The Return of Heathcliff

Laura Vivanco

Kate Walker's latest romance, The Return of the Stranger, is based on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and on Saturday 17 September she gave a talk about them at the 2011 Brontë Festival of Women's Writing (organised by the Brontë Society and the Brontë Parsonage Museum). As stated in the programme, Kate is "A huge admirer of the Brontës, she wrote her MA thesis on the work of Charlotte and Emily Brontë." I was very pleased to be able to interview Kate on behalf of those of us who couldn't get to Haworth.
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Laura: When I first learned that you'd be writing a romance based on Wuthering Heights as part of a four-book Harlequin Mills & Boon series (The Powerful and the Pure) based on classic novels I thought you perhaps had the hardest job of the four authors. They based theirs on Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. You have Wuthering Heights and although I suppose it's possible to argue that Wuthering Heights fits the Romance Writers of America's definition of a romance because it has "a central love story" (RWA) and "the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love" (RWA), by the time Catherine and Heathcliff are finally united they're both dead and have brought misery to almost everyone in their vicinity.

Who came up with the idea for the series and how did you end up writing a romance based on Wuthering Heights?

Kate Walker: Thanks for inviting me to do this interview Laura – it’s been fascinating wearing both of my ‘hats’ as an academic and a writer of popular romance to look at Wuthering Heights and answer your questions.

OK – so the idea for writing the mini series based on these classic books of romantic fiction was originally put to me by my editor. It was one of the editorial ideas that were being considered at the time and I’d recently written a book in a series on the Greek Myths which had been very popular, so with that and my MA in English Lit, I suppose I was a pretty natural choice as one of the authors involved. Originally, I was asked to write a book inspired by Mrs Gaskell’s North and South – I suppose because of the hugely successful TV production here in the UK, but I wondered if perhaps American readers might think this was the North and South by John Jakes that was televised starring Patrick Swayze. I was working on The Proud Wife at the time and there was a bit of a rethink, then next I heard was that they now wanted me to do Wuthering Heights. I’d recently appeared on a panel discussing the Brontës and Romantic Fiction at an event organised by The Brontë Society and of course Mills and Boon know about my MA thesis on Emily and Charlotte’s childhood writings and how they reflected in the adult novels they wrote.

So Wuthering Heights was mine – I think I’d have been very jealous of anyone who’d been asked to do this one! But yes, it was a problematic novel to work on as a romance writer. I’ve said several times that I don’t really believe it is a love story – it’s hugely romantic if you’re defining romance in terms of powerful, passionate emotions between a man and a woman, but it’s more a novel about passion and possession and power than a long-lasting love that would translate easily into the happy-ever-after ending romances promise the readers – the reason readers come back to them again and again. But the love these two share is ultimately a destructive one – it is a wild, ferocious storm of emotion and one that, as you say, is so self-absorbed that it has brought misery to so many others in their vicinity. It’s interesting that the real love story – that between younger Catherine and Hareton – seems so mild in comparison that in so many film adaptations it gets left out completely and yet this is a love of real strength that flowers in spite of the very rough ground it grows on and both Catherine 2 and Hareton defy the dangers of Heathcliff’s rage quietly and steadily as they grow to care for each other. In the end, the wild passion brings nothing but destruction, while the love story promises the hope of rebuilding a future. Together.

So that’s some of what I had to contend with - giving my Heath and Kat the understanding and strength of love, forgiveness, sharing while trying not to diminish them in the passionate, tempestuous love that readers remember from Wuthering Heights. I also had to make two characters who some readers find totally hateful, cruel and even downright evil, believably sympathetic and ultimately loveable.

Laura: You mention in your letter to the reader that when you were a child your

teacher started to read us Wuthering Heights. We only ever heard the start of the story - up to the moment when Heathcliff turned his back on Cathy and walked away to make his fortune - so I didn't know what happened until I found a copy on my mother's bookshelves [...] I had always hoped that Wuthering Heights would have a happy-ever-after for Cathy and Heathcliff. But even from the start I had somehow known that that wasn't going to be. (2)

Heathcliff has often been described, along with Mr Darcy and Mr Rochester, as a romantic hero, but I wonder if, in order to turn him into a romance hero, a reader has to adopt the position of Isabella Linton who, as Heathcliff says, eloped with him "under a delusion [...] picturing in me a hero of romance" (Chapter 14), having dismissed Catherine's warnings:

'I wouldn't be you for a kingdom [...] !' Catherine declared, emphatically: and she seemed to speak sincerely. 'Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is: an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation: an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. [...] It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don't imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He's not a rough diamond - a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. [...] avarice is growing with him a besetting sin. [...] There's my picture: and I'm his friend. [...]' (Chapter 10)

Is he a good template on which to base a Mills & Boon hero? Mills & Boon state that in the line of novels you write for,

When the hero strides into the story he's a powerful, ruthless man who knows exactly what - and who - he wants and he isn't used to taking no for an answer! Yet he has depth and integrity.

