Is Northrop Frye a Smart Bitch?

Jonathan A. Allan

July 14, 2012 marks the Centenary of Northrop Frye’s birth. Frye remains, without doubt, one of Canada’s most important literary and cultural critics, standing alongside Linda Hutcheon, J. Edward Chamberlin, Marshall McLuhan, and undoubtedly others. The Centre for Comparative Literature and the Department of English at the University of Toronto will host an international conference in honour of the Centenary (Educating the Imagination: A Conference in Honour of Northrop Frye on the Centenary of His Birth). Originally, I had intended to participate in the conference and present a paper called “Is Northrop Frye a Smart Bitch? Northrop Frye and the Development of Popular Romance Criticism.” Unfortunately, things have changed and I am unable to participate. Thus, I provide here some initial thoughts on Frye and popular romance criticism.

Most students of literature will read aspects of Northrop Frye’s theory of literature, likely taken from Anatomy of Criticism, and almost certainly about “archetypes.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, for instance, offers “The Archetypes of Literature.” Frye, of course, wrote about much more than archetypes. His writings on genre, and romance in particular, remain essential reading.

It could be argued that the most concise and enduring definition of romance comes from Northrop Frye. Frye’s theory of romance is convincing, I believe, because of its malleability and its translation across literary traditions, national traditions, and the erroneous concepts of “high” and “low” literature. Frye’s structuralism and archetypes are useful because they so often lend themselves to literary examples beyond the scope of Frye’s own writing. These, however, are just my opinions; what do other critics think?

In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Fredric Jameson writes, “Frye’s theory of romance […] is the fullest account of the genre.” In A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Pamela Regis, “the conventions of romance are very stable; the basic story, as Frye notes, has not changed in the centuries that followed its advent in ancient times.” Corinne Saunders, in her introduction to an anthology on romance, writes, “most influential in developing a grammar of romance has been Northrop Frye.” David Fuller, echoing Saunders, refers to Frye as “one of the most influential critics of the mode.” Likewise, Raymond H. Thompson writes that Frye is “the most influential among theoreticians.” Even in disagreement, critics like Doris Sommer have to admit that “Frye’s observations about masculine and feminine ideals are to the point; they point backward to medieval quest-romance where victory meant fertility, the union of male and female heroes.” Finally, Frye’s observations cut across traditions as Lois Parkinson Zamora recognizes “twentieth-century magical realism is a recent flowering of the more venerable romance tradition that Frye describes.” Indeed, though this is just a brief survey of Frye in criticism, it does seem certain that Frye is essential to romance scholarship.

But what can be said of Northrop Frye and popular romance criticism? Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel is, as we likely know, very much engaging with Frygian thought. Regis takes Frygian ideas about romance and applies them to the popular romance novel. Laura Vivanco’s For Love and Money: The Literary Art of Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance draws heavily on Frye’s early statements on romance.

To provide just one more, and final, example – Northrop Frye and the Smart Bitches. Wendell and Tan have summarized the romance novel as: “boy meets girl. Holy crap, shit happens. Eventually, the boy gets the girl. They live happily ever after.” Though the definition may lack a certain ‘academic prose,’ the definition itself flirts with Frye. Frye writes, “there is a social as well as an individual theme which must be sought in the general atmosphere of reconciliation that makes the final marriage possible.” Wendell and Tan, like Frye, recognize the importance of the concluding moments, the moments when the narrative comes together. Indeed, Pamela Regis notes this as well, “a novel that ends with the hero and heroine not in love, not betrothed, is simply not a romance novel.”

Frye, unfortunately, has fallen out of fashion in the literary academy. Perhaps many have not yet read through Frye’s theory of romance. There is, however, hope. Eric Selinger and Sarah Frantz remind us in their introduction to New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction that Northrop Frye was “the great early theorist of ‘Romance’ in the broadest sense.”

From my perspective, the importance of Northrop Frye in popular romance criticism cannot be denied, and perhaps like Fredric Jameson, we must recognize that “any reflection on genre today owes a debt – sometimes an unwilling one – to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism” (and I would add The Secular Scripture).

Cameras, Action, Romance Novels!

Laura Vivanco

According to Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan,

everyone has a very firm idea of what the average romance reader is like. We bet you already know her. She's rather dim and kind of tubby - undereducated and undersexed - and she displays a distressing affinity for mom jeans and sweaters covered in puffy paint and appliquéd kittens. (4)

If you'd like to see a picture of this typical romance reader, created by Joanne Renaud for the Smart Bitches' book, you can click across here. Wendell and Tan didn't mention the cause of the tubbyness, but it may be due to those bonbons that we romance readers apparently can't resist:

We still persist in the stereotypical belief that women who read romances can't get a date on Friday night. Instead, they lounge around all day eating bon-bons while they read their little books. This is simply untrue. (Bouricius 32)

According to Rachel Anderson, the genre "is usually condescendingly dismissed by those with highbrow pretensions as being harmless wish-fulfilment for ageing spinsters, or relatively harmless escapism for the ill-educated masses" (12-13). I suspect the stereotype varies a bit, perhaps from one country or time-period to another: Anderson was writing in the UK in the 1970s, whereas Wendell, Tan, and Bouricius were published in the US in the 2000s.

