Noted With Interest (Alpha Males)

--Eric Selinger

Almost exactly four years ago, Laura wrote a long and useful post here about the "Evolution of the Alpha Male," with links to then-recent scholarship by Heather Schell and a blog post on the topic by Jessica of Read, React, Review, as well as some very helpful background information from Joseph McAleer:  namely, that Alan Boon, of Mills & Boon, espoused as a "law of nature" the notion that "the female of any species will be most intensely attracted to the strongest male of the species, or the Alpha" (Joseph McAleer, Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999], 149-150).  

If you're interested in the idea of the "alpha male" in romance, and in the critical debates that surround him--both in academic scholarship and in the online critical world, where authors and readers and scholars are interacting--you might want to take a look at fantasy author Michelle Sagara's "Letter of Opinion" over at Dear Author ("Michelle Sagara Contemplates the Alpha Male"), at the debate that plays out in the comments, and at the essay in response by romance author and critic Olivia Waite, "Ecology and Uses of the Alpha Male in Romance."  Waite, too, embeds some helpful links, including one to a study that debunks the science about wolves on which some ideas of the "alpha male" seem depend.  

Sagara's description of the Alpha Male's appeal sometimes recalls ideas from Janice Radway's Reading the Romance, as in this set of paragraphs:

In real life, women are responsible for so much, emotionally. On hard days, on days when they just want to give up and crawl back into bed, one of the things they daydream of, outside of romance novels, is for someone else to pick up the slack for a day or a week or a month. It’s for someone else to get a grip, to take responsibility for their own lives, so that the woman herself can be responsible, for a tiny while, for just herself and her own needs. In fact, I’ll go one step further and say: on some days, when things are overwhelming, I want someone to take care of me. 

And that kind of care happens when we’re three. Or five. Or sick as a dog. If it happens at all. It’s not realistic. It’s not a desire upon which to build a real life. And we don’t. But we can dream. 

I don’t think it’s social conditioning about alpha males that causes the reading pleasure. I don’t think it’s the conditioning that makes romance alpha males work for readers. I think it’s the rest of real life. It’s having to raise children and be aware of their needs and their emotions constantly. It’s having to deal with failed relationships or walking away from those that are just draining because of incompatibility, etc. It’s having to be responsible, always, for other people. It’s having to make nice and to be someone else or be something other than we actually are for so much of day-to-day life.

I don't mean to suggest that Sagara is taking ideas from Radway without attribution; after all, Radway's analysis was based on reading romance novels and talking to readers, and anyone who's read romance novels and talked to (or been) a reader might independently arrive at similar conclusions. But I do wonder whether there might be an interesting story to tell about how ideas within the novels got talked about in the 1980s and then made their way back into the discourse of authors and readers alike in a more self-conscious or deliberate or heightened way.

And I wonder whether Waite's response to Sagara--which points out that "Social conditioning is what makes us feel like women have a greater responsibility than men do to raise children, to be the responsible nurturer in defiance of our own needs and wants" and that "what Sagara is describing here is patriarchy, in a very fundamental way"--doesn't also suggest that, at least where alpha males are concerned, the discussion hasn't entirely left behind the dynamics that Radway described thirty years ago.

Jennifer Crusie - Crazy for You

Laura Vivanco

Having raised the issues of rape and forced seduction in the context of Elizabeth Thornton's Fallen Angel, I'd like to look at how Jennifer Crusie deals with some of the same issues in Crazy for You.*

As usual this isn't a review, so there will be spoilers. You can find reviews here, here and here and there are also Jenny Crusie's notes on the novel and an excerpt.

Crusie has written that one of the reasons that romance has been 'reviled by radical feminists' and been 'called "fiction that promotes abusive relationships"' is that:

romance fiction says that sometimes women like to be overpowered sexually.

Politically incorrect though it may be, the rape fantasy not only exists, it's popular. And unless a heck of a lot of women are participating in their own degradation (not impossible given the Fifties), there's something important and valuable that women are getting from it. An examination of rape fantasies shows that for the most part, the fantasy isn't rape at all, it's non-responsibility; that is, somebody [...] sweeps away the heroine's (and the reader's) good-girl objections with the sheer force of his animal nature to give her the best sex of all time, and she's not responsible because she said no. [...] Does this weaken the important "if she says no it was rape" guideline? Only for those who confuse reality and fantasy, and the vast majority of readers can tell the difference.

Not all feminists reject the rape fantasy, either; Susie Bright has argued that the politically correct sexuality demanded in the past is repressive and has proposed a "Do Me Feminism" based on the theory that if a woman likes it, it's good regardless of political thought [...]. Romance fiction has been "Do Me Feminist" for decades. (Crusie 1998)

Jenny's latest thoughts on the issue of rape in romance can be found here.

Clearly the contexts in which rapes occur in different romance novels can vary greatly. Some heroes show far more contrition than others, for example, and the ideological subtexts underpinning the events may also vary. Crusie herself never presents 'true love' as an excuse for rape or abuse, nor do her heroes ever commit rape. Her heroes and heroines appear to have pretty equally matched libidos and her heroines are never innocent virgins, ignorant of their sexuality. What we do have in Crazy for You, however, is a text which explores the boundaries between the abusive and the acceptable.

