Black and White

Some people like to see things in black and white. It's simpler that way. But, as Benjamin Zephaniah's poem 'White Comedy' demonstrates, these colours have particular connotations:

I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
[...]
Lived off the white economy.
Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts
I waz condemned to a white mass,
Don't worry,
I shall be writing to de Black House.

Zephaniah's reversal of black and white in this poem reveals the extent to which, in English, the colour white has, both in the past and in the present, been associated with goodness and cleanliness (cleanliness being next to godliness), while black has often been associated with evil and dirt. The continued acceptance of these connotations is demonstrated by the following quotations from a webpage about a software programme to be used to create colour schemes:

White is associated with light, goodness, innocence, purity, and virginity. It is considered to be the color of perfection. White means safety, purity, and cleanliness. As opposed to black, white usually has a positive connotation. [...] In advertising, white is associated with coolness and cleanliness because it's the color of snow.

Black, on the other hand, has dangerous, sinister connotations, it

is associated with power, elegance, formality, death, evil, and mystery. Black is a mysterious color associated with fear and the unknown (black holes). It usually has a negative connotation (blacklist, black humor,'black death').

In the romance genre whiteness (blonde hair, or the redhead with very pale skin) has often been associated with beauty and purity. In E. M. Hull's The Sheik, for example, the heroine, Diana Mayo (whose name is that of the virgin goddess of the hunt), has a 'thick crop of loose, red-gold curls' (page 3 of the Project Gutenberg edition). Even today 'The majority [of heroines in sheik romances] are slender, with long fair hair' (Sheikhs and Desert Love), though there are exceptions, such as Brenda Jackson's Delaney's Desert Sheikh, in which the heroine is African-American.

Dandridge notes of the post-1989 historical romances written by African-American authors that they challenge the convention which so frequently links the heroine's beauty to her pallor:

The new image is that of the dark-hued heroine who triumphs. This figure revises the mulatta stereotype dominant in early African American historical romances and descended from the tradition of the blond, fair lady populating the traditional genre. In the later works, the dark-skinned heroine is a masculinized or toughened character, whereas her light-complexioned counterpart is too often perceived in black male and female fiction as too weak to effect societal change. [...] Dispensing with weak, light-complexioned heroines, post-1989 black writers of historical romances give victory to strong black women darker than mulattas. These narratives celebrate black women's victories in the tradition of black women pioneers who paved the freedom path. (2004: 4-5)

The associations between the features of the white heroine and beauty would, however, seem to persist in some of the Carribbean romances analysed by Morgan:

In some of the texts [...] curious permutations remain. Whereas the dark-skinned hero dovetails neatly with the bronzed Caucasian hero of the traditional formulaic romance, the requirements for female beauty are far more stringent, leading to peculiar formulations. [...] Charles's heroine may be brown of skin, yet her face, which is "a legacy from her Spanish ancestors, was that of a Renaissance painting of the Madonna" [...]. In this case, the darkness is, in a literal sense, no more than skin deep; every other feature remains Caucasian in ancestry and in construction. (2003: 808)*

Dandridge and Morgan's observations about the skin tones of African-American heroines reveal that skin colour remains an important issue, not just for 'white' people, but also for African Americans themselves. Monica Jackson's contemporary paranormal romance Mr. Right Now opens with the quotation 'I am black, but comely...' from the Song of Songs, thus affirming that black is beautiful. Later one of the characters asks 'Is he light or dark-skinned?” [...] Danni wasn't asking if he were white or black, she was asking about skin tone.' This isn't generally a question that would be asked about a white person perhaps because, as Kathry Perry observes, 'Gradations of shade in the skin colour of white people [...] carry little of the corresponding significance that slavery attached to the range of colour in black people' (1995: 176). In a short online novella, The Choice, also by Monica Jackson, Evelyn, the heroine, has very noticeably darker skin than her sisters:

Deb was beautiful, trim and small with smooth skin that looked like honey and long black relaxed hair hanging over her shoulders and down her back. Deb favored her other two younger sisters and her mother’s sister, Aunt Jean. Not for the first time did Evelyn wonder why she’d gotten such a different set of numbers in the gene lottery, with her stocky body, dark skin and short, kinky hair. [...]

Her body was sturdy and plump, not willowy with feminine curves like her sisters. Her skin was the color of Hershey’s chocolate, her features distinctly African. Brothers who would turn all the way around when one of her sisters passed wouldn’t give her a second glance on the street.