I'm not sure where these stereotypes of the romance reader come from, or how they're perpetuated, but since I'm interested in societal perceptions of romances and romance readers I was intrigued by Kirsten Valentine Cadieux's post about the recently released RED. She

was delighted to discover that a central narrative device of the film's setup is a somewhat elaborate, if simple, pattern in which the male romantic lead inquires about the current habits of the female romantic lead [...]; he then proceeds to read along with her trashy romance novels.

In the movie Mary-Louise Parker plays the part of Sarah, "a sweet, mild-mannered government HR rep and lover of romance novels who is inadvertently drawn into the film's dangerous world of intrigue" (CBR):

"She's a small town, Midwestern girl, and I think she's really positive and there's not a whole lot of dark in there," Parker said of Sarah during the press junket for "RED" in New York City. "She's a really bright, positive person, she reads romance novels and she kind of imagines herself "in" one of them. So when all of this happens, I think to her it's a dream come true. Even the horrible parts of it, like getting her mouth duct taped, there's some element to that that's thrilling and wonderful." (CBR)

Unfortunately, since I try to avoid depictions of violence, I won't be able to see for myself how the two romance readers (Sarah and Frank) challenge and/or reinforce particular stereotypes about romance readers.

When I looked to see if there were other movies with characters who read romance, I came across the following description, written by Dyanne, at The Romance Reader:

AMERICAN DREAMER - Stars JoBeth Williams and Tom Conti. Very funny - I love this movie! JoBeth Williams' character is a housewife who loves to read romantic thrillers by Rebecca Ryan and so she enters a Rebecca Ryan writing contest. She wins a trip to Paris and on her way to the awards luncheon gets knocked on the head -- when she awakens, she believes she is Rebecca Ryan.

I haven't seen that one either.

So is there anyone here who has seen either of these movies? If so, what did you think of their depiction of romance readers? And do any of you know of any other movies with romance-reading characters? Finally, is Jayashree Kamble overstating the case when she writes that

stereotypes about romance fiction are so deeply inscribed in popular discourse that they are regularly referenced by the entertainment media, such as television shows and movies, for comic effect. In every case, romance novels are portrayed as titillating fantasies written and read by oversexed or undersexed women. Romance readers often also come across in these electronic media as possessing little intelligence and discernment and as being incapable of separating themselves from the text. In most cases, these media are popular texts themselves and ridicule the romance genre as a way to elevate their own status by contrast and detract from their own formulae. (27-28)

---

• Anderson, Rachel. The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-Literature of Love. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974.
• Bouricius, Ann. The Romance Readers' Advisory: The Librarian's Guide to Love in the Stacks. Chicago: American Library Association, 2000.
• Kamble, Jayashree. Uncovering and Recovering the Popular Romance Novel. University of Minnesota, Ph.D. dissertation. December 2008. [Details here and available for download as a pdf here.]
  
• Wendell, Sarah, and Candy Tan. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.

Soft Men? Hard Women?

Laura Vivanco

In an essay I co-wrote with Kyra Kramer for the Journal of Popular Romance Studies we explored how social values are expressed through descriptions of protagonists' bodies and we noted that when the hero's penis is being described

in romances there is frequent “use of the personal pronouns — me, he, him, himself — to signify this body part […]. The seemingly unavoidable use of these pronouns is a […] curious euphemistic practice because it equates the man’s penis with the man himself” (Johnson-Kurek 119). The sentence “She cradled the rigid length of him in her palm” (Castle 172) is an example of this kind of writing: the part seems to become the whole. Conversely, when the reader is told that a hero’s body has “Long, long legs, […] a broad back that went on forever, all golden-skinned and rock-hard” (Lindsey 47), the allusion to another part of the hero that might be long, broad, and hard is not subtle.

As Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan have observed, "Heroes are never soft. They are hard. Everywhere" (94). The hardness of a hero's physique isn't just a metaphor for his sexual "hardness": it also implies that he is socially, politically, and/or physically strong. Indeed, the word "hardman" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning "a tough, aggressive, or ruthless man." Hardness, in other words, is used metaphorically to imply power of various kinds.

In her guide to romance writing, Kate Walker states that

the alpha male is strong, powerful, forceful, dynamic and successful ... add in all the rest of it - the cars, the money and the looks - and you have a romance hero. But at heart he's just a human being. [...]
If the hero is totally untouchable, how is he ever going to fall in love? What is it about the heroine that touches something in him in a way that no one has ever done before? [...] There must be a chink in his armour - the reason why he's doing something or the soft inner heart that he's trying to protect - through which your heroine can reach him. (109-110)

Softness, then, as in the phrase "soft inner heart," suggests emotional openness, and even if alpha heroes are allowed some emotional softness, softness is generally symbolically associated with heroines' bodies and their warm, nurturing personalities. The description of the soft and hard bodies is, then, often not simply a description of bodies, but also hints at the gender roles of the people whose bodies are being described.

Contrasts between a hard man and a soft women often serve to emphasise difference between the genders:

His body was rock solid against hers, complementing her softness, accentuating the fact that she was a woman and he was a man. (Carroll 43)

But are women's bodies really always softer than men's bodies? And what are the implications of a masculinity which requires constant "hardness" from someone who is "just a human being"?

