Ohio State University Press Texts - free pdfs

I was really happy to discover that Ohio State University Press make many of their texts free five years after publication. This includes some interesting work on popular romance fiction.

Kapila, Shuchi, 2010. 

Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP). ["Educating Seeta makes the case that representations of [...] inter-racial relationships in the tropes of domestic fiction create a fantasy of liberal colonial rule in nineteenth-century British India. British colonials in India were preoccupied with appearing as a benevolent, civilizing power to their British and colonial subjects" and although we see "The death of the Indian woman in many of these romances, signaling that interracial love is not socially viable [...] There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, for instance in the Orientalist idealization of the Indian woman in Maud Diver’s Lilamani, in which interracial marriage between Neville Sinclair and Lilamani heralds a new understanding between cultures with the ultimate goal of “civilizing” other cultures into European ways of life." See in particular pages 54-77.]

Lutz, Deborah, 2006. 

The Dangerous Lover; Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press). [Includes a chapter on the presence of the "dangerous lover" in the contemporary historical romance.]

Sanders, Lise Shapiro, 2006. 

Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. [See Chapters 3 and 4 on "The Failures of the Romance: Boredom and the Production of Consuming Desires" and "Imagining Alternatives to the Romance: Absorption and Distraction as Modes of Reading."]

Tatlock, Lynne, 2012. 

German Writing, American Reading: Women and the Import of Fiction, 1866-1917 (Columbus: Ohio State UP). ["Chapter 4 examines German novels as American reading from the perspective of the happy ending, an international signature of romance novels and of nearly all of the German novels by women in my dataset. The chapter uncovers and analyzes variations in plotting ritual death and recovery to a state of freedom that characterize these German novels and that appealed to American readers by offering them the vicarious experience of a multiplicity of female subjectivities and female-determined male subjectivities while cautiously expanding the boundaries of home in a place called Germany."]

Also of possible interest:

Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006).

Romance and Philosophy: Jo Leigh's Arm Candy

Laura Vivanco

I think, therefore ... I love?

In "Heidegger, the Erotics of Ontology, and the Mass-Market Romance" (2003), Deborah Lutz states that

This essay's project is not to understand mass-market romance using ideas culled from philosophy, but rather to illuminate them with the same rarified light as philosophy. In fact, reading romance as we generally read philosophy not only sets romance up to speak about human experience in general, but it also serves to situate philosophy within a romantic paradigm. (2)

The essay is freely available online so you can read it in full. I'm merely going to cull a few quotes from it which possibly "illuminate" Jo Leigh's Arm Candy. Lutz writes that:

The desire, love, of both philosophy and romance is to reveal the truth, to illuminate and bring it to a confession. The loved one envelops and imprisons unknown worlds, which must be deciphered. The erotically charged removal of the veil points to the spark from which this erotic originates -- the veil itself. The hiding and the disclosing of the secret both create eroticism. Clearly, secretiveness is itself erotic. (5)

It seems to me that the desire for truth, and the eroticism of the "removal of the veil" are central to Jo Leigh's Arm Candy. Dan agrees to pose as Jessica's lover in return for getting to

"[...] ask you anything. No holding back. No thinking twice about propriety. I ask, you answer. Honestly. To the best of your ability. All the questions I've wanted to ask but haven't dared."
"You've never dated?"
"Oh, I've dated. Many times. I've had relationships. All of which have failed. Mostly, I fear, due to my fumbling. My lack of understanding. Seriously, I don't get it. Screw physics and the Big Bang theory, the great imponderable isn't God, it's women. Who are you people? The books are useless. Believe me, I've read them. Everything from Men are from Mars to Dr. Phil. And I still don't get you. [...]" (27)

As for Jessica, she's extremely attracted to this

man who had it all: the looks, the brains, the wit, the strong hands, the taste in clothes. Her only hope was getting to know him. No way he was everything he purported to be. Impossible. (39)

Of course, she's wrong, and the "removal of the veil" only makes him more attractive:

noticing a tiny twitch of his right eye, the way his nostrils flared, and his white teeth, not perfectly even, but made endearing by slight imperfections. It was as if her vision had gone far beyond the traditional twenty-twenty into a new kind of sight. Not just because they were so close to one another, but because a veil of ordinariness had been lifted. She could read him like a book, his need, his tension, his excitement and his pleasure. (137)

Jessica does not, however, immediately want to enter into a permanent, full-time commitment. Instead she wonders if she could prioritise her career, but still maintain her new relationship, by having an

intermittent affair [...] when they both deemed it time, they'd come together in what she fully expected to be a mind-blowing week of unadulterated bliss. Then they'd go to their separate corners until the next time.
Think of how much they would have to tell each other if they didn't see each other day after dull day. It would be like Christmas four times a year. Everything would be new and fresh and thrilling. (213)

In effect, this plan would involve repeatedly hiding and disclosing their secrets, and in some ways it would appear to be a solution similar to that adopted by Heidegger, who

consciously created a relationship with his students that supported his character of an aloof and mysterious genius, often tortured by society and the technological world around him, finally wanting to live, reclusively, in his hut in the Black Forest, in the solitude he felt was necessary for his work. The biographer Elzbieta Ettinger writes, "Aware of his allure to both male and female students and of his power over their minds, Heidegger purposely kept his distance, intensifying the mystique, the awe, the reverence". (3)

Dan isn't keen on Jessica's plan and his response to her proposal seems to be an attempt to address any concerns that the "secretiveness [which] is itself erotic" (Lutz 5) will be lost as a result of prolonged close contact:

The reason [...] that I haven't asked you more questions, is that for the first time in my life, I prefer the mystery. I like not being able to second-guess you. It's not frustrating at all, which I never would have believed. On the contrary, not knowing every little thing about you makes the days fascinating. I can't think of a better tomorrow and tomorrow than to unravel the mystery of you. (229)

The novel concludes with Jessica agreeing to marry Dan and

safe in the cocoon of his arms. His breath caressed her cheek. As she closed her eyes, she felt something new, something foreign. A second later it came to her ... She was home. (249)

Is this another indication that what is well known ("home") can nevertheless be mysterious ("foreign")? Lutz, writing about the German word "heim" (home), observes that an

etymological thread related to "heim" is "geheim," which also has the "home" in it but it means "secret" or "concealed." We already know of the "secret home" because of the Heideggerian idea that, in an everyday way, authentic homes are "secret." [...] The romantic heroine's potential, her "authentic," lies in the presence of love. Her "ownmost" possibility is unconcealed, disclosed meaning. Her possibility as fully present to love is the secret behind all other secrets and this is her final "home" -- destiny, fate. (Lutz 8)

As a sort of post-script, I'd like to mention that I'd only got as far as Lutz's initial comment that "The conjunction of these two registers -- philosophy and the mass-market romance -- seems one of the most unlikely and implausible" (2) when it occurred to me that this conjunction may perhaps seem rather less implausible in the wake of Professor Vincent Hendricks's recent and very controversial inclusion of lad-mag-style photographs on a page advertising his undergraduate-level course on Argumentation, Logic and Philosophy of Language. And although Hendricks has now removed the photos and stated that "The intention was that the pictures, as a cover on a forthcoming magazine, might be used to view logic from a somewhat humorous and untraditional perspective appealing to larger audience which the magazine covers," their underlying perspective is perhaps not so very untraditional after all: as Lutz notes regarding Heidegger, "In 1924, thirty-five years old, married and with two children, he seduced his eighteen-year-old student Hannah Arendt" (3).
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Leigh, Jo. Arm Candy. 2004. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2005.

