More on Politics and Romance

Laura Vivanco

I've written about politics and romance before, particularly here but also in two separate posts about individual romances. I'm returning to the topic because RfP asked me a question elsewhere which (a) would be difficult to respond to in a short space there and (b) which I thought perhaps some readers of TMT could help me answer.

I'll give a bit of background first. Jessica had been asking for recommendations and one commenter suggested she might like to read Loreth Anne White's Seducing the Mercenary. I responded by commenting that

Having read the reviews [...] I wonder if there’s any exploration in the novel of the underlying political situation and whether the US’s involvement constitutes neo-imperialism. The situation, as described in one review, is as follows: “It is up to Emily [the heroine] to determine whether Jean-Charles [Laroque, who's the hero], a former mercenary who arrived in Ubasi [a fictional African state] a year earlier and ousted the dictator, should be captured or assassinated” and Emily “is working with the United States to bring the former dictator back into power, and it will be Emily’s profile that decides what needs to be done with Laroque.”

RfP, who had read the novel, responded that

I’d venture to guess that the answer is overall no, or perhaps mixed. It’s a complicated setup for such a short book, so most of it doesn’t get explored. [...]

In terms of politics, I’m sorry to laugh, but I do a bit when I try to imagine a Silhouette exploring “the underlying political situation and whether the US’s involvement constitutes neo-imperialism” in much depth. Mind you, the heroine isn’t a conscienceless drone, and I appreciate seeing a romance heroine in such a significant position, but there’s not a lot of space for a twist that deeply questions the initial premise. [...]

Do you disagree with my skepticism on category romance tackling this scale of political theme? I tend to expect that in science fiction more than in romance; and within romance, I expect more in that regard (though I often don’t get it) when I read single-title (i.e. longer) romantic suspense and historicals. Have I missed out on an interesting trend since I don’t read much category romance these days?

First of all, the reference to science fiction reminded me of Lois McMaster Bujold's speech about science fiction romance (which I came across via a post at the Smart Bitches):

There are indeed problems for this Odd Couple partnership between SF and Romance, but subtly not, or not only, the ones I necessarily thought. I certainly learned some lessons about how genre boundaries are maintained not only by publishers but by their readerships. [...]

I was more surprised to learn something new to me about fantasy and science fiction -- which is how profoundly, intensely, relentlessly political most of the stories in these genres are. The politics may be archaic or modern, fringe or realistic, naive or subtle, optimistic or dire, but by gum the characters had better be centrally engaged with them, for some extremely varied values of "engaged". Even the world-building itself is often a political argument. [...]

Romance and SF seemed to occupy two different focal planes [...]. For any plot to stay central, nothing else in the book can be allowed to be more important. So romance books carefully control the scope of any attending plot, so as not to overshadow its central concern, that of building a relationship between the key couple, one that will stand the test of time and be, in whatever sense, fruitful. This also explains some SF's addiction to various end-of-the-world plots, for surely nothing could be more important than that, which conveniently allows the book to dismiss all other possible concerns, social, personal, or other. (Nice card trick, that, but now I've seen it slipped up the sleeve I don't think it'll work on me anymore.)

In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency. All three genres also may embody themes of personal psychological empowerment, of course, though often very different in the details, as contrasted by the way the heroines "win" in romances, the way detectives "win" in mysteries, and the way, say, young male characters "win" in adventure tales. [...]

So the two genres -- Romance and SF -- would seem to be arm-wrestling about the relative importance of the personal and the political. [...]

So: is the personal political? It does explain the edginess of the mutual rejection between the communities of taste of SF and Romance -- each is in effect rejecting the others' judgment of what is the most important aspect of the world, which naturally gets danders up. My own view is that the political sits atop the personal as upon a disregarded foundation; the concerns of higher status could not even begin to exist without a hell of a lot of unsung and often unpaid or underpaid work being done, and not just by women, to keep the real world running. To even acknowledge the debt would be to court bankruptcy, so it is carefully ignored.

I'd tend to agree with Bujold's view of the relationship between the personal and the political, because I see the personal (in romances this is primarily the romantic relationship) as taking place in a social, and therefore political (in the broadest sense, not party political) context.