The poet Richard Jeffrey Newman has been writing a series of posts titled "Fragments of Evolving Manhood" and one of them is a "slightly edited version" of "the conclusion to an essay about pornography called 'Inside The Men Inside "Inside Christy Canyon,"' that I published in 1994 in the now-defunct literary journal called 'The American Voice.'" In it he quotes a poem by Sharon Olds:

The Connoisseuse of Slugs

When I was a connoisseuse of slugs
I would part the ivy leaves, and look for the
naked jelly of those gold bodies,
translucent strangers glistening along the
stones, slowly, their gelatinous bodies
at my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivel
to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,
but I was not interested in that. What I liked
was to draw aside the ivy, breathe the
odor of the wall, and stand there in silence
until the slug forgot I was there
and sent its antennae up out of its
head, the glimmering umber horns
rising like telescopes, until finally the
sensitive knobs would pop out the
ends, delicate and intimate. Years later,
when I first saw a naked man,
I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet
mystery reenacted, the slow
elegant being coming out of hiding and
gleaming in the dark air, eager and so
trusting you could weep.

Olds' poem presents men, and male sexuality, as soft and easily damaged. I found it interesting how the power dynamics shift when the male, instead of having a hard shaft which he will thrust into a soft body, seems soft and vulnerable, even as he grows hard: "the sensitive knobs" never threaten the "connoisseuse of slugs," and it is she who could represents a potential threat since she knows that "they would shrivel to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt."

I don't think slug metaphors will ever become popular in the romance genre, at least not unless readers decide that slimy invertebrates which damage garden plants are romantic (and even then there might be some prejudice against them because they're hermaphrodites), but heroes are sometimes shown to be physically vulnerable, and not just because they've been temporarily injured, but because that vulnerability, that softness, is an intrinsic part of their nature as men:

His skin was surprisingly soft. She was careful to avoid the wound. Men. They thought themselves invincible with their strong bodies. They armed themselves to the teeth and clattered about in their armour, banging their shields together, riding their great horses. None of them facing the fact that underneath it all there was this, warm, soft flesh. Beautiful flesh and muscle which, while it was wholly male, remained vulnerable - male flesh could be hurt as much as it could do hurt. Men. (Townend 2009, 212)

It's also possible for a heroine to be physically hard, like her hero:

"When I first met you, I wanted to do this. I told myself that someday I would, and that when I felt your flesh for the first time, it would be as hard and firm as mine is." He allowed her breasts to fall free [...] Then both hands were spanning her ribs, sliding down into the hollow above her navel as he dipped his head low and kissed her naked shoulder. "Your skin is perfect, not soft like most women's. Whoever said soft skin was sexy? (Spencer 173)

It's probably not a coincidence that when they play racket-ball, they do so as equals: "There were men who extended the courtesy of always letting ladies serve first. It had always peeved Winn. She'd win on her own merits or not at all" (135).

--------

• Carroll, Marisa, 1995. Marry Me Tonight (Don Mills, Ontario: Harlequin).
  
• Spencer, LaVyrle, 1985. Spring Fancy (London: Mills & Boon).
  
• Townend, Carol, 2009. Runaway Lady, Conquering Lord (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).
• Vivanco, Laura, and Kyra Kramer, 2010. “There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre”, Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1.
• Walker, Kate, 2008. Kate Walker's 12 Point Guide to Writing Romance (Abergele: Studymates).
  
• Wendell, Sarah, and Candy Tan, 2009. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels (New York: Fireside).

The photo came from Wikimedia Commons. Dating from 1857, it was taken by Andreas Groll and shows a suit of armour.

Michele Hauf: The Highwayman

Laura Vivanco

Paranormal romances often feature heroes who are bigger and more dangerous than mere mortals. The lovers can literally be soul-mates, and if they are (or become) immortal, their happy-ever-after may be precisely that. Jane has observed that "The paranormal allows for an amplification of loss and sorrow which makes the emotional conflict more compelling." Paranormals, by their very nature, seem to intensify or magnify many of the characteristic elements of the genre and Michele Hauf's The Highwayman contains many examples of this process.

An excerpt of the novel is available here and here and there are reviews here, here, and here (some of them contain spoilers). Carolyn Crane has made some observations about the way Hauf depicts the catlike aspects of the heroine's nature. There will be spoilers in what follows.

The heroine, Aby, is a "familiar." When "sexually sated" (22) familiars can "bridge a demon" (22) into the world in which the romance is set. For Aby,"Summoning demons was her job. Sex was a job" (23) and "her profession involved having sex - a lot of sex" (109). However, because sex is her job, "Aby wasn't sure what real sex was" (91) and it is Max, the demon-killing hero, who gives her her "first kiss" (96). This makes him feel "as if he'd done something wrong, like steal a neighbor's mail, or a woman's virginity?" (98). Nor has she ever had a "sexual daydream about a man" (117) or "had opportunity to really look at a man before" (218). As he realises, this heroine with the "wicked innocent sensuality" (219) who "come[s] off as very [...] Sensual and attractive and confident about yourself and your body" (108) but who is also so full of "bright-eyed innocence" (97), "so innocent" (110), is the incarnation of both sides of the "Madonna and the whore" (174) dichotomy.