Lutz, Deborah. “Heidegger, the Erotics of Ontology, and the Mass-Market Romance.” Comparative Literature and Culture 5.3 (2003). [Available for download from http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol5/iss3/5/ ]

What's at the Core of the Genre?

Laura Vivanco

A comment Dick made recently brought up the question of what's at the core of the genre. I think it it's a really important topic, so I'm giving it its own post. Dick wrote that

One of the things the HEA of the romance formula has always implied in my thinking, as evidenced by the penchant authors have for epilogues and continuing mentions of h/h's in subsequent books is that the union (marriage or whatever) of the two brings continuance far into the future through their progeny; it's almost as if the "ever after" of the HEA has to be demonstrated in order to be complete.

Dick's view, that reproduction is a central element of the genre, is shared by Stephanie Laurens, who has argued that "Romance today carries the essential message that love, marriage - and by implication children and family - are valuable and desirable goals" and she even tries to correlate birth and marriage rates with rates of romance reading:

If you want women to have children, you need to ensure they view finding love and marriage as worthy goals. The US also has a marriage rate more than 50% greater than any of those other countries.

Not one so-called expert thought of romance novels - the one thing - the one and only thing - that directly and effectively reaffirms love, marriage and family as being desirable goals. Just as we forgot about the environment, we've forgotten what Entertainment, particularly Genre Fiction, and most especially romance really is.

Dick and Laurens' view suggests to me that some romances can and do reaffirm the status quo (or perhaps a real or imagined status quo ante, given some people's distaste for contemporary sexual mores) by literally reproducing an existing social order. I'm not saying that that's exactly what Dick and Laurens were arguing, only that it makes me think it's a possible way of viewing the genre. Romance, after all, has often been criticised for being a conservative genre. When heroes (and it usually is heroes) are redeemed by heroines and settle down to become happy husbands and fathers, this can be seen as a reimposition of the values of an existing social order which were temporarily under threat from the rake/outsider's refusal or inability to conform to social norms.

Other analyses of the genre come up with rather different ideas about its core message. Pamela Regis, as I mentioned in my reply to Dick, has stated that

the romance novel itself is a subset of [...] comedy [...]. The writers of Greek New Comedy [...] established the pattern of comedy, which the romance novel would modify [...]. The context of comedy, its setting, is society. Comedy's "movement ... is usually ... from one kind of society to another" ([Frye] Anatomy 163). This, then, is the usual sequence that the reader encounters - an old society (which is often corrupt, decadent, weak, or superannuated), a hero, his intended, paternal opposition to his intended becoming his wife, a removal of that opposition, the hero's triumphal betrothal, and a wedding symbolizing a new, vital society. (28-29)

The romance genre, by giving more importance to the heroine, does change this pattern, but Regis argues that its central myth remains the same. If the central core, or myth, of the genre is about establishing a new society, then, as AgTigress argues, although

the birth and upbringing of children can be used as a very convenient shorthand symbol of the continuing and new social order that is the culmination of a happy and lasting romance/love-affair, and is thus a useful way of indicating that the romance is crowned with success

it need not be the only way in which to indicate it.

Whether romances establish a new social order, or reproduce the existing one, there will tend to be, either explicitly or implicitly, a set of values which underpin those orders. Jennifer Crusie's

feeling on this, which I have expressed loudly and often, is that the romance novel is based on the idea of an innate emotional justice in the universe, that the way the world works is that good people are rewarded and bad people are punished. The mystery genre is based on the same assumption, only there it’s a moral justice, a sense of fair play in human legal interaction: because the good guys risk and struggle, the murderers get punished and good triumphs in a safe world. So in romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice, unconditional love in an emotionally safe world.

What makes the "good people" good and the "bad people" bad? In some novels it may be stated explicitly, at others there may be implicit assumptions made about a set of values which the author and the implied reader share, which will allow them to identify the "good people."¹

Here's an example of the values being stated very explicitly indeed. In Mary Burchell's To Journey Together Elinor Shearn is faced with a choice between two men, Kenneth and Rudi. Rudi has come into a substantial inheritance from an unrelated elderly lady who, after a disagreement, had cut a relative, Anton, out of her will

"And left him nothing?" Elinor was a good deal shocked.
"Left him nothing," Rudi agreed.
"But - Rudi - it wasn't about anything vital, was it? I mean, if she had lived, she would probably have forgiven him and changed round again, wouldn't she? She seemed genuinely fond of him."
'Oh, yes, I expect so," Rudi agreed. "That's just the luck of the thing. Like staking on the wrong card."
"It's nothing of the sort!" Elinor sat up and spoke with energy. "I thought you - you liked Anton."
"Why, of course we do."
"Then why aren't you going to put things right?"
"In what way, Elinor?"
"By re-dividing the money, of course. [...]" (174)

Rudi then proposes marriage to Elinor, and

His attraction was indescribably strong upon her. She knew she had only to turn her head and his lips would be on hers. Already she savoured the moment with a delicious thrill of anticipation. But, even while the feel of his nearness excited and fascinated her, his words blew a strange, chill breath upon her eager enthusiasm. (176)

She then rejects his proposal:

"I just don't love you - or else I shouldn't be so regretfully aware of the weaknesses in you."
He drew away from her sharply.
"You do love me! Only you've set some sort of ridiculously idealized standard of behaviour which you think I should live up to. You mustn't expect people to be heroes, Liebling. Take them as they are and love them with their faults as well as their virtues."
"I do," Elinor said, almost gently. "But I couldn't really love and marry a man I didn't respect."
Most men would have been angry at that point, but Rudi took the implied criticism quietly.
"You don't respect me, then? Because I can keep you in reasonable comfort without working for you?"
"No." She smiled a little. "I'm not so unreasonable as that. There are certain things which test us - and our friends, Rudi - and however much we like them and excuse them and try not to judge them, we assess our friends by the way they react to those tests." [...]
"The will was explict enough," Rudi exclaimed impatiently.
She did turn her head then and look at him, but her expression did not encourage him to kiss her.
"We are not talking the same language, Rudi," she said, in that curiously gentle tone. "You have been a good and charming friend to me [...]. But I am not the wife for you, my dear, and you are not the husband for me. We think and feel too differently ever to be one. That's all there is to it." (176-77)²