Kate Walker: Your question makes me think of the many different ways I’ve ‘read’ Heathcliff over my lifetime, and more rereadings of Wuthering Heights than I can count. When I first heard the story of Heathcliff – just the beginning as you’ve described above – I fell head over heels with the hero of that story. I saw him so much as the wronged victim, lost, orphaned, treated appallingly by Hindley. It wasn’t until I found the whole book and read the complete story that my opinions started to change. I could see exactly why my schoolteacher had stopped where he did – and never finished the story for his class of 10-11 year olds. And yes, I think that early feeling, seeing him as a romantic hero, does have to be “under a delusion [...] picturing in me a hero of romance.”

Ever since then, each time I read the book I feel slightly different about Heathcliff. He’s brutal, cruel, he treats his own son appallingly, he hangs Isabella’s dog – when I said I was reworking Wuthering Heights, it was amazing how many people cited that as a reason to detest him rather than the way he treats the people who have the misfortune to be part of his plan of revenge and then his savagery after the loss of Cathy.

That’s when he ceases to be a hero for me now – when he loses depth and integrity. If I create a hero who is looking for revenge then he needs to take out his revenge on the person who deserves it, not her sister-in-law or her daughter or someone else who is linked to the person who hurt him, but isn’t directly involved in the hurt he has suffered. So my Heath can take revenge on Kat’s brother Joe, who, like Hindley, treated him appallingly and in Wuthering Heights Hindley is the author of his own downfall.

Writing a Modern Romance for Mills and Boon today, the trick is to make the hero ambiguous and open to different interpretations so that the reader initially believes that he is “an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation: an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone.” But in reality he “conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior!” Heathcliff is as Cathy describes him – “He's not a rough diamond - a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man” but he has intense romantic appeal in that so many people say ‘who wouldn’t want to be loved like that?’ - but that’s a dangerous, destructive ‘love’ even if it is intensely passionate.

So – both as a writer and as a person, I couldn’t justify Heathcliff’s behaviour, no matter how badly he has been treated in his youth; the revenge he exacts – and the people he destroys as a result – are out of all proportion. I need to have a hero who is a man of honour, who is a powerful, ruthless man who knows exactly what he wants but who doesn’t lie, cheat, hurt people just for hurting’s sake. Ambiguous maybe – but not downright cruel and evil.

Laura: I don't want to spoil the fun for readers who'd like to compare the two novels, so I shan't discuss this in detail, but it struck me that in addition to the changes you've made to the personality of Heathcliff, you've also made very significant changes to Edgar Linton and (I don't think this is a spoiler since it's revealed very early on) in a sense you've also literally sacrificed him so that your Kat can have her happy ending. Did you to some extent merge Edgar Linton with Linton Heathcliff to produce your Arthur Charlton? It certainly seemed to me that your Kat is a mixture of both Catherines, and that your Heath is a mixture of Heathcliff and Hareton. If so, it seemed to me that you had some textual justification for writing them like this because Linton bears a "strong [...] resemblance" (Chapter 19) to his uncle Edgar, the Catherines are mother and daughter and share the same name and, towards the end of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff says that "Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of my youth" (Chapter 33).

Kate Walker: One of the problems of writing a very much shorter book and one that obviously cannot possibly have the depth of Emily Brontë’s amazing original is that there isn’t space in 55,000 words to develop anything more than the central plot, or to bring in a large cast of secondary characters. (Though interestingly several people have commented on the fact that The Return of The Stranger actually has a bigger ‘cast’ than I usually deal in!) Some characters had to go, some had to be changed. Wuthering Heights has so many deaths in it but more than one would overload a short romance, but if Kat and Heath were to have their happy ending, I had to deal with the question of her marriage to Edgar/Arthur – and do so within the short space of the timeframe of a romance. No chance for 31 years and several generations as Emily Brontë had. Just as I’ve always had ambiguous feelings about Heathcliff, I’ve never seen Edgar as a sweet, lovable, caring man who was going to be a good husband to Cathy. When we first see Edgar, he and his sister have been fighting over a puppy – “That was their pleasure – to fight over a heap of warm hair, and each begin to cry because both, after struggling to get it, refused to take it” (Chapter 6). They hurt the puppy in this exchange – shades of Heathcliff’s callous treatment of Isabella’s dog. And later Edgar can be petulant, petty, mean . . So I already had a feeling of Edgar having a lot in common with his nephew Linton – and really Emily Brontë doesn’t show either of the Lintons as being anything but spoilt and pretty selfish. So I could combine all of these characteristics – with the strong possibility that one in particular might apply to Linton Heathcliff to create the character of Kat’s husband.

I think you’re right in that yes the two Catherines could be said to merge in Kat, and Heathcliff and Hareton could be said to merge into Heath. Catherine Earnshaw certainly needs softening - she is a very difficult, wild and selfish character. Though it was never that deliberate or thought out. I had created my central characters, and then they took on a life of their own – but because I needed to add in those ‘lovable’ elements to make their happy ending work, they inevitably ended up with aspects of the two people who in the original novel are capable of a loving relationship. It’s interesting that you’ve read it in this way when you are studying the book objectively and I would say that I didn’t rationalise these elements, but was working creatively - and now I can see that yes they are there. It’s one of the questions that fascinates me with my two ‘hats’ on – how much of the symbolism and the elements that critics analyse so much were deliberate planning on Emily’s part, and how much was just the burning flow of her imagination working on a deeper instinctive level.