Of course, this isn't just about aesthetics and which colours or types of physical characteristics are more pleasing to the eye. Colour is usually interpreted as an indication of racial origin and Evelyn's appearance, for example, is described as being considered less beautiful not just because her skin is darker but because it, her hair, her body-shape and features are 'distinctly African'. Steig, writing about 'Indian romances' (i.e. romances set in India and written by British authors during the period 1890-1930) notes that:

All authors of Indian Romances during this period were firmly committed to the notion that the two groups [Indians and British] were different in fundamental ways and should remain separate. They would have agreed with the mother of two girls in a Fanny Penny novel that “there was very little romance when it was a question of color.” [...] Indian Romances were clearly on the heredity side of the heredity vs. environment debate. The theme “blood will tell” recurs again and again. (Stieg 1985: 7)

Stieg adds that

When sex between English and Indians rears its ugly head, Indian Romances become almost-if not actually-hysterical. The credo of the Romance was “that nature itself has built a wall between East and West” and any interracial connection violated that natural law. There is more than an implication that Indians commonly engaged in deviant forms of sexual activity to intensify the reaction. (1985: 8)

Teo adds that in these romances 'If interracial love was to be contemplated, it could not be between an Indian man and an English woman, only between an English man and a high-caste Indian woman' (2004).

In the context of this sort of attitude, where genetics is thought to inexorably shape a character's personality, a novel such as Julia Collins' 1865 The Curse of Caste with 'its dominant themes of interracial romance, hidden African ancestry, and ambiguous racial identity' can be read as a challenge to simplistic, racist divisions between black and white, good and bad. On the other hand, as implied in Dandridge's comments about the very dark-skinned heroines of the recent historical romances, the mixed-race and paler-skinned heroine might be taken as an indication of capitulation to white aesthetic and cultural values. This ambiguity of interpretation exists in many other texts which deal with race. Is the marriage of Shylock's daughter to a Christian in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice a triumph of inter-racial harmony, understanding and tolerance, or is it a way of destroying Shylock by denying him the possibility of having fully Jewish grandchildren who are aware of, and proud of, their Jewish heritage?

in late-fifteenth-century Iberia, and increasingly throughout sixteenth-century Europe, the idea that meaningful national identities are determined immutably by inherited 'blood' began to take hold [...]. In The Merchant, Jessica herself enters this discourse – against the 'blood' fatalists. Of Shylock, she says, 'though I am a daughter to his blood, / I am not to his manners' (II.iii.18-9) (from a review written by Rebecca Nesvet)

Is the fact that Daniel Deronda, in George Eliot's novel of that name, can only marry the Jewish heroine once he discovers that he himself is Jewish (and the fact that the Jewish heroine rejects a non-Jewish suitor) an indication that individuals should not marry outside their own racial group? If we return to romance, we find that in E. M. Hull's The Sheik, the hero is not, in fact, Arab in origin and the heroine 'learns that she need harbour no further qualms about having sex with a man of a different race. It turns out that he is actually as white-skinned as she (though, of course, a touch more sun-bronzed) and is the son of a British peer and his strikingly beautiful Spanish wife' (Cadogan 1994: 130). Modern sheik romances do feature heroes who are Arab or Beduin, but 'In most cases, the heroines of these stories are women who hail from progressive countries, such as the United States, Canada, Australia or Great Britain' (Sheikhs and Desert Love). In many cases 'while the sheik’s country is often described as a utopian state where the people are happy and rich, it is also backwards and needs modernizing. [...] Often, the heroine somehow has the key to this modernization' (Taylor 2003). Is the heroine's role to 'tame' and civilise the noble savage? Or can the modern sheik romances be seen as rejecting the racism of the earlier works in this sub-genre?

When it comes to that other group of 'noble savages', the Native American, we find

the figure of the Native American in the widely popular "Indian romance," as the industry has named these novels that depict a love affair culminating in marriage between a European American character (usually the heroine) and a full- or half-blood Native American. Like Cooper and previous writers, the Native American in these texts represents more of the American cultural imaginary; these novels do not reflect reality so much as fantasy and include a mythical depiction of the tribal community as an integral part of that fantasy. (Wardrop 1997)

McCafferty has analysed a sample of these 'Savage' romances (they all feature the word 'Savage' in the title' and would appear to be historical romances) and finds that

The basic story formula is as follows: young, beautiful, white, affluent woman meets young, handsome, Native American man. Eighty percent of the time, players meet along border spaces, where the female has fled from an economically privileged but repressively gendered role. [...] Native lovers, “pure” or “half-pure,” come to accept mixed blood in themselves/their children, through the catylyst of romantic love for the white hero[ine]. In doing so they overcome the dominant model of oppositional racism, in favor of “miscegenation.” (1994: 46-47)

These romances about sheiks and Native Americans, then, present mixed-race relationships in a positive light, though they often emphasise the role of the white woman in 'civilising' the sheik or present a hightly idealised portrait of the world of the Native American hero. The latter 'offers as symbolic capital a utopian society in which women are valued for their social contributions; where they are sexually assertive members of a group distinctive for cooperation and solidarity' (McCafferty 1994: 51).