I also have the impression that some romances really aren't that concerned about society at all. Instead, their focus is on that "delicious thrill of anticipation" (and the subsequent delicious enjoyment) which result from an "attraction [which] was indescribably strong." Deborah Lutz has suggested that there are actually two different kinds of romance which, although they are placed within the same genre, in fact have what we might call two different "myths":

In her study of early romance genres (from 1674 to 1740), Ros Ballaster creates two categories of use here: didactic love fiction and amatory fiction. [...] Ballaster’s category of didactic love fiction—romance that has a didactic project, is future-directed, and attempts to represent a moral way of living, a “just” kind of love (depending on what constitutes the “morals” of the particular time period in question). On the opposite extreme, the dangerous lover type falls under the rubric of amatory fiction. Amatory fiction cannot be, generally speaking, recuperated morally, nor does it play out in a socially sanctioned realm. (2)

The "moral way of living" that is central to fiction about either the establishing of a new society or reproducing an existing one, is of minor or no concern in "amatory fiction." What matters here is that the lovers feel intense passion for each other. Of course, there can be overlaps since didactic fiction can include sexual tension and, nowadays, explicitly sexual elements, but I still think one can detect a difference between didactic love fiction in which "good people are rewarded and bad people are punished" and amatory fiction, which celebrates sexual passion.

Another suggestion for what's at the core of the genre was made by Phil Mathews, in his recent paper to the PCA conference. He suggests that the genre celebrates not physical passion, but love, and he quoted

screenwriting theorist Phil Parker’s requirements for a love story in film, noting that Parker does not require an HEA. According to Parker, even a love story which ends with the characters apart is a romance, so long as as long as the transformative value of love is upheld. (Jessica)

If the "transformative value of love" is at the core of the genre, all that really matters is the change which love causes in the characters, not the precise consequences (positive or negative) which that love has for either the characters or society. Phil Parker's requirement therefore has to be combined with a requirement for an "optimistic ending" in order for a novel to meet the RWA's criteria for being a "romance".

It seems to me that all of those descriptions of what's at the core of romance have some validity. The romance genre is, after all, a very big one, which means it probably can accommodate quite a lot of differences. Looked at structurally, in terms of core elements, it can be stated that "Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally-satisfying and optimistic ending" (RWA) but if one's looking at the cores of the novels, at their underlying ideologies, perhaps one can separate them out into at least four categories:

• Didactic love fiction which reproduces an existing society and its moral order. The transformative power of love is often shown.
  
• Didactic love fiction which establishes a new society with new, or at least significantly different, moral values. Again, the transformative power of love is often shown.
• Amatory fiction with an optimistic outcome for the lovers.
• Fiction in which the focus is on the transformative power of love, and any changes to, or continuation of, society, or an optimistic outcome, are incidental.
  

Does anyone else have other ideas about what's at the core of the genre, or, perhaps, at the core of some of the novels in the genre?

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• Burchell, Mary. To Journey Together. London: Romance Book Club, n.d. Originally published by Mills & Boon in 1956.
  
• Crusie, Jennifer. "I Know What It Is When I Read It: Defining the Romance Genre."
• Laurens, Stephanie. "Read Romance or Perish: A Biological Perspective on Romance Novels."
• Lutz, Deborah. The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.
• Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2003.

1 A reader who shares an implied set of values with the author may not even notice their presence, but they can be extremely obvious to a reader who does not share them. For example, a pacifist reader may find it jarring to read about protagonists who are deemed heroic because they are willing to fight for their countries, or a socialist reader may find a billionaire tycoon's success troubling rather than merely accepting it as a marker of the hero's suitability as a mate for the heroine.

2 Elinor's reference to being "one" seems to me to recall the words of Genesis 2:24, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh" and various other versions of this statement which exist elsewhere in the Bible, e.g. Matthew 19:3-5:

The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?
And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,
And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?

Perhaps because of that, the passage reminded me of something St Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 6:14: "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?" This is often taken to refer to marriage. It also reminded me of an article written by Jill, of Feministe, about dating:

Even getting to the point of “this is a person worth dating in the first place” is… not easy. Any relationship requires compromise and flexibility, sure; but how and where to compromise on the feminism thing is particularly difficult because we aren’t talking about a political issue here, we’re talking about a way of seeing the world. I also watch a lot of women date men who are, to be kind, Not Great, but they want to date someone and Not Great Guy is there I guess.

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The photos all came from Flickr. The first, on the stripy background, is a "Peanut Butter Bon Bon" photographed by Rox SM. The second is of "vegan chocolate with a strawberry filling" and was photographed by VeganWarrior. The third, with cherry centres, were photographed by Joana Hard. The fourth, "inside," is of a chocolate with a coconut filling and was photographed by Christaface. The photographs were made available under a variety of creative commons licenses.

Heyer 2009: Laura Vivanco: 'The Nonesuch as Didactic Love Fiction'

Laura Vivanco

My academic work is currently focused on the romance genre but I began as a hispanomedievalist, writing about death in fifteenth-century Castile as well as texts such as Celestina and the Spanish sentimental romances which are about love, but which definitely don't conclude with a Harlequin Mills & Boon happy ending.

In ‘“So educational!” she said. “And quite unexceptionable!”: The Nonesuch as Didactic Love Fiction’ I began by suggesting that one could compare The Nonesuch itself to the presents, described in The Nonesuch as “a book, or some trifle,” which Sir Waldo brings to “amuse” Charlotte Underhill during her convalescence. When Mrs Mickleby, learning of these presents, launches a brief attack on “romances,” Ancilla Trent defends some of them as being “well-written” and I believe that Heyer would have been very happy to accept this as a description of her own novels.

Ancilla continues by noting that a puzzle Sir Waldo brought Charlotte is “So educational! [...] And quite unexceptionable!” Again, this is a description which can also be applied to The Nonesuch itself. It may be deemed “quite unexceptionable!” because it is a "sweet" romance that avoids any description of sexual activity beyond a kiss, and its "educational" nature is suggested by the fact that it is a novel in which both the hero and heroine educate others.

