Incoherent Thoughts on Archetypes and Cultural Appropriation

Laura Vivanco

There have been a lot of very interesting discussions about romance this week.

Diana Peterfreund's Archetypes Anonymous meeting (she was drawing on Tami Cowden's list of the eight hero archetypes) underlined the importance of archetypes in the genre:

CHIEF: (almost holding back a sigh) As I said, there has been some concern raised recently that some of us—I won’t name names—haven’t been getting their fair share of work. Have, perhaps, been a little less popular with the audience.

BAD BOY:(rolling his eyes) So it’s my fault some of you are losers? [...]

PROFESSOR:(speaking for the first time) “Loser” is not the appropriate term. Our popularity has always been cyclical

Peterfreund suggests that The Warrior, Lost Soul and Bad Boy archetypes have been reinvented as vampires which, for a time at least, gave them an innovative new look. Some readers are complaining, though, that the vampires and werewolves are getting dull, and Kara Lennox says she's

heard at least one agent say she is suddenly finding it difficult to sell them. Several editors have said they are “becoming more selective” (that’s code for “not buying as many”). I’ve even heard one editor say the erotic-romance trend is starting to plateau.

Of course, everybody wants to know what’s the next big thing.

Will the 'next big thing' be a new twist on the archetypes? Or is the use of archetypes in fact a factor which contributes to the trend Robin identifies, whereby

with page counts shrinking, part of the burden of the novel-writing craft is being shifted more and more to readers—we have to fill in blanks and flesh out characters or worldbuilding and make critical links between plot points. And because so many Romance readers have read so much Romance, I think this process becomes almost unconscious, to the point where readers don’t recognize they’re being asked to do this, don’t have to struggle with it, and therefore don’t have any reason to think that they’re actually taking on a certain element of what I think is the author’s job in delivering a complete and coherent—and hopefully somewhat distinctive—vision.

Some people think that maybe 'the romance genre would greatly benefit from a healthy dose of tragedy' but it already has plenty of that (orphaned heroines and emotionally tortured heroes aren't exactly rare), just not at the end. And if we lost the HEA, the novels might be romantic, but they wouldn't be Romance as we know it and as the RWA defines it.

I was beginning to wonder if romances about normal people, doing relatively normal things and having a happy ending, might actually be somewhat radical. It's not that 'straight contemporaries' have ever gone away, but there don't seem to be that many romances around at the moment which are about normal people living normal lives and whose bodies are not the stuff of fantasy.

As I was pondering what 'normal' actually means, and wondering how many romance readers are looking for a fantasy, I remembered Pulp's Common People. It's about a woman whom I can imagine as the daughter of a billionaire Greek tycoon romance hero, and her idea of a romantic fantasy is to 'live like common people [...] sleep with common people'. The song is about 'slumming',

a practice, fashionable among certain segments of the middle class in many Western countries, whereby one deliberately patronizes areas or establishments which are populated by, or intended for, people well below one's own socio-economic level, motivated by curiosity or a desire for adventure. (Wikipedia)

If 'slumming' is seen as offensive, is it any better to practice it in reverse? And is it similar in any way to the cultural appropriation discussed by Gwyneth/Gwendolyn, and Karen Scott? It's not just an issue for contemporaries, since this was, after all, the week in which AAR's At The Back Fence columnist Robin Uncapher declared that

I believe that Americans not only identify with 19th century English, we understand them better than many of their descendants who live in England today. Those descendants know a lot about their ancestors, but do they know what its like to be the focus of the national foreign policy of virtually every country in the world? Do they know what its like to feel, in some way, responsible for the world’s welfare?

The Smart Bitches have been discussing which changes might be required to propel romances onto the pages of the New York Times Book Review and I'm wondering if fewer archetypes and less cultural appropriation would change the image of the genre. On the other hand, while that might work well for low mimetic romances, I'm not sure high mimetic romances could be written without using at least some archetypes.

I'm still thinking about all the issues raised in this week's discussions, and I hope we can carry on discussing them in the comments, but in the meantime I'll conclude with Goodess Gracious Me's Hindi People, a parody of Pulp's Common People which takes a satirical look at cultural appropriation and stereotypes of British Asians.

Stick figure from Wikipedia.

Metaphorical Medicine: Diagnosing Lovesickness

Laura Vivanco

'Lovesickness' wasn't always thought of as just a metaphor. In the Middle Ages authoritative sources which were thought to justify the classification of lovesickness as a real disease included the works of Ovid, which 'taught that sickness could be an artful strategy in the game of love, and that unwanted love could be cured by his remedies' (Wack 1990: 15) and

the story of Amnon and Thamar in 2 Samuel 13 (2 Kings in the Vulgate) and the refrain in Canticles, “for I am sick with love” (Cant. 2.5, 5.8).
The biblical episode of Amnon’s love for his sister Thamar both portrayed the reality of lovesickness and, in its narrative details, offered a vision of the disease that overlapped with those of medicine and secular literature. (Wack 1990: 19)

Medieval physicians were of the opinion that love was

a disorder of the mind and body, closely related to melancholia* and potentially fatal if not treated. [...] The university physicians were trained to recognize symptoms of love. By interpreting signs in the patient’s body and behavior (for example, by testing his pulse to see if it changed dramatically when the beloved was mentioned) the doctor could diagnose the malady even if the patient were unwilling to reveal its source. He would then prescribe a regimen designed to restore the body’s strength and to distract the mind from its obsession. Baths, good food, wine, and sleep insured the return of physical vigor, while therapeutic intercourse, business affairs, legal difficulties, real or concocted, and various types of sports and games, like riding or chess, distracted the mind from its fantasies. If left untreated, however, the disease of love could degenerate into melancholia, thought to be even more difficult to cure than lovesickness. (Wack 1990: xi-xii)

That tastefully worded phrase 'therapeutic intercourse' refers to the fact that medieval doctors thought one of the most efficacious remedies for lovesickness was

intercourse with the desired person; if that is not possible, then with another. All the authors recommend it highly; Avicenna and Gerard claim that the disease cannot be cured perfectly without it. If the desired person cannot be obtained legally and according to the faith, then recourse was to be had to "buying girls, and sleeping with them, getting fresh ones, and delighting in them". (Wack 1984: 56-57)

It makes me wonder if some romance heroes also ascribe to this medical theory since there are a fair number who seem to believe that one night of sex with the heroine will help them get over their feelings for her and they're often quite prepared to resort to blackmail in order to get the 'cure' they desire.