Angel commented that in many romances which include a rapist hero

The rape of the heroine is but one part of the violation committed against her -- the author, the God of her world, gives all the power to her rapist, organizes every event against her. Creates her only to put a noose around her slender neck and tighten it chapter by chapter.

Crazy for You offers the reader a case study of a social context which 'gives all the power' to a man (in this case, however, Bill is not the hero) and gives him the freedom to become increasingly threatening towards the heroine, Quinn.** Elizabeth Blakesley Lindsay, in her review of the novel, catalogues the escalating abuse suffered by Quinn. Blakesley Lindsay admits to 'skimming the last third' of the novel because she was upset by the content, so her chronology is perhaps not completely accurate, but she does give a comprehensive overview of this aspect of the plot. She is right in identifying violence against women as an important theme in the novel, but I think she is wrong to suggest that 'Crazy for You treats violence against women like a joke'.

This is a novel which explores the social attitudes which may lead to denial that real rape and abuse are taking place. Some people believe myths about rape and domestic violence. For example, they may mistakenly believe that it is easy to spot a rapist. In fact, 'Rapists are not physically identifiable. They may appear friendly, normal, and non-threatening. Many are young, married and have children' (Hamlin 2001). Similarly

Domestic violence crosses ethnic, racial, age, national origin, sexual orientation, religious and socio-economic lines as well as class, physical or mental ability and status as a refugee, migrant or prisoner. Women are most at risk of physical and sexual assault and homicide from men they know, often their husband, male partner or ex-partner. They are more likely to be injured or murdered by a spouse than any other person. Although women can also be violent, the vast majority of partner abuse is perpetrated by men against their female partners'.

USA: approximately 1/3 of the men counselled for battering are professional men who are respected in their jobs and their communities. These have included doctors, psychologists, lawyers, ministers and business executives. (World Alliance of YMCAs)

In Crazy for You, 'at six foot five, two hundred and forty-three healthy blond pounds, Bill was a Viking's Viking. All of Tibbett adored Bill' (2000: 4). Because (almost) all of Tibbett adores Bill, the members of the community find it difficult to believe that he could be acting inappropriately and increasingly abusively towards Quinn. Even after Bill has illegally entered Quinn's house and sabotaged it so that she will be physically harmed, the local police chief is 'not real interested' because 'Bill is God around here, all that charity shit he does and the work with the kids. Frank just didn't want to hear it' (2000: 250). Bill is one of those many abusers who is 'respected in their jobs and their communities' and the local community is reluctant to have its belief and trust in him shattered.

Crusie doesn't simply show the reader that respected members of the community may be abusers, she also demonstrates that there is a very fine line between some acceptable and unacceptable male attitudes towards women. Bill is in many ways the embodiment of masculinity:

His face was set in the benevolent Captain of the Universe look that had earned him the respect of all of Tibbett. A real man's man, her father had said when she'd brought him home the first time. Which would explain why she didn't want him now. Let the men have him. (2000: 28)

Nick, the hero, understands Bill's behaviour because it's based on attitudes/responses that he has himself:

[Quinn] "I don't understand Bill at all." [...]
[Nick] "I do. I think he's a jerk and we're calling the police right now, but I understand him. He thinks you belong to him."
[Quinn] "Listen, I have told him - "
[Nick] "You told me, too, and I didn't go away." He sat next to her on the couch, taking her hand, trying to make her understand so she wouldn't look so lost. "For the past two weeks, I've waited, and I've watched you, and I knew you'd come back to me because you belong to me. Every guy thinks that about the woman he loves." [...] "Look, I know it's not right, but that's the way it is. I watch you walk [...] and I look at your butt and I think, That's mine. [...] Even when you were saying no, you were mine. It doesn't go away. You can't talk me out of that. Every move you make belongs to me. I know it's wrong, and I don't care."
"Oh," Quinn said.
"And the problem is, Bill doesn't even know it's wrong. He just knows you're his and you're not with him." (2000: 291-292)***

Max, Nick's brother, is having problems with his wife Darla, and his words echo Bill's: "She's my wife," Max said stubbornly. "She belongs to me. I'll just wait. She'll come to her senses." (2000: 240). Bill thinks the same way: 'He couldn't understand it; he was giving her so much time. When was she going to stop this and let him back in?' (2000: 222) and 'I know you're upset right now, but that's really just stubbornness. You knew we'd get back together sooner or later' (2000: 315). Both Quinn and Darla have been bored in their relationships. Quinn said of her relationship with Bill that 'what we have, it's not exciting. I've never had exciting. And with the way Bill plans things, I'm never going to have exciting.' (2000: 20). Darla leaves Max because the excitement had gone out of their relationship and when she wanted to get it back 'He said, "What the hell's the matter with you?" and I said, "I want something different," and he said, "Well, I don't," so I left for awhile' (2000: 172). However, Max and Darla do recapture the excitement, as Max makes changes and, in the process, acknowledges Darla's needs and individuality. Bill never does, and since the start of his relationship with Quinn he's been making her fit in with his needs and wishes: 'When he'd met Quinn, he'd known instantly that she was the one [...] It had taken him a year to convince her to let him move in, and another six months to get her to move to the great apartment he'd found for them, but she'd understood in the end, and now his life was perfect' (2000: 24).

