Hughes, Bill
(2021).
"Genre Mutation in Young Adult Gothic: The Dialectics of Dystopia and Romance in Holly Black's The Coldest Girl in Coldtown."
Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others. Ed. Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi. Cardiff:
University of Wales Press. [More details here.]
Nickel, Eleanor Hersey
(2020).
Christian Popular Culture from The Chronicles of Narnia to Duck Dynasty.
Eugene, Oregon:
Wipf and Stock Publishers. [There is a chapter about Francine Rivers's Redeeming Love. Excerpt available here.]
Parnell, Claire, Andrea Anne Trinidad & Jodi McAlister(2021).
"Live literature in the Philippines: an ethnographic study of #RomanceClass and reading as performance."Creative Industries Journal. Online First. [Abstract]
Pierre-Robertson, Petronetta (2021). "Literature as an Agent of Change." Gender and Domestic Violence in the
Caribbean. Ed. Ann Marie Bissessar and Camille Huggins. Palgrave Macmillan,
Cham. 87-103. [More details here and here.]
Maria Nilson's "From The Flame and the Flower to Fifty Shades of Grey: Sex, Power and Desire in the Romance Novel" has been published in Akademisk Kvarter/Academic Quarter 7 (2013): 119-131.
Reading these books [i.e. the Fifty Shades trilogy] mainly as romance, Nilson focuses on how James uses well known and established romance traits from, for example, the so-called “bodice-ripper” novel and chick lit, in order to create a hybrid. These traits are visible in both how James describes her protagonists and in how the relationship between them is portrayed. Nilson argues that the Fifty Shades trilogy is, rather than a new kind of romance, a compilation of well-established traits.
I'm very happy to be able to announce that there's an essay by Teach Me Tonight's Pamela Regis in The Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011). Leonard Cassuto, one of the editors of the volume, observes that
The Cambridge History of the American Novel pays more attention to genre fiction than previous histories of American literature, and it accords them the importance they deserve in the shaping of literary fiction and the history of the American novel generally. If all literary histories ask, “What is ‘literature’?” then this volume argues that the study of popular genres alongside more self-consciously literary productions will help us to answer that question.
The rise of genre fiction is a story that begins early. Eclipsed genres like the sea novel helped to shape books that we read today as literature [...]. And later genres such as the crime novel or science fiction, which flowered in the twentieth century, have cross-pollinated with so-called literary fiction and inspired novelists from Hemingway to Marge Piercy. We have also seen notable entries from within a genre take their places on the high cultural podium.
The critical study of genre fiction begins somewhat later, as it took awhile for scholars to acknowledge the importance of formula-driven fiction as art, or as a source of literary influence and cultural insight. This history devotes chapters to “strong genres”– so called because they register with particular clarity the collectively held beliefs, hopes, and anxieties of the context in which they are produced. (10)
One of those "strong genres" is romance, which Pam examines in a chapter titled ""Female genre fiction in the twentieth century." In it Pam offers the reader "a definition of the romance novel, some categories to advance its literary analysis, and a first effort to place it in literary history, especially in foundational relation to the sentimental literature of the nineteenth century" (848). She includes short analyses of a number of American romances: E.D.E.N. Southworth's Vivia; or The Secret of Power (1857); Kathleen Thompson Norris' Rose of the World (1923); Faith Baldwin's Week-End Marriage (1931); Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt (1952);Kathleen E. Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower (1972); Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me (2004); Beverly Jenkins' Indigo (1996); Ann Herendeen's Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander (2005); and Nora Roberts' Irish Thoroughbred (1981). ----
Cassuto, Leonard. "General introduction." The Cambridge History of the American Novel. Ed. Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby and Benjamin Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 1-14.
Regis, Pamela. "Female genre fiction in the twentieth century." The Cambridge History of the American Novel. Ed. Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby and Benjamin Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 847-60.