She thus presents a solution to the problem of how to resolve the two directions in which the romance genre is tugged on the question of female sexuality. Candy Tan described them thus:

while I think romance novels are subversive and reinforce the whole notion that women CAN have premarital sex and NOT die horribly by the end of the book, in a lot of ways, the message isn’t subversive at all. In fact, the message is oftentimes quite distressingly sexist.

Look at the obsession with virgins, for example. In no other genre are there so many women over the age of 20 and widows running around with their hymens firmly intact. [...] The heroines who aren’t virgins generally aren’t allowed to have orgasms or fulfilling sex lives before the hero comes along [...] Women are also rarely allowed to be promiscuous the way men are in romance. [...] Erotica and erotic romance have done a better job of blasting through a lot of these walls, in my opinion, and portraying more sexually empowered women.

Thanks to the possibilities opened up by the opportunity to construct a paranormal world, Hauf's heroine can have have her sexual cake of innocence, but also have already eaten it very pleasurably.

Hauf also provides the reader with a very clear example of a Glittery HooHa (GHH). This special organ enables a heroine to "snare him [the hero] forever, for yea, no matter how many HooHas he might see, never will there be one as Glittery as hers…" (Lani Diane Rich qtd. by Jennifer Crusie). All romance heroines have a GHH, but the fact is made more explicit in some romances than others.

Max, as he explains, literally gets "distracted by sparkly things like a damned magpie. I think it's part of the demon curse" (164) but his supernatural attraction to sparkly, glittery objects, which he is compelled to steal and make his own, parallels his attraction to Aby and her extremely glittery HH: "she looked better than any sparkly gemstone Max had ever tucked into his pocket" (81). He wants "to possess her. To steal her. To tuck her away like those jewels you take" (113) and just before they have penetrative sex for the first time he imagines how she must look in the shower, "All those water droplets glistening on her skin like liquid diamonds. An easy nab for a thief who couldn't stop himself from stealing" (217). Inevitably, close contact with the heroine and her GHH starts "changing him. Making him tolerant. [...] Max was happy to please his sparkly thing" (200).

The specialness of the sexual relationship between heroes and heroines in romances is not only emphasised by the fact that it is often the heroine's very first sexual relationship. In some ways it is usually suggested that it is a "first" for the hero too. With a hero who has been very promiscuous there is often a moment when he learns sex with the heroine is special. In The Highwayman it is Aby who learns this lesson:

Max put his cheek to her belly and hugged her. "Is it good for you? I mean, better than ..."
He was wondering about Jeremy. But that had been business sex. Unfeeling, unemotional. "Twenty times better, Max. I love you." (240)

The paranormal element of the romance presents Hauf with the ability to create an ingenious method whereby sex with Aby is made extra-special for Max, who already believes that "Love is better than sex" (236). When he became immortal, around 250 years ago, "the third blow he'd been served by the demon shadow" was "inability to climax [...] Over the centuries he'd tried to climax with many women. If there was a trick to setting him off, he'd yet to find it" (101). In his shadow form "he could watch lovers and feel the moment of pleasure in the dream. But he could never recall that pleasure or retain the feeling after dropping the shadow [...] he couldn't climax. Hadn't since 1758" (144). However when he enters Aby's dream about the two of them having sex, it results in "a sticky wetness" (144) in his jeans. Clearly Aby's GHH works in the dream world, and there's a long-anticipated waking repetition of it towards the end of the novel, "And with his surrender, came salvation. He came hard" (272).

Interestingly, Aby's ability to make Max "surrender" and acknowledge her specialness with his "wetness" is paralleled by her ability to make him cry:

He'd watched Aby come close to being hurt today. [...] He turned his face and sniffed back the tears. [...] He hadn't cried after Rebecca's death. He hadn't cried after Emiline's death. He never shed a tear for any who had fallen at his whip. (234)

Aby recognises the significance of the moment: Max has "opened up to her" (234) and just as it is with Aby that he ends two and a half centuries of sexual frustration, it is with Aby that he is able "to trust and release" (235) all the "pain inside" (235) him.

Another instance of the paranormal setting allowing for the intensification of themes or elements present in other romances can be found in the heroine's response to the hero's body odor. As Jessica has noted,

Apparently, every lover has a bouquet, and our h/hs are always — always – connoisseurs. Like a Master of Wine, they can pick out different aromas and notes, hints of this or that. Over time, I have come to bracket my disbelief, understanding the important role of a unique set of smells to the development of the sexual relationship, and indeed to the full sensory experience romance novels provide.

Aby is a familiar, which means that she shapeshifts into cat form from time to time, and even when she looks human, she retains her catlike sense of smell:

Her world was navigated by scent. She never made a move without first assessing the atmosphere. It usually took her but moments to acclimate to new smells, else she'd be dizzy from the melee of odors.
A new smell, beyond the alcohol-laced colognes and grooming products and cigarette smoke, tickled her nose. [...] Running her tongue along her lower lip, she took in the tall man who also scanned the room. [...] He smelled different. But what about him was unique?
Drawing a soft breath through her nose, Aby discerned the faint masculine odor wafting from his direction. That was it. One simple scent. He was clean. No tobacco, alcohol or chemicals that tainted every living being in the world. Not a definitive food odor that usually lingered even on the most fastidious. (16-17)

Another example of the kind of intensification which can occur in a paranormal romance is provided by the heroine's need for protection. According to the statements collected at Bookbug on the Web, various authors, when asked "what qualities should a hero always have" mentioned protectiveness:

Lori Foster: [...] They have to be protective toward all things smaller or weaker than themselves.

