Laura Vivanco

Romance III: Civic Engagements: Romance Communities, In and Outside the Text

“Have you forgotten how bad the gossips are around here?”: The Functions of Idle Chatter in Harlequin Medical Romance

(Jessica Miller, University of Maine)

Harlequin medical romance novels depict an emotional love story that develops within the social world of medicine. These novels focus on two morally good and professionally competent protagonists navigating a highly dramatic and intense romantic relationship. But much of the excitement and appeal of medical romance also derives from the “high stakes” health care setting, with its medical crises, organizational challenges, and contested workplace relationships. This presentation focuses on one particular feature located at the busy intersection of the social and individual aspects of the Harlequin medical romance: gossip.

Gossip is depicted in nearly every Harlequin medical romance under review (a selection of fifty novels published between 2010-2014). As in fiction more generally, gossip serves many functions in these novels: it drives plot, illuminates the norms of the social world, reveals character, and locates the protagonists relative to the social groups in which they find their identity. In terms of genre romance specifically, gossip has a crucial role to play in defining and creating the “flawed society” (in Pamela Regis’s formulation) of the romance, and in bringing that society to a changed and improved state by the end of the novel.

In general, the novels track the prohibition against gossip present in traditional moral codes. Gossip is likely to be trivial or false, and protagonists are much more likely to be fearful of gossip, threatened by gossip, or harmed by gossip than to engage in it, use it for their own ends, or benefit from it. However, this presentation will also consider an alternative approach to gossip found in the texts, informed by recent feminist theory, that gossip is an emotionally charged intertwining of attentive moral judgment and non-trivial information sharing, especially among oppressed groups.

(EMS note:  after the abstract was posted, Jessica contacted me with a new proposal focused on the representation of nursing In HMB medical romances, especially on the "virtue script" that shapes this representation, undercutting disourses of professionalism, etc.  A lot of work on this in other media, but not until now on medical romances.)

“The town has really nice blonde hair”: The Romance Plot and Civic Engagement in “Parks and Recreation”

(Wendy Wagner, Johnson & Wales University)

This paper situates the television comedy “Parks and Recreation” within the subgenre of the small-town romance in romance fiction, focusing on the love story of Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt. Specifically, the presence of this particular love story in the show differentiates “Parks and Recreation” from similar television shows about quirky small towns, such as “Northern Exposure.” Television critics have often referred to “Parks and Recreation” as a political allegory, but I want to argue that it is, in fact, a romance plot where the hero and heroine’s relationship is deeply entwined with the story about the town of Pawnee. I compare the Leslie/Ben plot to classic romance novels such as Jennifer Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation and Courtney Milan’s The Suffragette Scandal, applying Pamela Regis’s eight elements of a romance novel to make this argument and calling attention to the relationship between romance and civic engagement in these texts. These romance plots are not just about finding love but also about remaking society, which Regis notes is a key element of the romance novel: “defining the society establishes the status quo which the heroine and hero must confront in their attempt to court and marry and which, by their union, they symbolically remake.” The inherent optimism of the romance novel, its foundational belief that love can ultimately change society, is in full display in “Parks and Recreation.”


Legitimating Romance: Neutralizing the Stigma of Romantic Fiction

(Joanna Gregson, Pacific Lutheran University, and Jen Lois, Western Washington University)

In April of 2010, we began a longitudinal sociological study of romance novel writers. By interviewing romance writers and other industry insiders, attending local and national RWA meetings, following writers on social media, and experimenting with writing romance ourselves, we are examining both the craft and the career of the romance writer. In so doing, we hope to explore how writers experience working in “the most popular, least respected literary genre” (Regis 2003: xi).