Romances perhaps use racial difference/difference in skin-colour and the differences in culture between the tall, dark, handsome and 'othered' Arab or Native American hero and the pale, beautiful heroine to reinforce the binary opposition of gender which is already emphasised in many romances. As Taylor observes,

The central ethnic/racial/national identification in the category romance, the non-Other condition, is that of the heroine, which is generally white Anglo Westerner. Thus, the male Other ethnic/racial/national positions do not just include the Arab sheik, but often also the Greek tycoon, the Italian count-- a type of aristocratic Mediterranean lover.

But if the tall, dark, handsome, male and 'Other' role can be filled by powerful men of Arab, Mediterranean and Native American origin, why is it so rare to find African-American heroes, who would also be tall, dark, handsome and male, in the non-African-American romance lines and in the general romance sections of bookshops? African-American heroes can be found in large numbers in modern romance novels, but they seem generally to be confined to the segregated African-American romance lines and African-American sections of many bookshops.

One possible answer to why this might be the case is suggested by McCafferty is that

In the choice of Native American (rather than African-American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Filipino, or Japanese American) lover, a tension concerning romantic love’s vulnerability to economic instability is avoided. The myth runs that the Native American man lived comfortably off the land (1994: 51).

The sheik too offers economic security, which is an important aspect of the romance fantasy for many readers (the hero of the popular Harlequin Presents/Mills & Boon Modern line, for example, is always 'wealthy'). I suspect, however, given that there are plenty of affluent, successful African-Americans, that financial status is not the only factor which impedes the acceptance of black heroes in mainstream contemporary romances.

As we have seen, racist attitudes towards sheiks, Indians and Native Americans did, in novels from an earlier period, preclude them from being cast as heroes. It is worth remembering too that where these heroes are present in modern romances they are usually paired with a white heroine. To my knowledge, romances featuring both a Native American hero and a Native American heroine, or a sheik and an Arab heroine are few or non-existent in the Western romance genre. Nor am I aware of many modern, Western romances which feature non-white heroines paired with a white man. This is not to say that there are not exceptions, but they remain rare (some are to be found here).

Inter-racial relationships between white and African-American characters would seem to have remained problematic for the romance genre and in Mr Right Now the black heroine, Luby, tries to resist her attraction to a white man (the hero): 'He’d probably never be attracted to a black woman, and to be frank, he wasn’t what I wanted either'. She also questions the motives of white women who seek out sexual relationships with black men:

Danni liked black men and black men only, although she was a petite, pretty blonde with a generous chest and big blue eyes. I know, once you go black, you don't go back, but it was deeper than that. She had issues and apparently sleeping with black men helped.
Most white girls like that were subconscious racist bitches wanting only to degrade themselves, but I’d known Danni long enough to see she didn’t have a bigoted bone in her body.

The suspicion about the motivations of people in mixed-race relationships can come from both black and white people, even from some of those individuals themselves engaged in a mixed-race relationship. Kathryn Perry writes that

Many white people are wary of discovering that the myths of black sexuality have spilt over into their own imaginations. Uncomfortable to be seen to have 'a thing' about black people, they deny that their desire may also encompass their partner's blackness. Others unashamedly desire the 'forbidden fruit' of racist mythology. (1995: 174)

Issues of race remain highly divisive and controversial within society and within the romance-reading and writing community, as suggested by the history of the African-American romance and African-American authors' ambivalence about courting a white readership (Monica Jackson, for example, has said that 'Disloyalty to the [African-American] niche is perceived as disloyalty to the readers who shell out their dollars to support us and our work. How can we diss them?'). Discussions of race generally, and of sexual relationships between members of different races may create unease. They can question the very foundations of 'race' itself and the cultural differences (and perceived differences) which have grown up around them. They may not do so as incontrovertibly as the

DNA analyses [which] illuminate the raging scientific debate about whether there is anything real to the notion of race.
"There's no genetic basis for any kind of rigid ethnic or racial classification at all," said Bryan Sykes, the Oxford geneticist and author of The Seven Daughters of Eve. "I'm always asked is there Greek DNA or an Italian gene, but, of course, there isn't. . . . We're very closely related."
Likewise, The New England Journal of Medicine once editorialized bluntly that "race is biologically meaningless" (CNN, from The New York Times, 2003)

but even if race is 'biologically meaningless', racism exists, and cultural diversity is often tied up with a perception of racial/national identity. It's an issue to ponder while looking at the photo of these babies (we're discussing romance, and given the popularity of babies in romance, I thought I'd finish up with a couple of them):

