, looking directly at the spectator with shrewd appraisal. (National Gallery)

I found this particular photo of the painting at Wikimedia Commons.

Romance Novels: Literary Texts or Formulaic Stories?

Laura Vivanco

Earlier this week Katherine Orazem from the Yale Herald asked me a few questions about the romance genre. Her article, "In Defense of Romance: Proving the Stereotypes Wrong," went online on Friday and it's well worth a read.¹ Orazem's obviously done plenty of background research and she notes that

[Pamela] Regis’ work on the literary history of romance has traced the precursors of the genre back to Samuel Richardson’s 1740 epistolary novel Pamela, as well as works by heavyweights like Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and E. M. Forster. Such proto-romances stretch back for centuries into the annals of great literature. “The love story with a happy ending is a very, very old type,” said Dr. Laura Vivanco, writer for romance-scholarship blog Teach Me Tonight.

In case anyone's wondering which works I had in mind, the answer is that in my reply to her I'd mentioned many of those included in Regis's A Natural History of the Romance Novel and listed above, as well as a number of works which are much older:

Many myths and legends are love stories, and many fairy tales end with marriages and happy ever afters. There were ancient Greek romances, including Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, although they, like their modern counterparts, have tended to have "had a bad press" (Williamson 23). Lovers in the literature of courtly love often meet with rather tragic fates, but some examples of medieval literature have more cheerful outcomes, for example the stories of Floire and Blanchefleur, and of Aucassin and Nicolette. Boccaccio included some love stories with happy endings in his Decameron. Shakespeare and others wrote comedies in which lovers overcome the barriers which separate them.

Orazem continues:

Despite this history—and the fact that several books possibly classified as romance are already included in the traditional literary canon—from their earliest days romance novels have drawn criticism. Willig, whose own novels earned her a nomination for the Quill Award in 2006, noted the widespread tendency “to dismiss romance novels as very thin productions.” But much of this criticism lumps romances together without considering the nuances and varieties of the category. As Vivanco said, “It’s a huge genre and if someone picks up a romance at random, it’s not likely that they’ll find one of the very best.”

Having read Orazem's article, I thought a bit more about the implications of some of the questions she asked me:

How do you consider the relationship between art and pleasure? Is the goal of art to bring pleasure and beauty, or to challenge and trouble us? Does art have to be difficult to be rewarding?

It seems to me that if someone picks up a romance at random, to assess whether or not it's art, the book they choose faces two obstacles in its attempt to convince a sceptical reader. The first, as I mentioned, is that the book may not be one of the best in the genre, but the second is that the sceptical reader comes to the book with preconceptions, both about the genre and about what "art" is. In “The Paradox of Junk Fiction” (recently discussed by Jessica at Read React Review - scroll down the page until you reach item 3) Noël Carroll, who includes romances in the group of texts he's labelled "junk fiction" (225) outlines the defining features of "junk fiction":

The junk fictions that I have in mind are all narratives. Indeed, their story dimension is the most important thing about them. [...] Junk fictions aspire to be page-turners [...] and what motivates turning the page so quickly is our interest in what happens next. We do not dawdle over [...] diction as we might over Updike's nor do we savor the complexity of [...] sentence structure, as we do with Virginia Woolf's. Rather we read for story. (225-226)

The trouble with this defining feature is that it depends in part on readers' behaviours. Can a literary text suddenly become junk fiction if I read it "for story"? A long time ago I read Tolstoy's War and Peace this way, and I read it fast. I read it so fast, I can't remember much about it now, I'm sorry to say. Does that mean it was just an engrossing page-turner that's largely forgettable? No, it doesn't. What it does suggest, though, is that the speed at which any particular reader, or group of readers, read a novel, and the extent to which they focus on the novel's "story" or plot, should not be taken as an indication of the novel's literary quality.