The present work examines how writer’s affiliation with the romance genre prompted outsiders to trivialize their work. We examine both the application and management of this stigma. First, we describe how outsiders applied the stigma, namely by suggesting that writing romance fiction is easy, that it is not “real” literature, and that it is not important. Although writers disagreed with these views, they nevertheless had to manage these negative perceptions. Writers attempted to neutralize the stigma by defending their writing process, contrasting the goals of literary and commercial fiction, demonstrating the impact of their work on readers, touting their financial success, and pointing out the sexism implicit in the stigma.
We conclude by distinguishing between the different stigma management techniques available to authors of different career statuses, and by highlighting the gendered and class-based biases informing the dominant cultural messages about the producers and audiences of romance fiction.

Blogging and Blackouts: Exploring Romance Readers’ and Authors’ Uses of Social Media

(Stephanie Moody, Kent State University)

In the wake of the October 2014 Blogging Blackout, new questions arise about the ethics and etiquette of romance fiction book blogging and reviewing. These questions are further complicated by the multiple and competing purposes romance readers and authors have for engaging with books and with each other online. My interviews with fifty romance readers, authors, editors, and publishers demonstrate that talking about books online – through blogs, reviews, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumbler – serves many, simultaneous purposes: as a marketing device, a creative outlet, a form of intimacy, a teaching tool, a process of reflection, and a political statement. Moreover, these purposes routinely change and shift, and are shaped by the web 2.0 medium in use.

In this presentation, I explore study participants’ talk about their purposes for using social media to discuss romance novels, and I suggest that notions of ethics and etiquette are largely shaped by individuals’ reasons for engaging with books and with others online. For instance, conceptualizing a book review as both a free source of marketing and as a way to, as one blogger put it, “c[o]me into being the person who I am now,” reveals how book blogging and reviewing collapse distinctions between public and personal writing. Likewise, characterizing the relationships between authors and readers within discourses of consumption, fandom, and intimacy demonstrates the slippery subjectivities evoked through such interactions. By attending to the literacy practices and talk that comprise individuals’ engagements with romance-related social media, I extend ongoing conversations about the perils and possibilities of book blogging and reviewing.

Review of a Review of EIKAL

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Back when I had time on my hands (ha!), I briefly flirted with starting a blog reviewing chick flicks and romcoms. I like my movies the way I like my books: smart, interesting, sexy, and with an HEA. I was tired of reading between the lines of professional reviews excoriating romcoms and chick flicks for not being Weighty and Meaningful, trying to figure out if I’d like the movie. I was sick to death of movie reviewers expecting these movies to be something they weren’t, something they had no intention of being, something that would defeat their very purpose and goals as chick flicks and romcoms. This kind of reviewing always seemed to be more about the reviewer and their insecurities about genre than the film itself. And that has always felt to me deeply unfair and frustratingly dismissive of a whole genre of creative expression that often does have weight and meaning to viewers who enjoy it.

And thus we come to Jessica Miller’s review of Sarah Wendell’s Everything I Know About Love, I Learned from Romance Novels (henceforth: EIKAL). EIKAL, according to Miller, is “boosterism” at its worst – incoherent, badly formatted, lacking distance from its subject, unhip, uncool, fawning even. What the romance genre needs, Miller argues, is sustained academic analysis about its literary merit, not heartwarming (even cloying) stories about what readers have learned from it.

I disagree and do so on a number of levels. Although I (obviously, I hope) believe that romance needs sustained academic exploration, I think that what EIKAL does is a necessary good. I also think Miller is expecting EIKAL to be what it never had any intention of being, what it doesn’t want to be, what – in fact – it has no business being (something, in my opinion, that Wendell understands, although that’s not really relevant to a review of the book itself). And in failing to meet and critique the book on its own terms, the review came across as ironically and unintentionally derisive toward the genre and its readers.