Barbara Dawson Smith: A romance hero [...] is willing to take risks to protect his property, his loved ones, and his beliefs

Linda Cajio: [...] protective

Geralyn Dawson: [...] protective

Leigh Greenwood: The most essential quality? I can't decide between "the ability to protect his wife and all that belongs to him" or "a willingness to risk all to protect his wife and all that belongs to him." Maybe this is a particularly male point of view; women may think some quality of sensitivity or understanding are most important. I agree that they're essential in a hero, but without the ability to protect, he won't get a chance to use the rest. That's a role men have had for a long time and I guess it's still necessary. I should add that I'm thinking about historical heroes. When you get into contemporary situations, then understanding and sensitivity would have to take first place.

In paranormal romances, as in historicals, there's often a lot of opportunity for a hero to be protective. Even if Hauf's characters weren't under frequent attack from demons, Aby's very nature requires that she be protected:

"[...] I have this great dream of being independent, but I'm fooling myself. Familiars do best when they have someone close to protect and care for them. I'm not like those wild cats that roam the plains. I've been domesticated."
That realization, always at the back of her mind, now blossomed, and she couldn't deny it. She'd never be truly independent, able to survive without the help of others. Could she accept it?
"Aby, I love you. And if you want it, I will protect and care for you."
She did want his protection. (237-38)

Finally, there's a dream-state paranormal version of forced seduction/rape. Rather than being an intensification like the previous two examples, it's more of a paranormal variation on a theme. Max enters Aby's dream without her consent and discovers that she's dreaming about having sex with him. Max isn't exactly himself at the time, because he is in the control of his demon shadow and

The pull to shadow always manifested as a dark desire he would not resist [...] he hovered in solid form at the end of Aby's bed. Adorned in darkness and raiments of night, the shadow devoured the peaceful quiet. [...]
Before it lay a sleeping being. It did not discern age or sex. The energy was strong. So strong, it drew the shadow forward." (141)

Once within Aby's sexual dream, "He, the shadow as human shape, entered the dreamer, hilting himself inside her" (142). When she wakes up, Aby knows she has had a dream, but doesn't realise the full extent of Max's participation in it. He delays telling her the truth because he "thought you'd feel ... violated" (196). Max thus recognises that the event was a kind of rape/forced seduction, but the paranormal circumstances in which it took place exonerate him and render it far from traumatising for the heroine. All that is left of the forced seduction/romance rape scenario is a mildly illicit frisson.

• Hauf, Michele. The Highwayman. New York: Silhouette, 2009.

Beyond Heaving Bosoms Blog Tour

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and Beyond Heaving Bosoms fame have graciously agreed to answer some probing questions from the denizens of TMT (or at least those of us who could be found at short notice). Actually their "gracious" response was more along the lines of "HELL YEAH" (Candy) and "Are you shitting me? HELL YEAH x2!" (Sarah), but that works for us, too.

So, here we go. Prepare for the invasion!

TMT Sarah: I will be assigning this book if/when I ever teach romance again. You've got the history, the criticism, the analysis, all in a neat, screamingly-funny package. Were you trying to write an academically valuable book with BHB, or a "textbook" of romance analysis, or were you just writing to entertain? Is there a difference? ;)

SB Sarah: We were definitely not aiming for academic analysis or a textbook on romance. But since both of us were English majors with an unhealthy interest in critical analysis, our examination of romances as valid and worthy narratives demanded we whip out the Jung (no pun intended) (no, I lie, totally intended) and subject the romance to the same level of attention as other narrative fiction.

Candy: One of my aims while writing this book was to write a funny, entertaining dissection of the modern romance novel, and to have fun while taking a hard look at the issues that many critics either (to my mind) mischaracterized or have mostly skirted around. I don't know that I was consciously thinking "This sure will be useful for professors who are all into women's literature and pop culture studies," and to be honest, I think in some ways it's a pretty poor resource for serious academics--it is, at best, a very quick and (very, very) dirty introduction to the genre and the issues it presents. It is, however, a fast and readable intro for students, so it has that much going for it.

As for writing to entertain: while I can write in a dry, academic tone, I'm also the kind of geek who thinks it's much more awesome to write about serious academic matters while using generous amounts of parody and cussin', so yeah, I write to entertain AND to inform. (Relatedly: I also think it's easier to get my message across to the widest cross-section of interested people when I'm funny. Which term is the average person going to remember more easily: man-titty and Heroic Wang, or metonymical hypertrophied masculinity?)

TMT Sarah: Why do you feel romances are viable subjects of academic analysis? What about why they are valuable subjects? What can we learn, as academics, from studying popular romance?

SB Sarah: How could they not be? A genre devoted to women's self-actualization and sexual agency, produced during and after the feminist movement, read by women and created by women? Gee, nothing at all to see here. Please move along.

The romance genre is an anthropological history of women's sexuality in North America over the past 60+ years. If you want to study a culture, study it's popular culture - and romance novels are a crucial element to our popular culture.