Beautiful baby twins Alicia and Jasmin Singerl certainly make people look twice.
Alicia has dark brown eyes and complexion, while Jasmin is blue-eyed and fair-skinned.
Experts say the chance of twins being born with such different physical characteristics is about a million to one.
Conceived naturally, the sisters from Burpengary, north of Brisbane, were born at Caboolture Hospital in May. (The Courier Mail)

• Cadogan, Mary, 1994. And Then Their Hearts Stood Still: An Exuberant Look at Romantic Fiction Past and Present (London: Macmillan).
• Dandridge, Rita B., 2004. Black Women's Activism: Reading African American Women's Historial Romances, African-American Literature and Culture, 5 (New York: Peter Lang).
• McCafferty, Kate, 1994. ‘Palimpsest of Desire: The Re-Emergence of the American Captivity Narrative as Pulp Romance’, Journal of Popular Culture, 27.4: 43-56.
  
• Morgan, Paula, 2003. ‘ “Like Bush Fire in My Arms”: Interrogating the World of Caribbean Romance', Journal of Popular Culture 36.4: 804-827.
• Perry, Kathryn, 1995. 'The Heart of Whiteness: White Subjectivity and Interracial Relationships', in Romance Revisited, ed. Lynne Pearce & Jackie Stacey (New York: New York University Press), pp. 171-184.
• Stieg, Margaret F., 1985. 'Indian Romances: Tracts for the Times', Journal of Popular Culture, 18.4: 2-15.
• Taylor, Jessica, 2003. '"And you can be my Sheikh": Gender, Race, and Orientalism in Contemporary Romance Novels', an online essay.
  
• Teo, Hsu-Ming, 2004.'Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels', History of Intellectual Culture, 4.1.
• Wardrop, Stephanie, 1997. 'Last of the Red Hot Mohicans: Miscegenation in the Popular American Romance', MELUS, 22. 2, Popular Literature and Film: 61-74. [Unfortunately this article refers to only two of the modern romances in this sub-genre, both published by Zebra,so the sample size is extremely small.]
  

* I wonder what Faith Smith's Smith 1999 'Beautiful Indians, Troublesome Negroes, and Nice White Men: Caribbean Romances and the Invention of Trinidad' in Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, ed. Belinda Edmondson (Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia), pp. 163-182 has to say about race and representations of race in these romances. It's an item I haven't been able to find and read.

Reclaiming Jane Austen

I'm currently at the Jane Austen Society of North America Annual General Meeting. This is a once a year event in October, when 500 Jane Austen fans get together to talk about all things Austen. I've been speculating this weekend that this is one of the only academic conferences in which we get together to talk about one book for an entire weekend. I'm not sure accurate that is, considering there's a Milton Society and a Burney Society and a Bronte Society, etc., but on a quick search, they don't seem to have conferences, or at least not such well-attended conferences.

This is my fourth JASNA AGM, with another three "super-regional" JASNA conferences, and there's nothing quite like performing in front of the JASNA crowd. As a presenter, it's almost unique and certainly gratifying to know that every person in that audience has read the book you're talking about, so you don't have to spend any time on plot summary. They've also thought about the book and question and answer sessions are sometimes my favorite part of my presentation, because I get to talk about like-minded people who are sincerely interested in what I've just said.

All that aside, when I suggest that Jane Austen is a romance novelist, the instinctive reaction I get is a cringe, followed by a grudging admission that they suppose I'm probably right. This is usually immediately followed by an insistence that Austen's works are so much deeper, so much more layered, so much better, so much more lasting than modern mass market romances. Those who know a little more quickly point out that Austen wasn't actually a best-seller in her own time, the implication being that if she didn't have mass market appeal when she published, then she can't be compared to popular mass market romance novelists of today.

On the other side of the fence, however, "it is a truth universally acknowledged" among romance critics that Jane Austen is a romance writer. How could she be anything else? Non-romance critics might label her genre the domestic novel or the courtship novel or might just label her "the best" and leave out genre classification, but she wrote romances. And although we all love to ascribe our beliefs to Austen's being, I think she'd proudly admit she wrote romances if she were alive today.

Jane Austen might be the female author least in need of reclaiming today. She's was canonized in about 1870 and has since been sometimes the only female in the literary canon and certainly the first female (besides perhaps George Eliot) to receive the treatment of whatever new literary criticism is currently hot. The feminists got hold of her in the 1980s and we've never let go.

But I now reclaim her for romance criticism. Jane Austen wrote mass market romances, which does not imply that she wrote simple books, but rather implies that modern popular mass market romance novels are as layered and textured as Austen's six novels and as deserving of consideration.