Four paragraphs in, Miller provides three paragraphs of background about SBTB and Wendell’s career as a romance-positive media pundit. Miller strongly implies that Wendell and Tan “scored” a book contract for their first book, Beyond Heaving Bosoms (henceforth BHB), because they destroyed the career of (plagiarizing) romance author Cassie Edwards. As I said in my comments at the review site, the facts are wrong: although BHB was published in April 2009, almost 18 months after the posts in January 2008 about Edwards’ plagiarism, the publishing world being as slow as it is, Wendell and Tan “scored” their book contract in 2007 and were deep in the process of writing BHB when they broke the Edwards story. And while Miller responded to me at the site that “Luckily, nothing hangs on the timeline, as far as I can see. I was trying to give the OLM reader a general sense of the Wendell’s history, not making a judgment in any way about that history,” I think, in fact, that the judgmental – even personally pointed – tone (Tan departs for “greener pastures,” implying, for instance, that Wendell’s career as a “man titty media pundit” is something she has to settle for, is the best she can get) colors the rest of the review. The tone of these paragraphs cradles and contextualizes the rest of the review, almost implying that the review hinges on an incorrect view about Wendell’s history and success more than it rests on the merits of the book itself.

However, Miller follows this highly questionable history with a fairly brilliant summary of the goals and aims of EIKAL:

The premise of Everything I Know is clear from its title: romance novels offer life lessons, especially about love and relationships. The critics who assume romance novels feature gorgeous, perfect people “meeting cute” and slipping effortlessly into a happily ever after are wrong: romance novels tell the stories of flawed people who struggle and face the same challenges as any average reader. Reading romance novels has a positive impact on readers’ lives, teaching them about everything from effective communication and mutual respect to being happy with themselves and enjoying sex. And to the extent that romance novels do contain fantasy sex, perfect love, and the kind of triumphant overcoming of impossible odds that makes for a compelling narrative, romance readers, aware that it’s fantasy, can still be inspired, comforted, or moved in ways that make them better, wiser people. Everything I Know takes the romance genre and its readers seriously, insisting that the genre’s central concerns—especially romantic love, sex, and relationships—are vital human interests that are often unfairly trivialized owing to their association with femininity. Wendell’s claims are substantiated by an abundance of reader testimony, author interviews, and some industry-sponsored research. While Wendell undoubtedly chose the responses that best supported her own hypothesis, Everything I Know offers romance readers a unique platform for sharing the impact these novels have had on their lives.

Yes, this is exactly what EIKAL is, which is why what comes before and after in Miller’s review is so problematic.

I will not comment here on Miller’s claims about EIKAL’s size, formatting, repetitiveness, or audience confusion. I don’t disagree with a lot of what Miller says in this section – EIKAL is not, in fact, even close to perfect – and I appreciate the frankness of her critique here.

I do, however, disagree with Miller’s turn to scrutinize Wendell’s “specific claims” about “reader engagement” and with her subsequent critiques of the book on those grounds.

First of all, Miller seems to imply that Wendell’s contributing readers/authors must be uncritical readers, because how they “manage to glean the good stuff from the bad” amounts to an utter mystery. But then, in the next paragraph, Miller claims that readers have a “diversity of . . . engagement with the genre” that Wendell ignores. It seems contradictory to claim, on the one hand, that readers are so uncritical and morally naive that they’ll be led astray by immoral representations in the novels they read, and then, on the other, condemn Wendell for not recognizing or for deliberately ignoring the nuances of her contributors’ experiences. And this contradiction goes to what I think is the fundamental problem in Miller’s review, which is that the book is being judged against Miller’s personal standards of feminism and literary value, rather than whatever standards the book establishes for itself (and if these are contradictory, then that is another, more pertinent, level of critique to be pursued).

In an apparent attempt to question Wendell’s over-generalizations and simplifications of her contributors’ experiences, Miller next turns to discuss her experience of reading Wendell’s book “as a feminist.” (My reference to Wendell and not EIKAL is intentional here, since Miller often refers to Wendell when critiquing the book, another aspect of the review I find troubling.) In the process, though, she (re)creates a fairly standard Second Wave feminist critique of the romance genre. More often than not, the review comes across to me as a debate between Miller’s feminism and what Miller (sometimes rather condescendingly) perceives Wendell’s feminism to be. This is particularly apparent, for example, at the point where Miller feels “dismay” at the anecdote by the reader who comes home from work and reads 30 minutes of Harlequin before preparing dinner. While Miller notes (echoing Radway almost perfectly) that such an anecdote begs the question of the second shift, she does not consider the possibility that the woman is a single mother, or that for any number of reasons there is no partner with whom the second shift labor can be shared. Moreover, the shifts in the review back and forth between a critique of the reader anecdotes and a critique of Wendell as author further confuse Miller’s analysis and forefront the judgments she is making as personal rather than critically embedded in the terms of the text itself.