Although RfP's probably right that political issues aren't generally tackled in any depth in romances, that doesn't stop me reading between the lines of the romance in order to catch glimpses of the political. And then there are the romances which, like White's novel, include situations or comments which are quite overtly political, even if the author doesn't explore the politics in much detail. I'm certainly not the only person to notice the politics in some romances. C. J. D. Duder notes that "The study of popular imperialism, how the British Empire was represented to the British people, is now popular among historians" (427). Duder's focus is on Kenya and "It was just as the political battles over white settlement in Kenya were heating up that a minor literary phenomenon, popularly known as the 'Kenya Novel,' began to appear in British bookstores. This was a variety of that much despised popular literary genre, Romantic Fiction" (428). Duder identifies these novels as having had an "immense, if indirect, propaganda value [...] to the position of white settlement in the Colony" (431) because

Riddell and Strange used their novels as a means of presenting the white settler view of Kenya to British readers. The settlers themselves, whatever their personal failings, are collectively responsible for the railways, roads, hospitals and schools, progress in other words, which the twentieth century has brought to Africa. They are the civilization in the Dark Continent. (432)

But what of more recent romances? To what extent can and do they include politics? Melissa James has written that the inspiration for one of her novels, Her Galahad (a Silhouette Intimate Moments, reviewed here), was

My university course in Aboriginal History in 1999. I read about the Stolen Generation, ‘half-caste’ children forcibly taken from their parents and either illegally adopted out or sent to orphanages to become Anglicized in culture. I was shocked at the extent to which the governments of the day were willing to go to do this. Such as giving the kids fake death certificates for their parents so they wouldn’t return to their homes. Such as imprisoning the parents on fake charges to get them out of the way. I had to write about it, using all those ideas plus other truths that my abuse counselor mother gave to me, to show just how life is for many who are perceived as “different” in society – and the last documented case of this kind was in 1987, so it wasn’t that long ago.

Another Silhouette Intimate Moments romance which devotes a sizeable (by romance standards) amount of attention to politics is Suzanne Brockmann's Get Lucky. Lucky, the hero, is asked by the heroine why he decided to join the SEALs (151) and he points to a photo and says "This [...] is Isidro Ramos. He's why I joined the SEALs" (152). He goes on to explain that his mother

started working full time for a refugee center. This was back when people were leaving Central America in droves. That's where she met Isidro - at the center. [...] Isidro later told me he'd been out trading for gasoline on the black market, and when he came home, his entire town had been burned and everyone - men, women and children, even infants - had been massacred. (154)

and

"[...] I used to go with him to meetings where he would tell about these horrible human rights violations he'd witnessed in his home country. The things he saw, [...] the things he could bear witness to ..." He shook his head. "He told me to value my freedom as an American above all else. Every day he reminded me that I lived in a land of freedom, every day we'd hang an American flag outside our house. He used to tell me that he could go to sleep at night and be certain that no one would break into our house and tear us from our beds. No one would drag us into the street and put bullets in our heads simply for something we believed in. Because of him, I learned to value the freedom that most Americans take for granted. [...] I joined the Navy - the SEAL teams in particular - because I wanted to give something back. I wanted to be part of making sure we remained the land of the free and the home of the brave. [...]"(157-58)

What I think is happening here (and was also happening in Betina Krahn's The Book of True Desires, which I looked at a while ago) is that the novel is contributing to the construction of, or reinforcing an existing model of, American identity. That's a deeply political project. In this particular case I found it impossible not to think about alternative views of American history in relation to Latin America which were left unspoken by the hero and unwritten about by the author. Greg Grandin has observed that

After World War II, in the name of containing Communism, the United States, mostly through the actions of local allies, executed or encouraged coups in, among other places, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina and patronized a brutal mercenary war in Nicaragua. Latin America became a laboratory for counterinsurgency, as military officials and covert operators applied insights learned in the region to Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. By the end of the Cold War, Latin American security forces trained, funded, equipped, and incited by Washington had executed a reign of bloody terror -- hundreds of thousands killed, an equal number tortured, millions driven into exile -- from which the region has yet to fully recover. (4)

As I suggested earlier, sometimes, at least for a reader like me, the politics seeps out from between the lines of a romance, and at others it moves quite directly into view, making its presence felt much more acutely.

Have any of you come across examples of romances, particularly category romances, where politics stepped out from behind the central relationship and captured your attention?

• Brockmann, Suzanne. Get Lucky. Richmond, Surrey: Silhouette, 2000.
• Duder, C. J. D. “Love and the Lions: The Image of White Settlement in Kenya in Popular Fiction, 1919-1939.” African Affairs 90.360 (1991): 427-38.
• Grandin, Greg. Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. Macmillan, 2007.
  