Femininity, Chivalry, Class and Patriarchy

I've been reading Kate Millett's Sexual Politics and I'd like to quote one passage which seemed particularly relevant to a discussion of the romance genre:

It is generally accepted that Western patriarchy has been much softened by the concepts of courtly and romantic love. While this is certainly true, such influence has also been vastly overestimated [...] traditional chivalrous behavior represents – a sporting kind of reparation to allow the subordinate female certain means of saving face. While a palliative to the injustice of woman’s social position, chivalry is also a technique for disguising it. One must acknowledge that the chivalrous stance is a game the master group plays in elevating its subject to pedestal level. Historians of courtly love stress the fact that the raptures of the poets had no effect upon the legal or economic standing of women, and very little upon their social status. As the sociologist Hugo Beigel has observed, both the courtly and the romantic versions of love are “grants” which the male concedes out of his total powers. Both have had the effect of obscuring the patriarchal character of Western culture and in their general tendency to attribute impossible virtues to women, have ended by confining them in a narrow and often remarkably conscribing sphere of behavior. It was a Victorian habit, for example, to insist the female assume the function of serving as the male’s conscience and living the life of goodness he found tedious but felt someone ought to do anyway. (Millett 1971: 36-37)

There are plenty of romance heroines who seem to possess 'impossible virtues': as Radway notes, 'the fact of her true femininity is never left in doubt. No matter how much emphasis is placed on her initial desire to appear a man's equal, she is always portrayed as unusually compassionate, kind, and understanding' (Radway 1991: 127). Sexually, the heroines of romance are very often virgins paired with more sexually-experienced men. Of course, a lot has changed in the genre since Radway wrote her Reading the Romance, and there are all sorts of different heroines, some more traditionally 'feminine' than others, and even Radway recognised that the romances did engage with the inequalities between the sexes in contemporary society by creating 'heroines in these female-sponsored fantasies [...who] explicitly refuse to be silenced by the male desire to control women through the eradication of their individual voices' (1991: 124). This could sometimes tip over into excessive 'feistiness' and a heroine so determined to do things her own way that readers might nowadays dub her 'too stupid to live', but nonetheless a heroine of this type was generally asserting her individuality, her right to think and act for herself in a male dominated society. That the heroines retain many aspects of femininity as traditionally defined (usually being in possession of exquisite beauty and a caring personality) does not mean that they should necessarily be read as repressive: there is nothing wrong with being caring and beautiful. One might, however, begin to question the cumulative effect of a genre which only featured such heroines, but fortunately the modern romance genre does provide us with other types of heroine. Heroines of the kind described above may not represent a total overthrow of sexual stereotypes, but one can see evidence of a struggle by the authors of romances to assert women's worth and to give them some sort of victory in a patriarchal society.

That victory is not infrequently framed in terms of her 'taming' of the hero:

With courage, intelligence, and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on earth, the human male, to his knees. More than that, she forces him to acknowledge her power as a woman. (Krentz 1992: 5)

This could be read as an acknowledgement of the dangers that men pose to women in a patriarchal society, and, given that the heroine in romances with this type of plot is usually exceptional, as an acknowledgement that in the normal course of events many dangerous men remain 'untamed'. Doreen Owens Malek writes:

So what is the fantasy? Simply this: a strong, dominant, aggressive male brought to the point of surrender by a woman.
Why does this particular fantasy hold so much appeal for us? Because it dramatizes, colorfully and dramatically, a battle of the sexes in which the woman always wins. Women are weaker physically, perennially behind in civil rights, always playing catch-up ball with men. This type of fiction offers a scenario in which a woman inevitably emerges victorious. (1992: 74-75)

For me personally, winning the 'battle of the sexes' holds no appeal at all: I'd rather we all 'work together as a team', as Bob the Builder and Wendy would say, but clearly winning the battle is a fantasy that has appealed, and continues to appeal, to many woman, perhaps precisely because they have frequently felt oppressed by patriarchy in their daily lives. Krentz adds that

the heroes in the books undergo a significant change in the course of the story, often being tamed or gentled or taught to love, but they do not lose any of their masculine strength in the process. [...] The journey of the novel, many writers say, is the civilization of the male. (1992: 6)

Leaving aside the issue of whether the hero and heroine can be read as two aspects of the readers' own personalities which need to be integrated (see, for example, Barlow and Kinsale, in the same volume), if one reads the stories on a literal level they show the heroine's triumph over the hero. But the heroine has to accept the responsibility for 'civilizing' the male: in other words, she, as Millett observes, 'assume[s] the function of serving as the male’s conscience' and although the hero may be 'tamed' with regards to the heroine and any children she may have with him, he does not lose his 'masculine strength', so in many respects his behaviour is likely to remain the same in his interactions with other individuals (although if he was rakish this particular part ofbehaviour will cease permanently). If read as a recipe for challenging patriarchy, it suggests a case-by-case approach, with the woman putting herself at considerable risk in order to achieve this desirable end. It also suggests that in order to succeed the heroine must be exceptionally feminine. In addition, there may be issues of class involved.