Miller then calls for an entirely different evaluation of the romance genre: “It’s time to stop evaluating romance novels in terms of their putative effects on (women) readers, and to pay more attention to their literary merit and ability to provide pure pleasure.” I’m very unclear what Miller means by “pure pleasure.” Why is “pure pleasure” (whatever it is) better (as it obviously must be) than the pleasure that Wendell’s contributors say time and again that they received from romance novels?

More pertinent, however, to my own work and to most valid literary criticism of the romance genre is the combative dichotomy Miller constructs between reader response and literary merit as valid ways to examine the genre. Modern literary criticism is not, in fact, in the business of determining literary merit. Whether that’s a good thing or not is another question with much spilled ink to its name, but that’s just not what we as literary critics do anymore. I can say just as much about a novel that I think is truly bad from the standpoint of literary merit and “pure pleasure” as I can say about one that I think is brilliant (in fact, I spent a whole chapter of my dissertation doing precisely that). Literary criticism is not about picking the good novels from the bad. It’s about analyzing cultural phenomena. From that perspective, EIKAL is more valuable precisely as evidence of reader response to the genre than any list of the 100 Best Romances. Which is not necessarily to say that EIKAL is successful in what it sets out to do; the problem is discerning that initial aim (or aims) and evaluating the book on those terms, something that lies at the heart of both literary criticism and reviewing from an academic perspective.

Academically, for instance, I use BHB as evidence of the “received wisdom” of the deeply-knowledgeable romance reader, the “superfan,” if you will. Which is to say, when Wendell and Tan conflate Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower and Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love as pretty much the same book, I use that as evidence in my own discussion of these blockbuster historical romances that this is how twenty-first century romance readers in general see these two books and the disparate genres they spawned, despite their significant differences from each other. I do not expect BHB or EIKAL to be anything other than what they claim to be, what they try to be, and what, I argue, they succeed in being. I do not expect BHB to be a vigorously researched academic critique of the romance genre. Nor do I expect EIKAL to be a rigorous scientific survey of a representative sample of readers. I expect them both to be what they claim they are: BHB is an exploration of the genre that defends the genre for what it does right and lovingly brings it to task for what it screws up, while EIKAL is a loving exploration of reader interaction with the genre that provides readers with both a voice and the arguments to defend their reading habits. Miller may disagree with my assessment of EIKAL’s success in achieving its aims, but I wish she had done it on the book’s own terms, so that any debate about the review could be based on the book itself and not an external standard of academic worthiness.

The difference between applying literary criticism to the genre or to EIKAL is important and generally ignored in Miller’s review. That Miller is writing the review from an academic perspective might account for some of this disconnect, although I don’t think it accounts for all of it. Some is, I think, a product of a conflation of literary critique of the genre from within the genre, and critique of a work that is more about readers than the genre itself.

I think, in fact, that there’s a disconnect between EIKAL’s aims as a proudly fond exploration of reader response, and Miller’s entirely laudable desire to have genuine deep critique of the genre. Wendell is not attempting in EIKAL to analyze the genre, nor does she have any pretentions to being able to perform literary criticism. Wendell is focused on demonstrating that her contributors (romance readers and authors) are intelligent, conscious consumers of the genre they (we) all love so much. She is also attempting to provide readers with a validation of their own reading choices and to provide non-readers with something to think about (hence, as Miller rightly points out, its confusing tone shifts at times). EIKAL might not, as Miller points out, change any minds, but it gives readers a voice to relate the (pure?) pleasure they find in the romance genre. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Miller’s review, on the contrary, suggests that there is, indeed, something wrong with that. This is not only a provocative implication, but also a different question from what the book is and whether or not it succeeds in being what it claims to be.

