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)

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• 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.

Covers and Coverings

Laura Vivanco

A while ago I posted about a cover I was sure had been inspired by one of Edmund Blair Leighton's paintings. This time I'm not so sure, but I have the impression that Blair Leighton must be quite popular with Harlequin/ Mills & Boon's art department, because they chose his A Favour (left) for the cover of one of their reissues (right).

Take a look at the cover of Barbara Dunlop's The Billionaire's Bidding, below. Do the lighting, the angle of the bride's head, her hair-style, the white objects beside the register, the feather pen, or the position of the groom remind you of anything?
What about this?

It's Blair Leighton's Signing the Register.

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A recent call for papers on Literary Dress: Fashioning the Fictional Self states that

Fashion, fabricate, artifice, make-up: all these terms have a double valence. Each term in noun form denotes a prosthetic application of something foreign atop something natural (usually a human body) with the intention of concealing or enhancing the natural item beneath. Each term in verb form, though, carries a connotation of constitution and creation: a sense of literal “becoming,” or even investiture. In some way, these terms gesture towards the ephemeral, frivolous, and the temporary AND towards a sense of ontological making.

The wedding dresses pictured above seem good examples of how an item of dress can communicate to the viewer "a sense of literal 'becoming,'" since the individual wearing it is in the process of being transformed from the single to the married state. It seems, therefore, that clothing can tell the viewer much about the individual. In addition, as Joanne Entwistle has noted,

The social world is a world of dressed bodies. Nakedness is wholly inappropriate in almost all social situations and, even in situations where much naked flesh is exposed (on the beach, at the swimming-pool, even in the bedroom), the bodies that meet there are likely to be adorned, if only by jewellery, or indeed, even perfume. (6)

However, in an anonymous madrigal in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, 1602, while the poet mentions that his beloved's clothing "doth show her wit" and varies according to the season, he nonetheless finds her unclothed body even more beautiful:

My love in her attire doth show her wit,
It doth so well become her:
For every season she hath dressings fit,
For winter, spring, and summer.
No beauty she doth miss,
When all her robes are on:
But Beauty's self she is
When all her robes are gone. (Carpenter 78)

The last line's reference to the lady's nakedness perhaps provides some subtext when the previous line appears in Georgette Heyer's Venetia (1958). Notice, too, the detailed description of both Lord Damerel's clothing and his body:

Startled, she turned her head, and found that she was being observed by a tall man mounted on a handsome grey horse. He was a stranger, but his voice and his habit proclaimed his condition, and it did not take her more than a very few moments to guess that she must be confronting the Wicked Baron. She regarded him with candid interest, unconsciously affording him an excellent view of her enchanting countenance. His brows rose, and he swung himself out of the saddle, and came towards her, with long, easy strides. She was unacquainted with any men of mode, but although he was dressed like any country gentleman a subtle difference hung about his buckskins and his coat of dandy grey russet. No provincial tailor had fashioned them, and no country beau could have worn them with such careless elegance. He was taller than Venetia had at first supposed, rather loose-limbed, and he bore himself with a faint suggestion of swashbuckling arrogance. As he advanced upon her Venetia perceived that he was dark, his countenance lean and rather swarthy, marked with lines of dissipation. A smile was curling his lips, but Venetia thought she had never seen eyes so cynically bored.
'Well, fair trespasser, you are justly served, aren't you?' he said. 'Stand still!"
She remained obediently motionless while he disentangled her skirt from the brambles. As he straightened himself, he said: 'There you are! But I always exact a forfeit from those who rob me of my blackberries. Let me look at you!'
Before she had recovered from her astonishment at being addressed in such a style he had an arm round her, and with his free hand had pushed back her sunbonnet. In more anger than fright she tried to thrust him away, uttering a furious protest. He paid no heed at all; only his arm tightened round her, something that was not boredom gleamed in his eyes, and he ejaculated: 'But beauty's self she is! ...'
Venetia then found herself being ruthlessly kissed. (31-32)¹