Over at Dear Author Sunita's got a post up in which she contests the idea that Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower gave "birth to the romance genre." The post is, in a way, a follow-up to a post by Jessica at Read React Review but Sunita takes the novel as a case study in how changes in the publishing industry affect which novels reach the book-buying public, and the formats in which we read them. Sunita mentions (but does not quote) Janice Radway's analysis of the changes in the publishing industry at the time of The Flame and the Flower's publication, so I thought I'd include part of it here:
A paperback original, The Flame and the Flower was given all the publicity, advertising, and promotion usually reserved for proven bestsellers. Such originals had been issued continuously in small quantities throughout the early years of mass-market history, but concentration on them was not widespread for the simple reason that it cost more to pay out an advance to an author and to advertise an unknown book than to buy reprint rights to an already moderately successful hardback. Avon, however, under the direction of Peter Meyer, had begun to experiment with originals and different advertising campaigns in the mid-1960s. When Coffey agreed to publish The Flame and the Flower without previous hardcover exposure, she was simply following a practice that had become fairly common within her firm. The house's extraordinary success with Woodiwiss's novel soon caused industry-wide reconsideration of the possibilities of paperback originals as potential bestsellers. (34)
Sunita concludes that as far as the content of The Flame and the Flower was concerned, it "didn’t really break new ground, but it put together a winning combination of proven ingredients" and that reminded me of a description in Meljean Brook's In Sheep's Clothing of the difference it makes to have been changed from a human into a werewolf:
"I heal faster now [...] it was harder to fight myself when I wanted something. [...] And I didn’t want to accidentally hurt anyone.”
“But now?”
“I learned to control it better. And the more I let it—the wolf—out, the more control I have when I’m human.”
Becoming a werewolf isn't depicted as being an inherently bad thing. Indeed, the truly shocking character in this short story isn't the werewolf; it's a human serial murderer who rapes his victims before strangling them.
The transformation from human to werewolf, however, seems to enhance the powers and impulses the individual already possessed. I think one might perhaps be able to say the same about the paranormal romance genre itself. It builds on existing tendencies and plots which existed in the romance genre but makes them more intense: a vampire hero can be much, much older and richer and stronger than a human heroine, demons can be even more tortured and angst-filled than rakes, happily-ever-afters can be exactly that if the protagonists are immortal. And, of course, the frequent animal metaphors, which express the hero's physical power, his undomesticated nature, and his sexuality, can be given physical form in the werewolf.
romance has not become a $1.37 billion business on the basis of people too embarrassed to admit that they want porn buying 400-page books for the 3-4 sex scenes within. See, they also contain characters and stories, and some people like those. In fact, and I realize this is going to sound as ridiculous as claiming to smoke a lot of pot without inhaling, I mostly skip the sex scenes. I read the books for the stories, and I doubt I'm unique in that.
Since various other romance readers commented in response that they, too, mostly skip the sex scenes, Clawson is clearly not alone in this particular reading behaviour. Still, there's obviously a perception that romances are "porn for women" and the question of how romances affect their readers' sex lives is one that seems to have intrigued many, including a few academics. What follows is a short summary of the existing research (that I'm aware of) into the sex lives of romance readers.
Coles and Shamp (1984) - In their “Some Sexual, Personality, and Demographic Characteristics of Women Readers of Erotic Romances” Coles and Shamp begin by describing the novels under discussion and they state that
Given their tremendous sales, the reading of these books must be a significant behavior for the 20 million loyal readers [...] who buy them. Since these stories are neither well written "literature" nor informative, in the sense of being original or historically accurate, their appeal can only result from some emotionally compelling quality in plots or settings. (188)
Bearing in mind that in the court case over Lady Chatterley's Lover "Penguin won their case, on the new legal grounds of ‘literary merit’ as a justification for explicit sexual content. The mere presence of sexual incidents in a book no longer defined it automatically as pornographic, obscene and illegal" (AgTigress), one might suppose that a work with "explicit sexual content" which is deemed to have no "literary merit" is likely to be labelled as pornography or erotica. Certainly Coles and Shamp write: "it can be suggested that erotic romances are so popular among their readers because they represent a socially acceptable form of mild pornography that is not recognized as such either by those who read them or by the rest of society" (207-8). I do wonder if, however, their article subsequently helped at least some sections of "the rest of society" feel secure in describing romances as "pornography."