As George Eliot noted in her 1856 essay on 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists', 'The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right'. Although this is not very often the case in modern romance novels, the heroines of historical romances still tend to be 'ladies', very often from aristocratic families. Even in modern, contemporary-set romances there is often a class element to the fantasy:

Harlequin romances allow their readers to experience the ideal rewards of capitalism, insofar as the novels are usually fantasies of financial empowerment as much as they are romantic fantasies. The standard Harlequin narrative, for instance, usually involves a middle-class woman’s relationship with a rich, single male—usually a businessman, wealthy rancher, or male engaged in some similar occupation. The inevitable marriage at the end thus also involves a marriage into wealth, or at least improved financial security. (Darbyshire 2000)

According to Pamela Fox

During the early decades of the twentieth-century in Britain, it was predominantly middle-class women who felt the daily strictures of (and protested against) romantic codes of behaviour. Working-class women were more typically denied access to those codes by their own cultural experience. Romance functioned as an emblem of privilege, was reserved for others. While the cinema and popular novels encouraged their diverse female audiences to identify with an array of romance heroines, working-class mothers made sure their daughters understood that romance was purely a fantasy with little relevance to their lives [...]. Unlike their middle- and upper-class counterparts, who frequently suffocated at the hands of father, brothers, guardians and mothers while playing out the real-life role of romance heroine, working-class women suffered chastisement or ridicule within their communities if they merely made attempts to try the role on. (1994: 141)

Of course, times have changed, as have romance heroines, but it's worth remembering that, as Millett says of the concept of chivalry (vis-à-vis women), 'the Victorian doctrine of chivalrous protection and its familiar protestations of respect, rests upon the tacit assumption, a cleverly expeditious bit of humbug, that all women were “ladies”' (1971: 73) and she quotes the words of Sojourner Truth, a freed slave:

That man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place - and ain't I a woman?
Look at this arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me - and ain't I a woman?
I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? (Millett 1971: 72)

The triumph of the lady and the privileges she was accorded were limited and did not extend to her working-class sisters.

If we take Edmund Blair Leighton's painting 'Accolade' as a portrayal of the workings of chivalry, we can see that the woman, or rather princess, since she wears a crown and has her hair loose (which often, though not always, indicated that a woman was a virgin) and is dressed in white (another indication of purity, as in The Book of Margery Kempe), is knighting a young warrior. In the background stands another figure of male power, the priest. For the moment, the young princess is in control, holding a sword, while the knight, whose black eagle perhaps suggests his wild, strong nature, is on his knees before her, 'tamed'. The knight is a warrior, not a peasant, a monk, priest, merchant or physician, and he represents temporal power. Medieval society was, according to the three estates theory, divided into three classes, the oratores, bellatores and laboratores. The aristocratic, warrior class were the bellatores, in whom rested earthly, physical power, while spiritual power was in the hands of the priests, or oratores. The painting does indeed indicate a degree of female power, but at the same time, it's worth remembering that the laws of male primogeniture made female rulers rare (and non-existent where the Salic law on the issue was in effect), and that most women were neither ladies nor princesses.

• Darbyshire, Peter, 2000. ‘Romancing the World: Harlequin Romances, the Capitalist Dream, and the Conquest of Europe and Asia’, Studies in Popular Culture 23.1.
  
• Fox, Pamela, 1994. 'The "Revolt of the Gentle": Romance and the Politics of Resistance in Working-Class Women's Writing', NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 27.2: 140-160.
  
• Krentz, Jayne Ann, 1992. 'Introduction', in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, ed. Jayne Ann Krentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 1-9.
• Millett, Kate, 1971. Sexual Politics (London: Rupert Hart-Davis).
• Owens Malek, Doreen, 1992. 'Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: The Hero as Challenge', in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, ed. Jayne Ann Krentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 73-80.
  
• Radway, Janice A. 1991. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).

Not-so-secret Children and Babies

Today I want to go, if not from the sublime to the ridiculous, at least from the Platonic ideal to the more prosaic reasons why children might be included in romances.