The heroine, Ancilla Trent, is a governess and the hero, Sir Waldo, is a role model to the many young men who aspire to emulate his sporting prowess and fashionable mode of dress. Laurie and Tiffany are secondary characters who serve as demonstrations of the negative consequences of a lack of suitable education. Their bad habits and traits were learned easily, but effecting changes in their behaviour is rather more difficult and requires both knowledge and cunning on the part of their teachers. Miss Trent, for example, is described as using “unorthodox” methods, including lies, in order to guide Tiffany. Sir Waldo also uses his cunning to teach the besotted Julian about Tiffany's faults: he subtly provokes her into “betray[ing] the least amiable side of her disposition” with such skill that “His trusting young cousin” remains unaware “that Waldo’s lazy complaisance masked a grim determination to thrust a spoke into the wheel of his courtship.”¹

Heyer herself can perhaps also be thought of as having employed subtle educational methods since she concealed the didactic elements of her novels beneath a highly entertaining outer layer. The authorial approval for the modest yet brave Patience Chartley, and the disapproval of the vain and selfish Tiffany, for example, serve as examples of both the right and the wrong way for a young woman “to go on in society.”

The Nonesuch can thus be classified as what Deborah Lutz terms “didactic love fiction - romance that has a didactic project, is future-directed, and attempts to represent a moral way of living ” rather than as “amatory fiction” which “cannot be, generally speaking, recuperated morally.” Sometimes “the enemy lover” of amatory fiction, “Contrary to all expectation […] appears in […] didactic fiction” (3), but when he is the hero of a work of didactic love fiction he is “set up as dangerous only to then be reformed in the end” (3). This type of hero does appear in some of Heyer's novels:

my youthful fans [...] seem (from their letters) to be convinced that my Ideal Man is the prototype of what I call the Heyer Hero, No. I pattern – a horrid type, whom no woman in the possession of her senses could endure for more than half a day (Aiken Hodge 197)

He does not, however, appear in The Nonesuch, which is therefore more completely didactic in nature.

Perhaps the most obvious aspect of Heyer's didacticism is to be found in her use of historical detail. As is apparent from the size of Jennifer Kloester's Georgette Heyer's Regency World, Heyer did include a lot of details about the Regency period in her novels. The accuracy of these details allow us to date the chronological setting of the novel very precisely to June 1816, a “couple of years” after the death of “Lady Spencer – the one that [...] was mad after educating the poor.” Heyer's attention to accuracy is also suggested by the presence in John Bigland’s Yorkshire volume of The Beauties of England and Wales (1812) of an engraving of what he calls the “Dropping Well” at Knaresborough, which may have formed the inspiration for the one spotted by Heyer’s Lord Lindeth in Leeds. Heyer also recognises the less pleasant aspects of Regency life via her mention of Leeds' charitable organisations and the presence in the novel of a “ragged urchin” who has to be reassured by Patience Chartley that he will not be handed over to “the beadle (an official of whom he seemed to stand in terror.” Again, Heyer seems to have been drawing on contemporary sources, since John Ryley in his Leeds Guide (1806) describes the beadle, along with the Chief Constable, as “personages who are, to vulgar thieves, as terrific as the Chief Justice himself” (89).²

The Nonesuch is a Regency romance populated by fictional characters but Heyer also wrote some works of biographical historical fiction, including The Conqueror (1931) and The Spanish Bride (1940). Heyer seems to have wanted to write more works of biographical historical fiction but after her death her husband revealed that “The penal burden of British taxation, coupled with the clamour of her readers for a new book, made her break off to write another Regency story.” Jennifer Kloester suggested in her presentation that there were other reasons why Heyer eventually concentrated her talents on Regency romances, and she promises that all will be revealed in her forthcoming biography of Heyer. Whatever the precise reasons, I concluded that most of us of who are fans of Heyer's work are probably very glad that circumstances pushed her to write more of these only somewhat “educational” yet “quite unexceptionable” novels.

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1 I didn't mention this in my presentation, but I thought I'd note here that it's interesting that Heyer uses this particular metaphor to describe Sir Waldo's actions. Sir Waldo has a reputation as a nonpareil, a "nonesuch" at driving and it was he who taught Julian to drive. Now he takes a metaphorical spoke and pushes it into the "wheel" of Julian's courtship so as to prevent Julian from hitting a dangerous obstacle and driving off the straight and narrow path towards a respectable and happy marriage. Julian, of course, currently believes that the obstacle is his destination, and he would therefore consider the spoke-poking to be sabotage. For this reason, Sir Waldo has to use all his skill to prevent Julian from realising that his carriage is quite deliberately being redirected.

2 In my presentation I didn't have time to give more details about Heyer's description of Leeds. I hope that if/when the paper is published in full I'll be able to include more about this. I'd also like to acknowledge the assistance I received from Greta Meredith, Assistant Librarian, Thoresby Society, who kindly pointed me in the direction of useful primary and secondary sources about Leeds, and from Louise-Ann Hand, Information Librarian: Local and Family History Library, Leeds City Council, who was a fount of useful information about the streets and inns of early nineteenth-century Leeds.

Didactic Fiction - A Lesson in Submission

Laura Vivanco

I've read a few romances recently which reminded me of Ros Ballaster's distinction between "didactic love fiction" and "erotic fiction." These books were most definitely "didactic love fiction. According to Ros Ballaster

The early eighteenth century [...] saw a split between female-authored pious and didactic love fiction, stressing the virtues of chastity or sentimental marriage, and erotic fiction by women, with its voyeuristic attention to the combined pleasures and ravages of seduction. (33)

For Deborah Lutz

contemporary romance falls under Ballaster’s category of didactic love fiction—romance that has a didactic project, is future-directed, and attempts to represent a moral way of living, a “just” kind of love (depending on what constitutes the “morals” of the particular time period in question). On the opposite extreme, the dangerous lover type falls under the rubric of amatory fiction. (2)

However, given that Lutz also writes of modern romance that, "Contrary to all expectation, the dangerous subject appears in this form of didactic fiction" (3) it's probably best to think of the genre as one which exists along a spectrum, from the most didactic, which endeavour to teach the reader what to look for in a potential spouse, and how to achieve a happy marriage, to those in which the focus is really on the "combined pleasures and ravages of seduction" and in which the genre's promised "happy ever after," if it takes the form of marriage between the protagonists, may be less than convincing.

Some of the books I've been reading lately are vintage Harlequin/Mills & Boons and it's interesting to see the advice handed out by the ones which are at the "didactic love fiction" end of the spectrum.