Ironically, given that it's Bill who's been manipulating Quinn, at first she takes the blame for shaping Bill:

Looking at his smug, sure face, Quinn realized she'd created a monster. Bill thought she was going to give in because she always had; so why should he expect anything else? She'd trained him to be smug. She looked around. This wasn't even her apartment. Bill had picked it out and moved them in, and when she said, "It's too beige," he'd said, "It's five minutes from school," and that made so much sense she'd given up. (2000: 30)

The reader, however, can see that Bill's behaviour was not caused by Quinn but is the direct result of his philosophy about relationships. Bill is

a man who'd taken the Tibbett High football team to five consecutive championships and the baseball team to four - fifth one coming right up - almost solely, Quinn believed, by never considering the possibility of defeat. "Know where you want to be and go there," he'd tell the boys (2000: 2).

He considers himself to be a leader and his method is to be persistent and let nothing get in the way of his success. As he tells Robert Gloam, the School Principle, this attitude will work in other relationships too:

I make it clear what I want from them [the boys]. I don't get upset, I just expect them to deliver. [...] Take this thing with Quinn and the dog. She knows we can't have a dog, so I just kept reminding her of that until she agreed to give it to Edie. [...] You let people know what they have to do to earn your approval, and they'll do that. (2000: 23-24)

Bill never once questions why people would want his approval. In addition, it would seem that he is particularly likely to use his technique on women and children/young adults, perhaps because he expects them to look up to him. As Shulamith Firestone observed, women and children have often been grouped together and treated as inferiors by men but because the 'oppression of women and children is couched in the phraseology of "cute" it is much harder to fight than open oppression. [...] If she responds to his, "Baby you're looking good today!" with "No better than when I didn't know you," he will grumble, "What's eating that bitch?" Or worse.' (1972: 89) Clearly not every compliment is a patronising way of putting a woman or child in his or her place by reinforcing the idea that she or he should want, and be pleased to receive, a compliment from a man but, as with Bill's expectation that others will want his approval, this may be a subtext in some cases. Robert certainly expects women to accept his authority and can't understand his secretary's behaviour: 'I mean, sometimes I think she's defying me' (2000: 23) and 'Edie's another one I'm not too sure about. [...] These older women do not understand authority' (2000: 24).

The idea that women need male 'protection' also perpetuates the idea that males are superior beings whom women and children should respect. When Nick pays part of Quinn's mortgage without telling her, Quinn is furious and compares Nick to Bill:

"It was Bill," she said. "He went behind my back to screw it up."
"That's what I figured."
"And then you went behind my back to fix it," she said. "Pretty patriarchal of you, wasn't it?" (2000: 196)

Barbara, who works at the bank, expects Quinn to be pleased.

"I think it's wonderful," Barbara said. "He's taking care of you. You're so lucky."
"I'd rather take care of myself," Quinn said. "I'd rather he treated me as if I were capable of taking care of myself."
"Why?" Barbara looked at her so blankly that Quinn said, "I don't get you. You have a real career at the bank, and you make good money. Why are you so fixated on getting a man to support you?"
Barbara drew back, two spots of color flaming in her cheeks. "I don't need a man to support me. I'd never depend on a man for money." (2000: 186)

Quinn knows that being 'protected' in this way contains the assumption that she, like a child, is not 'capable of taking care of myself'. Barbara doesn't need a man financially, but emotionally she feels unsafe without one:

"It's just so hard to find somebody to take care of you, you know? When you find a good repairman, you know you're lucky." [...] "And I feel so safe, and I know who I am because I'm with this wonderful man who knows everything." She came back to earth and said, "But it always turns out he doesn't. It's so disappointing because they always say they do, you know? But they don't, and you can't trust them after all." (2000: 187)

Barbara never finds her ideal repairman and Crusie shows us, through Bill's actions, that male protectiveness may at times be more of a threat than a source of security. His knowledge, which might once have been used to keep Quinn 'safe', is now used to threaten her:

On his way up the stairs, he noticed how flimsy the railing was. Just bolted to the wall. It could come loose any time. If he lived here, he'd make sure there was a better railing. She really needed him there.
He slowed as he neared the top of the stairs. Maybe that was it. Maybe if she realized how much she needed him -
He went back downstairs to the back porch and found Quinn's toolbox. With the screwdriver he loosened the bolts on the stair rail, and then went through the house, loosening other screws, to doorknobs and outlet plates, loosening the wires behind the plates, too. He thought of other things he could do. He could loosen the gas lines so there'd be just a little leak, nothing big. The steps to the front porch were awful. He could weaken one so it would go later, so everything wouldn't be bad at once. He could loosen a porch rail. He could do lots of things. She'd need him again. (2000: 235)