It is not only Damerel's clothing which proclaims his status and character, since "no country beau could have worn them with such careless elegance." It is the body inside the clothes which reveals that Damerel is a rake: "he bore himself with a faint suggestion of swashbuckling arrogance," his face is "marked with lines of dissipation" and his eyes are "cynically bored." That it is the body, rather than the clothes, which proclaim the truth about the man is demonstrated by the counter-example of Oswald:

'[...] He is Sir John Denny's son, and the top of his desire is to be mistaken for the Corsair. He combs his hair into wild curls, knots silken handkerchiefs round his neck, and broods over the dark passions in his soul [...] if ever he meets you he will be quite green with jealousy, for you are precisely what he thinks he would like to be - even though you don't study the picturesque in your attire.' (36)

Oswald may dress the part, but he nonetheless fails to give the impression of "A Byronic hero" (36), perhaps because he cannot fabricate the necessary "lines of dissipation," fails to move his body with "swashbuckling arrogance" and does not have "cynically bored" eyes.

Romance heroines, it seems to me, are often remarkably skilled at reading the truth in their heroes' eyes. Sometimes all it takes is a single look and, depending on the circumstances, they can discern cynical boredom, soul-deep anguish, or passionate love. Their bodies are also frequently described as betraying them, or of revealing truths:

'You've no right to decide what I want and what I don't, she said [...]. 'I am the only one who can say that.'
'You are saying it, he whispered. 'Your eyes say it ...' He brushed a fingertip over her lids and lashes and her eyes closed on a reflex. 'Your mouth says it,' Sean said, and lingeringly stroked her lips. 'Your whole body is saying it ...' (Lamb 135)

If romances, both chaste and more explicit, traditionally depict the truth being revealed and spoken wordlessly by bodies, this may explain why, in the context of the genre, scenes of "forced seduction" appear unproblematic to many readers. In real life, verbal consent is required as evidence that any ensuing sexual activity is not sexual assault, or rape. In romances, however, it seems that a heroine's body may apparently speak the truth, giving consent even as the heroine's words seek to deny it. Obviously, this concept is rather troubling if one takes it out of the realm of fiction and considers what its consequences are when applied to real women.

As for the genre itself, if bodies are deemed inherently more truthful than words, could this be at least part of the explanation why the depiction of sexual passion has become more and more central to the novels? Certainly Sylvia Day, co-founder of Passionate Ink, the erotic romance chapter of the Romance Writers of America, has defined this sub-genre as follows:

Erotic Romance: stories written about the development of a romantic relationship through sexual interaction. The sex is an inherent part of the story, character growth, and relationship development, and couldn’t be removed without damaging the storyline.

Maybe, in many modern romances, the truth is naked, even when the novels don't reflect the naked truth about real relationships?²
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• Carpenter, Frederick Ives. English Lyric Poetry, 1500-1700.
• Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.
• Heyer, Georgette. Venetia. 1958. London: Pan, 1972.
• Lamb, Charlotte. Fire in the Blood. Richmond, Surrey: Mills & Boon, 1993.

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1 Heyer was, of course, using the word "ejaculated" in the now rather archaic sense of "say[ing] something quickly and suddenly" (AskOxford).

2 I apologise for the somewhat appalling pun. I wanted to include it, though, because the phrase "naked truth" contrasts with the "dressing up" of facts, and both seem to point to the idea that, as the call for papers suggested, fashion and clothing are often considered to involve the "application of something foreign atop something natural [...] with the intention of concealing or enhancing the natural item beneath."

Charlotte Lamb, Hot Blood, and Acting One's Age

Laura Vivanco

Charlotte Lamb was the "author of more than 150 romances and thrillers" and her oeuvre is certainly varied. SB Sarah described her "last novel, The Boss’s Virgin" as "cracktastic, sudzy, over the top, silly and utterly insane fizzy candy, and I cannot put it the hell down. It’s a horrible turn-the-page omg-what-next experience, reading this book. What is IN this book?" but Sandra's review of Lamb's Vampire Lover gives an insight into another type of novel that Lamb is known for, namely romances which pushed at the boundaries of what was taboo. As Sandra quoted from the Harlequin website:

Charlotte was a true revolutionary in the field of romance writing. One of the first writers to explore the boundaries of sexual desire, her novels often reflected the forefront of the "sexual revolution" of the 1970s. Her books touched on then-taboo subjects such as child abuse and rape, and she created sexually confident—even dominant—heroines. She was also one of the first to create a modern romantic heroine: independent, imperfect, and perfectly capable of initiating a sexual or romantic relationship.