Another reader-based criteria on which it might be unwise to base judgements of literary quality is sales: "many novels which we would call high art have over a longer period of years, sold as well as many ephemeral bestsellers" (Cawelti, "Notes" 258) and conversely

The fact that a work is designed to please the audience, clearly does not mean that it will become popular. Otherwise, most Hollywood films and pulp novels would achieve the popularity of Hitchcock at his best, and works created primarily with a view to an artistic expression of the creator's vision would inevitably fail. (Cawelti, "Notes" 258-59)

Returning to Carroll and his definition, we find the following:

junk fictions are the sort of narratives that commentators are wont to call formulaic. That is, junk fictions generally belong to well-entrenched genres, which themselves are typified by their possession of an extremely limited repertoire of story-types. [...] Junk fictions tell these generic stories again and again with minor variations. (225)

I think it's significant that Carroll has been contrasting "junk fiction" with twentieth-century literary fiction. If he'd taken a look at medieval, Renaissance, or early modern literature, I think he'd have found it much, much more difficult to draw distinctions along these lines.² As Cawelti once stated:

all cultural products contain a mixture of two kinds of elements: conventions and inventions. Conventions are elements which are known to both the creator and his audience beforehand - they consist of things like favorite plots, stereotyped characters, accepted ideas, commonly known metaphors and other linguistic devices, etc. Inventions, on the other hand, are elements which are uniquely imagined by the creator such as new kinds of characters, ideas, or linguistic forms. Of course it is difficult to distinguish in every case between conventions and inventions because many elements lie somewhere along a continuum between the two poles. Nonetheless, familiarity with a group of literary works will usually soon reveal what the major conventions are and therefore, what in the case of an individual work is unique to that creator. ("The Concept" 384-385)

Cawelti goes on to observe that "Most works of art contain a mixture of convention and invention. Both Homer and Shakespeare show a large proportion of conventional elements mixed with inventions of great genius" ("The Concept" 385) and Cawelti later wrote of Shakespeare that he

worked in a popular, commercial medium and accepted the limitations of that medium. He [...] made extensive use of conventional material; as we know from the many studies of his sources, most of Shakespeare's plays were adaptations of existing stories. His work is full of the stage conventions of his time and emphasizes [...] sensational crimes and international intrigues, madness and violence, mystery and romance. ("Notes" 264)

If only works with a high level of innovation and a low level of convention were to be accepted as "art" and "great literature," then a lot of works written prior to the twentieth century would have to be removed from the literary canon.

This leads me on to another set of questions that Orazem sent me:

When you approach literary analysis of a romance novel, do you treat it any differently than a work from other genres? Do romance novels have a different goal than other works, or are their artistic aspirations fundamentally the same?

I replied that "I think it's unwise to generalise: different romance authors will undoubtedly have different artistic aspirations." I've already mentioned that I don't think it's necessarily helpful to assess the literary merit of works on the basis of how fast they can be read or how popular they appear to be, and I think we also need to be careful about using authors' "artistic aspirations" as an indication of the quality of the work in question.³ One author could have lofty aspirations but fail miserably, whereas another author whose primary intention was to entertain by providing an exciting plot might also include complex characterisations, thought-provoking moral dilemmas and exquisite imagery. On the question of how we should study art/literature versus works of popular culture, Cawelti has written that

When we are studying the fine arts, we are essentially interested in the unique achievement of the individual artist, while in the case of popular culture, we are dealing with a product that is in some sense collective. Of course it is possible to study the fine arts as collective products just as it is possible to examine individual works of popular culture as unique artistic creations. ("The Concept" 382)

He suggests that if one wishes to "examine individual works of popular culture as unique artistic creations" then "the traditional methods of humanistic scholarship are the most appropriate, with some allowance for the special aesthetic problems of the popular arts" ("The Concept" 382). With my background, I don't see these as "special [...] problems." As a medievalist, the works of fiction I approached tended to contain high levels of what Cawelti calls "convention," as does the modern romance genre. And so, as Katherine Orazem reported,

Vivanvo [sic], who is planning a close literary analysis of Harlequin Mills & Boon romances, said she “approach[es] romances in the same way that I’d approach any other work of fiction.”