If we turn to what Coles and Shamp have to say about readers, we find that they first surveyed "college women" and,
In support of the hypothesis that reading erotic romances is related to sexual deprivation, readers in this group who are more often married or cohabiting, report a mean frequency of 1.45 sexual acts per week, while nonreaders report 2.50 acts per week. (196)
However, the picture of romance readers changed when they surveyed older women:
Older readers reported having sexual intercourse twice as much as did nonreaders and, indeed, more frequently than the national average for all women [...]. In addition, housewife readers reported being more satisfied with sex than nonreaders. These data do not support the simplistic idea, which might have been suggested by the college sample, that lack of sex is forcing women to find other outlets through erotica. (206)
Thurston comments on this to the effect that
While the Coles and Shamp (1984) study, which was conducted in 1978 and focused on the bodice rippers of that period, does not say that erotic romance readers make love twice as frequently as non-readers because they read romances, it does establish a correlation between frequency of intercourse and reading erotic romances, and between reading erotic romances and use of sexual fantasy. (158)
It should be noted that when Coles and Shamp refer to "erotic romances" they are referring to novels which are rather different from those in the sub-genre known by that label today, and they are also different from the novels focussed on by Thurston.
Thurston (1987) - Thurston also refers to "erotic romances" but in her book, The Romance Revolution, she was using the term to refer to both "The erotic contemporary series romances which began appearing in 1981" (Thurston 92) and the "erotic historical romance [which] as an identifiable entity is widely considered to have appeared on the American scene with the 1972 publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower. Two years later Avon again struck gold with Rosemary Rogers's Sweet Savage Love [...], setting off an avalanche of feisty heroines, high adventure, and sex that sounded the death knell for the suddenly tame gothic and regency romances" (Thurston 67). Thurston, whose The Romance Revolution was published in 1987, states that "the popular romance genre since 1972 has been divided into two basic types - the sweet romance and the erotic romance - with the fundamental difference between them being the presence or absence of specific sexual behavioral norms and explicit sexual activities" (7).
In Thurston's view, "Other story characteristics (contemporary or historical settings, for instance) create secondary divisions in the two subgenres, but it was a specific kind of sexual activity, more and more explicitly described as the 1970s progressed, that created the first and most significant division within the genre" (8). Thurston states, however, that "Sexual content is the most important classifying characteristic [...] because of the kind of sex-role portrayal that came to be associated with it" (7) and that
More and more explicitly articulated after 1972, female sexuality became increasingly complex in the most evolved erotic romances (heterosexual in the genre examined here), and by 1982 it was generally being portrayed as inextricably intertwined with both economic and personal autonomy, and ultimately with a joyously feminine sense of self. (141)
In other words, Thurston seems to be suggesting that in the romances under discussion, sexual freedom and freedom from particular gender ("sex-role") norms have become inseparable.1 Thurston also notes that there are many reasons why people would choose to read romances:
For almost all of the readers surveyed [...] reading romance novels is primarily entertainment-seeking behavior that provides pleasure, escape, relaxation, and renewal because it stimulates and challenges the imagination. Thus the romance as a form of entertainment and escape encompasses a web of complex motivations and gratifications, serving as a means of exploring new ideas about the changing role and status of women in society - a kind of test run or sounding board for a variety of ideas, attitudes, and behavior - at the same time that it provides the security of the familiar. It is the formulaic nature of genre fiction that opens the door to the unfamiliar, and through time and repeated exposure converts unusual or new elements into the ordinary and familiar. (131-32)
Thurston also has something to say about the sex lives of romance readers. She found that "about half of the readers surveyed in 1985 said they use erotic romance novels as sexual fantasy" (134) and that
Seventy-seven percent of the romance readers surveyed in 1985 agreed with the statement "Many of the love scenes depicted in romance novels are sexually stimulating," attesting to the fact that erotic romances contain fantasies that many women can and do relate to sexually. Furthermore, most readers consciously perceived these novels as erotica and said they use them for sexual information and ideas, to create a receptive-to-sex frame of mind, and even to achieve arousal. (10)
Thurston believed that in romances sex "was generally being portrayed as inextricably intertwined with both economic and personal autonomy" (141), perhaps at least in part because at the time she was writing, during the 1980s, many of the novels contained
The New Heroine [who] generally is experienced, confident, self-sufficient, assertive, and even daring - all traits traditionally assigned to men - which means she no longer needs the male guardian, the rake, or the sugar daddy. What does she require in a man? Still a strong-willed character (he must be if he is to be her equal), the New Hero also exhibits many traits traditionally assigned to females - openness, flexibility, sensitivity, softness, and vulnerability - transforming him from invincible superman into fallible human being. Thus androgyny has burst into full bloom. (Thurston 98)