The most recent boundary-pushing novel of Lamb's that I've read is Hot Blood (1996). It wasn't just that Lamb set up a love triangle which kept me puzzled until very close to the end of the novel because I really didn't know which man the heroine would end up with, it was also that this heroine, who was being pursued by two very eligible men, was a 52-year-old grandmother. I doubt that heroines of that age were common when Lamb wrote the novel, and they're still uncommon in the romance genre today. This is perhaps because of the prejudices that still exist about older women:

Historically, women in mid and later life have been characterised as losing interest in sexuality and the expression of sexual desire. The Victorians preferred to view women in general as asexual creatures. Progressively, throughout the 20th century, this view has been revised thanks to the pioneering work of Freud, Ellis, Kinsey, Masters and Johnson and Hite. As views about sexuality have changed[,] the recognition that ageing might include continuing sexual activity [...] has been slowly gaining ground. [...]

Even so, many people both young and old, still regard the menopause as a cut off point in the sexual life of women reflecting Havelock Ellis’s view in the early 20th century that " there is a frequent well marked tendency in women at the menopause to an eruption of sexual desire, which may easily take on a morbid form". In a 1969 publication entitled Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex, Reuben claimed that ‘as estrogen is shut off, a woman becomes as close as she can to being a man’. ‘… decline of breasts and female genitalia all contribute to a masculine appearance.’ ‘Having outlived their ovaries, they have outlived their usefulness as human beings’. Even in 1997 this view was echoed in the Pennell Report where one quoted author reported that ‘the removal of a monthly event (menstruation) [is] central to the perception of femininity and fertility’ ‘age [causes] fear of the loss of sexual attractiveness due to a decline in beauty…’ (Vincent, Shmueli, and Ridell)

At first Lamb only hints at her heroine's age by referring to her "silvery hair" (5) so at first a reader might assume the hair is simply a very pale shade of blonde, since this is how she is depicted on the cover. The back-cover copy omits to mention her age either. What Lamb does do right from the start is subtly underscore the value of older things through the heroine's love of them:

She felt stupid, sitting here in floods of tears over an old black and white movie made before most of the audience had even been born!
Kit was a film buff, obsessed with the cinema and with the techniques of filming [...]. She particularly loved old black and white films. They had so much more atmosphere; a tension and power that films shot in colour simply didn't have. (5)

It is only after proof of the heroine's sexual attractiveness has been offered to the reader in the form of Joe's attentions towards her that her age is revealed.

Although Kit is aware of the sexual double-standard regarding beauty and ageing, she cannot help but be affected by it:

he looks good for his age. Men always did - that annoyed her whenever she thought about it. It was so unfair. [...]
Along with all the other advantages they had, men aged slower than women. They didn't live as long, of course. Women tended to outlive them, but life did not compensate by letting women keep their looks into old age.
Time started in on you once you were in your forties, pencilling wrinkles in around your eyes and mouth, especially if you had ever smiled a lot, which seemed doubly unfair. (10)

The problem is not necessarily that time ages women unfairly quickly, but that female beauty is so closely associated with youth:

Youth and (until recently) virginity have been "beautiful" in women since they stand for experiential and sexual ignorance. Aging in women is "unbeautiful" since women grow more powerful with time [...] Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our "beauty" so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air. (Wolf 14)

With two potential love interests, though, one of whom is ten years her junior, the novel suggests that Kit's assessment of herself isn't entirely accurate. And although Kit muses that "Everything has its season [...] - being born, growing up, falling in love, having children, growing old" (147) the novel demonstrates that falling in love may happen after having children and after a person begins to grow old. Kit herself mentions the "natural round of the seasons of the human race - we begin, we end, and in between we do the best we can" (147), a concept given visual form in Titian's painting of The Three Ages of Man (c1513) with which I began this post. As explained on the website of the National Gallery of Scotland

This early work depicts the three stages of life: infancy, adulthood and old age. Cupid clambers over the sleeping babies who may grow up to be like the young lovers on the right. Their intense and intimate relationship will eventually be interrupted by death, symbolised by two skulls which the old man contemplates.