Laura: The Harlequin/Mills & Boon line you write for is characterised by "smouldering intensity and red-hot desire." There's certainly intensity in the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Catherine, for example, states that

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. (Chapter 9)

However, this isn't exactly the same as 'red-hot desire' and Patsy Stoneman has recently argued that

The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff [...] follows the many intense brother-sister relationships found in the Romantic poetry of Byron and Shelley, and is inevitably tragic since it cannot be consummated except in nostalgia for childhood or anticipation of death.

I noticed that in your novel it's revealed that, at the point when Heath left Kat, her feelings for him were childlike: "He had become a man when she was still lingering in girlhood - still in so many ways a child - so that she hadn't recognised what was growing between them" (135-36). What's your view of the nature of the relationship between the original Catherine and Heathcliff?

Kate Walker: There’s a lot of evidence for Patsy Stoneman’s argument – if you study a timeline for Wuthering Heights, Catherine is only just 15 when Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights to make his fortune. Her birthdate is around 28^th May 1765 and Heathcliff leaves about August 1780. Catherine is in fact only 18 when she dies. And Heathcliff is just about 20. So they are very young in the early part of the story. Some film versions and TV adaptations have made their early relationship a very sexual one, but the passion and devotion inspired by longing and non-consummation of their relationship is perfectly believable too. Today we tend to think in terms of passion being sexual but sexual anticipation, sexual tension builds the intensity harder and stronger in a story as in life.

There’s a possibility of interpreting Catherine’s ‘madness’ and decline to her death as being strongly connected with her pregnancy as well as the emotional upheaval of Heathcliff’s return etc. If Cathy and Edgar marry about 12^th March 1783, and she dies giving birth to young Cathy, I have felt that there it is possible to read into the book the fact that in marriage, coming up against the reality of sexual love between a man and a woman, she longs for the ‘innocence’ and intensity of the relationship of their youth and the loss of the freedom of their childhood.

Again this is something that I’ve read differently at different stages of my own life – when I first saw a TV production of Wuthering Heights it was the 1967 version with a young Ian McShane as Heathcliff. I was young and impressionable too - and I couldn’t imagine how anyone could not want to go to bed with him! But even at 25, McShane was older than Heathcliff ever was when Cathy was alive. But then I didn’t register quite how young Cathy and Heathcliff were. It wasn’t until I studied the book as a critic rather than swallowed it whole as a passionate reader that I started to wonder and question. I suspect that if Heathcliff and Cathy had slept together then their relationship would not have been lived at the intensity it is. And if Heathcliff knows that Edgar has been Cathy’s lover his jealousy will be all the more savage. Certainly I found that this worked very well for me with the characters I had created and the relationship that developed between them.

This all of course begs the question of what Emily Brontë, spinster, clergyman’s daughter, knew of sex. I still remember when I did my MA thesis reading a totally serious discussion of Emily having a French lover – possibly one she met in Belgium – called Louis Parensell. This was in fact the result of Virginia Moore misreading the handwritten title of Emily’s poem Love’s Farewell. So we don’t know - but there is a lot of the same ardent yearning and passion in Emily’s sister Charlotte’s relationship with M Heger so she might have drawn on some of that for inspiration.

I used the fact that Cathy was so young when Heathcliff left as part of the story of The Return of The Stranger because it’s in the original and because it fitted well with adding another dimension to the reason Heathcliff left. The famous words “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff” (Chapter 9) that Catherine Earnshaw declares were perfectly justifiable when they were written – even more when you consider that Wuthering Heights is in fact a historical novel, set over 70 years before the date when Emily wrote it. It would have degraded her to marry the servant Hindley had made him. But that wouldn’t fit with the 21^st century mentality. We would expect love to conquer all, no matter what position in life the hero and heroine hold. And I couldn’t make Heath stay under Joe’s oppressive rule for too long or he wouldn’t appear heroic if he didn’t fight back. But if he went away to make something of himself and because he knew that the feelings he was having for this young girl were sexual then that fitted.

Laura: You've made your hero Brazilian and called him Heath Montanha (which means "mountain," I think). I thought that was quite clever, and it also occurred to me that you have some textual authorisation for giving Heathcliff a new nationality. After all, Nelly Dean once suggested to him that

Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week's income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors, and brought to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my birth. (Chapter 7)

Indeed, your own novel recalls that passage when Heath states that "you were the one who once told me that my father could have been an emperor of China" (29). In addition, the original novel is told by one narrator (Mr Lockwood) who is recounting the details told to him by another narrator (Nelly Dean) and questions have been raised about their reliability. Did these things make you feel more comfortable about creating your own version of the story?

Kate Walker: There’s lot of justification for considering that Heathcliff is not English, that he might have a partly or totally foreign heritage. In fact, because he is so dark in appearance there is the possibility that he was black. And the latest actor to be cast as Heathcliff, James Howson, is black. Lockwood describes Heathcliff as: “a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect...” (Chapter 1) and Mr Linton says in Chapter 6:

 Oho! I declare he is that strange acquisition my late neighbour made, in his journey to Liverpool—a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway. 