In Jill Christian's The Tender Bond the heroine, Pamela Jane, has realised that she has feelings for both Dominic and his half-brother, Martin. She's engaged to the latter, but

He did not stir her to tingling excitement as Dominic did. Dominic roused in her the instinct to surrender, to give herself body and soul into the hands of a lord and master. He would dominate her, and there would always be a certain awe in her love, a desire for meek obedience. She would never, never win the upper hand with him.
Martin would never seek to dominate her. She would be the tender wife-mother to him; she would guide and shape both their lives, and he would let her mold him into the pattern she wanted. He would come to her for comfort and courage, and she would kiss him gently and send him out into the world strong again.
Which was it to be? Wife-mother, queen of her home, the comforter, the lady; in the old meaning, the loaf maker? [scroll down this page a little to see the derivation of the term "loaf maker"] Or the wife by capture, the weaker vessel, her husband always in the ascendant; a man to love, honor and obey?
One could not obey if one did not honor. Was the reverse true also, that one could not honor if one did not obey? (157)

Christian's novel was first published in 1961, and the edition I read was published in 1981. Between these years Dobash and Dobash wrote that:

"Love, honour and obey", the phrase is now often deleted from the marriage vows, but still stands as confirmation of the fact that the woman enters into the state of marriage in a secondary, subservient position. This omission may reflect the current concern about the position of women in marriage and society, but it does not reflect a change in the reality of married life. The omission is a bow to the trendy new cause called 'women', but it is a superficial, cosmetic patch which has been placed upon the institution of marriage. An institution which has been blemished for centuries by a patriarchal structure and a hierarchal ideology which has institutionalized the subservience of one half of the population and deified and enshrined that relationship to such an extent that it is almost beyond question or scrutiny.
"Love, honour and obey" is the lot of women in marriage. Care for him, look up to him and do as he wishes - or else. Implied in that vow is the threat of rightful control over those who fail to obey; control may take the form of coercion. Thus, foundations of wife battering are written into the marriage contract. (403)

As Lutz observed, didactic romance "attempts to represent a moral way of living [...] (depending on what constitutes the 'morals' of the particular time period in question)" (2), but even in any "particular time period" there are likely to be starkly contrasting moral opinions.

The passage I quoted from Christian's novel is one I found interesting because of the evidence it offers about attitudes towards femininity and masculinity. It is pretty clear from this and other parts of the novel that Christian believes women should both "love, honour and obey" their husbands and have maternal instincts. Pamela Jane's initial preference for Martin is explained by reference to these maternal instincts:

Up to this hour, the strongly marked maternal side of her nature had ruled her life. The instinct to serve, tend and heal had led her into nursing [...] Martin's dependence made an irresistible appeal to an instinct highly developed and active. To progress from nurse-mother to wife-mother was but a natural step, and one she could have taken with happiness if tonight had not happened.
She had not even suspected the existence of another woman within the kernel of her personality. A woman whose instinct was for a man of power, stronger in mind, body and character, a ruler, a king to whom she could submit joyfully.
Dominic had held out a hand to that other woman, wakened her and led her forth, like a king plucking a beggar-maid from the crowd. [...]
The words of the stately old prayer book came to her mind. "To love and to cherish." That was the man's promise. "Wilt thou obey and serve him, love, honor and keep him?" That was the woman.
Those old churchmen knew human nature through and through. They understood it long before psychology was thought of. They knew a man in love would want to cherish, that a woman in love needed to obey.
But they'd overlooked one thing, those men of old time. That not all human creatures have the same needs, the same nature. Sometimes it is the woman whose love is fulfilled by the promise to love and to cherish. There were men who needed to lose themselves in the strength a woman possesses, to love and to honor, serve and obey as a man obeys his queen. (157-8)

Dominic hopes and prays that "she would see for herself that a complete, truly feminine woman, with all the complex needs of her perfect body and lovely mind, cannot be satisfied forever by a perpetual child" (159).

The impasse is broken due to the scheming of Isabel, who wants Martin for herself. Isabel explains that

" [...] Martin will never be more than a big handsome schoolboy. His wife will have to be the man about the house, make all the big decisions, carry all the final responsibility. [...] You're an ordinary girl; you've got ordinary desires, ordinary needs and feelings. Martin's type wouldn't satisfy you six months. [...] I'm not an ordinary woman. I'll never be a little, adoring wife. [...] At my wedding there'll be no such words as 'obey.' In the old days, I could have been a queen." She smiled as if seeing a picture of herself, a cruelly satisfied expression that reminded Pamela of a fed tiger in a zoo. "I should glory in possessing and ruling Martin, and he'd glory in obeying."
Pamela shuddered. "It's horrible, like the spider and the fly."
"A lot of insects eat their husbands. I don't find that disgusting. I find it interesting. [...]" (176-77)

and

[Isabel] " [...] Can't you see - I'm concerned for him! I love him."
[Pamela] "Love? It sounds more like hatred."
[Isabel] "You wouldn't understand. What do you know of a love that will compel, use force to get what it wants? [...] I can make him eat and like the food that's best for him. He'll thank me in the end."
[Pamela] "You can't force a man to love you."
[Isabel] "Martin will love me because I do force him. He'll love me because I'm strong and completely ruthless [...]" (177-8)

Pamela recognises that

It is true, what Isabel says. He is a handsome boy and I love him as a boy, but that isn't enough to last us through the long years. [...] She is cleverer than I thought, that Isabel. It's she who has the eternal fountain to offer him, with her strange, possessive - and to me, terrible - love. She was right to be concerned about his future with me. (180-81)

In her acknowledgement that Isabel is right, and that "not all human creatures have the same needs, the same nature," Jill Christian may be showing some tolerance for individuals like Isabel and Martin but it's nonetheless the case that female dominance and male submission are depicted as reversing gender roles in an unnatural (not "ordinary") manner that seems repellent and "terrible" to "ordinary" people. The submissive man is described as less than a real man: he is a "boy". The submissive woman and dominant male, on the other hand, are considered to be the norm.

In addition, the dichotomy between dominance and submission within marriage leaves no space for equality. Christian does allow for the possibility of very temporary shifts in roles. Pamela Jane, who feels she has "two women" inside her, "the one desiring to uplift and comfort, the other needing to surrender and accept sweet defeat with joy" (170) is going to be given the opportunity to "uplift and comfort": "It came to her that Dominic needed the mother-woman in her perhaps even more than Martin. He, too, was lonely, frustrated and vulnerable; he had his wounds of the spirit" (171). This temporary granting of power to the "feminine" woman is, however, couched not in the language of dominance and submission, but that of service, which is hardly threatening to traditional gender roles.

The authorial commentary on the action and the particular lessons the novel seeks to convey to the reader, may make the didacticism of this particular romance difficult for a 21st century reader to miss, but contemporary romances can also be highly didactic. I'm planning to put up a post about one of them next week. [Edited to add: A few other things have come up, but I promise I will get back to this topic.]