Not everyone saw this as a positive move, however. Jayne Ann Krentz, in her essay in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women (1992) discussed the
pressure exerted to make romance writers and romance fiction more politically correct. During the past few years, even as romance novels have commanded a spectacular share of the publishing market there has been an unrelenting effort to change them. Much of this effort was exerted by a wave of young editors fresh out of East Coast colleges who arrived in New York to take up their first positions in publishing [...]. The first target of these reforming editors was what has come to be known in the trade as the alpha male. These males are the tough, hard-edged, tormented heroes that are at the heart of the vast majority of bestselling romance novels. (107)
It is not difficult to see the "New Hero," so pleasing to Thurston, under attack in this scathing comment by Krentz:
you don't get much of a challenge for a heroine from a sensitive, understanding, right-thinking "modern" man who is part therapist, part best friend, and thoroughly tamed from the start. You don't get much of a challenge for her from a neurotic wimp or a good-natured gentleman-saint who never reveals a core of steel. (109)
According to Krentz "The second target of those who attempted to change romance novels was another familiar convention in the books: the aggressive seduction of the heroine by the hero" (109) and she concludes that
The effort to make romance novels respectable has been a resounding failure. The books that exemplify the "new breed" of politically correct romances, the ones featuring sensitive, unaggressive heroes and sexually experienced, right-thinking heroines in "modern" stories dealing with trendy issues, have never become the most popular books in the genre. (113)
Wu (2006) - Perhaps it is at least in part because of this "resounding failure" that some, including Wu, believe that "Most romance novels promote deeply constraining patriarchal values" (131). Wu's
results reveal that female readers self-reported greater sex addiction, greater sex drive and greater number of orgasms required for sexual satisfaction than female non-readers. [...] Contrary to expectations, readers of romance novels had fewer sex partners, a lower level of self-assessed femininity than non-readers, and were older when they had their first thoughts about sex and had their first sexual intercourse. [...] The overall results of this study suggest that the general attitude-behavior pattern of readers of romance novels fits the Harlequin stereotype of nourishing a satisfying sex life in the context of romantic monogamous fidelity, while at the same time vicariously fulfilling sexual desires through fictitious characters in romance novels. (131)
Anderton (2009) - Widener University's Center for Education announced that Gretchen E. Anderton had successfully defended her Ed.D. dissertation on "Excitement, Adventure, Indifference: Romance Readers' Perceptions of How Romance Reading Impacts their Sex Lives." Some details about it are now available from ProQuest. Unfortunately you need to have a subscription to the database in order to read them, and a copy of the whole dissertation can only be ordered from ProQuest for a fee.
The dissertation is based on information provided by "Fifty-three women romance readers over the age of 18 [who] completed an online survey composed of multiple choice and open-ended essay questions." That's really not a lot of romance readers, so it's possible the results are unrepresentative of the genre's readers as a whole. In addition, if the online survey is the same one discussed on the romance scholar listserv in August of 2008, and which was titled "Opium or Viagra: The effects of reading romance novels on women's sex lives," then it should be noted that various members of the list who attempted to answer the questionnaire had their responses automatically rejected, and at least one of these rejections was due to the person living outside the US. It's perhaps no coincidence, then, that the introduction of Anderton's dissertation opens with statement that "Since the first modem romance novel was published in 1972, romance novels have contained sex" (1). Since this seems to be a reference to Kathleen E. Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower it perhaps indicates that Anderton is following Thurston in taking an American-centred view of the genre's readers.
Since I haven't been able to read the whole dissertation, many of my questions about it remain unanswered but its main findings seem to be included in the abstract and are as follows:
In this study, it was found that participants use romance novels primarily to relax and escape the pressures of everyday life and only secondarily to produce sexual arousal.
Most of the study participants (75.5%) reported that reading romance novels has had an impact on their sex lives. This occurred in several ways, including making participants more likely to engage in sexual activity and by making them more likely to try new sexual activities.
A smaller number of participants (24.5%) stated that reading romance novels has not had any impact on their sex lives, sexual behavior or knowledge about sexuality. These participants emphasized the fictional nature of romance novels and stated that they read strictly for pleasure and do not learn anything or make any behavioral changes based on what they read.
