Romance VIII: Imperialism, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Genre
Imperial Affairs: Colonialism, race and the early twentieth-century romance novel
(
Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University)
The romance novel became a distinct genre during the zenith of the
British Empire and, unsurprisingly, women writers used Britain’s
colonies as exotic backdrops for their love stories. At a time when many
men insisted that the empire was ‘no place for a white woman’, romance
novels from the 1890s to the Second World War spread imperial fantasies
of women who travelled to the colonies, hunted, worked as governesses,
nurses and secretaries, managed households, ran viable plantations,
fended off attacks by ‘the natives’, fell in love, married and made a
place for themselves in the empire.
This paper explores how dreams of love and empire building bloomed in
the Kenyan novels of Florence Riddell and Nora K. Strange; the Rhodesian
and South African romances of Gertrude Page; the New Guinean romances
of Beatrice Grimshaw; and the Raj romances of Maud Diver, Ethel M. Dell,
Bertha Croker, Alice Eustace and many more. Martin Green has argued
that ‘the adventure tales that formed the light reading of Englishmen
for two hundred years … were, in fact, the energizing myth of English
imperialism … they charged England’s will with the energy to go out into
the world and explore, conquer, and rule’. Romance novels may not have
created such determinedly colonizing drives among women, but they were
important nonetheless because they purportedly disseminated ‘knowledge’
about Britain’s colonies and naturalized colonial possessions and racial
hierarchies among women readers. At the same time, they unintentionally
foregrounded the fragility of love relationships between British men
and women by portraying the strains colonizing activities placed on
interpersonal relations and the racial anxieties caused by the sexual
attractiveness of ‘native’ men.
Tears and Desires: Qiong Yao’s Romantic Melodrama in a Transnational Frame
(Danju Yu, Stony Brook University)
Qiong Yao, the renowned Taiwanese female novelist, is known for her
sensational novels that depict pathos, overwrought emotions and the
ostensibly suffering female protagonists. The visual adaptation of one
of her most popularly-received novel,
You Can’t Tell Him (
Tingyuan Shenshen, 1972)
, tells
the story of a female schoolteacher’s rendezvous with a student’s blind
father, who eventually discovers that this mysterious school teacher
happens to be his beloved ex-wife who has been reported dead for years.
The novel as well as its film adaptation mimic Jane Austen’s 1847
bildungsroman novel,
Jane Eyre, while the narrative is
relocated to Taiwan in the 1970s with the backdrop of problematic Cold
War geopolitics and Taiwan’s rapid economic boom. Embedded in the
romantic love affair are the film’s detailed depiction of Taiwan’s
budding tea farm business and the growing community of working class
women. This paper examines the gothic elements, melodramatic narrative,
elaborate mise en
scène to tease out the underlying neoliberal
desires expressed through the tears and desires of female protagonists.
In addition, this paper intervenes in the derogatory reading of
Wenyi Aiqing
melodrama (romance melodrama) films by shifting the attention to
excessive emotions that provide ruptures in dominant ideologies. By
tracing the transnational trajectory of
You Can’t Tell Him, I explore romance melodrama and its role in opening up new spaces for female discourse.
“I’m Just Telling You a Story, That’s All”: The
Reading and Misreading of Gendered, Raced, and (Dis)Abled Bodies in
Courtney Milan’s The Heiress Effect
(
Mallory Jagodzinski, Bowling Green State University)
Courtney Milan is quite well-known in the romance industry for
walking away from a “very nice deal” at Harlequin to successfully
self-publish her subsequent novels and for writing characters one
doesn’t often see in the genre (such as virgin heroes, suffragette
heroines, and heroines whose characters are defined by the work they
do). In interviews, she alludes to the fact that this is because she has
more freedom to write these characters due to the fact that there is no
publisher asking her to make her characters more generic and typical.
In her 2013 novel
The Heiress Effect, which is set in 1867,
Milan writes a “B” romance featuring an epileptic heroine, Emily, and an
Indian student studying at Cambridge, Anjan.
In this paper, I show how Milan builds the romantic relationship
between the heroine and hero through the reading and misreading of
bodies in regards to gender, disability, and race. I argue that Milan
uses the constraints placed on Emily and Anjan’s bodies by systems of
power and privilege to illustrate the ways our society has and continues
to allow bodies to speak for individuals rather than trusting their
stories. It is only after Emily and Anjan begin telling stories to one
another about their possible courtship that the two are able to achieve
the genre’s requisite happily ever after, which I assert to be Milan’s
insistence on importance of diverse representation in the stories
American culture tells itself about who is worthy of love.
Brothers Under Covers: Race and the Paranormal Romance Novel
(
Amanda Hobson, Ohio University)
From sparkling teen-angst-filled “vegetarians” to crime fighting
warriors, the vampire hero has become a mainstay in novels, films, and
television
. Vampires have held the imaginations of readers since the time of the “penny dreadful” and
Dracula.
In contemporary American culture, the vampire has shifted beyond the
borders of the horror and science fiction genres to become a featured
icon in the romance genre. The subgenre of paranormal romance has
inundated the publishing market over the last decade for both adult and
young adult romance readers. One of the most glaring and intriguing
aspects of these vampire romance novels is their consistent
whitewashing. Just where are all the undead heartthrobs of colour, and
why are they seemingly absent? Though this piece will focus on Black
vampire heroes specifically, where are the women of colour as female
leads? While these vampire romance novels may have periphery characters
that are people of colour, they remain almost entirely populated by
whites, mainly Americans descended from European heritages. I explore
the representations of race and ethnicity within the paranormal
subgenre, focusing on two popular series as guideposts: Kerrelyn
Sparks’s
Love at Stake series and J.R. Ward’s
Black Dagger Brotherhood
series. How can a reader understand issues of race and ethnicity within
these vampire romances? The vampire, who has long-stood as the iconic
symbol for the Other, reconstructs oppression within the narratives of
these paranormal romance novels first by eliminating race and ethnicity
from the vast majority of the texts and then by reinforcing the cultural
stereotypes of Black masculinity. The genre in which the vampire
fiction is written matters a great deal for the representation and
inclusion of Black vampires. Using genre theory and critical race
theory, this paper examines the lacuna of race and ethnicity present
within vampire romance fictions.