• Ballaster, Ros. Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
• Christian, Jill. The Tender Bond. 1961. Don Mills, Ontario: Harlequin, 1981. [First published by Mills & Boon under the title Nurse to Captain Andy.
• Dobash, R. Emerson & Russell P. Dobash. "Love, honour and obey: Institutional ideologies and the struggle for battered women." Crime, Law and Social Change 4.1 (1977): 403-15.
  
• Lutz, Deborah. The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

My Route From Here

Laura Vivanco

Last week I was in the library, doing research, and it so happened that first I re-read Deborah Lutz's The Dangerous Lover, about "The dangerous beloved [who] hides a secret melancholy interiority that flashes out in passionate violence and rage" (2) and then turned to Julia Wood's article about how women in violent relationships seek to understand them through

western culture’s primary gender narrative, which prescribes and normalizes dominance and superiority for men and deference and dependence for women. Participants also relied on romance narratives – which entailed both fairy tale and dark versions – to make sense of violence in their relationships. (239)

Wood isn't writing specifically about romance novels (though the report here about her article seems to have misunderstood the term "romance narratives" and assumed Wood meant "romance novels"). Wood argues that "Humans rely on narratives to make sense of their lives" (241). These "Narratives are not strictly personal accounts, or stories; instead, they are decisively social, which is to say culturally constructed, sustained, reproduced, and sometimes altered" (241). We can think, for example, of Sternberg's theory of love as a story. According to Wood, "Narratives are most urgently sought when experience does not make sense" (242), such as when a partner becomes abusive:

Immersed in this incoherence, women search out a way to narrate themselves and their experiences. One option is to interpret a relationship so that it is consistent with the culturally favored romance narrative and the gender narrative that infuses it. Entirely compatible with the fairy tale view of romance, the primary gender narrative casts men as domineering, superior, and aggressive and casts women as subordinate, forgiving, loyal, and accommodating. (243)

An alternative narrative to which some of the women interviewed by Wood turned was

one that constructs violence as typical in romantic relationships. The dark script claims that it is normal for men to have ‘bad spells,’ [...] and it is normal for romantic relationships to be hurtful to women. The dark romance narrative also insists that abuse and unhappiness are not reasons to abandon the relationships because women are supposed to be forgiving and because they need men to be complete. (253)

In addition,

Framing both versions of the romance narrative were knowledge and acceptance of the primary gender narrative authorized in western culture. This gender narrative stipulates that it is normal/appropriate for men to be controlling and dominating, and it is normal/appropriate for women to defer and subordinate themselves and their interests. (247)

Lutz explains the figure of the dangerous lover ("The dangerous beloved [who] hides a secret melancholy interiority that flashes out in passionate violence and rage" (2)) in terms of understanding the self: "The dangerous lover narrative makes the [...] argument about ontology [...] that our 'true' selves reside in what is most strange and enemy-like, in the dangerous other" (x-xi). I have no doubt that this is a valid approach to the figure of the dangerous lover, but so is Wood's, and viewed through the analysis presented in Wood's article, the dangerous lover would also play a part in legitimising particular "romance narratives" which, in turn, can be used by some women to explain/legitimise their experiences within abusive relationships.

This sharp difference in possible readings re-echoed in my mind when I read Meriam's recent post about romance and politics:

I’ve always considered romance a bloodthirsty genre, rarely shying away from the gory details of a violent death or torture scene (recalling an early Nora Roberts’ thriller still makes me blanch). I’ve read romance novels that deal with rape and domestic abuse and child molestation. Blood and lust go hand in hand with love and romance. [...]

For such a highly politicized genre (I think romance is all about the negotiation of power) romance is also a genre that tends to steer clear of overtly political stances, or straightforward social commentary.

Aoife responded that

The problem with introducing age-differences, political views, race and social commentary is that:

a) They are polarising. A significant number of readers are turned off by the inclusion of these in a genre they read for escape.

But what happens if, as is the case for RfP, "A lot of romances strike me as political, though I’m not always sure the author is aware of the strength of the subtext"? How then do you find "escape" when the texts you read present you with subtexts you find politically or culturally problematic? I also wonder if the fact that so many of them have been written by authors, and for readers, who live in a different cultural context from mine often makes those subtexts even more obvious (because less normal and comfortable) to me. As Jules Jones recently wrote,

The US and the UK have a lot of things in common, including (more or less) a language. But now and then you trip over something where the culture is so wildly different that people on one side or the other may not even be able to grasp how utterly different the other culture is.

Whatever the reason, I feel like I'm tripping over quite a few things in romances. I'm getting so sensitised to the many elements which I read as political but which for the target audience are presumably the "norm" or are aspirational elements, that I feel distanced from a lot of romances and am finding it more and more difficult to read them for "escape." Instead, I can't stop myself thinking about the subtexts of these romances.

I picked up Mary Balogh's No Man's Mistress recently, skipped to the back (I sometimes read the endings of romances first when I'm unsure of what to expect) and was horrified by this scene in which the hero, Ferdinand, punishes Kirby, the man who forced the heroine into prostitution:

Kirby merely covered his injured nose with both hands.
"I am a peaceable man," he wailed.
And so it was punishment pure and simple. And coldly and scientifically meted out. It would have been easy to render him unconscious with a few powerful blows. And it would have been easy to pity a man whose physical stature and condition gave him no chance whatsoever of winning the fight. But Ferdinand did not allow himself either the luxury of fury or the weakness of pity.
This was not for himself or for the spectators. This was not sport.
This was for Viola.
He had said he was her champion. He would avenge her, then, in the only way he could, inadequate as it was - with his physical strength.
She was his lady, and this was for her.
The spectators had grown strangely quiet and Ferdinand's knuckles on both hands were red and raw by the time he judged Daniel Kirby to be within the proverbial inch of his life. Only then did he draw back his right fist and drive it up beneath the man's chin with enough force to send him into oblivion. (332)

I'd call that torture. According to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as [...] punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, [...] when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

Technically Ferdinand is not acting in an official capacity, but the fact that this scene takes place in the presence of "fifty or so [...] chosen witnesses [...] By now there is probably no one in the ton who does not know. [...] Everyone knows that the villain who preyed upon you has been publicly humiliated and published" (344-45) means that in the world in which the novel is set, he is the instrument of justice. It's not an uncommon in romance novels for the hero to be cast as the defender of the heroine and the one who administers violence to those who have attacked her, but it's hardly unproblematic. As Elizabeth has observed

Men’s protection can be welcome, valuable, even life saving. Yet in the end, this chivalry reinforces the idea that women are only safe if under male protection. The flip side of this coin is that women outside of male protection are fair game, a threat that is often targeted in very particular ways at openly lesbian women. Either way, women’s voice in consent is lost. Ignored by this equation is the fact that sexual violence is a crime overwhelmingly committed by intimates and acquaintances.

