Cameras, Action, Romance Novels!

Laura Vivanco

According to Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan,

everyone has a very firm idea of what the average romance reader is like. We bet you already know her. She's rather dim and kind of tubby - undereducated and undersexed - and she displays a distressing affinity for mom jeans and sweaters covered in puffy paint and appliquéd kittens. (4)

If you'd like to see a picture of this typical romance reader, created by Joanne Renaud for the Smart Bitches' book, you can click across here. Wendell and Tan didn't mention the cause of the tubbyness, but it may be due to those bonbons that we romance readers apparently can't resist:

We still persist in the stereotypical belief that women who read romances can't get a date on Friday night. Instead, they lounge around all day eating bon-bons while they read their little books. This is simply untrue. (Bouricius 32)

According to Rachel Anderson, the genre "is usually condescendingly dismissed by those with highbrow pretensions as being harmless wish-fulfilment for ageing spinsters, or relatively harmless escapism for the ill-educated masses" (12-13). I suspect the stereotype varies a bit, perhaps from one country or time-period to another: Anderson was writing in the UK in the 1970s, whereas Wendell, Tan, and Bouricius were published in the US in the 2000s.

I'm not sure where these stereotypes of the romance reader come from, or how they're perpetuated, but since I'm interested in societal perceptions of romances and romance readers I was intrigued by Kirsten Valentine Cadieux's post about the recently released RED. She

was delighted to discover that a central narrative device of the film's setup is a somewhat elaborate, if simple, pattern in which the male romantic lead inquires about the current habits of the female romantic lead [...]; he then proceeds to read along with her trashy romance novels.

In the movie Mary-Louise Parker plays the part of Sarah, "a sweet, mild-mannered government HR rep and lover of romance novels who is inadvertently drawn into the film's dangerous world of intrigue" (CBR):

"She's a small town, Midwestern girl, and I think she's really positive and there's not a whole lot of dark in there," Parker said of Sarah during the press junket for "RED" in New York City. "She's a really bright, positive person, she reads romance novels and she kind of imagines herself "in" one of them. So when all of this happens, I think to her it's a dream come true. Even the horrible parts of it, like getting her mouth duct taped, there's some element to that that's thrilling and wonderful." (CBR)

Unfortunately, since I try to avoid depictions of violence, I won't be able to see for myself how the two romance readers (Sarah and Frank) challenge and/or reinforce particular stereotypes about romance readers.

When I looked to see if there were other movies with characters who read romance, I came across the following description, written by Dyanne, at The Romance Reader:

AMERICAN DREAMER - Stars JoBeth Williams and Tom Conti. Very funny - I love this movie! JoBeth Williams' character is a housewife who loves to read romantic thrillers by Rebecca Ryan and so she enters a Rebecca Ryan writing contest. She wins a trip to Paris and on her way to the awards luncheon gets knocked on the head -- when she awakens, she believes she is Rebecca Ryan.

I haven't seen that one either.

So is there anyone here who has seen either of these movies? If so, what did you think of their depiction of romance readers? And do any of you know of any other movies with romance-reading characters? Finally, is Jayashree Kamble overstating the case when she writes that

stereotypes about romance fiction are so deeply inscribed in popular discourse that they are regularly referenced by the entertainment media, such as television shows and movies, for comic effect. In every case, romance novels are portrayed as titillating fantasies written and read by oversexed or undersexed women. Romance readers often also come across in these electronic media as possessing little intelligence and discernment and as being incapable of separating themselves from the text. In most cases, these media are popular texts themselves and ridicule the romance genre as a way to elevate their own status by contrast and detract from their own formulae. (27-28)

---

• Anderson, Rachel. The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-Literature of Love. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974.
• Bouricius, Ann. The Romance Readers' Advisory: The Librarian's Guide to Love in the Stacks. Chicago: American Library Association, 2000.
• Kamble, Jayashree. Uncovering and Recovering the Popular Romance Novel. University of Minnesota, Ph.D. dissertation. December 2008. [Details here and available for download as a pdf here.]
  
• Wendell, Sarah, and Candy Tan. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.

Martyrs and Helen Hackett's Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance

Laura Vivanco

This is really just a very quick note which I'm posting (a) because I thought it might be helpful to mention the older (and very different) genre of romance at some point, albeit I'm doing so very briefly here and (b) because it tied in with a discussion taking place elsewhere.