Medieval doctors may not have understood the mechanisms by which illnesses were caused, and we may question the efficacy of many of their suggested cures, but they weren't completely wrong in their diagnoses. Modern doctors are concluding that the strange effects caused by love may be due to chemical changes in the brain:

Science is beginning to pay more attention to the chemical storm that romantic love can trigger in our brains. Recent studies of brain scans show that being in love causes changes in the brain that are strikingly similar to serious health problems like drug addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder. [...]

Studies in Italy looking at blood levels of the brain chemical serotonin have suggested that love and mental illness have much in common. They compared serotonin levels of people recently in love; patients with obsessive compulsive disorder; and a "control" group that was neither. The researchers found that the love-struck participants showed a drop in serotonin levels similar to those with obsessive-compulsive problems. (Parker-Pope 2007, Wall Street Journal)**

For all that medieval doctors' scientific knowledge was lacking by modern standards, their descriptions of lovesickness nonetheless demonstrate an understanding of the symptoms and feelings caused by love and in this respect they may have a lot in common with modern romance authors.

Most romance novels (with the obvious exception of medical romances) don't make accuracy in medical matters a high priority and it's perhaps better to think of many medical details in romances as having a strong metaphorical and psychological significance rather than view less than total accuracy as a flaw. I'm not suggesting that romance authors never bother to get medical details right, because many do make great efforts to ensure accuracy, but it's certainly not always the case. Some romances seem to use medical matters almost metaphorically, with the emphasis on emotion and psychological exploration rather than strict attention to medical detail. This really isn't very different from the ways that 'wallpaper historicals' use historical details and settings to create a romantic backdrop for the drama but are not overly concerned with total historical accuracy, or, to take some more literary examples, the way in which Ionesco uses the metamorphosis of his characters into rhinoceroses to describe the spread of fascism, or the role of cholera in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, where the disease can be read as an indicator of moral decay.

One of the most common romance medical metaphors concerns the location of the hymen. As Kalen Hughes observes,

Contrary to what appears to be popular mythology (at least among the writers of romance and erotica) the hymen is not a “barrier” (except in RARE cases that require surgery; 1 in 2000 per Blaustein's Pathology of the Female Genital Tract) nor is it up inside the vaginal canal as it is commonly represented to be in fiction.

Here's an example of a description of the piercing of a romance heroine's hymen:

Her hands were scrabbling through his hair [...] blindly seeking some course that would answer the tumultuous need within. And finally he answered it, lifting himself over her, knowing she was open to him, open and waiting tremulously, wanting the ultimate fulfilment of all he could give her, and she sighed with intense relief as she felt him push into her, felt her inner muscles contract around him, felt the glorious fullness moving slowly onward, meeting the resistance of her virginity, pausing.
Even in that brief moment of panic she couldn't bear the thought of him stopping. If there was pain, there was pain. She didn't care. (Darcy 2003: 95)

While this heroine has clearly got a hymen located somewhere anatomically impossible, the barrier here represents the way the heroine is letting down her emotional defences, opening herself to the hero emotionally as well as physically. Where she had previously avoided falling in love, now she is willing to take a risk, even if it causes her pain. Another medical condition common to romance is what Maria K labels 'AIR Syndrome':

The word amnesia may sound scientific and impressive but Amnesia In Romance (AIR) has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with air-headed research. Many novels romanticize head injury and portray amnesia patients in a completely unrealistic manner.

I recommend you read Maria's article if you want to know more about the reality of brain injury and how it compares with the descriptions in romance. Maria concludes, with her tongue firmly in her cheek, that AIR Syndrome is probably

caused by conversion hysteria, some sort of confusional state or delirium, dissociative disorder or psychosis rather than a head injury, although romance authors seldom choose these alternatives. Someone might forget a traumatic event to protect herself from severe emotional distress or they might have a multiple personality.

I agree, and I think that yet again what the romance authors are trying to do is portray for the reader the emotional intensity involved in falling in love.

Another medical problem I've noticed in romances are heart conditions. A striking example of almost literal broken-heartedness can be found in Anne Mather's Jack Riordan's Baby. After Jack becomes estranged from his wife, Rachel, he tries to take his mind off his problems by devoting himself to his business (one can imagine that the medieval medical practitioners who suggested that the love-sick individual should be distracted by 'business affairs' would have approved), unfortunately the treatment is not successful (though his business flourishes) and he develops physical symptoms of heart disease, collapses and ends up in hospital. It also appears that, as feared by medieval doctors, his illness has almost developed into melancholia (a term which ancient and medieval doctors used to describe a variety of different mental health problems, including what we'd now term 'depression'*):

He certainly didn't believe the shrink who'd come to see him while he was in the hospital. Obviously someone who was recovering from an attack that had limited the amount of blood entering the heart might be suffering depression [...]. His diagnosis - that Jack's problems were possibly as much psychological as physical - hadn't won him any favours. [...] Okay, he [Jack] thought now, so maybe their estrangement had played a contributory role in the way his body was behaving now. Losing three babies [his wife had miscarried three times] and the wife you loved more than life itself could do that to you (2006: 155-156)

Once Jack and Rachel are reconciled Jack's health returns and in fact 'had never been better. He'd had a comprehensive check-up [...] and according to Dr Moore his arrhythmia had corrected itself' (2006: 181). I'm not sure what modern doctors would think about Jack's symptoms and his rapid recovery, but I'm sure that their medieval colleagues would have had little problem diagnosing Jack's problems as being caused by lovesickness, nor would they have been surprised by his swift return to health. There's another Jack with heart trouble in Maggie Cox's The Pregnancy Secret and here the heroine quite explicitly makes a connection between emotional heartbreak and his heart attack:

clearly Jack's lifestyle up until now must have been impossibly stressful to have caused him to need heart surgery at the too young age of thirty-seven [...] She already knew that he was angry and bitter about what had happened between them. If he'd been carrying around that rage inside him all these years and on top of that the stress of a demanding job, then no wonder he had suffered a heart problem!
Caroline had read in a self-help book she'd bought that one of the possible metaphysical causes of a heart attack was when a heart felt deprived of joy due to a person's pursuit of making money over everything else ... that, plus long-standing emotional problems that eventually helped harden the heart. (2006: 164-165)

If, rather than feeling upset at a lack of accuracy in modern romance novels, we treat the descriptions in the novels as metaphors which use medical terminology to describe emotional states, and accept that these texts are more concerned with describing emotion than with medical realism, we will have a more satisfactory reading experience. 'Heart-ache', 'Heart-broken', 'Lovesickness', 'Love is blind' are all expressions which do precisely the same thing: they use the language of medicine to describe the experience of falling and being in love.