Or as Wood puts it,

The established gender narrative defines women as needing men. Women are waiting to be rescued, waiting to have their lives and themselves completed by a man. [...] They are socialized to believe that their value and happiness depend on ‘catching a man.’ Women who accept the gender narrative that links their self-worth inextricably to having a male partner are at risk for believing that they must sustain romantic relationships, even destructive ones. (243)

I've always been aware of the variety that exists within the genre and I know that I cannot possibly read every single romance written, so even if I avoid the novels whose depictions of gender roles, violence or politics I find problematic, I can still find lots of romances to read and enjoy on an emotional level, and the ones that I find problematic may still provide fodder for thought and analysis. However, I'm not sure that a blog's the best place for me to do that analysis. I know that by "thinking out loud" as I'm doing in this post, I may offend some people (e.g. readers who loved Balogh's novel), and because a blog post is written relatively quickly, I won't have had the time or resources to put together all the evidence required to bring sub-texts to the surface and fully examine them. In addition, I think I'd prefer to focus on other aspects of the genre or individual romances which I find more enjoyable, but even with them I'm finding that I want to spend more time and exploring the issues and the novels in detail than is really desirable on a blog.

Looking back on my blog posts here, I've noticed that I've gradually been writing more and more in individual posts, and posting less frequently. I think I've now reached the point where I'll only write long blog posts occasionally, and spend more time writing full-length essays (in the hope that by the time I've finished them, there will be a suitable journal in which to publish them). I'll have to see if I can relearn the art of writing short blog posts on topics which don't ask to be expanded into essays.

• Balogh, Mary. No Man's Mistress. New York: Dell, 2001.
• Lutz, Deborah. The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.
• Wood, Julia T. “The Normalization of Violence in Heterosexual Romantic Relationships: Women’s Narratives of Love and Violence.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 18.2 (2001): 239-261.

The first painting is Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, from Wikipedia. Whatever the original meaning of it was, I read it as an individual looking forwards and spotting the issues which, although they're usually submerged beneath the sea of fog, sometimes partially emerge from it and hint at the amount of subtext that lurks below.

The second painting is "Chivalry" (1885) by Sir Frank Dicksee, from Wikimedia Commons.

Eric Rereads the Romance

Laura Vivanco

Eric's had a review article on romance criticism published, so I thought I'd discuss its contents here. The full reference is Selinger, Eric Murphy. “Rereading the Romance.” Contemporary Literature 48.2 (2007): 307-24 and if you have an Athens password you can read it online here.

Eric defends the genre, observing that the fact "That romance novels can, themselves, display intelligence, worthy politics, and aesthetic accomplishment remains one of the best-kept secrets in literary study, however easy to find and read the books themselves may be" (308-09) and noting that "Romance novels have rarely, if ever, been treated by scholars as aesthetic objects, but rather as fungible, even standardized products" (313).¹ The article is, however, primarily a review of the following recent works on the romance genre:

• Juliet Flesch, From Australia with Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels. Fremantle, Australia: Curtin University Books, 2004.
• Sally Goade, ed., Empowerment versus Oppression: Twenty-First Century Views of Popular Romance Novels. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Scholars, 2007.
• Deborah Lutz, The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2006.
• Lynn S. Neal, Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006.
• Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003.

Eric begins by putting this new romance criticism in its historical context, and very kindly mentions me and a comparison I've made in the past between medieval Castilian cancionero love poetry (which was, for a time, the butt of many an insult from the academic community) and the modern romance genre (312-13). As this is my blog post, I'm going to expand on this extremely minor point from Eric's essay, which I am sure he only made because he's kind and wanted to refer to as many of the new wave of romance scholars as possible.

The typical criticisms of cancionero love poetry were summarised by Keith Whinnom, who quoted some of the insults that dripped from the pen of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, who attacked both poets and poetry:

"versificadores débiles y amanerados", [...] "la mente de sus autores, extraviada por el mal gusto" [...] "de más interés histórico que poético" [...] "el convencionalismo a que todos rendían parias" [...] "ausencia de verdadero pensamiento." (Whinnom 9)

"weak and mannered writers of verse" [...] "the mind of their authors, gone astray down the path of bad taste" [...] "of more historical than poetic interest" [...] "the conventionality to which they all rendered tribute" [...] "lack of any real thought"

Whinnom argued that the criticism was wrong, because "ha sido equivocado el modo de aproximarse a la cuestión" ("it has approached the question in the wrong way"; 11) and he suggested that cancionero love poetry should instead be judged in terms of its own style and aims, not by comparison with other forms of poetry which are more varied in their vocabulary, or appear to the critics to be more realistic and sincere in their expression of emotion.

Eric observes that early critics of the romance genre similarly conducted their work while under the influence of certain prejudices about what literature ought to be about, what made it good and what its purpose was: "the first twenty years of serious analysis of romance fiction treated it and its readers with ambivalence at best, and often with undisguised contempt" (309-310). Janice Radway, for example, critiqued the genre because it "fails to supply the reader with 'a comprehensive program for reorganizing her life in such a way that all needs might be met'" (Selinger 310), yet, as Eric points out, "As a rule, comprehensive programs for reorganizing life are the stuff of self-help books, theology, and political manifestos, rather than literature" (310).

Eric then contrasts the newer works he reviews with the older works of romance criticism. He finds that Pamela Regis's book "answers the need for an expansive, theoretically grounded account of the genre and bids fair to be the standard introductory text for romance-fiction study in the coming decade" (311) and "Even those primarily or exclusively interested in ideological, psychological, and philosophical approaches to romance fiction will want to have Regis’s precision tools in their kit" (313).

In Lynne S. Neal's book about inspirational romance "the appeal, aesthetics, and cultural work of such romances receive her attention, since Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction attends primarily to readers and reading practices rather than to texts" (314-15), bringing "a new, dispassionate aplomb to the ethnographic analysis of readers" (316).

Empowerment versus Oppression: Twenty-First Century Views of Popular Romance Novels is a collection of essays edited by Sally Goade. These include an essay by Guy Mark Foster in which he "takes up 'black women romance novelists and the taboo of interracial desire,' arguing that 'no other literary form has thus far attempted to take up the vexed question of interracial sex as it relates to black women' with 'the commitment and purpose' of popular romance" (317).² Emily Haddad's essay "looks at how the enduring subgenre of 'Arab abduction romances' changed in the years just before and after 9/11" (317). Jayashree Kamble's "Female Enfranchisement and the Popular Romance: Employing an Indian Perspective" "reports on the ways the Indian readers whom Kamble surveyed in 2005 both perceive and use the genre" (317).

Eric describes Juliet Flesch's From Australia with Love as "The most fully developed exploration of romance from a comparative perspective, at least so far, [...] a crisp historical inquiry into “whether there is such a thing as ‘Australian romance’” (318).