First of all, children may, as suggested in the Symposium, be the embodiment of a couple's love. However, although children can be read as proof of a couple's continuing love and affection (or at least, of an active sex-life), they may be indicative of little more than considerable fecundity and a lack of contraceptives. In Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy, for example, Lady Ombersley, a minor character, is described in the following terms: Twenty-seven years of wedlock had left their mark upon her; and the dutiful presentation to her erratic and far from grateful spouse of eight pledges of her affection had long since destroyed any pretensions to beauty in her' (1951: 2). Despite being referred to as 'pledges of her affection', it's clear that the children are not the result of the sort of romantic love one would expect the hero and heroine of a romance to feel for each other.

New babies, as well as being 'pledges of affection' may also serve to reinforce the depiction of a society undergoing change. According to Pamela Regis one of the essential elements of the romance genre is 'Society Defined' and 'Near the beginning of the novel the society that the heroine and hero will confront in their courtship is defined for the reader. This society is in some way flawed' (2003: 31). Regis also describes some additional 'accidental elements characteristic of the romance novel' (2003: 38) which occur towards the end of the novels and these include the wedding/dance/fete which demonstrates that 'Society has reconstituted itself around the new couple(s) and the society comes together to celebrate this' (2003: 38). If the hero and heroine have children together these can be interpreted as being among the first new members of this new, 'reconstituted' society, and a hope for the future.

From the point of view of the plot, children and babies can often provide a reason for a hero and heroine to meet or work closely together for the first time, or, in the case of many of the secret-baby books, to come back into contact with each other. Babies and children may be a source of conflict between the hero and heroine but they cannot simply walk away because the children have needs (for care, a home etc) which force the hero and heroine into close proximity and oblige them to work with each other.

Whether or not babies are intrinsically romantic, however, is another matter. For Kimber, children are on her list of things in the romance genre which are 'Not Romantic':

what could be less romantic than having to keep the sex quiet in case Junior wakes up in the night and comes down looking for a drink of water? Or when Little Susie gets a life-threatening fever or is kidnapped by the villain? Although better a son, since then your hero can effortlessly become the male role model/father figure that Young Master desperately needs.

The combined effects of dirty nappies, sleep deprivation, the baby's crying and the physical and emotional consequences of childbirth do not create the ideal circumstances for romantic interludes. Even if the baby is not the heroine's, she and the hero would still have to deal with the sleep deprivation, the nappies, crying, feeding etc. Babies in romance novels do tend to be remarkably easy to care for, but this is not necessarily unrealistic given that:

• (a) some people have more help than others (for example, in historicals set among the aristocracy one might expect the heroine to have the help of a nursemaid or two)
• (b) some people's experiences of this stage in a baby's life are better than others (some babies quickly sleep through the night and fall into a routine easily, for example)
• (c) not all mothers experience negative physical or emotional consequences of childbirth.

Personally, however, I find the easy-care babies so often found in romances intensely irritating, but that's probably due to extreme jealousy on my part, because my baby was very far from the ideal in this respect.

Nicola Marsh is an author who used to think that children were 'contraception on legs', but after writing some romances featuring children, she changed her mind. In the comments on that blog post Fiona Lowe added that 'I reckon children are a GREAT way to showcase the softer side of our hero'. They certainly are seen to have that effect on the perception of Sophy, the heroine of Heyer's The Grand Sophy. Following Sophy's devoted nursing of her sick young cousin, Sophy's very conventional suitor, Lord Bromford, says that:

"[...] even Mama owns herself to have been moved by the devotion of Miss Stanton-Lacy to her little cousin!" [...] Lord Bromford, who had started to repeat O woman, in our hours of ease! [...] pronounced: "Any doubts that might have been nourished of the true womanliness of Miss Stanton-Lacy's character, must, I venture to say, have been lulled to rest." (1951: 224-225)

It's not simply that the ability to interact with children shows a 'softer' side, it's also that children, particularly young children and babies, are often considered innocent.

Around the enlightenment period of the eighteenth century, popular conceptions of childhood changed. Society adopted the idea of the "blank slate" and beginning life in a state of unconsciousness. Art reflected the transition: no longer vessels of psychological and sexual awareness, children became asexual, physically neutral, and psychologically unaware. The "Romantic child" was born. [...] No longer considered little adults in need of moral reform, children became icons of innocence and naivete onto which adults could project their own hopes, dreams, and ideals.

As a result of this belief in their innocence, the approval of children, like that of dogs and other animals, is often an indication that a character who may appear wicked, depraved, or merely lacking in conscience, in fact has redeeming features. For example, here's a short conversation from Heyer's Frederica, between Felix, the heroine's young brother, and the self-centered Lord Alverstoke, the hero, who has already met, and successfully dealt with Lufra, Frederica's very large and unruly dog:

before suffering himself to be led away by Charis, [Felix] took his leave of the Marquis, and said eagerly: "And you will take me to Soho, won't you, sir?"