* According to Jackson:

The term 'melancholia' suggests modern syndromes of depression, and it certainly did designate cases of psychotic depression and probably other severe depressions, but it also referred to a variety of what would come to be called functional psychoses, including schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychoses; and probably some disorders now recognized as organic psychoses were included. (1972: 289)

Medieval doctors also ascribed to the theory of the humours, and melancholia and lovesickness might sometimes be ascribed to an excess of black bile.

**There's more on this topic here (from The New York Times) and here (from the BBC).

• Cox, Maggie, 2006. The Pregnancy Secret (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).
  
• Darcy, Emma, 2003. The Bedroom Surrender (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).
  
• Jackson, Stanley W., 1972. 'Unusual Mental States in Medieval Europe I. Medical Syndromes of Mental Disorder: 400–1100 A.D.', Journal of the History of Medicine, 27.3: 262-297.
• Mather, Anne, 2006. Jack Riordan's Baby (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).
  
• Wack, Mary F., 1984. 'Lovesickness in Troilus', Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 19, No. 1/2: 55-61.
  
• Wack, Mary Frances, 1990. Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The ‘Viaticum’ and its Commentaries, University of Pennsylvania Press, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania).

Image from the Medieval Woodcuts Clipart Collection. This particular image isn't actually of a doctor diagnosing love sickness. It shows a woman visiting a doctor (he's the one examining a urine flask) and is taken from the Mer des Hystoires, Paris 1488-89. In general medieval medicine considered lovesickness to be an illness which afflicted aristocratic males:'the sufferer was typically thought to be a noble man' (Wack 1990: xi).

Romance History - Guidelines

I've posted about publishers' guidelines for romance before but, as we all know, the romance genre has changed over time, and one can see that if one compares modern guidelines with those of the 1980s. Kassia Krozser posted the story of how she got hold of these old guidelines, as well as a bit of a bit of background about the upheavals that were going on in romance publishing at the time. Now she's posted the guidelines themselves, over at the Romance Wiki.

You can see the following guidelines:

• Dell's Candlelight Ecstasy Romance Guidelines Circa 1980 - They advise authors to 'Avoid the use of formula plot devices such as a marriage of convenience between the protagonists, or amnesia'. Clearly some things haven't changed that much in over 20 years, as novels with these plots are still written (and although such plots may be described as 'formula', authors still manage to give such old plots new twists).

• Gallen Books Guidelines Circa 1980 - the heroine must be 'beautiful [...] Instinctively, she knows how to dress well, can carry off almost any fashion. She may choose to wear very casual clothes, but descriptions of pretty clothes are important'. The Silhouette Romance guidelines (see below) also state that 'Her outfits are described in detail'. We've discussed fashion in romance novels already and Radway's criticisms of the many descriptions of the heroine's clothing date from this period (Reading the Romance was first published in 1984). Like the 'formula plot devices' mentioned in the Dell guidelines, I think descriptions of the heroine's clothing can seem tired and clichéd if badly written, but take on new depths of meaning when handled by a skilled author.

• Second Chance At Love Guidelines Circa 1980 - this is a letter to authors warning them not to use 'devices which we feel have been sadly overworked'. These include some professions for the hero and heroine which are relatively rare today, while others remain much more common. I've not seen many heroes or heroines who are travel agents, for example, but there are still plenty of heroes who are architects and heroines who are journalists, writers and artists.

• Silhouette Desire Guidelines Circa 1982 - I was amused by the warning that 'The plot should not consist of a series of chance encounters, coincidences or filler scenes in which nothing substantial happens.' I can't imagine that many romance authors would set out to write a novel with 'filler scenes' or a plot based solely on 'a series of chance encounters' and coincidences. If someone did, it would be unlikely to impress readers who, as Anne Marble observes, 'often refuse to swallow coincidences. If the plot hinges on a huge coincidence at a crucial moment, don't be surprised if readers get upset. Even little coincidences can rile nerves if they happen too often'.

• Silhouette Romance Guidelines Circa 1980 - In the Galen guidelines authors were told that 'The heroine's parents may be living, but, if so, are not capable of giving her the full support she needs'. In the Silhouette Romance guidelines the heroine 'is usually without parents or a "protective" relationship. [...] A brother is permissible, but she is often in the position of caring for him, rather than vice versa--he may be weak, crippled, or uncertain as to his morals or future'. This is a feature of romances which was noted by Ann Douglas: 'As the story opens, the heroine has usually lost a parent, a home, or both, making her especially vulnerable' (1980: 26). Ann Rosalind Jones, writing in 1986, suggests that this may be beginning to change: 'let me offer a summary of a typical romance plot, as it's been stabilized in the genre and is still used by older writers. The heroine, a virgin in her early twenties, is set in a social limbo: her family is dead or invisible' (1986: 198). I wonder if the absence of family in these romances was in any way linked to the popularity of 'the modern "gothic" romance, a genre that enjoyed enormous popularity throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s' (Radway 1981: 141). We can, of course, still find plenty of romance heroines who are orphaned or have parents who are absent for other reasons, but they are not nearly so frequent as they were in the past.

• Silhouette Super Desire Guidelines

• Silhouette Special Edition Guidelines Circa 1980 - A matter of craft/style which has changed considerably since the 1980s is point of view. Nowadays readers often know what the hero is thinking, but that was not so often the case in the past, unless he revealed his thoughts in conversations with other characters. As noted in the comments at the top of this entry at the Romance Wiki, the Silhouette Special Edition guidelines were somewhat unusual in what they have to say about point of view: 'A Special Edition is always written in the third person, but it is the heroine's point-of-view which shapes the novel' but 'The narrative may sometimes include the hero's point-of-view in order to more fully develop his character and the plot'. In the Silhouette Romance guidelines authors were informed that, 'Though the point of view of a SILHOUETTE BOOK is usually omniscient--i.e. the author can get in anyone's head, she chooses to remain almost completely in the heroine's'. One consequence of the use of heroine-only point-of-view was that it tended to make the hero's motivation somewhat mysterious. According to Ann Barr Snitow

  Since all action in the novels is described from the female point of view, the reader identifies with the heroine's efforts to decode the erratic gestures of "dark, tall and gravely handsome" men, all mysterious strangers or powerful bosses. [...] He is the unknowable other [...] She, on the other hand, is the subject, the one whose thoughts the reader knows, whose constant reevaluation of male moods and actions make up the story line. (1983: 247-248)

  As Anne Gracie observes,

  In the past, the dominant romance convention was that romance used only the heroine's POV. This was because it was believed that most readers identified only with the heroine.
  
  When authors began to include the male POV -- entering the hero's mind -- readers loved it (to publishers' amazement!) and the dual POV became pretty standard.