Deborah Lutz is a contributor to Sally Goade's volume and the author of a book that's been discussed on this blog previously and which Eric refers to as "a radically new way to attend to the genre, and one as needed as the aesthetic turn we find in Regis" (324).

Some other newer works of romance scholarship are also mentioned in passing:

• “What ‘Race’ Is the Sheik? Rereading a Desert Romance,” Susan L. Blake’s "superb new historical reading of the E. M. Hull best seller in light of the debates over race and divorce in the 1910s and 1920s" (316) in Doubled Plots [2003], edited by Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden.

• The "groundbreaking [...] economically focused" (316) “Desire and the Marketplace: A Reading of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower” by Charles H. Hinnant, also in Doubled Plots.

• The "delightful" (316) “What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Book Like This?” by Stephanie Burley, "an exploration of 'homoerotic reading and popular romance'" (316), again from Doubled Plots.
  

• Sarah S. G. Frantz's "'Expressing' Herself: The Romance Novel and the Feminine Will to Power" in Scorned Literature (2002) in which she "draws on Michel Foucault and Hélène Cixous for an inquiry into romance and the 'feminine will to power.' Her analysis of romance novel scenes in which the hero breast-feeds from a nursing heroine is as vivid and counterintuitive as the scenes themselves, and through old-fashioned close reading of such scenes, she demonstrates the subtlety with which authors have invited readers to identify across boundaries of both gender and power" (317).

----

• Selinger, Eric Murphy. “Rereading the Romance.” Contemporary Literature 48.2 (2007): 307-24.
  
• Whinnom, Keith. La poesía amatoria de la época de los Reyes Católicos. Durham Modern Languages Series, Hispanic Monographs, 2. Durham: UP, 1981.

1 To go off-topic, the word "fungible" is one of those which comes up at FreeRice.Com. FreeRice "has a custom database containing thousands of words at varying degrees of difficulty. There are words appropriate for people just learning English and words that will challenge the most scholarly professors". To play the game, an individual has to "click on the answer that best defines the word. [....] If you get it right, you get a harder word. If wrong, you get an easier word. [...] For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program."

2 There may be "commitment and purpose", but, as noted in a recent newspaper article on race and the romance genre by Brian Miller, "A Billion-Dollar Romance Novel Industry, And Its Lonely Black Author: The Fabio business finds itself short on diversity", published in the Seattle Weekly yesterday, romances by black authors are usually segregated, shelved in African American sections. This tends to leave the romance sections of bookshops filled with books among whose "covers, where yearning maidens cling to strapping lads with gilded locks, it's nearly impossible to find an African-American face. Nor any Latina features, nor any Asian figures, nor any sign that love exists for nonwhite women."

The Dangerous Lover

That's the title of Deborah Lutz's recent book (full title The Dangerous Lover; Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative ). The central thesis of the book concerns the dangerous lover, and it seems to me that what Lutz has to say about this character type illuminates the discussion we've been having about risk, eroticism and romances which function on a mythical level. There's a synopsis and a link to a pdf of the introduction and first chapter available, but to give you a flavour of what the book's about, here are some quotations:

Standing always under the sign of longing is the dangerous lover—the one whose eroticism lies in his dark past, his restless inquietude, his remorseful and rebellious exile from comfortable everyday living. His ubiquity marks him as always central to what we mean when we talk about existence and the modern self. (2006: ix)

Caught up in an everyday world of all that appears closest and most familiar to us, we believe that our existence can be explained by what we know well. But ontologically, our most authentic selves lie in what is most mysterious and strange — what appears to be furthest from us. Confronted with authentic being, we feel a sense of terror in the face of the unknown. The dangerous lover narrative makes the same argument about ontology—that our “true” selves reside in what is most strange and enemy-like, in the dangerous
other. (2006: x-xi)

The romance heroine finds her most authentic self at the heart of what seems at first most foreign and outside her way of being—an arrogant, hateful other. Romance moves always toward discovery and approaching the impenetrable: what is uncovered is authentic existence in the uncanny other; at the very heart of what appears to be not ours comes what we must fully own as ours. (2006: xi)

In her study of early romance genres (from 1674 to 1740), Ros Ballaster creates two categories of use here: didactic love fiction and amatory fiction. [...] Ballaster’s category of didactic love fiction—romance that has a didactic project, is future-directed, and attempts to represent a moral way of living, a “just” kind of love (depending on what constitutes the “morals” of the particular time period in question). On the opposite extreme, the dangerous lover type falls under the rubric of amatory fiction. Amatory fiction cannot be, generally speaking, recuperated morally, nor does it play out in a socially sanctioned realm. The anarchical rebelliousness of the dangerous lover narrative — its moments of frozen inarticulateness — undercut a didactic project. In its aestheticization of failure, dangerous love has its foundations in the finitude of being, on the edge of silence, in fragmentation, and in disintegration. Dangerous love plays with the outside — of possibility, life in society, happiness. (2006: 2)

On some level the dangerous lover hides in myth; he retreats from present being into being an other from the past. And to love a dangerous lover is also to step into the fantasy of mythology and its truth, seemingly frozen yet always shifting. To retreat into myth is to step out of the present and re-create a past, larger than life. (2006: 4)

His seductiveness can be located here: the one who loves him can grasp the power of impossibility; she can make the world possible by being, herself, the plenitude, the immanent meaning of existence for him. The hero’s belief in his brilliance, his superior, misanthropic position above all others and their run-of-the-mill lives, is so very believable to the heroine that to change this decimation to plenitude becomes her reason for being. (2006: 5)

The dangerous lover narrative exemplifies, in its movements and its central concerns, the angst of being itself. The unfathomable mystery of existence in the world and the longing it perpetuates—the longing to fully be, to be sure what to do with the world that surrounds us—is the same desire the heroine of the romance has for the dangerous beloved. This is the desire to desire; it is desire per se. (2006: 20)

Oh, and she mentions Laura Kinsale's essay in Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women in one of the endnotes:

As has been argued about Jane Eyre, often the heroine’s search to read the hero is a search for her own dark depths, her perhaps angry, sexual, insane, powerful, and free side, expressed by the hero, her double. To some extent, the dangerous lover always acts as a placeholder for desire. An investigation of this would be another historical trajectory entirely, one that waits to be written. An analogy is Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic, which charts the ways Jane’s anger and sexuality are expressed through Bertha as her double. Also, Laura Kinsdale [sic] discusses the hero as double for the heroine in contemporary romance in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women. (2006: 96)

I did have some relatively minor quibbles about the book, which I mentioned on the Romance Scholar listserv, but these were about small details, not about the central thesis of the book, which is interesting and, I think, very relevant to the discussions we've been having lately.