Lamb's novel suggests that we need to place older lovers alongside the younger ones, because the ending of youth does not signal the end of either life or of opportunities for forming romantic relationships.

Whatever the reasons for the general scarcity of middle-aged and older heroines in the genre, authors themselves do age and this may affect their depiction of supposedly youthful heroines. RfP at Readers Gab observes that many young heroines appear more like older women in disguise or young women trapped in a time-warp:

What decade do you think most contemporary romances are set in? I mean romances ostensibly set today—when would you place them, relative to real people in the present day? Do novels published in 2005 ever strike you as more like 1985? I have the impression most heroes and heroines are described as between 20 and 35, but how old do they seem?

Every so often I run across a romance in which the hero and heroine act older than they’re supposed to be. Not necessarily more mature, but as if their attitudes and concerns (and sometimes fashion sense) were shaped a decade or more earlier than the setting of the novel.

RfP's not alone in asking these questions. Last year Robin Uncapher at AAR asked "When was the last time you read a contemporary romance novel where the characters, hero or heroine, really sounded young?" and she added "here’s my suggestion to romance publishers: if you want younger readers romance publishers, its time to write heroines who really seem to be young themselves."

Harlequin seems ready to take up the challenge with its Modern Heat romances which are described in the guidelines for the line as featuring "the kind of relationships that women between the ages of 18-35 aspire to. Young characters in affluent urban settings". As reported at the Pink Heart Society blog the editor of the Modern Heat line,

Joanne Carr, describes Modern Heat as "a sassy, vibrant, new stream of editorial published in Harlequin Presents from aimed at a younger readership. Think of Modern Heat as Presents’ younger sister.

Sparky dialogue, urban settings and smouldering sensuality combined with original author voices - these are upbeat contemporary romances at their best! The heroines are your twenty-something girls-about-town [...]. We are on the look-out for new authors that can convey that young urban feel with 21st century characters.

To find new authors for the line Harlequin is currently holding a writing competition. The rules can be found here, and fuller descriptions of the Modern Heat line can be found here and here.

• Lamb, Charlotte. Hot Blood. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 1996.
• Vincent, Chris, Avi Shmueli, and Jenny Ridell. "Sexuality and Older Women – Setting the Scene." Tavistock Marital Studies Institute, 2001.
• Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. 1990. London: Vintage, 1991.
  

The painting is Titian's The Three Ages of Man, Titian, c1513. I found this photo at Wikimedia Commons.

I found the photo of the UK cover of Hot Blood via Amazon. The back-cover copy and a photo of the US version of the cover (using the same cover art) can be found here. There's also a rather negative, one-star review of the novel at Romantic Times where Shannon Short states that "Although story development is poorly structured and the characters not particularly sympathetic, Charlotte Lamb comes up with an interesting premise for readers." I wonder if this reviewer has an antipathy to love triangles and/or to divorced older women who have affairs, because I didn't notice anything wrong with the plot or anything particularly unsympathetic about the characters.