With regard to safer sex practices, participants said that romance novels present incorrect or misleading information about safer sex and that they regard them as unreliable in this area.
Most participants (85%) reported that reading romance novels has not had an impact on their feelings about their sex partners or has had a positive impact on their feelings about their sex partners.
Another major finding of this study was that women who read romance novels and who are satisfied with their sexual relationships feel that there is no basis for comparison between their sex partners and the male protagonist or hero in a romance novel, or that their sex partners compare favorably to the male protagonists or heroes in romance novels. In contrast, women who read romance novels and who are not satisfied with their sexual relationships feel that their sex partners compare unfavorably to the male protagonists or heroes in romance novels.
------
Anderton, Gretchen E. Excitement, adventure, indifference: Romance readers' perceptions of how romance reading impacts their sex lives, Ed.D., Widener University, 2009, 165 pages; AAT 338383
Coles, Claire D., and M. Johnna Shamp. “Some Sexual, Personality, and Demographic Characteristics of Women Readers of Erotic Romances.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 13.3 (1984): 187-209.
Krentz, Jayne Ann. "Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 107-114.
1 Specifically with regard to romances, Thurston acknowledges that "Traditional attitudes or viewpoints are still present in a number of stories" (104) and she found that "It is in the area of childbearing and how it functions in the context of sexual and social relationships that the contemporary romance most often is murky" (107). Thurston also notes that
Feminists early on rejected the simplistic assumption that sexual liberation equals women's liberation (a familiar cry being "the sexual revolution is not our revolution"), asserting that it increased the availability of pornography and in general made women more vulnerable to sexual exploitation. They also realized, as Edwin Shur (1983, 118) warned in his comprehensive work on the social control of women, that "when women's active sexuality is acknowledged, it may be misleading presented as the main path to full female liberation," ultimately distracting women from the pursuit of real social change. But while a fully developed sexuality does not predict a conscious sense of self, it is difficult to imagine that such a self could be achieved without it. (140)
The danger warned of by Shur has been explored more recently by Ariel Levy:
Only thirty years (my lifetime) ago, our mothers were "burning their bras" and picketing Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants and wearing the bunny logo as supposed symbols of our liberation. How had the culture shifted so drastically in such a short period of time?
What was almost more surprising than the change itself were the responses I got when I started interviewing the men and -- often -- women who edit magazines like Maxim and make programs like The Man Show and Girls Gone Wild. This new raunch culture didn't mark the death of feminism, they told me; it was evidence that the feminist project had already been achieved. We'd earned the right to look at Playboy; we were empowered enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes. Women had come so far, I learned, we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny. [...]
There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda. It doesn't work that way. "Raunchy" and "liberated" are not synonyms.
Janet/Robin, of Dear Author suggests that in the romance genre, however, traditional versions of female sexuality still predominate: "So-called Dukes of Slut can be heroic, but not Duchesses of Sexual Liberation." She does, however, note that there are more
heroines who have been damaged by sexual promiscuity. [...] In one sense I appreciate the willingness to investigate the darker connections between self-esteem and sexuality in Romance heroines. But I also think it’s interesting that the sexually promiscuous woman written within a construction of romantic love often endures a great deal of shame or punishment (inflicted by others or by herself) before she receives the gift of romantic happiness. Those heroines who are unashamed of their sexual polyamory may, more often than not, be pushed into erotica, where there is no expectation of a romantic happy ending.
Of course, not all romances contain heroines, and the sexuality of the characters in romances featuring gay men has also come under scrutiny recently. Spark in Darkness has summarised some of the issues as he sees them:
M/m fiction as I see it, is literature centring around a male/male relationship. It is also primarily written by straight women. And I know some gay men loathe it with a fiery passion. And I don’t blame them - because most of it is bloody awful. No, really. It’s full of gross (and often insulting) stereotypes, focused entirely on the sexing [...] I have read good m/m. But the majority I’ve read doesn’t come close - in fact it goes a long damn way from coming close. In fact, let’s be frank, most of it is porn. The m/m characters have as much relation with actual gay men as the nigh obligatory “lesbian” sex scene in porn aimed at heterosexual men. And, naturally, that has strong implications of appropriation, exploitation and voyeurism to say the least and potential consequences for young gays looking for something about them come across a stereotypical, angst filled, sex obsessed one-hand-reading piece of m/m fiction.