---

• Douglas, Ann, 1980. 'Soft-Porn Culture: Punishing the Liberated Woman', in The New Republic, August 30, volume 183, pp. 25-29.
• Jones, Ann Rosalind, 1986. 'Mills & Boon meets feminism', in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. Jean Radford (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), pp. 195-218.
• Radway, Janice, 1981. 'The Utopian Impulse in Popular Literature: Gothic Romances and "Feminist" Protest', American Quarterly, 33.2: 140-162.
• Snitow, Ann Barr, 1983. 'Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different', in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell & Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press), pp. 245-263. First published in Radical History Review, 20 (Spring/Summer 1979): 141-61.
  

Happy New Year!

As most of you probably already know, January takes its name 'from Latin Januarius mensis "month of Janus" (the Roman god who presided over doors and beginnings)', and like the two-headed (sometimes even four-headed) god, people often look both backwards and forwards at this time of year, remembering what's happened over the past year and thinking about how they'd like things to improve in the coming one.

Looking back, I notice that among those who have have arrived here via a search engine, quite a lot would seem to be looking for someone to teach them about sex. They could probably do a lot worse than to read some romances because, as I mentioned in August, some romances can be read as sex education. I would, however, like to point out that romances can also contain inaccuracies. As Kalen Hughes has observed,

Contrary to what appears to be popular mythology (at least among the writers of romance and erotica) the hymen is not a “barrier” (except in RARE cases that require surgery; 1 in 2000 per Blaustein's Pathology of the Female Genital Tract) nor is it up inside the vaginal canal as it is commonly represented to be in fiction.

In addition, the exceptional stamina and physical endurance of many romance heroes and heroines are precisely that - exceptional. If anyone's looking for a more factual approach to sex education, then I'd suggest they look at a site like Scarlateen, where there are detailed articles about safer sex, first-time sex, emotional readiness for sex and a lot more.

We also get quite a lot of hits from people wanting to be taught what's romantic. I doubt they're looking for the distinction between romance novels and romantic novels (though if they are, we've got a post on that here). If these people are looking for advice on what their partner might find romantic, Germaine Greer thinks that they might do well to read some romance novels:

The hero of romance knows how to treat women. Flowers, little gifts, love-letters, maybe poems to her eyes and hair, candlelit meals on moonlit terraces and muted strings. Nothing hasty, physical. Some heavy breathing. Searing lips pressed against the thin stuff of her bodice. Endearments muttered into her luxuriant hair. ‘Little things mean a lot.’ Her favourite chocolates, his pet names for her, remembering her birthday, anniversaries, silly games. And then the foolish things that remind him of her, her perfume, her scarf, her frilly underthings and absurd lace hankies, kittens in her lap. Mystery, magic, champagne, ceremony, tenderness, excitement, adoration, reverence – women never have enough of it. (1993: 194)

That was written in 1970, though, and both society and romance novels have changed a lot since then. Although some people may find such objects and proceedings romantic, others may well see them as clichéd and lacking in thought.

Still looking back, but thinking about how the past can inform the present, in a recent post at Romancing the Blog, Kassia discussed some old publishers' guidelines for romance novels that she'll be adding to the Romance Wiki:

Her figure is always perfectly in proportion, usually petite, and slight of build. He is usually dark, though we have seen some great Nordic types, and recently, we have been introduced to a stunning redhead. [The Other Woman is] usually mean, over-sophisticated, well groomed. She NEVER gets our hero. [Other Characters are] stock, easily recognized, cameos. (Silhouette Books, Character guidelines, excerpts)

and in the comments she added that 'as I read them [the guidelines], I could also see how so many current day perceptions of the genre developed. I mean, the guidelines out-and-out state that secondary characters should be stock'.

If this is the perception of the genre that's still held by many non-romance-readers, however, that's troubling, because it means that attitudes towards the genre may have been shaped by works written decades ago. One of the genre's biggest image problems is tied to a lack of knowledge about its history: it is precisely because people don't know about romance's long history and its various sub-genres that they can talk of the genre being written to an unchanging formula.* As Pamela Regis has said:

Most critics writing about "the romance" pay, at most, lip service to the forebears of contemporary works. This practice robs the genre of its most distinguished representatives, marooning it in the present, and reducing it to the few works that a given critic has chosen to analyze. (2003: 53)

Over the coming year I'd like to discuss a few of the less well-known ancestors of the modern romance novel. I may well not get very far with this, and, like so many other New Year's resolutions it may be quickly abandoned, but I have got at least a couple of blog posts lined up on the topic so far.

• Greer, Germaine, 1993. The Female Eunuch (London: Flamingo).
• Regis, Pamela, 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press).

* Re the romance 'formula', romance author Deborah Hale suggests that perhaps it's (H + h x A) ÷ C + HEA = R and what she has to say is very positive about the genre. Usually, however, the words 'formula' and 'formulaic', when applied to romance, have rather more negative connotations. The online Compact Oxford English Dictionary even mentions the genre in its definition of the word 'formulaic':

• adjective 1 constituting or containing a set form of words. 2 produced in accordance with a slavishly followed rule or style: much romantic fiction is formulaic.

Vicki Lewis Thompson - Nerd in Shining Armor

The title of Nerd in Shining Armor is clearly a play on the phrase 'a knight in shining armour' and given that I'd recently written about chivalry, I couldn't resist picking this up. I'm going to have to give a few spoilers, so if you're just looking for a review, you might want to look at AAR's review of the novel, or the one at The Romance Reader, or Mrs Giggles'. There are excerpts here and here and a sort of epilogue to the epilogue here.

Susan Scribner, at TRR describes it as 'a quick, breezy (albeit silly) read', while Blythe Barnhill at AAR comments that 'When Gen talks about her childhood, she manages to touch on every possible stereotype, and I found it all a little hard to believe'. I'm of the opinion that this book is full of deliberate parodies of romance and movie conventions and clichés, as well as of stereotypes about hillbillies and nerds, an opinion which is reinforced by the titles of some of the other novels in Thompson's Nerd series: Nerds Like It Hot (Some Like It Hot); Gone With the Nerd (Gone With the Wind); The Nerd Who Loved Me (The Spy Who Loved Me).

Parody can be hard to pin down, and people do sometimes say or write things which are meant to be parody but which are not recognised as such, and the reverse can also happen. I happen to think that the parody here is deliberate, but without confirmation from the author I can't be certain I'm right. What I'll do is try to demonstrate how a variety of romance conventions are included, only for the reader's expectations to be confounded by parodic reversals, or for the situation to be described in a comic manner.