Candy: I said in a recent entry for the Powell's Books blog that romance novels are the subduction zones of literature, and that sums up, in one over-stretched nerd simile, why I think they're worth academic analysis and why they're valuable subjects. There are all sorts of interesting conflicts and assumptions and subversions going on in romance novels about gender roles, courtship rituals, the constitution of families, sexual norms, etc. And they're valuable, not only for the overt conflicts they present, but for all the subtextual stuff that's assumed and unsaid, like how sexually deviant behaviors in villains (oh my god they're GAY, or holy crap they like TYING PEOPLE UP AND THEN WHIPPING THEM) serve as a symbol for a villainous rejection of other societal values.

TMT Sarah: If you were writing a dissertation about popular romance, what would the thematic focus of your analysis be and why? (Mine, for example, would be the construction of the hero.) What books would you analyze and why?

SB Sarah: If I were writing a dissertation (and concurrent with that premise is the outright fucking miracle that I'd be allowed to in a graduate program. No, not bitter, not at all) on romance, I'd probably focus on acts of violence on the part of heroines, particularly in paranormals, and likely contrast that with violence from heroes. I'd analyze the Cole series, Showalter's books, Kelley Armstrong's series, and a lot of the urban fantasy genre. I am fascinated by how adding the whizzy fizz of paranormality suddenly makes room for women to literally rip someone a new one.

Candy: I think it would have to be the evolution of sex in romance novels. God, that'd be a huge, unwieldy (and throbbing--at least, it'd make my head throb) dissertation, wouldn't it? I think I'd focus on non-consensual sex in romances--whether it's possible to create a principled distinction between forced seduction and rape in the fictional world, why rape by the hero is OK, why rape by the villain isn't, when romance hero rape stopped being the norm, and how that rape has been channeled into other avenues, like the unwilling turning of the heroine in paranormals. I started naming names of books at first, and it rapidly got out of control, especially once I realized that I'd listed mostly historicals without even thinking of all the contemporaries and category romances I'd want to cover as well, so let's just acknowledge that if I did, in fact, write this dissertation, it'd probably take me eight full years and lot of tears, cussing and bloodshed.

TMT Sarah: The one small issue people have been having with BHB is that it's very historical romance centric. Do you agree and if so, why do you think this is?

SB Sarah: Yes, it is historical-romance centric, and part of that was constraints of total word count and part of that was our desire to really portray the full history of what most people think of when they think "romance novel" - e.g. the historical bodice ripper. And in discussing it, we had to reveal it, unpack it a bit, and defend it because that's the source of the most damaging of the stereotypes hurled at the genre: ye olde "bodice ripper."

Candy: It's a fair cop; the only thing I can say in reply is that we were trying to represent the history of the genre, and historicals dominated for decades--I mean, they've only ceded ground in the last seven or eight years to paranormals. And it's also what I'm most familiar with, and what I've read the most, so when I have to trot out an example that I can examine intelligently, it's probably going to be a historical.

TMT Eric: Near the start of the book you call yourselves "lit nerds." When did you start thinking like "lit nerds" about romance fiction? Was there a particular book that got you started?

SB Sarah: I probably started thinking like a lit nerd when I had a really demanding professor in college, and when, in the course of writing papers for that course, found a literary journal called "The Explicator" which had the wonderful combination of being (a) full of concise, short, but delightfully sharp pieces of criticism of random things and (b) somewhat friendly to elements of popular culture in its subject matter. It became my go-to journal for critical backup when writing a paper. That was the type of criticism I wanted to write.

As for harnessing the lit crit thunderstick and waving it at romance (oh noes!) I am honestly not sure which one it was that started the whole mess. It might have been Kelley Armstrong's "Bitten" which really got me thinking about the subtext of otherworldly villainy in a terrorism-conscious society.

Candy: I think I first started analyzing romances after I read Loretta Chase's The Lion's Daughter when I was seventeen years old or so, because the hero and heroine were so unusual. The hero is a wastrel in a distinctly un-romantic way, because you see in a very concrete way what happens when a rich kid fritters away his fortune, whereas a lot of historicals at the time tended to present these rakish wastrels in a much more dashing light. And that got me thinking about how characters were portrayed in romance, and how the characters were made to fit into boxes, but the authors didn't seem especially aware of the boxes--or, if they were aware, they didn't really care to take the characters out of those boxes and sort of extending them to their logical conclusions. Once I went to college and learned some actual analytical tools, forget about it--I did (and to this day) still do it to just about anything I read, from magazine articles to Supreme Court opinions to romance novels. I'm fucknoxious that way.

TMT Eric: In your book and on your blog you don't just celebrate the best romance novels; you have a lot of fun with some of the worst of them. What makes a really good (or really fun) bad book? Why is it important to celebrate (as well as mock) the stuff that "makes the baby Ganesh weep with the badness"?

SB Sarah: Well, if you can't laugh at the stuff that really does suck with the badness, how would anyone take you seriously when you try to tell them how good the other stuff is?