Bill wants to trap Quinn into 'needing' him the same way that Barbara 'needs' a man. But a relationship based on such needs, rather than emotional closeness and mutual support, is one of dependency, in which the power is in the hands of the male who has knowledge of technology and handicrafts. His offer of 'safety' is perhaps more of an 'offer you can't refuse' rather than an offer which is embraced freely and out of love. This new understanding of what might be implicit in offers of protection makes Quinn and Edie wary of masculine use of such language:

[Nick] "I'll be there. So will Max. She'll never leave my sight."
"Just like Bill," Edie said.
"Nothing like Bill," Nick said. (2000: 250)

and

[Nick] "[...] I want to take care of you."
Quinn tied not to wince at the echo of Bill. (2000: 302)

Turning now to the rape fantasy, it is Quinn who mentions that this is something she wants:

Maybe if she smiled at him tomorrow night, he could take her on the wrestling mats at the back of the stage, a sort of pseudo-rape fantasy because she'd be too tired to contribute. He could do all the work. Screw equality. (2000: 272)

These three sentences demonstrate the complexity of the concept of the rape fantasy. Is Quinn implying that an 'equal' contribution she'd make if she wasn't tired would be for her to pretend to be unwilling? Is the 'screwing' unequal literally (rather than metaphorically) if she doesn't? Or is equality metaphorically 'screwed' in this sort of fantasy anyway? Quinn's thoughts also make it clear that this is not real rape: it cannot be rape if the woman is planning what will happen to her. Shortly after this, Nick, the hero, arrives and fulfills her fantasy (though against a wall, not on a mat). No mention is made of rape during the scene, but Nick does suggest that Quinn is in danger: ' "You shouldn't be here alone," he said. "You know that. It's dangerous," and she said, "I'm not alone. You're here"' to which he responds 'That's even worse' and 'He came closer to stand in front of her, not smiling' (2000: 274). Unlike Bill, who is blond and looks heroic (but is the real danger), Nick looks dangerous but doesn't pose a real threat. Earlier, Quinn had thought that

He'd always been the wild Ziegler brother, but she'd never quite understood that part because she always felt so safe with him. Until he looked at her like that. Until she'd looked back and really seen him, dark and dangerous and full of infinitely impractical possibilities. Really, he was the perfect guy for her right now: a bad guy who would never hurt her. Excitement without risk. (2000: 75)

The fine line between real danger and pretence is one which may not be grasped by onlookers such as Quinn's neighbour:

"[...] I thought he [Bill] just had the hots for her, you know? Looking in the window. Big deal."
"He's dangerous," Nick said.
"So are you." Patsy looked him up and down. "But I guess you're hers, right?" (2000: 249)

Of course, Bill thinks that he's Quinn's too. The underlying attitudes of the two men are not very dissimilar, as Nick acknowledges. He, like Bill, thinks that 'Even when you were saying no, you were mine. It doesn't go away. You can't talk me out of that' (2000: 292). Apart from Nick's knowledge that his possessiveness is 'wrong' (2000: 292), the other main differences between Bill and Nick's possessive attitudes towards Quinn are (1) Quinn consents to Nick's behaviour because she wants him and (2) Bill is prepared to use increasing force. These differences are highlighted in two scenes in which each man presses Quinn up against a wall. Crusie's said of the scene with Nick that it's one which she 'rewrote and made tamer because my editor said the original version was “icky.” Too close to rape'. The parallels still remain. Here are some quotations from the scene with Nick:

• He came closer to stand in front of her, not smiling. [...] And he came closer. [...] He took another step closer, until he was almost against her (2000: 274)
  
• He put his hand on her crossed wrists and rested against them, just firmly enough so she couldn't move them' (2000: 274)
• Let me go," she said, and tried to pull her hands from his grip so she could touch him [...] but he tightened his hold, crushing her wrists together, stretching her arms higher (2000: 276)
• "Louder," he said in her ear as he stroked her. "Scream"' (2000: 276)
• "We better stop," Quinn whispered [...] "I don't think so," Nick whispered against her ear. "I think we do this now. Right up against this wall." (2000: 277)
• "I'm going to take you hard against this wall," he whispered [...] Harder than you've ever been had before. So hard you're going to feel me with every move you make for a week. You're going to remember you were mine every time you breathe."' (2000: 277, my emphasis ***).

Here what excites Quinn is 'the roughness of him, the darkness of him, the difference and the danger of him' (2000: 278) but when Bill is rough, different and dangerous in the dark her reaction is very different. Bill has turned the 'rape fantasy' into a real assault (not rape, because Quinn manages to escape):

• "I want to talk," he said, and crowded her closer, liking the way she stepped back [...] so that he moved closer and closer again until she was up against the building, nowhere to go. (2000: 283)
• he caught at her wrists to hold her there. [...] She tried to twist her hands away and he held her tighter, felt the fragile bones in her wrists crunch together (2000: 283)
• Quinn tried to jerk her wrists free, but there was no way, not anymore, he'd had enough, so he pulled her close and then shoved her really hard against the building to make her listen, and her head smacked against the wall, and she cried out and blinked back tears, pain (2000: 285)
  

Nick explains that his sense of possessiveness, his feeling that Quinn is his, is