ETA Full Disclosure: I'm quoted two or three times in EIKAL. I responded to Wendell's SBTB posts asking for input and she quoted me from there, not from a personal interview. I am, however, also friendly with Wendell and occasionally share meals with her. But then I've also shared meals with Miller.

Nora Roberts' Midnight Bayou

In my post on the definition of paranormal romances, Eric asked:

I wonder whether paranormal romance lends itself to allegorical reading, or at least metafictional reading. That is, does the "paranormal" part of the world correspond in some way to the world of romance experienced by the reader while reading the book itself--and, by extension, to the worlds of desire and love?

My quick answer to him was,

Eric, yes, absolutely. I'm reading Nora Roberts' Midnight Bayou and it's doing exactly that in ways I think I'm going to blog about when I've finished it.

So here I am to fulfill my promise. Rethinking my ideas, I don't think Eric and I are talking about exactly the same thing, but here we go anyway.

Nora Roberts' Midnight Bayou.

I'm not very good at summarizing plot. The above link takes you to the Barnes & Noble site for the book, with its plot summaries. Suffice it to say that Declan, a rich Boston lawyer, quits everything and buys a house in New Orleans, Manet Hall, that he has always been drawn to. There he falls for Lena, a bar owner and descendent of a previous inhabitant of the Hall. Interwoven in Declan and Lena's story is the turn-of-the-century story of Abby, the bayou servant who marries Lucian, the heir of Manet Hall, and bears him a child (Lena's ancestor), but whose rape and murder by Julian, her husband's twin, is covered up by her husband's mother. Ghosts haunt the house, although it's never 100% defined whose ghosts (Abby, Lucian, Lucian's mother, certainly; Abby and Lucian's daughter as a baby, maybe; potentially Julian, Lucian's brother, the one who rapes and murders Abby). The ghosts want the house to remain abandoned and/or filled with unhappiness, and try to get their way by slamming doors and producing cold spots and apparitions of rooms as they once were. When the ghosts get particularly mad, they can throw crockery. But Declan and Lena, of course, refuse to be driven away.

It's definitely a paranormal by my definition. The hero and heroine, each with their own baggage, are attempting to establish (or desperately trying to avoid establishing, in Lena's case) an intimate, sexual relationship. It is explicitly stated, however, that in order to achieve their HEA, they have to resolve the hauntings in the house. So the final tension of the novel is firmly grounded in the paranormal, even if neither of the characters is particularly paranormal themselves.

The crux of the hauntings is the fact that Abby's rape and murder are unknown and unacknowledged. Julian rapes and murders her in the nursery, in front of her child, in a jealous, drunken rage. His mother walks in just as the deeds are done and becomes the brains behind the cover-up. When Abby's husband Lucian comes home the next day, rather than trusting Abby's fidelity, he eventually believes his mother's claim that Abby left him to run off with her lover, leaving him with her bastard child. He never knows what happens to her and finally commits suicide by walking into the bayou, already dead inside of a broken heart.

In a move that Kirkus Reviews (from the B&N website) calls "an unconvincing twist of gender and reincarnation" (more about those awful reviews in a bit), it is Declan, not Lena, who is the reincarnation of Abby. While he works to refurbish the house, he dreams that he is Abby, living through the experiences of falling in love with Lucian, pregnancy, child birth, and finally not only the rape and murder, but also the cover-up and the hauntings. Declan's connection to Abby, the fact that Declan IS Abby, if firmly grounded in the corporeal. He is much more Abby than Lena is Lucian because he relives the female bodily traumas of childbirth and rape. Although it is Lena who suggests that he is Abby, rather than Lucian, Declan accepts the reincarnation much more easily because he is forced to because of the experiences of his body.

While one can speculate that Roberts probably "meant" the reincarnation twist to be merely a way to perk up the tired reincarnation plot, or, as Publisher's Weekly puts it, merely a way to "giv[e] her faithful readers a little extra thrill," I'm interested in the literary and theoretical repercussions of that choice, especially as they relate to gender and the reader's experience, whether or not they were consciously "meant."