Frustration and Emotional Rollercoasters

Laura Vivanco

For a long time I'd been a bit puzzled by the popularity of romances in which the protagonists seemed to spend most of their time tormenting each other or otherwise causing each other a lot of suffering. Then, not that long ago, on a blog not so very far away, Smart Bitch Sarah wrote a grade D review of a Charlotte Lamb novel, The Boss's Virgin, and in response Tumperkin recommended Lamb's Frustration (Lamb is a favourite of Tumperkin's). I decided that as part of my general research into the genre, I needed to read some of Lamb's novels and obtained copies of both The Boss's Virgin and Frustration. Both involve a domineering hero who forces himself on the heroine repeatedly until she finally admits both her desire and her love for him. Or, as Smart Bitch Sarah put it,

Not only are there an abundance of punishing kisses (ow) but there’s a great deal of insistence on the part of the Insane Hero that she likes it: “You little liar! You love it when I kiss you!” That pretty much sums up the hero, that sentence right there. [...] The [...] heroine vacillates between spineless - or possibly unconscious - and strong enough to run away from a hero who scares her. Insane Hero You Love It When I Kiss You is autocractic, demanding, and, dare I say, punishing in his affections, which he declares immediately and presumes she returns based on… well, based on what evidence I have no idea. Perhaps falling in love for him is based on the idea that if you insist upon it enough, it will come true? The plot goes in loopy circles that don’t spell out so much forward progression as they do plain old loopyness, and yet. I. Cannot. Put. It. Down.

I could easily have put them both down. But I make noble sacrifices in the name of research, so I read on, hoping to discover what it was about these books that appealed so much to Tumperkin and rendered Sarah unable to Put. It. Down. Finally Tumperkin very kindly gave me an explanation:

I did not concern myself with [...] judging the hero's actions against 'reality'. And I think that that is the case for a lot of romance readers (although I appreciate you are reading romance as an academic - I am not). You talk about the definition of the romance novel as being two characters/ love story/ HEA. That's all well and good, but I don't think it follows that just because that is what the story is 'about' that readers (or all readers) are concerned with the authenticity of the central relationship. My own view is that for many readers, it's more about the journey - the roller-coaster if you like. A story arc contains highs and lows that deliver an emotional punch to the reader. A story with a very dark hero (abusive in the real world) might deliver a much more satisfying journey for certain readers. I tend to think of the more lurid examples of this type of story as 'emotional porn'.

So it's a high adrenaline ride with a plot that performs multiple loop the loops which, if viewed logically, seem a repetitive and rather inefficient way of getting from point A to B. But then, with a roller coaster, getting to point B really isn't important. As Tumperkin said, it's all about the journey.

I began to wonder if maybe there was some correlation between reading preferences and the personality continuum which runs from Big T to Little T personalities: "Type T personality is a personality dimension which characterizes individuals along a continuum ranging from those who are stimulated by risk-taking, stimulation-seeking and thrill-seeking (Big T) to those who are risk, stimulation, and thrill-avoiding (Little t)" (from the abstract of a paper by Knutson and Farley). Certainly

research suggests that high sensation-seeking reaches into every aspect of people’s lives, affecting engagement in risky sports, relationship satisfaction before and during marriage, tastes in music, art and entertainment, driving habits, food preferences, job choices and satisfaction, humor, creativity and social attitudes.

[...] Probing further, Zuckerman has found evidence for both a physiological and biochemical basis for the sensation-seeking trait: High sensation-seekers appear to process stimuli differently, both in the brain and in physiological reactions.

High sensation-seekers, who crave novel experiences, are at one end of the scale, while low sensation-seekers, who actively avoid excitement, are at the other end. Most people fall in the middle, with a moderate inclination to seek out new experiences, but a disinclination to push too far, he says. (Munsey, Monitor on Psychology)

and

In photographs, television, films, and reading, the high sensation seekers show a greater interest than the lows in morbid and sexual themes, whereas low sensation seekers find these themes distasteful and avoid them. High sensation seekers are more likely to be found among those attending sexually explicit (X-rated) movies and horror films. There is some evidence that the high sensation seekers may habituate more rapidly than lows to scenes in horror films. (Zuckerman 223)

What do you think? Do you enjoy an emotional roller coaster? Do you think there's any correlation between your reading choices and your personality type?

• Zuckerman, Marvin. Behavioral Expressions and Biosocial Bases of Sensation Seeking. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Photo from Wikipedia, of Corkscrew, "a roller coaster at the Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio. When built in 1976, it was the first roller coaster in the world with 3 inversions" (Wikipedia).