Our heroine, for example, is in love and thinks that she will be the one to tame the rake (she's a secretary, he's the boss, a common pairing in romance):

Nick might not realize it yet, but he needed her in his life. [...] He was gorgeous, rich, and single. And wounded. Not anywhere you could see, but deep in his soul. [...] Nick was an orphan who'd had a rough childhood, so he didn't trust people (2003: 2)

We also learn that he, like so many romance heroes, has a smell which the heroine finds irresistible: 'that purely sinful, strip-naked-for-me aftershave' (2003: 2). The hero's unique scent is one of the details that romance authors are often advised to include, and Karen Weisner, for example, gives the example of one of her heroine's who 'loves the way the hero smells, so much so that she tries to buy his cologne to wear herself' and Gail Gaymer Martin writes that 'The sense of smell is often captured in the awareness of perfume or after shave'.

He's also described by reference to a movie hero: 'He was the spitting image of Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby' (2003: 4), and that's a technique which is also used not infrequently in romance novels (though it can have its disadvantages). Unfortunately for Gen, though, this selfish, promiscuous man is not going to be changed by the love of a good woman, and he's not the hero of this romance. In fact, he's the villain.

AAR's November 13th At the Back Fence column dealt with obnoxious heroes, and one poster responded by saying that sometimes the main difference between a hero and a villain isn't so much the way they treat the heroine (because some heroes treat the heroine atrociously) but simply that the author has decided that this man is going to be the hero, so the heroine falls in love with him and he has a sudden change of heart and (usually) behaviour towards the end of the novel. Romance readers are also used to the convention that the first eligible man described in a romance is usually the hero. Liz Fielding, for example, says of the hero and heroine that

These are the most important characters in a short romance. The sooner you can introduce them the better. On the first page is good. In the first paragraph is better. In the first line if at all possible. [...] The reader is like a newly hatched chick, programmed to bond with the first likely character she meets. Ensure that it is the hero or heroine.

Because of this convention, readers are primed to recognise the hero, even if he behaves like a villain (this is not the case in Gothic romances, where for much of the book the heroine and the reader remain unsure of the identity of the hero, and may for a long time think that the hero is a villain). Thompson turns the convention on its head, and thus for a time confuses a reader who expects Nick to be the hero.

And here is the nerd-hero:

His eyes were red, his glasses smudged, and his dark hair stood out in sixty-eleven directions. To make matters worse, he'd decked himself out in a sweet-potato-orange plaid shirt and pants the color of a rotten eggplant. Because he was tall, there was a lot of orange plaid and a lot of rotten purple, and all of it was wrinkled (2003: 5).

He has a habit of thinking up computing-related metaphors, for example Jack's thoughts about Gen's eyes sound just a little like a geek version of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, in which Shakespeare rejects the clichéd descriptions of female beauty. Where Shakespeare says that 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips' red', Jack describes Gen's eyes as 'that blue-green color that reminded him of a tropical lagoon picture he'd used once as a screen saver. He'd loved the color of the water in that screen saver.' (2003: 68). Clearly Jack doesn't mean this to be satirical, but I wonder if a description such as this is gently poking fun at the descriptions of other romance heroine's eyes.

Jack never stops being a nerd, but during their adventure his outer appearance is transformed:

"You do have manly sex appeal, Jackson." She seemed quite amazed by the discovery. [...] I would never have thought so, but with your beard, and-"
"It was rough on your face. I'm sorry about that."
"The beard made all the difference. When you kissed me I felt like a maiden captured by a pirate, a maiden who had been flung down on the sand and ... well, you know what I mean."
"Ravished?" (2003: 72)

Pirates are, of course, the swashbuckling heroes of many classic movies and romances. And Thompson even manages to fit in a pretend forced seduction. Jack

lifted her over his shoulder [...] She struggled and kicked, but she was careful not to kick him anywhere that she'd do damage. The more she struggled and wiggled against him, the more she liked his idea. But she didn't want him to know that yet. [...]
"You're going to force me to have sex with you?" [...]
"It won't be forced and you know it."
He had a point. "Then could we ... pretend it's forced?"
His laugh was breathless. "Sure. One ravishing coming up."(2003: 206)

As Candy at The Smart Bitches says, rape and forced seduction has long been a staple of the romance genre, and the original romance genre rapes and forced seductions were not humorous:

Rapist heroes are not nearly as common as they used to be. Between 1972 and about 1988, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a rapist hero in the face. Starting in about the mid-80s, though, the tides started turning, and by the mid-90s, rapist heroes were mostly a thing of the past, although forced seductions still popped their heads up here and there. (There are readers who maintain there’s no difference between forced seduction and rape, of course.)

Thompson's example, with Jack cast as the pirate seducer but with an entirely willing 'victim' playfully subverts these romance conventions.

The actions of the villain involve at least 2 movie-villain clichés, though Thompson makes them more plausible than usual by making the villain worried about leaving bullets in the bodies and/or not having anywhere to dispose of them:

The bad guy, having finally gotten the good guy into his clutches, will usually spend a few meglomaniac minutes gloating over his victory and his opponent's downfall. This increment of time will prove just enough to allow the good guy to figure a way out of his predicament, or just long enough to allow a rescue attempt.

The bad guy, instead of simply offing the captured good guy on the spot, will devise some sort of drawn-out, fiendishly clever method of execution that will take enough time to allow the good guy to figure out his escape.

I wonder also if the situation the two find themselves in is intended to recall faintly that of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe manages to rescue some supplies, and so does Jack, though in this case the supplies include condoms and a curling iron rather than the more practical tools salvaged by Crusoe. One might also wonder, in this context, whether Gen, with her knowledge of how to survive in the outdoors, is the female equivalent of Crusoe's Man Friday, and the references to filmstars from the 1940s (see below) perhaps reinforce the possibility that Gen is being cast as Jack's Girl Friday.

For all that this is a light-hearted romance, there is a serious theme in here, about not judging people on appearances alone. Gen eventually says of Jack 'You're ... you're real, Jack. [...] So many people in this world look like they came right off the assembly line some people factory. They wear what everybody else wears and they talk like everybody else talks." Like she'd been trying to do herself.' (2003: 215). He certainly isn't the usual type of romance hero. Jack also comments on appearances, though, being a nerd, he uses a metaphor from computing: 'relationships were so damned complicated. With computers it was strictly WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get, and he loved that. With women you could never tell. Like Genevieve - a perfect example [...] Genevieve had always reminded him of a movie star from the forties - Katharine Hepburn, maybe, or Lauren Bacall' (2003: 15). Jack's exactly right, but this appearance did not come naturally to Gen, whose mother had 'learned everything she knew about manners and fashion from watching Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, and Ingrid Bergman. She'd done her best to teach those things to Genevieve' (2003: 14). I'm assuming that the repetition of these names is deliberate, as they occur on adjacent pages and emphasise the extent to which Gen's 'look' has been carefully created. It also takes an effort to maintain, and 'the deeper they got into this mess [the adventure they end up on], the more she was reverting to the little hillbilly she once was' (2003: 65). Jack is a nerd, but his problems with colour-coordination are due to him being colour blind, and underneath them he's got an impressive body and a loving heart. And as for the glasses? Well, Gen has a pair too, she just doesn't wear them, because glasses 'made her look like too much of a nerd' (2003: 30).