The pictures are of "The 'Glasses Apostle' in the altarpiece of the church of Bad Wildungen (Germany). Painted by Conrad von Soest in 1403, the 'Glasses Apostle' is considered the oldest depiction of eyeglasses north of the Alps" (from Wikimedia Commons) and Franz Eybl's "Lesendes Mädchen," (also from Wikimedia Commons). In my journey around Wikimedia Commons I also came across the cover of this comic book, and as it probably embodies many readers' ideas about the worst possible fusion of science fiction and romance, I couldn't resist including it too. Its title is Rocket to the Moon and the description reads "Could Ted Dustin, rocket explorer, and Maza, beautiful princess of Lunar, stem the powerful hordes of Green Monsters who sought to conquer the world?"

Miscellaneous Links

Laura Vivanco

I thought I'd share some links to interesting blog posts about romance that I've come across recently.

• Over at Dear Author they've been running a series called “If You Like” [...] hosted by various readers, authors and bloggers of Dear Author. The purpose of the post and the comments is to explore what we like about a particular iconic author and what other authors have books like the iconic author." I've already mentioned Sarah's contribution to the series. Today's "iconic author" is Jennifer Crusie, and Morgan S has included plenty of analysis as well as description of Crusie's novels.

• Jessica at Read React Review thinks she's spotted a pattern: "in romance series featuring male siblings, you can often find the same character types."

• RfP reports on a

new article by Aaker, Drolet, and Griffin in the Journal of Consumer Research [which] says our memories are less reliable for experiences that provoke mixed emotions. We tend to remember our feelings as more definite than they were, and over time we forget the intensity of our initial mixed feelings.

she analyses some of the implications there might be for our perception of the books we've read.

The photo is of the Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, was taken by Babak Gholizadeh, and is available via Wikipedia. Have you come across any interesting analysis of romance recently in the grand bazaar of romance blogs and websites?

In other news, both The Spiced Tea-Party and the Dishing with the Divas blogs are closing.

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.

Taking Sex Seriously: Harlequin Presents

Laura Vivanco

RfP has found a very interesting article, published in Macleans this month, titled "Harlequin thinks unsexy thoughts" and subtitled "Impotence is just the start: the new romance novels put the 'fun' back in sexual dysfunction". The journalist, Patricia Treble, found that

in this month's Harlequins was Sandra Marton's The Greek Prince's Chosen Wife, about a woman learning to trust after being sexually abused in foster care. It's not a character or subject that most people expect to find in a happy-ending-in-200-pages serial romance. But today's Harlequin authors are increasingly devoting swaths of their books to upfront discussions of such serious sexual issues. Last month, Annie West's For the Sheikh's Pleasure focused on a woman struggling to be physically and emotionally intimate after being drugged and raped during a night out. And plots such as these are prominently displayed in the bestselling Harlequin Presents series, not tucked away in one of the publisher's more marginal lines.

Though sexual problems have been in HP books for years, they were often "alluded to, talked about euphemistically," explains Tessa Shapcott, executive editor of HP for 13 years. "Now we're just reflecting the fact that people are freer to discuss such intimate things. People are far more honest and open about suffering." For Shapcott, the breakthrough sexual dysfunction book was Lucy Monroe's Blackmailed into Marriage. Its entire plot revolved around vaginismus, a condition that causes vaginal muscles to involuntarily contract shut.

I mentioned Monroe's novel when I discussed the ways in which romance novels can provide sex education. Something I found particularly interesting was the fact that the authors of the Harlequin Presents/Mills & Boon Moderns which tackle these difficult sexual subject matters have solid evidence that their readers appreciate them:

today's authors, who all closely monitor their individual book sales, haven't seen a dip in purchases when the reading gets difficult. [...] I don't think it's a conscious thing but some part of you says 'Oh, I can go there' and the same thing is reflected in the publisher's overall sales." The financials are buttressed by the fan mail. "I think that women who do read our books know damn well that they're going to get something that could be light but could have some meat to it," Marton says. "They are not just perfectly happy getting that -- they're interested in getting that."

Works like those by Monroe, Marton and West may deal with some of the more harrowing problems which can make it difficult for a woman to achieve sexual pleasure, but rather than being aberrations in the Presents/Modern line, they are simply among the most explicit in tackling a theme which, as I found when I did my research for the paper I presented in Newcastle, is often present in novels in this line, namely a woman’s right to experience sexual pleasure without fear or shame or, as Monroe puts it, "I wrote this book for the tens of thousands of women who suffer in silence believing there is something wrong with them. [...] healing is possible. I hope that if you are one of the women suffering in silence, [...] you will realize that it’s not your fault.

I'd encourage you to read both Patricia Treble's article and RfP's analysis of it.