----

• Carroll, Noël. "The Paradox of Junk Fiction. Philosophy and Literature 18.2 (1994): 225-241.
• Cawelti, John G. "Notes toward an Aesthetic of Popular Culture." Journal of Popular Culture 5.2 (1971): 255-
• Cawelti, John G. "The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature." Journal of Popular Culture 3.3 (1969): 381-390.
• Orazem, Katherine. "In Defense of Romance: Proving the Stereotypes Wrong. Yale Herald Friday, February 12, 2010.
• Williamson, Margaret. "The Greek Romance." The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction. Ed. Jean Radford. London: Routledge & Kegan
• Paul, 1986. 23-45.

----

1 My opinion of the piece has not, I hope, been influenced by the fact that its author quoted me.

2 Carroll tangentially includes a recognition that this may be the case when he writes that

Detractors of junk fiction or, as it is sometimes called, kitsch, maintain that the audience for junk fiction is passive when compared to the audience for high art. Moreover, they explain this by claiming that junk fiction is "easy" while high art, or at least high art of the twentieth century, is "difficult." (238)

3 In many cases the author's intentions remain unknown to the literary critic. In others, the stated intentions are known, but may not be a reliable indication of the author's true intentions. I am thinking in particular of cases in which the "modesty topos" has been employed:

The "modesty topos" was a well-worn strategy in Renaissance writing for displaying "sprezzatura" -- an apparently unstudied, natural elegance of demeanor. (The contradiction built into this is fascinating.) In a warped way, the modesty topos manifests itself in the American consciousness. The folksy, downhome, southern style is politically popular because it aims to represent a trustworthy "regular guy" character -- as if anyone more articulate than oneself is as dangerous as Milton's silver-tongued Satan. (Nancy Weitz)

Janet Claire has commented that some Renaissance women writers employed

the modesty topos. The apologetic or self-deprecating idiom of several of the texts which will be considered needs to be read at other than face value. Paradoxically, to draw attention to a lack of learning or seemingly to acquiesce in patriarchal notions of female inferiority could disarm the male reader and prove an enabling device for the publication of women's writing.

Since we're discussing how to weigh up the value of different texts, I thought the photo of War and Peace on a set of scales was appropriate. The photo was taken by Jill Clardy, who titled it "War and Peace is 'Heavy Reading'." It's used under the terms of its Creative Commons licence.

Loretta Chase - Miss Wonderful (an addendum)

Laura Vivanco

I think maybe we need a soundtrack for this post, so here it is. It's Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for a Hero.

In a previous post I wrote about Loretta Chase's Alistair Carsington, an acclaimed war hero. Alistair and Mirabel's thoughts on what makes a hero can perhaps be read as being somewhat metafictional:

"I am tetchy about being made out to be [a] hero," he said. [...] "Others did as much and more [...] My actions were nothing extraordinary. There were men who'd been with Wellington for years, who acted with surpassing courage and gallantry. If you knew their stories, you would understand how demented it seems to me to be singled out as the hero." [...]
"I suppose this is the price one pays for having a forceful and exciting character," she went on. "You attract the press. The newspapers made you famous, not solely because of your deeds - though you are entitled to be proud of them - but because you made a grand story." (220-221)

A romance hero becomes a hero not just because of his courage or other interesting and/or valuable qualities. He's also got to be someone about whom the romance author can make "a grand story."

I think there's an extent to which, as Cawelti observes, culture affects the qualities which are thought to make a character sufficiently heroic to create "a grand story." Certainly

general plot patterns [such as "boy meets girl, boy and girl have a misunderstanding, boy gets girl"] are not necessarily limited to a specific culture or period. Instead, they seem to represent story types that, if not universal in their appeal, have certainly been popular in many different cultures at many different times. In fact, they are examples of what some scholars have called archetypes or patterns that appeal in many different cultures. [...] But in order for these patterns to work, they must be embodied in figures, settings, and situations that have appropriate meanings for the culture which produces them. One cannot write a successful adventure story about a social character type that the culture cannot conceive in heroic terms; this is why we have so few adventure stories about plumbers, janitors, or streetsweepers. It is, however, certainly not inconceivable that a culture might emerge which placed a different sort of valuation or interpretation on these tasks, in which case we might expect to see the evolution of adventure story formulas about them. (5-6)

This isn't to say that each culture will only have one type of hero, but it does suggest that in certain periods, there will be noticeable "types" that exist and then, with the passing of time, either change somewhat or fall out of fashion.