If you've read this book, did you think it was spoofing romance genre conventions? If you haven't, do you think that there are some romance clichés which are ripe for parody?

• Thompson, Vicki Lewis, 2003. Nerd in Shining Armor (New York: Bantam Dell).

Metaromance (4) - Romance Readers

Nicola Marsh’s Contract to Marry, is another metaromance, since the heroine’s best friend, Liv, is a romance reader and through her the novel ‘systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality’ (Wikipedia entry on metafiction). A discussion about romance novels sets the scene for the meeting between hero and heroine and every so often references to the genre provide a point of reference for reflections on their relationship.

Liv has to face the usual negative comments that romance readers have come to expect if they read their favourite novels in public:

She [Fleur, the heroine] scanned the growing lunch crowd and spotted her friend at a corner table, nose buried in the latest romance novel as usual.
Taking care not to decapitate anyone on the way to their table, Fleur slid into a vacant seat and stacked her load against a nearby wall. ‘Let me guess. The tall, dark and handsome hero is about to rip off the heroine’s bodice and thrust his -’
‘No! Romance novels aren’t bodice-rippers. They’re contemporary fiction. How many times have I told you that?’ Liv stared at Fleur over her rimless spectacles, a faint blush staining her cheeks.
Fleur grinned. ‘All those books seem the same to me. Lots of hot action, with the main protagonist being men with broad, naked chests and big-’
‘OK, you’ve made your point.’ Liv snapped the book shut and held up her hand to silence her. (2005: 6)

The author soon gets her revenge on Fleur, by making her the heroine of a romance and giving her her very own Darcy (though in his case it’s his first name rather than his surname):

suddenly, just like that, Fleur experienced that strange, fluttery feeling that Liv’s romance novels raved about, that once-in-a-lifetime gut-churning, toe-curling reaction that signalled the one. She gazed at the stranger (2005: 9)

It’s playful way of challenging some of the stereotypes about romance, while simultaneously acknowledging that some of them may be correct: as Liv’s blush indicates, many romances do indeed feature ‘ Lots of hot action’ and heroes with ‘broad, naked chests and big-’. In fact, in Contract to Marry itself Fleur will be depicted ‘admiring his toned torso [...] her hands skimming the broad, muscular expanse’ (2005: 126).

Another of the stereotypes about the genre, and one which Marsh seems to be attempting to refute, is that it’s unrealistic in its portrayal of happy outcomes for relationships. As Crusie observes:

Yes, there's still tragedy and suffering in the world, but not unbroken tragedy and suffering, and in fact, most of us are surrounded by good stuff. Specifically, people fall in love, get married, and stand by each other every day, and roughly half of them stay that way. For the first time in a century, the commitment and happy ending of the romance plot is every bit as realistic as the Modernist plot. Unfortunately the perception is that they're just not artistic.

The plot of Contract to Marry depicts a cynical heroine, one who states that she’s ‘not a heroine in one of your novels’ (2005: 91) and who refers to romances as that those ‘corny novels’ (2005: 134). Nonetheless she falls in love and comes to believe in romance. When Liv temporarily becomes disillusioned with the genre, saying ‘I’ve given up on romance. It’s nothing like the books say it is’ (2005: 170), it’s Fleur who tries to reassure her and restore Liv’s faith in romance.

Marsh isn't alone in depicting romance-reading characters and using them to counter some of the prejudices about the genre. Another romance novel which mentions a romance reader, but this time only in passing, is Karen Templeton’s Swept Away. Here Carly, the 14-year old daughter of the hero of says that:

“Mama and I had ‘the talk’ when I was like ten or something. And I’ve been reading romance novels for years. Not that I believe it really happens like that or anything. But I definitely get the general idea.” (2006: 122).

There may not be very many romance readers of that age, but they do exist. According to the Romance Writers of America’s statistics, 1% of readers are aged 13 or younger, and 6% are between the ages of 14-17. Carly's reading hasn't entirely prepared her for adult, sexual relationships, but the romances certainly aren't depicted as having harmed her in any way. Karen Templeton also presents us with a heroine who's been raped, and Carly faces a similar (though different) situation. The result in no way reinforces the 'forced seduction' scenario that can sometimes be found in romances. Instead there's a very clear '"no" means no' message in this romance.

Anyone else come across examples of romance-readers in romance? Do they reinforce, or challenge the stereotypes that exist about both romance and romance readers?

----

• Marsh, Nicola, 2005.Contract to Marry (Richmond, Surrey: Mills & Boon Limited).
• Templeton, Karen, 2006. Swept Away (Richmond, Surrey: Silhouette Books).

Metaromance (3)

Here's one I found online. It's a short story by Liz Fielding, The Secret Wedding and I'm only going to quote from the first chapter, to avoid giving spoilers. You can find it at the Mills & Boon online reads library. The formatting on the Mills & Boon website is a little strange, but you should still be able to read the story. There are 8 tiny 'chapters', each with 3 sections. It used to be on the Harlequin website too, but they removed most of the online reads, which I thought was a bit of a shame, but it could be because they've launched an ebook 'boutique' where, among other things, they're selling 'Harlequin mini' ebooks. I'm sure at least one of the mini ebooks is a story which used to be a free online read.

The Secret Wedding is a story about two writers. The hero, Tom,

wrote bestselling thrillers for men. His readers didn’t want emotional guff polluting the action. Women were included for the sole purpose of providing sex and sympathy while they fixed up his hero’s wounds. And to bump up the body count.

The heroine is 'bestselling romance novelist Mollie Blake', who's giving a writing workshop. The types of novels written by the protagonists, and the way they're described, reminds me of this description of the collaboration between Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer, though I think Fielding's story was written some time prior to this:

One evening in Maui [at the Maui Writers Conference, where both were teaching], Jenny Crusie was watching the sun set over the Pacific when Bob Mayer sat down beside her and said, “What do you write?” Jenny said, “Well, basically, in my books, people have sex and get married.” Bob said, “In my books, people have sex and die.”

Tom's publisher is not entirely happy with his writing and tells him that he has to go on a writing course because

" [...] you seem to have lost that wonderful humanity the women readers loved. Get back in touch with your feminine side, Tom." The man hadn’t been making a suggestion. He’d meant it. "Women buy a lot of books."