" [...] the reason I trapped you against that wall after you blew me off for those weeks. I took you back." [...] "Sorry."
"I'm not." She opened her eyes again and looked at him fully. "I was just overwhelmed by how sexy that was. Politically incorrect as hell, but really, really sexy." (2000: 291)

Interestingly, in a replay of the sex-against-the-wall scene, Crusie reverses the power dynamics between Quinn and Nick, which perhaps reasserts the underlying equality in their relationship, which has always been based on friendship, not control:

"You're mine," she told him.
"Works for me." He ran his hands up her sides until she caught at his wrists and pulled them over his head.
"You are going to feel me for a week," she whispered, moving against him.
"Honey, I already feel you every minute of the day." [...]
Quinn was breathless. "This domination thing doesn't seem to work when I do it," she grumbled [...]
"Oh, I don't know." Nick kissed her neck [...] "We get some leather and handcuffs in here, you could do some damage."
Quinn let go of him. "I can do some damage without leather," she whispered [...].
"Oh, Christ," she heard Nick say [...] "You're right. I'm yours."
Damn right, she thought, and took him. (2000: 299-300)

------

• Crusie, Jennifer, 2000. Crazy for You (London: Pan Books). The cover photo is of this edition. The novel has appeared with many other covers, often in bright colours, but this one seems to me to convey something of the sense of danger present in the novel. There's some discussion about covers for romances which contain rape here, though the discussion did get very off-topic at times, as it was a continuation of the previous thread, about rape in romance.
  
• Firestone, Shulamith, 1972. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Bantam).
  
• Thornton, Elizabeth, 2004. Fallen Angel (New York: Zebra).

* One of the differences between Crusie's novel and Thornton's is that Thornton presents the rapist hero as the heroine's fate/destiny. Crusie, however, begins her novel with a rather different manifestation of destiny: 'Quinn McKenzie lifted her eyes from the watercolor assignments on the desk in front of her and met her destiny. Her destiny was a small black dog with desperate eyes, so she missed the significance at first. [...] It looked cold and scared and hungry and anxious' (2000: 1). Over at Jenny's thread about rape in romance, she agreed that 'animal torture is beyond the pale' for a hero and it's Bill's attitude towards the dog which first cues the reader in to the fact that Bill is not the hero: he wants it removed and isn't terribly troubled by the idea that the dog might be euthanised if taken to the pound. By contrast in Fallen Angel the hero may be a rapist but he's good with animals. Prior to the rape there's a scene in which a

ball of black fur [...] came streaking round the corner of the house. The ball launched itself at Maddie's feet where it lay panting.
"Good grief! I think it's a dog," exclaimed Deveryn.
Maddie sank to her heels and embraced the shivering creature. "Kelpie!" she cried. [...] It was then that she observed that the animal at her feet, under the coat of matted hair, was painfully emaciated.
Deveryn squatted beside Maddie and gently scratched Kelpie's ears. "Easy girl, I won't hurt you," he said in a low soothing voice, and his fingers splayed out as he probed beneath the filth infested coat of hair. ( Thornton 2004: 84)

I suspect that the parallels between the training of children by Bill, the 'gentling' of animals by Deveryn and their beliefs about training/gentling women are not accidental. Ascione, Weber & Wood (1997), for example, have noted the 'potential confluence of child maltreatment, domestic violence, and animal maltreatment'. Similarly, The Humane Society of the United States warn that

# Animal abuse exposes the deliberateness of battering rather than loss of control.
# Animal abuse and child abuse are closely related.
# Animal abuse is often a tool used by batterers to emotionally control or coerce victims.

The UK's NSPCC state that 'There is increasing research and clinical evidence which suggests that there are sometimes inter-relationships, commonly referred to as ‘links’, between the abuse of children, vulnerable adults and animals'. I wonder if, in some romances (certainly not all, because the way in which rape is depicted in romance, and the subtexts present in each text can vary greatly), the implicit subtext present when a rapist hero is kind to children or animals is that he isn't an abuser but, rather, is carrying out a sort of 'training' of the heroine, teaching her to accept her sexuality in the same way that Deveryn makes sure that the dog Kelpie is given a bath, whether she wants it or not, for her own good. The converse certainly seems to be true: individuals in romance who abuse animals or harm children may also rape, but they are not cast as heroes. The Smart Bitches recently reviewed an erotic romance in which the hero rapes/forces the heroine. There is also a villain who's a rapist and, as Sarah observed 'It’s usually the scene [of] animal abuse that serves as the first clue to a villain. In this case, it’s not animal abuse but sexual abuse and murder of children'. In that particular case the comparison between the actions of the hero and those of the villain was so obvious that Sarah wrote:

the contrast between sexually explicit exploration of female domination and the use of sex as a tool of violent domination over children. I get it - sexual domination isn’t always good or always bad but has a place within consensual activities - but no need to hit me over the head with it.