Recently Maverick, posting at Romancing the Blog, said that she looks for a hero who's "richer than Croesus," "arrogant and dominating," "sometimes just this side of abusive", and, before he meets the heroine, "promiscuous." Bonnie Tyler, in the lyrics of her song states that

He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta be fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight [...]
He's gotta be sure [...]
And he's gotta be larger than life

Taken to a parodic extreme, this type of strong, aggressive hero can perhaps end up as Stella Gibbons' Seth Starkadder:

Standing with one arm resting upon the high mantel [...] was a tall young man whose riding-boots were splashed with mud to the thigh, and whose coarse linen shirt was open to his waist. [...] His voice had a low, throaty, animal quality, a sneering warmth that wound a velvet ribbon of sexuality over the outward coarseness of the man. (38)

Meriam, the hired girl, would not be in until after dinner. When she came, she would avoid his eyes, and tremble and weep.
He laughed insolently, triumphantly. Undoing another button of his shirt, he lounged out across the yard to the shed where Big Business, the bull, was imprisoned in darkness.
Laughing softly, Seth struck the door of the shed.
And as though answering the deep call of male to male, the bull uttered a loud tortured bellow that rose undefeated through the dead sky that brooded over the farm.
Seth undid yet another button, and lounged away. (42)

Mr Neck, a film producer, who wants to find "a second Clark Gable [...] I want a big, husky stiff that smells of the great outdoors, with a golden voice. I want passion. I want red blood. I don't want no sissies, see? Sissies give me a pain in the neck, and they're beginning to give the great American public a pain in the neck, too" (182) finds precisely what he's looking for in Seth:

A silence fell. The young man stood in the warm light of the declining sun, his bare throat and boldly moulded features looking as though they were bathed in gold. His pose was easy and graceful. A superb self-confidence radiated from him, as it does from any healthy animal. [...] He looked exactly what he was, the local sexually successful bounder. (184)

He's not the only possible type of hero (or attractive anti-hero), but he's certainly a very popular one. Alistair, despite his war record and his string of love affairs, isn't really that kind of a hero, but with his romantic and military reputation, his appearance (he's tall, dark-haired and has a "hawklike profile" (2)) and as a possessor of the "deep Carsington voice, which emotion - whether positive or negative - roughened into a growl" (2), it's not surprising that other people immediately think he is.¹

• Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.
• Chase, Loretta. Miss Wonderful. 2004. London: Piatkus, 2006.
• Gibbons, Stella. Cold Comfort Farm. 1932. London: Penguin, no publication date given.

1 Alistair, as he points out, "never was" a rake and though "The difference between me and a libertine will seem a mere technicality to you" (121) it is in fact significant. Whereas a rake or libertine is "a man who behaves without moral principles, especially in sexual matters", able to seduce women without moral qualms, Alistair's problem is that, far from callously advantage of women's weaknesses, he acts as he does because he "fell in love quickly, deeply, and disastrously" (3). Unlike a rake or libertine, he is not a man who needs to be "tamed" or reformed.

The picture is of the cover of Loretta Chase's Lord Perfect. I've included it because it illustrates very nicely the way in which heroes tend to be depicted. As Kalen Hughes recently observed regarding the shirt in the Regency period:

One very important thing to note: it does not open all the way down the front (regardless of what is depicted on countless romance novel covers)! It has a partial neck-opening from the collar to about mid-chest. So the shirt had to be pulled on/off over the head.

Cover artists, however, often seem to be convinced that romance heroes must resemble Seth Starkadder, with open shirt and indolent, lounging pose.

[A companion post by Kalen, on how to dress/undress a Regency lady, is available here.]