Women do, indeed, seem to read more fiction than men. In 2005, for example, Statistics Canada published a report including the finding that 'Women are clearly the biggest readers. Women comprise 6 out of 10 regular readers and 7 out of 10 heavy readers'. In the UK, according to a 2002 report prepared by Book Marketing Limited:

• Men spend slightly more time reading (about 5%) than women, but this is because they spent far more time reading printed newspapers and electronic information. Women are more avaricious book readers, particularly of fiction. Over a quarter of women’s reading is devoted to fiction, compared to one sixth for men. [...]
• Two thirds of all books started are read by women, though this rises to over 70% for fiction, and falls to under half for non-fiction.
• Of the new books started, three-quarters are fiction. Over 80% of new books started by women are fiction, whereas for men this figure is nearer 60%.

The story told in The Secret Wedding isn't particularly full of novelties: it doesn't 'push the envelope' of genre conventions. But it isn't meant to. Instead, it illustrates the various aspects of the romance novel that Mollie intends teaching her students. Each chapter begins with a quotation from 'Mollie Blake’s Writing Workshop Notes', and then serves as an example of how to put the writing advice into practice.

The advice given in Chapter One is: 'Begin your story at a moment of crisis, a point in time when your character’s life is about to change forever'. While this advice isn't adhered to by those who commence with a prologue, or many famous authors such as Thomas Hardy (his Return of the Native, for example, begins with a pages-long description of the landscape of Egdon Heath), it does seem to be popular with many contemporary writers of genre fiction. At the site of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, for example, there's an item which asks:

Does the story start at the right place (the beginning?) Most stories by beginning writers start far too early - way before the key action takes place. Some, however, may start too far forward. These writers have taken the advice of "start with the action at full steam" too literally.

At Liz Fielding's own website she gives the same advice as Mollie does: 'The opening is important. Start with the crisis'.

The descriptions of the characters are similarly, and quite explicitly, written to fit genre conventions: 'she was the kind of woman that any one of his heroes would be glad to have hanging off his left arm', and:

the man was a relic from some cliché-ridden romance. Ignoring the pick-chat up line, she straightened, unimpressed with Mr. Cute.

But she couldn't escape the clichés. Even in the darkness of the car park she could see that he was tall, with mile-wide shoulders.

I had a lot of fun with this, reading the story and noticing how it fitted Mollie's guidelines, and how self-aware Fielding was about genre conventions/clichés. There's even a fairy-tale beginning, '"Once upon a time..."' at the very end of the story, which reminds us that romances have a lot in common with fairytales, and usually end with everyone living happily ever after.

Romance Clichés: Judging Each Book Individually?

In a recent post at Romancing the Blog, literary agent Kristin Nelson said that

I think writers assume that good writing is enough. Well, it’s not. You have to couple good writing with an original storyline–something that will stand out as fresh and original. A story never told in this way before (even if elements are similar to what is already out on the market). [...] Which is why I tell writers to read as much as you can of what’s already out there-because you don’t have the advantage of seeing the hundreds of partials and fulls like we do.

And in a not at all recent At The Back Fence column Laurie Gold speculated about whether 'readers tend to prefer the first book they read by a beloved author', and concluded that very often they did. But is it really fair to judge a book negatively because of what one knows about other books in the same genre? Agents and readers are, of course, not obliged to be fair: agents are looking for what they think will sell in a crowded market-place and readers are looking for a novel which will entertain them. But how about the academics? How should we approach the genre and its clichés?

There are plenty of them, including the virgin widow, the multi-orgasmic virgin and the Duke of Slut. Given that Dukes of Slut are so often paired with virgin heroines, it may well begin to look as though there's a very obvious sexual double-standard operating in the genre. There are also so many Dukes of marriageable age in romance-land's Regency London they had they actually existed they would have made Debrett's more than double in size. But does this mean that anyone attempting to analyse the genre should dismiss out of hand the more recent examples of novels containing a promiscuous aristocratic hero who finds love, sexual passion and monogamy with a virgin of impeccable birth and a feisty nature? My worry is that while analysis of a large number of romance novels, taken in bulk, by quantity, rather than quality, may be useful if one wishes to identify trends, it may mean that we miss out on a book which includes some of the clichéd plot elements, but which reinterprets them, or presents them in unique ways. Uniqueness with regards to plot, however, can be over-valued, and it's worth remembering that the romance genre is not unrelated to the fairy or folk tale, and, as

Folklorist Nils Ingwersen notes [...] in folk tales, you already know from the beginning what is going to happen; it is familiar to you [...] motifs are the building blocks of this literature.
For instance, one common pattern in folk literature has to do with the site of action. One always meets the protagonist at home, then sees him/her transferred into the unknown world; part of the final reward is always either a new home or a return to the original home. [...] A motif [...] is a plot element or object that may recur over and over in various folk tales. [...]
The standard index of motifs, produced by Stith Thompson at Indiana University, contains about 40,000 distinct motifs, carefully categorized for ease of reference: for example, Animals (B), Tabus (C), Ogres (G), Unnatural Cruelty (S), Sex (T). Thompson’s Motif-Index is a 6-volume guide to all the various motifs found in a variety of folk literatures, including myths, legends, tall tales, and other oral narratives, not just folk fairy tales.

(Professor Waller Hastings, Northern State University)

I do think it is legitimate to ask what the cumulative effect is on readers of repetitive reading of particular situations (e.g. the Duke of Slut). Does this reinforce sexual double standards in society? Do the frequent portrayals of the hero and heroine with their large brood of offspring emphasise a particular aspect of femininity, or suggest that procreation is the expected outcome of marriage? At the same time, I think that if we want to do literary analysis of individual books we have to examine each book on its own merits. Not every portrayal of a large family, for example, is an attempt to coerce the reader into giving their fertility free reign. A particular virgin widow might just have lost her husband before the marriage could be consummated. Lady Bracknell may state with great authority that 'To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness', but those of us engaged in close reading of literature may wish to look a little closer to discover how an individual author deals with the clichés and motifs. Is the author careless? Or does she bring these motifs to life, explore their possibilities and create a work which, while based on traditional elements, leads the reader to think about the issues anew?

On Comfort, Challenge, and "Importance"

J has posted a variety of thought-provoking comments on Jennifer Crusie, and more generally on the enterprise of treating romance fiction from an academic perspective. I've replied to some of these already (the exchange is over here); the most recent ones, though, deserve to be addressed "above the fold," I think. I'm not sure I can do them justice under current circumstances (I'm blogging in the basement, with my daughter foraging for entertainment not three feet away), but let me throw out a couple of ideas.