** In her comments about community Crusie has observed that

the reader will bond to the community in the book if the community appears to share her values, which means the characters would recognize her as one of their own if she came into the story and would invite her to sit down and stay. This one is pretty much out of your hands: the reader chooses the kind of book he or she likes to read, the type of book that has the kind of community that shares her values

Fictional communities, as Crusie notes, tend to have shared values which find expression in 'a common goal [...] and a common language of experiences and catchphrases'. Tibbett, as we shall see, is a place where there are common values/attitudes and a common language. Clearly some individuals within the community take the shared Tibbett language of possession/protection very much more literally than others. I wonder whether some readers who reject the book do so because they associate the whole community with attitudes which potentially permit abuse.

*** These words are also to be found in the lyrics of Every Breath You Take, by The Police.

P.S. In the review at the Smart Bitches site, Sarah took issue with the conclusion in which Katie the dog behaves 'as if she knew Bill was locked up for at least her life span' (2000: 323) because 'Stalkers do not go to jail for years and years. [...] Stalking is not punished to nearly the degree that it should be, and to make an exception for a happily ever after yanked me right out of the fantasy and pissed me off'. Bill has, of course, been stalking, but during the course of the story Quinn also alerted the police to his attempt at rape, and her father told them about the sabotage of her house (which could be construed as attempted murder, given that it included a gas leak and making her stairs a danger to her). During the final attack the police are able to witness the fact that Bill is guilty of breaking and entering Quinn's property, he perpetrates cruelty against an animal and there's also the issue of the assault on Robert Gloam which leaves Robert needing facial surgery. I don't know how the law in Ohio deals with such crimes, but I'd imagine that they would lead to Bill receiving a lengthy prison sentence.

Quality, Patriarchy and Popularity

Laura Vivanco

In the comments on my last post Kimber said

I have a troublesome theory that's been nagging at me for some time I wish you would discuss on the blog. The romance blogosphere seems to accept as a home truth that romances are empowering women's fiction unfairly maligned by the patriarchal, white-male establishment.

So I thought I'd oblige. It seems to me that any generalisation about a genre as big as romance is going to be problematic because there are bound to be exceptions, perhaps quite large numbers of them, to almost any claim one chooses to make. Karen Kosztolnyik, who's worked as a senior editor at Warner Books said something about the genre that I've read quite a few times before: 'this is a genre of books where the product is written by women for women'. It's true, but only up to a point. We all know that there are male authors of romance and, according to the RWA's 2005 Market Research Study, '22% of romance readers are male'.

Other claims are much more difficult to either prove or disprove. Jayne Ann Krentz, in her introduction to Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, writes that a

strong theme that emerges from the essays is that of female empowerment. Readers understand that the books celebrate female power. In the romance novel, as Phillips, Clair, and several others point out, the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence, and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on earth, the human male, to his knees. More than that, she forces him to acknowledge her power as a woman. (1992: 5)

What is indubitably true is that the romance heroine is always given what the author thinks, and/or hopes the readers will think, is a happy ending, but readers may disagree about whether the HEAs in particular books truly represent a triumph for the heroines of those novels. All About Romance had a column about 'heroines who need to be slapped upside the head [and] heroes in need of a good kick in the you-know-where'. It seems to me that when readers classify a book as being about a doormat who marries a jerk, they aren't considering the outcome to be a 'win' for the heroine.

Jenny Crusie says that

The fairy tales I read as a child told me that boys' stories were about doing and winning but that girls' stories were about waiting and being won. Far from setting out on their own quests, women were the prizes in their own stories, and the less active they were--do NOT be a pushy, knife-wielding stepsister--the better their chances were of getting the castle and the crown.

so she

rewrote the fairy tale and recast the canon so that I was at the center of the story. It told me that what I did made a difference, that the things I understood and had experience with were important, that "women's stuff" mattered. It gave me female protagonists in stories that promised that if a woman fought for what she believed in and searched for the truth, she could strip away the old lies about her life and emerge re-born

Romances can do that but I think it would be impossible to deny that some don't. Are Barbara Cartland's novels empowering re-writings of the fairy tale? Or do they tend to imply that a powerful man can only be 'tamed' by a sexually innocent, startling beautiful young woman? Cartland's heroines get their happy endings, they 'win', they show courage and certainly gentleness, but does the emphasis on the ways in which the heroine is exceptionally lovely, gentle and innocent empower other women? Or does it suggest that we will never be as deserving of a fairytale ending because we lack the qualities embodied in the heroine? And why are we offered so many heroes who are rich, rakish, distant, sexually experienced older men? Is the implication that a man who was poor or only comfortably off, of a similar age to the heroine, lacking in sexual experience and emotionally open wouldn't be worth winning? And what if we prefer not to think of the relationship between the sexes as a competition or battle to be 'won'? Why does it have to be about 'winning' anyway? Can't we have heroes and heroines who co-operate? Actually, we do, and that's acknowledged by many of the authors whose essays appear in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, even as they state their strong preference for heroes who need to be 'tamed'. So, while it's (almost) always the case that a romance has a heroine and she's rewarded at the end of the novel with requited love, the nature of the heroine, who/what she struggles with and the precise nature of her reward (is it a reformed rake and motherhood? is it a new career and a younger man?) can vary.*

Krentz also writes that the essays in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Woman explore:

A third theme, one related to empowerment, [...] that of the inherently subversive nature of the romance novel. Romance novels invert the power structure of a patriarchal society because they show women exerting enormous power over men (1992: 5)

I'm not sure how subversive this really is. I wouldn't deny that romances can be subversive, but I certainly don't think that all of them are. The idea that women exert 'enormous power over men' is at the heart of Victorian chivalrous ideals and in an earlier post I discussed why I don't think that was generally 'empowering' for women, despite the fact that proponents of chivalry claimed that women exerted enormous power over men. Mary Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, was considered subversive:

"Educate women like men," says Rousseau, "and the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us." This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves. (from her Vindication of the Rights of Women)

And she wasn't at all anti-sex or male/female relationships:

Mary worked on a final book, The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria, a kind of sequel to The Rights of Woman. In it she revealed the need of women for companionship and freedom to express their sexuality, as well as for reason and independence. The originality of the book lies in its depiction of a working class prostitute who, along with the sensitive and adulterous heroine, is allowed a voice as she tells her story of immense and continuing suffering. The novel was unfinished, for death came tragically to Mary. (Todd)

Another point to bear in mind when it comes to defining 'subversiveness' in romances is that a work can only really be labelled 'subversive' when compared to other novels and/or societal norms. I'll use Crusie as an example again. She'd been reading the classics, in which there were

miserable women like the one who pursued the life she wanted, had great sex, and then ate arsenic; or the one who pursued the life she wanted, had great sex, and then threw herself under a train; or my personal fave, the one who pursued the life she wanted, had lousy sex with a masochistic dweeb, and spent the rest of her endless life atoning by doing good works in a letter sweater.

In comparison with Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina or The Scarlet Letter, yes, of course the treatment of sexuality in many romances looks subversive. Juliet Flesch comments that 'In general, the moral, social and ethical stance adopted by many Australian romance writers is tolerant and progressive, most notably in relation to the rights of women, children and ethnic minorities' (2004: 295). One person's 'tolerant and progressive' can be another's 'subversive' and yet another's 'deeply conservative' because so much depends on which books or social norms you're measuring them against.

Kimber also commented that some people claim that

the very fact romances sell like hotcakes proves they are not only a commercial force to be reckoned with but they deserve more literary respect.

I've gone along with this for a while, and tried to broaden my horizons beyond historicals, thinking that perhaps there existed a bright world of top-notch romances out there. But even though I've tried hard to give them benefit of the doubt, I'm forced to the conclusion that most romances are indeed filled with cardboard characters, clichés and bad writing. The blogosphere decries the double-standard applied to fiction written by women for women, but I think we're guilty of applying a double standard ourselves. I think we just accept lower-quality writing in romances because they're "fun" to read.

This isn't to say there aren't good romance writers out there. But I have to disagree with the argument that because they're popular and profitable, romances as a genre deserve more respect. Popularity does not imply quality.

High sales can, I think, be taken as an indication that the genre is a popular culture phenomenon which should not be ignored. They also tell us that the books contain something which appeals to a large number of people and that they may therefore give some insight into the aspirations and tastes of a great many readers.

However, readers select books for a number of reasons. These may include: literary style; complex world-building; complex, realistic characterisation; intellectual stimulation; emotional impact; fast-moving plot; 'escape'; validation/reassurance. Some books work on more levels than others: while some novels may combine an exciting plot with well-drawn characters, an engaging underlying theme and complex use of imagery, others may only only succeed in a few of these areas. As Pacatrue commented: 'If a novel can be enjoyable without good characters, that simply means its found a different way to accomplish the task. I'm just wary of the notion that we forgive bad novels because we enjoy them. If we enjoy them, then they aren't bad.' It might, however, have been even more enjoyable (and a better book) had it had 'good characters' too. If one could exclude the effect of external factors such as good promotion and distribution, quirks of survival (some texts might be classics had they not been lost in the centuries since they were written) or some element which leads them to become 'set texts' in schools and universities, my intuition would be that novels which succeed in more areas (characterisation, theme, plot, style etc) are more likely to become classics, because there is more chance that some element of the novel will continue to appeal to readers even while other elements of the writing go out of fashion. Success on many levels also makes it more likely that the book will continue to appeal to the same reader when she or he re-reads the novel. Pacatrue asked 'are romance novels like cotton candy that vanishes in the blink of an eye, or are they a savory treat that you can go back to over and over?' I think some can be read and re-read but once the element of surprise is lost, a novel must depend on success in areas other than the plot twists if it is to engage the reader.