Candy: I love lots of bad romances, and I think what tends to make then really fun for me are the ones that hit my taboo hot buttons (like Morning Song by Karen Robards, which features a truly squicky but compelling romance between a stepfather and stepdaughter), or ones that showcase a certain kind of good-natured energy, like a lot of Dara Joy's work. The bad books that are the most fun to write about, however, tend to be the ones that make me mad, because then I'm writing with passion, and sweet creamy Christ it's so cathartic to strike back at a book that's injured my aesthetic and grammatical sensibilties.

And it's important to acknowledge the bad stuff unflinchingly (well, OK, we flinch for the Indian and sheik romances) because--well, it's the same thing for any argument, isn't it? Find your weak spots and cover them before your opponents can. Like Sarah said, if we insist that everything is sparkly ponies and magical liopleurodons, when it's patently not, then it's going to be hard for people to take us seriously when we point out the awesome bits that deserve celebration. Standards require a baseline and differentiation; ignoring the bad stuff just turns us into mindless cheerleaders.

TMT Eric: What are your favorite Old Skool romances? Is there an Old Skool romance you wish that we Professors Brilliant would take a look at?

Sarah: My favorite Old Skool will always be "Midsummer Magic" by Catherine Coulter. Dowdy disguises! Forced marriages! Surly but noble hero with moral compass. AND USE OF CREAM OMG TO SMOOTH THE TENDER PASSAGE. It's full of win and omg. Plus, the original printing has a swan freaking the fuck out behind the hero, and that always makes my year.

Candy: I can't think of a genuinely Old Skool romance that I love; I read them mostly because I want to see how romances have evolved with time. And if you Professors Brilliant would look at Catherine Coulter's Devil's Embrace, which made me go OH JESUS WHAT IN THE SWEET MOTHER OF FUCK more often than any other book I've read, ever, that'd be great, because I'd love to read an academic dissection of that book.

TMT Eric: If you could magically replace The Scarlet Letter with a romance novel in every high school in America, what romance novel would it be?

SB Sarah: "The Windflower" by Laura London or "Dream Man" by Linda Howard. The former b/c it is awesome. The latter because I don't like The Scarlet Letter and would replace it with something that bothered me equally on multiple levels.

Candy: Y'know, Hawthorne was a misogynist dipshit, but I like his writing style, and he had important things to say about the human condition. If I had to replace the Scarlet Letter with a romance, I think I'd go with a one-two punch of To Love and to Cherish and To Have and to Hold by Patricia Gaffney, largely because I think they're both really, really well-written, and they present very different facets of sexuality, sex roles and sexual control.

TMT Eric In many of the interviews with you have asked about the Magic Hoo-Hoo. Why do > you think that none of the interviewers have asked about the Heroic Wang of Mighty Lovin'?

SB Sarah: I was asked by a butterscotch-voiced radio host named Dr. Alvin Jones about the Wang of Mighty Lovin' and he sounded so incredible talking about it I wanted him to say it over and over again. Heroic Wang never sounded so good.

I think otherwise "Hoo Hoo" is part of the cultural consciousness, what with Grey's Anatomy talking about the 'va-jay-jay' and the presence of other socially acceptable somewhat funny euphemisms for vagina. So Hoo Hoo is yet another.

Candy: Have you seen Sarah Haskins' absolutely hilarious video on popular discourse on the vagina called Your Garden? [ETA: TMT Sarah's response: Bwahaha! OMG!] That video, right there, expresses my answer in pretty compact form. I'll have to try answering this question more fully some time in the future, though; I think I could easily write about 1,500 words on this issue.

TMT Eric: What (if anything) have you learned from the academics who study romance fiction? What could we academics learn from you?

SB Sarah: it makes me so happy to know there are academics who take it seriously, considering a ran screaming out of grad school in part because I couldn't study romances as a contextual field in which to locate any type of critical examination. I have learned that just about any specialty within the humanities (and probably the sciences as well) can be applied to romances, and because the genre is so neglected, there's an incredible amount of room to discover what lurks beneath the texts and across the various narrative trends. A minefield of heaving bosoms, if you will.

I don't know that you can learn much from me, really, except perhaps creative cussing. And how much I really hate the word "emails."

Candy: I've learned that the breadth and scope of romance is much bigger than what I could've imagined, thanks to you guys. As for what academics can learn from us: funny, foul-mouthed ways to refer to metonymical hypertrophied masculinity? All kinds of squirrelly stuff that fall under reader response theory?

Beyond Heaving Bosoms

Laura Vivanco

Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels has already been reviewed by Sarah Frantz over at Dear Author but I thought I'd offer a few of my own thoughts here.

Katie Dickson, in her review, describes Beyond Heaving Bosoms as "an authoritative text that will undoubtedly help many a scholar in his or her romance research in the days to come; I should dearly love to see BHB cited in an article over on GoogleScholar" and Sarah F states that it is "invaluable to the academic romance field we’re working so hard to build."¹ However, although Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan exhort their readers to "break out your red pen and your English degree! While it's undeniable that romance novels are great fun, they should absolutely be subject to rigorous examination. We lit nerds say so" (7) they also add the caveat that while "There are [...] some excellent academic examinations that subject the genre to a long-overdue analysis. Us? We're here to throw a party for the genre" (1). Thus, although their book contains many serious insights into the genre, these are expressed in a less than academic style (for examples, see the excerpts on their website).