And when he is first brought to Wuthering Heights, no one understands him:

yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. (Chapter 4)

So there was plenty there to give him a different nationality.

Then there was the fact that Mr Earnshaw had found Heathcliff in Liverpool, a busy international port – and Heathcliff could have arrived there on any of the boats. I assumed that boats would arrive there from the west, from the Americas – and that was also where Heath could go to start his new life after he left High Farm. I also needed to explain his absence and his return as a wealthy man. No one says how Heathcliff made his money and in fact Emily Brontë didn’t really need to say how he came by it, but I did. There are suspicions that he was a gambler, or in the army – or even connected to the slave trade. The reference to America meant that I could use that, and send him back there to make his fortune. But I wanted something wilder, more elemental for Heath so South America worked better for me. It also gave me a chance to give him a surname that was as close to Heath Cliff as I could go!

Laura: Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances are short novels and having read the Mills & Boon guidelines on 'How to Write the Perfect Romance', in which it's stated that

I don't like secondary characters - use with caution! You're writing a romance, readers are interested in your hero and heroine so keep the focus on them.

I think it would be fair to say that a Mills & Boon editor would not respond to Nelly Dean's detailed account in the same way that Mr Lockwood did:

'Sit still, Mrs. Dean,' I cried, 'do sit still, another half hour! You've done just right to tell the story leisurely. That is the method I like; and you must finish in the same style. I am interested in every character you have mentioned, more or less. (Chapter 7)

Were there elements or aspects of Wuthering Heights which you'd have liked to include (or include in more detail) but which you had to cut out (or down)?

Kate Walker: Emily Brontë’s book is a far more lengthy and complicated story than the one I’ve written. I am only dealing with one small section of the whole book and focussing on one element – the Cathy/Heathcliff story and working it into a love story. I needed to concentrate on that. I also have to make it clear who is the hero, the heroine and what is the truth about their relationship. Like all the narrators in Wuthering Heights, Nelly Dean isn’t a trustworthy reporter, she’s partial and inclined to slant her narrative in a way that leaves questions unanswered and makes answers unreliable. As a result, obviously, I’ve had to cut and simplify, make sure that the focus stays on the hero and heroine and nowhere else.

One of the obvious things I had to do was to remove Edgar/Arthur from the scene, and to have his relationship with Kat come out in talk between her and Heath. Originally I had planned that Heath would flirt more with Isabella to make Kat jealous, but this didn’t work from the point of view of a man of integrity. I would have liked to work more on Heath’s relationship with Kat’s brother Joe, and Joe’s son Harry. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff’s relationship with Hareton is complicated and ambiguous – Hareton is his enemy’s son, the child of the man he hates, but he is also Cathy’s nephew – and constantly reminds him of the woman he has lost. Hareton is one of the few people who has feelings for Heathcliff, he is loyal to him and he weeps “in bitter earnest” (Chapter 34) when Heathcliff dies. I would have liked to show Heath work through the demons of his past with the man who had treated him so badly. But I was writing a romance and as you have quoted, the focus of a romance has to be on the hero and heroine, so that’s where my spotlight had to stay through the book.

Laura: Thanks very much for visiting Teach Me Tonight and answering my questions!
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The picture of Emily Brontë came from Wikipedia.

Reworking Classics: Powerful? Pure?

Laura Vivanco

Liz Mc2 writes that

Several years ago I taught a first-year Major Themes in Literature course I called “Transformations.” All the readings had transformations of various kinds in them, and I paired “classic” texts with later “transformations” by other writers. [...] A modern re-imagining can shine new light on a classic and vice versa, and the pairings help students find a way in to reading analytically. [...]

Taking on a beloved classic is an enterprise fraught with peril, and though Kate Hewitt says in an interview with CataRomance that she “leapt at the chance” to rewrite Emma for a Harlequin Presents series paying homage to romantic classics, she is also frank about the difficulties. The Matchmaker Bride didn’t work for me as well as The Man Who Could Never Love for two reasons: a) Austen’s tart, ironic narrative style isn’t a good match for Hewitt’s sweet sincerity (that sounds belittling, but I like that about Hewitt); b) Emma–and Austen’s Augustan restraint generally–isn’t a good fit for Harlequin Presents, a line characterized by angsty, over the top emotion. Moreover, although it ends with a slew of marriages, Emma is far less shaped by the plot conventions of romance than Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion. It’s a comedy of manners about the heroine’s education. Matchmaker Bride felt caught between the conflicting demands of its source and its Harlequin category.

Tomorrow I'll be posting an interview with Kate Walker about her contribution to the mini-series Hewitt was contributing to. As Kate Walker has explained elsewhere, it's a

four book mini-series, The Powerful and the Pure. These books are by four different Modern authors, myself, Sharon Kendrick, Kate Hewitt, Cathy Williams, and the series description was on the ‘concept page’ in the books:

The Powerful and The Pure

When Beauty Tames the Brooding Beast

From Mr Darcy to Heathcliff, the best romantic heroes have always been tall, dark, and dangerously irresistible.