The house is haunted because the ultimate violence against a woman has been erased from history. The secret died with her murderer and his collaborator. No one else has ever had knowledge of it. Justice has not been served and the house is therefore haunted until it is. But the justice is not that of a courtroom and a murder conviction. Rather, the justice Abby's ghost demands is the trust of her beloved. Lucian did not believe in her love, in her fidelity, or in their relationship. Neither did he love and protect their child after her disappearance as he had promised when she was born. Rather, he took her back to Abby's bayou relatives (where she had a contented, fulfilled life). It is Lucian's distrust, his emotional abandonment of Abby and their child, that Abby's ghost cannot forgive. For Declan and Lena, reincarnations of Abby and Lucian to achieve their happy ending, the star-crossed lovers must resolve the issue that kept them apart in a past life in order to come together in this life.

The modern hero and heroine, then, cannot attain their happy ending until the enormity of the crime against Abby--the ultimate crime of violence and power possible against a woman--has been uncovered, lived through, and acknowledged by a man. It would not be enough for Declan to be a reincarnation of Lucian, because the whole point is that Lucian was not present during the rape and murder and could not save Abby. Rather, a man must experience the devastating results of a woman's rape and murder. And although Abby-through-Declan receives Lucian-through-Lena's apologies and remorse and in turn forgives him, freeing the house of its ghosts, this occurs only after the alpha male hero has literally become a woman by experiencing that which only a woman could experience (childbirth and rape), and has acknowledged their power.

Midnight Bayou, then, demonstrates an alpha male recognizing and acknowledging that a woman's experience is necessary for full truth in and full understanding of any situation. It is not enough that the hero merely know this intellectually; he must experience and acknowledge the primacy, the necessity of a woman's experience.
_____________________________________________________________________

While that is my "official" analysis of the novel, there are a couple of other things I'd like to cover. Both reviews (PW and Kirkus) mention the "predictable" nature of this romance, but one can almost imagine them calling every romance predictable.

The implications of these statements is that the narrative closure should NOT be predictable, that the reader must be reading for something other than the happy ending, so the reviewer will try to figure out what elusive quality the reader enjoys other than the happy ending. Kirkus comes up with "Agreeably credible lovers and a neat piece of home-restoration compensate some for the hokey hauntings on the bayou," as if this were a written version of "This Old House," rather than a romance where Declan's renovations of Manet Hall are certainly interesting, but rather get in the way of what I'm really looking for, which is, of course, exploration of his relationship with his heroine.

I've long been interested in establishing a blog rather like the Smart Bitches, but for Chick Flicks. I'd love to be able to read reviews of romantic comedies that review the movies on the basis of their status AS romantic comedies, rather than on the basis of their status as NOT being Schindler's List. I want to know if a film is a good or bad romantic comedy, not whether it is an Important or Ground-Breaking Film.

In fact, reader reviews of Midnight Bayou on the B&N site express disappointment that the happy ending is not extended further. Declan finds a ring for Lena in an antique store in New Orleans, but is never given the opportunity to give it to her. While she asks him "We getting married or what?" on the last page and he responds enthusiastically, "You better believe it," and while she gives him the necklace and charm that represent the "key to her heart," the issue of the engagement ring is not resolved, and readers noticed. Not only do they count on the happy ending, but they are disappointed when they do not get ENOUGH of it.

Why do "predictable" happy endings automatically make books less worthy of being read? Why is "boy and girl live HEA" the predictable part, but the actual unpredictable achievement of that HEA (Declan becoming a woman) mentioned with even more scorn by the reviewers than the HEA itself?

Questions for the ages, I guess, but this is why romance reader websites are so common on the web and why they're such strong communities. We've had to fight back against "official" brush-offs from reviewers and we review the romances AS romances, coming from the axiomatic stance that romances are worth reading because of their HEA, and exploding from there. And I think that's a Very Good Thing (TM).