Hackett devotes the second chapter of her book to exploring whether or not there are any similarities between the modern romance genre and the romances of the English Renaissance. She begins, however, by describing the older romance genre, which

can require some acclimatisation from the modern reader, since it operates not by the familiar principles of the novel, but in the fantastical, non-naturalistic mode [...]. It tends to be concerned, for instance, with the adventures of elaborately named knights and ladies in exotic lands and/or in periods of distant mythologised history. [...] These fictions usually also involve supernatural interventions, amazing coincidences and twists of fate, amidst a general ambience of the marvellous and wondrous; and their style is highly rhetorical [...]. Renaissance romances can be long and highly digressive, often consisting of many strands of narrative; Philip Sidney's New Arcadia and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene are obvious examples. These two romances underwent ongoing processes of revision and expansion by their authors and were left unfinished at their deaths, features which suggest open-endedness and the potentially infinite self-generation of the narrative. (1-2)

Given this description, it is not surprising that in the second chapter Hackett concludes that there are few similarities with modern romances: "analogies between Renaissance romance and modern romantic fiction depend upon a characterisation of Renaissance romance as a popular genre of courtship narratives offering escapist pleasures to women readers; yet each one of the terms of this equation is debatable" (32).

While I was reading Hackett's book, Jessica posted about rape in the romance genre and looked at it from a variety of perspectives, including that of sexual fantasy. One issue that Hackett's book raised, and which struck me as potentially interesting to explore in this context, is that it suggested yet another perspective:

What we often find in Renaissance romances is both the repression of female agency and, beyond this, the infliction of extreme torments upon female victims. [...] In all these episodes the infliction of pain or humiliation on a female body is dwelt upon in detail, with fascination, or even with relish. Violence and degradation serve either as a punishment of female characters who are transgressively dominant and sexual, [...] or as a test of heroines who prove their virtue through passive stoicism and noble self-denial. (28)

and

Rather than imposing stereotypical modern feminist definitions of heroism we need to reconstruct iconographies of martyrdom and sanctity which have become relatively alien to us [...]. In mediaeval literature, female saints and courtly-love mistresses were frequently addressed in virtually indistinguishable terms, while female saints’ lives recorded the bodily ordeals of virgin martyrs in ways which strikingly deployed potentially erotic material in the cause of holiness. [...] In Renaissance romances [...] heroines often adopt the behaviour of saints in the cause of love. An idea of ‘erotic sainthood’ might be a useful way of understanding the forms of female heroism found in these fictions, and the nature of their appeal to women. (32)

I suspect that although the "iconographies of martyrdom and sanctity" may have become "relatively alien to us," the eroticised martyr-heroine may still be with us, in a modified form. According to Rachel Anderson, writing about the beginning of the modern romance genre, "The ideals of most of the early romantic novelists were based loosely on Christianity. [...] But the majority of today's romantic novelists are far less specific about the motivating ideals behind their work" (275). Anderson was writing in 1974, so her study is hardly up-to-date, but nonetheless, as I've discussed before, there remains a very strong spiritual element in the genre. Looked at from this perspective, perhaps it's only to be expected that the genre might contain some martyr-like heroines who, though they lose their virginity to the sinner-heroes and/or are raped by them, can be thought of as ultimately triumphing over their seducers or rapists by redeeming them.

Jessica also wrote a review of one romance with a rapist hero in which she stated that "Great writers can make us believe in unbelievable things." I'd suggest that hagiographies can also make many people believe in miracles which they would dismiss as unbelievable were they to occur in other contexts.

Janine's response encapsulates why such romances may be felt by some readers to be positive narratives: "That Gaffney was able to begin the reader’s journey in such a dark place and then bring us out into the light is a lot of what makes the books so uplifting to me as well as so incredibly romantic." Are there any parallels to be found with the "uplifting" emotions that may be experienced by readers of narratives about female martyr saints as the focus shifts away from the torments inflicted upon their bodies by abusive, powerful men and towards a conclusion in which the souls of the martyrs are taken up into the light of Heaven?

• Anderson, Rachel. The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-literature of Love. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974.
• Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: UP, 2000. A description, and a pdf of the first ten pages of Hackett's Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance are available from the University of Cambridge Press's website.