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).

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• 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.

Representing Mothers and Children

Laura Vivanco

I've just finished reading Kate Walker's Kept for Her Baby and one of the key issues is the heroine's status as a mother. In part this is because, as the title suggests, "If she had never become pregnant then he would never have married her at all. It was only because of his determination that his son would be legitimate that he had ever put a ring on her finger" (45) but it is also because of the questions raised by what happened after that son was born: "What loving mother, what good mother, would abandon her baby, walk out on him, leaving him alone with his father?" (17). The baby ended up in the care of

his father and the trained nanny [...]. The nanny that Ricardo had insisted on from the moment she had given birth, making her feel useless and inadequate, in a way that must have contributed to her breakdown. (36)

As the above quotation indicates, Lucy's abandonment of her child is ascribed to a temporary cause, and since "The doctors said that she was well again now" (18) there is no reason for the reader to believe it will affect her ability to be a "loving mother," a "good mother" in the future.

What does one have to do, though, in order to qualify as a "good mother"? Lucy seems to convince her husband that she's a good mother at least in part by how she picks up the baby and changes his nappy:

She almost laughed as she laid Marco on his back on the brightly coloured changing mat. This was something she knew how to do.
'Let's get you cleaned up ...'
Unfastening the sleep suit, removing the dirty nappy, cleaning, was the work of moments. And she enjoyed it - doing this simple task for her baby. Even when Marco waved his arms and legs wildly in the air, wriggling so that it was a struggle to get the nappy on and fastened, she couldn't hold back the soft chuckle of appreciation of his life and energy. Forgetting about the dark, watchful man behind her, she bent her head and blew a loud raspberry on his exposed stomach, revelling in its soft roundness, the uncontrollable giggles that burst from him in response. (115)

and how she feeds him:

She was looking down at Marco, laughing softly as the little boy squished his banana in his hand, obviously revelling in the mess he was making and the feel of it between his fingers. And Marco was watching her, his wide smile a beam of delight as he held up the sticky mess for her to see. (118)

Obviously one has to interpret Lucy's happiness in these scenes in the context of her previous separation from her baby. Having feared she might never see him again, it's entirely understandable that she should feel delighted to have the opportunity to spend time with him. It's also important to remember that the book is about a heroine who had "Post-natal psychosis" (171). Nonetheless, what is depicted for the reader are scenes which present motherhood as a source of joy.

The depiction of motherhood in Angela Thirkell's High Rising (1933) is rather different. In part this is because of the very different circumstances in which the two mothers find themselves, but I think it may also reflect different attitudes towards motherhood. It should also be noted that Thirkell's novel is more "romantic fiction" than "romance" since the central protagonist, Laura, is not involved in a romantic relationship (she does get involved in a bit of matchmaking for others). She's a forty-five year old author and widowed mother-of-four who, at the beginning of the novel, is collecting her youngest from boarding school. I wonder how many modern heroine-mothers would choose this option for their children? Clearly the many billionaire/sheik etc heroes could easily afford to educate their children this way, and some have been to boarding schools themselves. Maybe the ages of the children in romances play a part in how schooling choices are depicted in the genre, but I wonder if nowadays more people feel that children should stay with their parents. The heroine of Janet Evanovich's Smitten in fact broke up with her husband over this issue rather than over his infidelity:

"It turned out we had different expectations about marriage. Paul expected me to close my eyes to constant indiscretions, and I expected him to be faithful to me."
"I'm sorry."
Lizabeth waved it away. "Actually, I could have lived with that. What finally drove me out of the marriage was when he insisted that the boys go to boarding school. Paul had political ambitions. He wanted me to be a perfect hostess. He found the children to be a burden." (24)

For Laura, and other mothers of her class and era, sending children to boarding school would have seemed entirely normal, and although she may wonder, "as she had often wondered with the three older boys, why one's offspring are under some kind of compulsion to alienate one's affections at first sight by their conceit, egotism, and appalling self-satisfaction" (4) she does love her sons. It seems unlikely, however, that she would respond with joy to a sticky mess, no matter how much a child was "revelling" in it. This is a woman who admits to feeling rather "exhausted" after bringing up so many children:

When for about a quarter of a century you have been fighting strong young creatures with a natural bias towards dirt, untidiness, and carelessness, quite unmoved by noise, looking upon loud, unmeaning quarrels and abuse as the essence of polite conversation, oblivious of all convenience and comfort but their own, your resistance weakens. (21-22)

And when she has finally got her son into his bed after his first day home for the holidays, she

shut the door and reeled downstairs. [...] Oh, the exhaustingness of the healthy young! Laura had once offered to edit a book called Why I Hate my Children, but though Adrian Coates [her editor] had offered her every encouragement, and every mother of her acquaintance had offered to contribute, it had never taken shape. Perhaps, she thought, as she stood by Tony's bed an hour later, they wouldn't be so nice if they weren't so hateful.
There lay her demon son, in abandoned repose. His cheeks, so cool and firm in the day, had turned to softest rose-petal jelly, and looked as if they might melt upon the pillow. His mouth was fit for poets to sing. His hands - spotlessly clean for a brief space - still had dimples where later bony knuckles would be [...] she tucked the bedclothes in, kissed her adorable hateful child, who never stirred, and turning out the light left the room. (39-40)