J began by quirking an eyebrow at what seems to her (to him? I don't want to presume) to be a recycling of formulaic elements in Crusie's novels, devices that have been around so long they have grown, in J's word, "trite":

I am not criticizing her use of pets and children. Of course the pets are cute and need rescuing, and naturally the children are loveable and need rescuing. That's what the heroine is for -- to rescue the weak and helpless. And then to be rescued herself by the hero with his sweet kiss.

The other day I was reading an Amazon review of one of her books, and found the comment "First off, where were the dogs?!" Okay, it's every reader's right to expect love and romance from Crusie, but must our author also deliver canine companionship, as well?

The first thing that strikes me about these comments is their witty, debunking tone: the tone of a reader who is not, by gum, about to let an author pull a fast one on her. I actually rather like that tone, since it reminds me of Min in Bet Me, but as a professor, it also puts me on my guard. Whenever my students strike it--heck, whenever I strike it myself in my own reviewing--I'm generally about to say something funny, but reductive: something that breaks whatever spell a book has tried to cast over me. I'm not a sucker, it says. And, indeed, a moment later, J offers this observation:

I suppose if I had to write a paper on Crusie, it would be on the topic of women's tendency to seek comfort in familiarity. Time and time again I read women's comments that they read a certain author because "they know what to expect." It's the key to Nora Roberts' empire, I think.

Now, maybe it's just because I've been properly humbled one or two times in my day, but I'm awfully wary of generalizations about "women's tendency" to do anything. Are women more likely to seek comfort in familiarity than men? Two days ago I was at a Cubs game with my son: we ate familiar ballpark food, wore familiar sports fan clothing, watched an utterly familiar, indeed utterly rule-bound activity for, what, 3 1/2 hours or so, and drove home listening to extra innings of yet another baseball game. Was there anything unpredictable in what transpired? Well, the Cubbies won, which is certainly an unfamiliar experience this season. But that's a little condiment of unfamiliarity spicing up an utterly comforting-because-familiar, even ritualized activity.

Suppose, then, we change J's comment to read: "If I had to write a paper on Crusie, I'd write it on the topic of the human tendency to seek comfort in familiarity." Fair enough, say I--but to get anything more than a C on that paper, you'd have to address not only the familiar elements in Crusie's books (say, the motifs she comes back to over and over again, like the animal friends and pop culture references), but also the way these novels address familiarity thematically, and also how Crusie attacks the aesthetic problem of over-familiarity, too. What does she do to vary her material, if only just enough to avoid boredom? In which novels is she more successful at this, and in which is she less effective as an artist? Does she ever address the question of familiarity directly in narrative or dialogue, or otherwise show some literary self-consciousness about the issue? (She was, after all, an academic before she became a novelist, and her dissertation was on narrative structures in men's and women's fiction. Surely she's as aware of this issue as any of us are.)

Now we're not asking snarky questions, but serious ones: in fact, the same serious ones we can ask about Petrarch, or about the Jewish poets of the Golden Age in Spain, or about qasida writers in Islamic world, of haiku poets in Japan, or about virtually any other literary artist working within a highly conventionalized framework. (Such conventionalized frameworks are, I would hazard, the norm in literary culture, except in isolated periods that value individualism and originality. Those are the exceptions, not the rule.) We may call romance fiction "romantic," but it's a classical art, and needs to be read as such.

Bet Me, I would argue, is a profoundly self-conscious book: probably Jenny's most visibly structured, visibly "designed" novel, and one in which the appeal of the conventional, the familiar, and the predictably appealing is addressed in many ways. J could write about how the superfluity of fairy tale material in the novel--allusions, both subtle and obvious, discussions of fairy tales between characters, and so on--makes the text both familiar and playfully self-conscious about that appeal to narrative and explicatory comfort. (It's a literary game as old as Alexandria, but here it's one that many readers, not just the cultured elite, can play.)

Min's resistance to the fairy tales, and her need to give in and articulate her own HEA, would then seem to match the reader's need to give up his or her cynicism in order to savor the text. (I think here of J's later comment that "I don't believe in fairy tales. They have much to teach us, like don't eat houses made of candy and don't expect your birth parent to keep your wicked step-parent from tormenting you. But if you lie around waiting for your prince to come and rescue you, you'll end up sleeping for 100 years.") It is also congruent with her resistance to fats and sweets, which suggests that fairy tales are the literary equivalent of those culinary pleasures, all of which we are suckers for, simply due to biology. We slim ourselves down by refusing them, the novel suggests, but at what cost? Is that cost worse than throwing up if we eat too much of them, as Harry does? Certainly we can't cook [create] our own chicken marsala [HEA] while leaving out essential ingredients, although we may want to, since those ingredients are the ones that some Nanette voice inside us insists we refuse. (It took me longer than I'd care to admit before I caught that joke about "No, No, Nanette.")

J finished that particular post with this challenge:

That stated, I reiterate that I enjoy the books; I enjoy the cute little pets that never seem to make nasty puddles on the heroine's carpet or chew her favorite shoes; I enjoy the children who are never hideous, spoiled brats. The writing is funny. But is it more than an entertaining and comforting formula? Is it "important"? Does it challenge us in any way?

I don't have time to address each part of this at length. For now, suffice it to say that I do not admit that "importance" is equivalent to "challenge," nor do I buy the notion that entertainment and comfort are unimportant, unworthy of intellectual inquiry. These seem to me the cliches of modernism, beloved of English teachers everywhere who want to show their students that the texts they enjoy are not as worthy of attention as the ones they are now being forced to read and write about for credit. In many moods, I think that NO literature, no art at all, is "important" in the way this question assumes. Rather, there are works that let us flatter ourselves that we are doing something important when we read them, like thinking about, I don't know, war and famine and political corruption, as opposed to the pleasures of food and sex. Less cynically, let me just suggest that Crusie herself addresses this question in Bet Me, embodying it in the pair of restaurants her characters visit.

Other kinds of art may get more credit, more acclaim, than romance fiction, Bet Me suggests, because they "challenge" us. In the end, though, they are the Serafino's of literature--places where an author "makes a statement," but does not please. We may convince ourselves that food that tastes bad must be "important," especially if the restaurant critics all concur. But do we really want to, in the end? Emilio's may boast innumerable cliches both of menu and decor, like romance fiction itself, but it also satisfies: not least, it satisfies our most embarassing, because most conventional, cravings.

That's not a full-blown essay, J--just an hour on a Tuesday morning. Give me time and coffee and I can do the job better, but this will give you some idea of how I think about this novel, and about the very good questions you raise!