"If I don't, my secretary shall," replied Alverstoke.

"Oh! Well - Well, thank you, sir! Only it would be better if you came with me yourself!" urged Felix.

"Better for whom?" demanded his lordship involuntarily.

"Me," replied Felix, with the utmost candour. "I daresay they would show you anything you wanted to see, on account of your being a - a second-best nobleman, which I know you are, because it says, in a book I found, that Marquises come directly after Dukes, so--"

In addition to this ability to bring out the best in adults, 'out of the mouth of babes and sucklings' can come forth truths that adults would either leave unspoken, or of which adults might otherwise remain in ignorance.

It has to be admitted that, on occasion, the children in romance can bear an unfortunate resemblance to those George Eliot mentions in her description of 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' (1856):

There are few women, we suppose, who have not seen something of children under five years of age, yet in "Compensation," a recent novel of the mind-and-millinery species, which calls itself a "story of real life," we have a child of four and a half years old talking in this Ossianic fashion -
"Oh, I am so happy, dear gran'mamma; -- I have seen, -- I have seen such a delightful person: he is like everything beautiful, -- like the smell of sweet flowers and the view from Ben Lomond; - or no, better than that -- he is like what I think of and see when I am very very happy; and he is really like mamma, too when she sings; and his forehead is like that distant sea," she continued, pointing to the blue Mediterranean; "there seems no end -- no end; or like the clusters of stars I like best to look at on a warm fine night [...]"

Luckily child prodigies are not the only, or even the most frequent, sort of child depicted in romance. There are plenty who are interesting characters in their own right, with their own particular flaws and quirks. For example Lou, the heroine of Jessica Hart's Contracted, Corporate Wife, says of her teenaged children:

'I’d like to be able to say that I had raised a couple of thoughtful, unmaterialistic, community-minded children who understood that the love and security you strive to give them mattered more than the latest brand of trainers or the newest computer game, but sadly they’re not like that at all!’
‘Oh?’ said Patrick, rather taken with the idea that Lou’s children weren’t the paragons he would have expected them to be. He found her attitude refreshing. He’d had to listen to too many mothers telling him how clever and talented and generally marvellous their children were.
‘They’re not bad kids,’ said Lou, ‘but they’re like all their friends. They want to be in with the in-crowd, to be like everyone else and to have what everyone else has. [...].’ (2005: 41)

In romances with more realistic portrayals of children, the hero and heroine's difficulties in caring for children and babies may provide an interesting source of discussion for the adults, revealing their own experiences of childhood. In Polly Forrester's Jewel Under Siege, for example, the hero is a Frank, on crusade, while Elena Rethel is a Byzantine merchant. Their ideas about child-rearing reveal much about the adults' different cultures:

'You'll spoil that child, if you haven't already.'
'Oh, but he's only a baby, my lord. Not even three years old, yet.'
'Time enough to be spoiled by rich food and an indulgent mother. Well-born Franks are sent from home at four to become pages. By then they're hardened enough to wait at tables and live with the hounds. That soon puts some character into them. Sink or swim.'
"I don't doubt it, my lord. Yet what sort of people raise their children among animals? [...]'
'People whose men are more than milk and water. Men who will fight for what they know is right, and will not dress in effeminate fashions [..]' (1990: 89-90)

The hero and heroine's attitudes towards children can be instructive in contemporary settings too, often giving clues about their own very different childhood experiences. In historical romances (of the non-wallpaper variety) attitudes towards childcare form part of the historical setting, reminding us that, in many respects, 'the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there'. As Jo Beverley observes

The way we portray children and parenting in books can be interesting. I don't think we can help bringing some modern sensitivities to it, but I like to try to get within the thinking of the day. For example in one of my books, CHRISTMAS ANGEL, Judith and Leander fall into fights about the raising of her children. She wants to protect them from hurt while he believes boys sometimes need the cane. Speaking from his own experience, he claims to have preferred it to endless lectures and tiresome punishments such as writing out pages of the Bible. And he adds that as Bastian won't escape being beaten at school, he might as well learn to accept it with dignity. That, to me, is true to the times, but it bothered some readers.

There's a lot of variation in the way children and babies are portrayed, depending on factors such as the level of realism with which they are described, the historical setting and the ages of the children. Sometimes children seem to be included mainly for their cuteness factor, and because they provide a source of conflict or otherwise propel the plot forwards. At others, the children are well-developed characters in their own right.

• Forrester, Polly, 1990. Jewel Under Siege (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).
• Hart, Jessica, 2005. Contracted, Corporate Wife (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).
• Heyer, Georgette, 1951. The Grand Sophy (London: The Book Club).
• Regis, Pamela, 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).