The ways in which heroes respond to mothers also vary. Amanda Vickery describes one depiction of motherhood thus:

When Samuel Richardson singled out the breast-feeding mother in Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4), one of the most popular novels of the century, he presented a traditional duty in a haze of beguiling limelight. Witness the scene when the once naughty Lady G. is surprised with her babe at the breast by her estranged husband:

Never was a man in greater rapture. For lady Gertrude had taught him to wish that a mother would be a mother: He Threw himself at my feet, clasping me and the little varlet together in his arms. Brute! said I, will you smother my Harriet - I was half-ashamed of my tenderness - Dear-est, dear-est, dear-est Lady G. - Shaking his head, between every dear and est, every muscle of his face working; how you transport me! - Never, never, never, saw I so delightful a sight! (Vickery 93-94)

Heroes in modern romances may not express themselves in quite these words, or feel "rapture" of exactly the same kind, but they too often react extremely strongly to motherhood:

Her body was preparing itself for the birth of their baby and the thought of that was a massive turn-on. (Williams 107)

'You're very sexy, pregnant,' he whispered.
'No, I'm not.'
'You are to me. [...] We men are simple creatures [...] Evidence of our virility can't help but prove satisfying. Call it a weird macho thing.' (Williams 108)

There are, of course, plenty of romances involving pregnant heroines who become involved with a new man, but occasionally I've come across characters who would rather not begin a relationship with a woman who's a mother. In Janet Evanovich's Smitten, for example, the hero hesitates before kissing the heroine:

He didn't want to come on too strong or too fast and frighten her away. And he didn't want to make working conditions awkward. And besides that, she was a mother. He'd never before been involved with a mother. In his eyes motherhood was in the same category as a PhD in physics. It was outside his sphere of knowledge. It was intimidating. And the thought of bedding someone's mother felt a smidgeon irreverent. Not enough to stop him, he thought ruefully. Just enough to slow him down. (17-18)

The heroine herself seems to have some preconceptions about what is, or isn't, suitable for a mother to do, but by the end of the novel she appears to have revised at least some of them:

She was in a suggestive position on the trunk when he returned. "Do you think this is undignified for a mother?"
He pulled her panties down. "I think this is perfect for a mother." (176)

So, is this novel grappling with the madonna/whore dichotomy? According to Caroline Myra Pascoe:

Images of motherhood in western society have most often ignored maternal sexuality, notwithstanding the sleight of hand that this entails. Anne Summers in Damned Whores and God's Police noted:

It is conveniently forgotten that married women must have sexual intercourse in order to reproduce: a general Australian puritanism has managed to convince itself that mothers are not sexual creatures and female sexuality is either denied or relegated entirely to the Damned Whore stereotype.

The modern romance genre, however, provides a reader with plenty of sexually active mothers and mothers-to-be. I suspect that the portrayal of mothers and children varies not just across time (and cultures, classes and many other social variables), but also across different genres. Jennifer Weiner, who writes women's fiction, thinks that

even though there are blogs and books and first-person essays about the everyday exhaustion and dreariness and frustration of motherhood, the prevailing cultural view is still that motherhood comes with this rose-tinged blissful glow.

You might get rather a different view of children and childrearing from the horror genre, however. John Patterson at the Guardian suggests that

The most interesting evil-kid movies seem to rise up from the subconscious of their creators. Stephen King has said that he wrote The Shining when he was drinking a lot to numb his bleakest feelings about family life, and evil and/or seriously scary kids proliferate across his work in that period: Danny and the chopped-up Grady Twins in The Shining; Drew Barrymore in Firestarter; the dead child in Pet Sematary; Isaac in Children Of The Corn. David Cronenberg had a five-year-old daughter when he made his 1979 gyno-horror movie The Brood, with its murderous mutant children, and David Lynch memorialised his complicated feelings about fatherhood with the monstrously deformed baby in Eraserhead. Whereas most kid-slaying horrors play nakedly to the taboo, these films have a sense of anxiety, dread and profound ambiguity about parenthood that often makes them richer as works of art.

Those examples were all created by fathers, whereas romances are far more likely to be written by women. Is that just a coincidence? And does the romance genre, as a whole, represent motherhood and children in an idealised way or is it relatively realistic?

-----------

• Evanovich, Janet. Smitten. 1990. London: Bantam, 1991.
• Pascoe, Caroline Myra. Screening Mothers: Representations of motherhood in Australian films from 1900 to 1988. PhD thesis. University of Sydney, 2006.
  
• Thirkell, Angela. High Rising. 1933. Osney Mead, Oxford: Isis, 2000.
• Vickery, Amanda. The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.
• Walker, Kate. Kept for Her Baby. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009.
  
• Williams, Cathy. The Italian's One-Night Love-Child. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009.