Success in characterisation, style etc is, however, a subjective matter. Catherine Sheldrick Ross and Mary K. Chelton carried out a survey of 'heavy readers' and found that

When readers reject a book as "poorly written", they often mean that the book was successfully written to achieve an effect that they personally dislike - too sexually arousing, too scary, too sentimental, too full of verbal effects, too descriptive, or too literary for them. A fan of the stripped-down Hemingway style might dislike the sensuous language of romance and declare that all romances are "poorly written." (2001: 53)

I've mentioned their findings and discussed them in more detail here. The tastes of academics, and their judgements about literary merit, are also subjective. To take an example from medieval literature, cancionero poetry placed many restrictions on the poet:

This restriction is a sign of ingenuity: to operate successfully within the very narrow limits allowed by the new convention is a supreme test of a poet's skill. [...]
The skill and the restriction are conceptual as well as metrical [...] the vocabulary is remarkably limited both in quantity and in type (nearly all of the words are abstract). This, of course, makes it very difficult for the modern reader to concentrate on even a short poem like a canción [...] It is tempting to regard these late canciones as displays of ultimately pointless ingenuity, and this may prove to be the right answer - some cultures do take disastrously wrong turnings. It is, however, also possible that modern readers have somehow missed the point. (Deyermond 1971: 198)

Or, to take a more recent example which I mentioned in my comments on my last post,

Dickens has always presented problems for literary criticism. For theorists whose critical presuppositions emphasise intelligence, sensitivity and an author in complete control of his work the cruder aspects of his popular art have often proved an unsurmountable obstacle. (Alan Shelston)

What constitutes 'literary merit', then, seems to be at least partly a matter of taste.

• Deyermond, A. D., 1971. A Literary History of Spain: The Middle Ages (London: Ernest Benn Limited).
  
• Flesch, Juliet, 2004. From Australia with Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels (Fremantle, Western Australia: Curtin University Press).
• Krentz, Jayne Ann, 1992. 'Introduction', Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, ed. Jayne Ann Krentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 1-9.
• Sheldrick Ross, Catherine & Chelton, Mary K., 2001. ‘Reader’s Advisory: Matching Mood and Material’, Library Journal (February 1): 52-55.

* To state the obvious, there are no heroines in m/m romances.

Femininity, Chivalry, Class and Patriarchy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Pamela Fox

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Are Family

Ann Barr Snitow, in her 1979 essay 'Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different' wrote that:

The heroine is alone. Sometimes there is another woman, a competitor who is often more overtly aware of her sexuality than the heroine, but she is a shadow on the horizon. Sometimes there are potentially friendly females living in the next bungalow or working with the patient in the next bed, but they, too, are shadowy, not important to the real story, which consists entirely of an emotionally isolated woman trying to keep her virginity and her head when the only person she ever really talks to is the hero, whose motives and feelings are unclear. (1983: 249)*

Not having read many romances from this period, I'm not sure whether this ever was actually an accurate description of romances (I suspect there will always have been exceptions). Nonetheless, it does remind me of the gothics. Could it be that the heroine's isolation, which was important in creating the plot and atmosphere of the gothics, influenced the portrayal of female friendships in other forms of romance at the time?

Snitow's description certainly isn't true of modern romances. Nowadays, as has recently been pointed out by Sharon Long, there are plenty of romance series where

Everything is hunky dorey in romance land. The women of the group get along famously. Like sisters even. They all HEART one another on sight and know that the guy has done the best job ever in choosing his mate.

Could this be due in any way to the influence of feminism? Is it an expression of belief in female sisterhood? Certainly there would appear to have been some feminist influence on romance. Kay Mussell, for example, has described the more equal relationships between heroes and heroines as 'clear evidence of the influence of feminism on romances'. Female friendships, however, are not simply valued by feminists. Peter Darbyshire**, writing about certain inspirational romances, despite concluding that they 'vilified' (2002: 80) feminism, nonetheless also finds in them strong bonds between women:

Female characters frequently live at home or with members of their extended family in these books, and these characters are almost always all involved in nurturing, supportive relationships with one another. [...] it is often the grandmother or mother figures that instruct the heroines to be subservient in their relationships with men, thus locating the origins of the reaffirmation of traditional patriarchal values in female characters. (2002: 80-81).

Whether or not one agrees with his opinion of inspirationals, it does serve as a reminder that female relationships are valued (perhaps for very different reasons) by people with a wide range of ideologies.

Is it, as suggested by posters responding to Sharon Long's comments that female friendships are an extra part of the 'wish-fulfillment' that romance provides, another aspect of the Happy Ever After ending? Are such friendships among women really so uncommon that they're more fantasy than reality? Sharon Long certainly seems to think so:

Let’s face it. Women do not get along that well in real life. Women are bitchy. They are competitive. They do not tend to LOVE one another on sight. Sure it happens. Every once in a blue moon, but the cold hard facts are that women, especially when you group them into a pack, do not all love one another and get along famously.

Another response to her comments was that the women described in these series are going to be family members through marriage, and this does mean that they'll be predisposed to attempt to establish friendly relationships.

The prevalence of both the the friendless, family-less heroine of the past, and the loving families who welcome new sisters with eagerness and instantaneous affection raise questions about what readers and authors want family and female friendships to be (just as the 'secret baby' stories seem to be exploring how important it is to know one's biological family, in particular one's biological father). Quite how one interprets such depictions will depend on a close reading on the individual texts. Some authors may simply be following a trend, others may be drawing on their own personal experiences of female friendships, yet others may be expressing their ideals (and those of their readers) regarding relationships between women.


*For full reference see RomanceWiki bibliography.
** For full reference see the first page of the Romance Wiki bibliography.