Beyond Heaving Bosoms focuses on issues related to sexuality and gender (although the authors do tackle a number of other issues).² In this the book perhaps reveals the influence of Sarah Wendell's early interest in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick:

Sedgwick was, in short, holy shit amazing with critical analysis of gender relations in text. [...] Personally speaking. Segwick was part of the reason I long thought that romance novels ought to be held up to critical analysis, and also part of the reason I ran screaming out of grad school, never to return. [...]

When my paper [on "the novels of Jude Deveraux and Judith McNaught in particular, notably those that featured love triangles, competitive twins, and similar storylines"] was rejected by the professor on the grounds that I’d chosen an “unsuitable subject matter” for my analysis, I realized it was time to get the hell out of dodge. I left short of attaining my Master’s degree, and gave up any desire to get a PhD.

Sedgwick changed the way I looked at heterosexual relationships within the courtship rituals of romance novels.

It is perhaps because of this focus on sexuality that although Wendell and Tan devote a chapter to "A Brief History of the Modern Romance Novel," in this history the authors

cut right to the chase and talk about the clearest predecessor we can find for the modern romance novel: The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss.
The Flame and the Flower was first published in 1972, and it's one of the most famous in the bodice-ripper tradition. (11)

They note that

"sweet, savage love" serves as a neat encapsulation of the older style of romances. The turmoil and violence, they runneth over in torrents as mighty as the hero's seed. And speaking of mighty torrents of heroic seed, it was well-nigh de rigeur for the heroine to be raped by the hero in those novels. (12)

and

The Old Skool, very roughly speaking, ran from the late 1970s through the '80s, while the New Skool started sometime in the late 1980s and continues to the present, but as with any attempts at categorization, there were some books published in the '80s that were in the New Skool mode, and Old Skool-style romances are still occasionally published. (13)

Clearly the distinction between "Old Skool" and "New Skool" romances, and the portrayal of ripped bodices and rape in the former, are important subjects to discuss. However, a history of the genre which begins in the 1970s is incomplete at best, and extremely misleading at worst. Even if one doesn't want to discuss older precursors of the modern genre, including Richardson's Pamela, the novels of Jane Austen and Jane Eyre (to name just a small sample of classic novels which meet the RWA criteria for a romance, namely that it feature "a central love story and an emotionally-satisfying and optimistic ending"), the modern genre did not suddenly come into existence in 1972. And if one's taking a look at romances in which the hero rapes the heroine, why not at least mention E. M. Hull's The Sheik (1919)?

At least one romance by Georgette Heyer, whose first novel was published in 1921, is named later in Beyond Heaving Bosoms, but not in this chapter, and I didn't spot even one mention of: Mary Stewart or other authors of modern "gothic" romances; pre-1945 Raj romances; any of the early authors of inspirational romances including Augusta Jane Evans (whose St Elmo I've discussed in two posts at Teach Me Tonight) and Grace Livingston Hill; or Barbara Cartland. Nor is there much mention of authors of romances in languages other than English, such as Corin Tellado.³ Given the chapter's very tight focus on "Old Skool" and "New Skool" romances, it might have been more accurate to label the chapter something other than "A Brief History of the Modern Romance Novel."

Although I've mentioned the focus on gender and sexuality and spent considerable time pointing out omissions from the chapter on the history of the genre, many other topics are touched on in Beyond Heaving Bosoms. Wendell and Tan

• discuss how readers relate to the protagonists of romances e.g. are the heroines placeholders? does the reader explore "more 'masculine' elements of her personality" (75) via her relationship with the hero? does he represent "the Jungian shadow archetype" (76)?
• note the way in which "The hero's occupation often forms a short-hand to his character" (91)
• examine some "cringe-worthy plot devices we know and love" (99)
• explore a few of the "romance trends we've known and loved (and loved to hate)" (107)
• suggest some reasons why "romance [is] so often and so frequently denigrated" (126)
• take a look at "the covers, and the reasons to snark them" (168)
• list and give some details concerning "controversies, scandals, and not being nice" (190) in which they "have a look at our dirty laundry: minorities and gays in romance, plagiarism, and the pressure of the Be Nice culture in Romancelandia" (190)
• attempt to predict "the future of the genre" (274) and
• make the interesting observation that

the direct descendant of the romance-novel rape may not merely have changed genre [from historical to "paranormal and erotic romance"], but changed form. The involuntary change, in which the heroine is transformed into a vampire or superpowered being or three-toed weresloth, usually with copious amounts of blood, trauma, and sex, uses much of the same language and framework as rape in Old Skool romances. (146)

Wendell, Sarah, and Candy Tan. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.


1 Sarah rather sneakily embedded a link in there to the new website for IASPR. It's still under construction at the moment, so there's not a lot of text to read there, but you can see the logo (which includes a speech bubble incorporated into a heart, which I think informs the viewer that IASPR and JPRS are about romantic love and popular culture).

2 I should perhaps note at this point that I was rather gratified to see myself cited on pages 156-57 and 159 (with the quotes taken from a 2006 blog post I wrote about romance as sex education).

3 Wendell and Tan do mention "Littattafan Soyayya," "written in the local Hausa language, [which] 'extoll the values of true love based on feelings, rather than family or other social pressures.'" (131).