With thanks to Kate Walker for sending me a copy of Kept for Her Baby, Tumperkin for giving me The Italian's One-Night Love-Child, AgTigress for providing me with a copy of Smitten and Sunita, who recommended Angela Thirkell's novels. The illustration came from Wikimedia Commons.

Anne Weale Dies

Last weekend I put the finishing touches to my ballot for AAR's Top 100 Romance Novels. Among the many category romances that ended up being on my list is Anne Weale's Castle in Corsica at #56. I found the book five years ago in the darkest, dustiest corner of the English Bookshop in Mainz, together with several other old Harlequin novels. I greatly enjoyed Weale's novel, especially the ending when, just as the heroine is about to leave the island, the hero races after her to make her face the truth about their relationship:

"For once in your ostrich existence, I want you to face the truth. If you honestly believe that the feelings that you've been at such pains to suppress boil down to nothing more than antagonism -- well, I still won't be convinced but I'll accept it. But be very sure you aren't deluding yourself, little one." He paused and she saw the muscles at his jaw working. "I'm asking you to marry me, Polly."

Right on the next page he calls her a nincompoop and continues to give her an ultimatum: he'll wait outside in the car and give her half an hour to make up her mind -- and she lets him wait 25 minutes (which he apparently spends "pacing up and down the pavement behind the car" -- tee-hee, he is definitely not as cool as he wants to make her believe) before she finally comes after him. I have, of course, no idea whether the author intended it to be read this way, but I thought the scene very sweet and funny, though it does have some gritty undertones. Yes, from among that stack of old Harlequin novels I found in that dark corner in the English Bookshop, Castle in Corsica is one of my favourites.

Yesterday I was greatly saddened to learn from a post on Kate Walker's blog that Anne Weale had died on 24 October. Between 1955 and 2002 she wrote 88 novels for Mills&Boon, the last one having been The Man from Madrid. In the "Dear Reader" at the beginning of the book, she calls herself a "World Wide Web enthusiast" and writes, "I believe the Web can be used to enhance our enjoyment of reading." It is therefore not surprising that from 1998 to 2004 she wrote a website review column for the UK magazine The Bookseller, which she later used as a basis for her blog, Bookworm on the Net.

A biography of Anne Weale can be found on the Harlequin website (for some reason the link on the M&B website seems to be broken). Both Kate Walker and Liz Fielding have written tributes to her on their blogs.

What the Reader Brings to a Text

Laura Vivanco

One of the things I've found most fascinating about the many discussions I've read and participated in on romance message-boards and blogs is the extent to which tastes differ, and the glimpses I catch of why that might be the case. I think a lot of it has to do with what readers (and authors) bring to the stories. Some of these things are quite often discussed, for example there are the authors accused of writing a 'Mary Sue' character or the theory of the 'placeholder heroine':

Placeholding and reader identification should not be confused. Placeholding is an objective involvement; the reader rides along with the character, having the same experiences but accepting or rejecting the character's actions, words, and emotions on the basis of her personal yardstick. Reader identification is subjective: the reader becomes the character, feeling what she or he feels. (Kinsale 1992: 32)

Reader-response theory goes a lot further than that (and I'll admit now that my knowledge of that theory is fairly minimal). It can

range from the [...] theories of Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden -- both of whom argue that although the reader fills in the gaps, the author's intentional acts impose restrictions and conditions -- to the relativistic analysis of Stanley Fish, who argues that the interpretive strategy of the reader creates the text, there being no text except that which a reader or an interpretive community of readers creates. (Henderson & Brown 1997)

I suppose my instinct would be to head for the end of the spectrum which holds that 'the reader fills in the gaps, the author's intentional acts impose restrictions and conditions'. What's been interesting me recently is where different readers see gaps and how they fill them. As an example, here's what one blogger, Heather, has to say: she prefers novels in which the heroes behave like 'Mr Darcy and pine for the women no matter how the women respond — and instead of retreating, the men change themselves (that is, their own faults) to win the love of the women'. Pride and Prejudice is a good place to start because clearly, as Sarah observed not so long ago, some people (usually non-romance readers) will deny that Austen's works are very similar to modern romances, but many romance readers can't imagine Mr Darcy as anything other than the ideal romance hero. Both groups, however, agree on certain issues, e.g. that he is called Mr Darcy and he marries Elizabeth.

When I read what Heather had to say about Mr Darcy, I was surprised. I'd never thought of Mr Darcy as someone who changed to win the love of a woman. I'd always thought of his change having come about as a reasonable response to justified criticism which he would have accepted had it come from any other person he respected, rather than an emotional response made in order to win the love of a particular woman. Clearly I come down on the 'sense'/reason rather than the 'sensibility'/passion side of the fence. And this was where I began to see how differing interpretations and emotional responses reflect the reader's own ideology, and by ideology I mean what Kinsale referred to above as the reader's 'personal yardstick' or 'the structure of assumptions which form the imaginative world of groups' (Lye 1997) or 'the set of beliefs characteristic of a social group or individual' (OED). Authors bring their ideologies to the texts they create and readers, in their turn, bring theirs:

Texts include statements, assumptions, attitudes, which are intrinsically ideological, i.e. express attitudes towards and beliefs about certain sets of social and political realities, relations, values and powers. As a text is produced in a certain social and material milieu it cannot not have embedded ideological assumptions. The reader herself will have ideological convictions and understandings as well, often unrecognized. (Lye 1999)

These understandings which often go 'unrecognized' are sometimes challenged when we discuss texts with other readers, who hold different assumptions, or when the ideological assumptions of the author are so explicitly related that it's difficult not to notice them (though, of course, this is more likely to be the case for a reader whose ideology differs from that of the author). A reader with a similar ideology to the author's may simply feel a sense of comfort or belonging, and may feel that the book is one which he or she connects with emotionally. The reader may even feel that such values are universal. For example Dick, a poster at AAR, argued that

most men and women who have a close relationship, whether in romance fiction or otherwise, delight in the idea that the other member of the duo feels a sense of possession. And certainly, protectiveness is a part of the relationship, isn't it? Would anyone want it otherwise? [...] I still haven't read anything which changes my thinking: Heroes of romance fiction differ very little regardless of the setting.

And yet, does Edward Ferrars conform to this ideal? And what of the 'boyish, feminized male figure [which] was definitely eroticized by Mills & Boon authors of the 1920s' (Dixon 1999: 68)?

It seems to me that readers' responses to romances are shaped by the ideas they have about masculinity (and which behaviours and attitudes are considered heroic), femininity, passion, the family, duty, individualism, etc. Jayne Ann Krentz, for example, wrote that 'Men represent to women one of the greatest sources of risk they will ever encounter in their lives' (1992: 112) and that opinion underpins her belief that 'Romance novels are tales of brave women taming dangerous men' (1992: 113) yet even as she dismissed them, she had to acknowledge that the genre also contained 'politically correct romances, the ones featuring sensitive, unaggressive heroes and sexually experienced, right-thinking heroines' (1992: 113).

I'd like to conclude with a few excerpts in which the author's ideology on a particular issue seems particularly close to the surface. Here's a passage from Connie Brockway's As You Desire which may leave some readers sighing over the hero, Harry. Marta has withheld information from him concerning Desdemona's (the heroine's) safety but Marta:

needn't have worried about Harry's reaction to her duplicity. He'd had none.
Except for the information she'd provided, Harry had taken no notice of her actions at all. All of his being, his every mental faculty, centered on Desdemona. There was simply no room in that concentration for something so inconsequential as outrage over her [Marta's] actions. What would it be like to be the focus of such devotion?
Cal's hand cupped the curve of her shoulder and she covered his big, rough hand with her own. Pray God she'd know. (1997: 350)

And here's Kate Walker's description of why, in Harlequin Presents/Mills & Boon Modern romances (and, probably, elsewhere in the romance genre too), the revenge plot is in fact:

an expression of an alpha hero’s male passion and power. I’d like to take this one stage further and say that it’s more – much more – the expression of his passion than anything else. His passion for honour, for justice, and – ultimately – for the heroine.

Or how about this conversation in which two happily-married men are trying to instruct the hero on how to understand his estranged wife, a lesson they present indirectly by recounting anecdotes and making generalisations about women:

When they clam up on you, it's a danger signal. What you've got to do is get them talking, about anything, and worm it out of them. It'll all come flooding out, on a burst of tears likely as not, but at least you get to know what's eating them. You may say what you will about women never being silent, I'd rather have them talking. A silent woman is a dangerous thing. She's sitting there, tallying up points against you. You can see it in her eyes. Thing to do is keep at them till it comes out. They want to tell you. They're dying to throw your faults in your face, and it don't take a whole lot of urging. (Gallant 2004: 90)

• Brockway, Connie, 1997. As You Desire (New York: Dell).
• Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, 1992. Edited by Jayne Ann Krentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
• Dixon, jay, 1999. The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1990s (London: UCL Press).
• Gallant, Jenny, (Joan Smith) 2004. Lady Hathaway's House-Party. Electronically published in 2004 by Belgrave House, but originally published by Fawcett Coventry in January, 1980.
• Kinsale, Laura, 1992. 'The Androgynous Reader: Point of View in the Romance', in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, pp. 31-44.
• Krentz, Jayne Ann, 1992. 'Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness', in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, pp. 107-114.

The image is of Don Quijote, reading. I found it on Emeritus Professor Fred F. Jehle's webpages. The engraving is by Gustav Doré, from an 1888 Italian edition of the novel and contributed by Claudio Paganelli. Links to more of the illustrations of this edition are available on the same page. Don Quijote comes to identify so fully with the ideology present in his chivalric romances that he fails to distinguish between fantasy and reality and sets out on his own quest.

Paintings of readers are analysed in William B. Warner's essay 'Staging Readers Reading' and he observes that

Anyone surveying the Dutch and French genre paintings and prints of the 17th and 18th century [...] will quickly discover the currency of images of readers reading. From old men reading grand folios in solitude to young women absorbed in their novels, the paintings and prints of the period stage reading as inviting, compelling, and sometimes dangerous.

The essay includes images of the paintings, some depicting readers of didactic texts while others show the effects of sampling more erotic novels.