Beginning with Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Elliott and Willig plan to examine some of the tropes and changes which are unique to the Regency romance, and those which, according to Willig, “mirror developments in the romance community as a whole.” From Austen, the course moves through Georgette Heyer and Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, looks at changing attitudes towards sexuality and heroism in a variety of authors over a thirty-year time span, then continues through Regency paranormals to chick lit.
Those at the university can apply to attend the seminar, which will take place in Saybrook in spring term 2010. They might also find it useful to know the following:
CSSY 222b (DC), Hu, "The Historical Romance Novel" Andrea DaRif and Lauren Willig, historical novelists. Lecturers in Yale College. Approved for elective credit to the major in English; not approved for credit toward the pre-1900 requirement.
Meetings: M 2:30–4:30 SY: Lyceum
The Regency romance tradition from the works of Jane Austen to modern permutations of the genre. Discussion of novels in textual, historical, and sociological context through examination of changing tropes and themes.
"Every poem," says Harold Bloom, "is a misinterpretation of a parent poem." Is every romance novel likewise a misreading, a creative revision, of some parent romance? Probably not, but Bloom’s approach to literary history was all the rage when I headed off to graduate school in the 1980s, and I’ve never entirely grown out of it. And Virgin Slave, Barbarian King can certainly be read as a text that rewrites—for better or for worse—one famous predecessor, Kathleen Woodiwiss's early bestseller The Wolf and the Dove (1974), and more confidently as a text that echoes and revises crucial topoi from the sweeping historical romances that revolutionized the genre in the 1970s. Allen borrows scenes and character descriptions familiar from, and made popular by, the “bodice-ripper” romance, but she tames them, drains their violence, and imbues them with more consoling, egalitarian values. Just as her Visigoths want to build a new society in the shell of the old, adding a dash of “Visigoth honour” to “the good things of the Empire” (147), Allen’s novel aspires to offer the best of both worlds. Whether you think it succeeds, comes across as nostalgic, or simply fails, a lamb in wolf’s clothing, may be a matter of taste. For now, description, rather than evaluation, is the task at hand.
[Note: with her attention to historical detail, Allen probably has more in common with Roberta Gellis than with Woodiwiss as an author, and Woodiwiss, an American, may not have had nearly the impact in the UK that she had in the US. That said, as a text, Virgin Slave, Barbarian King strikes me as more profitably to be compared with The Wolf and the Dove--not least for the whole "wolf" thing--than with Gellis's Roselyndenovels, and I am comfortable working by comparison and contrast even if no direct influence can be proved.]
As you may recall, The Wolf and the Dove begins with a deliciously campy "myth," impossible to read now without hearing the dulcet strains of Spinal Tap in the background.
"In times of yore," Woodiwiss writes, "when druids roamed the northern forests of England and held their sabbaths in the dark of the moon, a young man grew enamored with battle and violence and studied the arts of war until none could best him." This young man, nicknamed "The Wolf," angers the Great God Woden with his “impudence”; Woden therefore turns him into an iron statue of his namesake and leaves him waiting in the woods near Scotland for "times of war" to come. Then, only, then, will he be set free to prove that he can turn his strength into actual “valor.” The eponymous hero of this novel, Wulfgar, likewise must be changed, this time by love, from a bitter, violent man into a warrior for what is right and good. The comparison to “Beauty and the Beast” is obvious; less obvious, but just as crucial, would be the way that Woodiwiss here repeats the plot of E. M. Hull’s The Sheik, in which the hero must change from a cruel, self-centered man into a “preux chevalier.” To coin a term, each man needs to be chivalrized, and in the process, each must learn to love and respect the woman he has heretofore simply taken.)
As the prologue closes, it’s business time, or at least time for a clash of cultures, medieval-style. "William's hordes crossed the channel and Harold rode from the north and war drew near,” Woodiwiss writes; a page later, as the novel proper begins, the author posts a talismanic date: October 28, 1066, a day when "hewn bodies" litter the earth outside newly Norman Darkenwald Hall and an assortment of Saxon women--notably our heroine, Aislinn, her mother Lady Maidia, and the unlucky 15-year old serving girl, Hlynn--wait within to be brutalized by evil Sir Ragnor de Marte. In the first twenty-six pages, all of the women have been bound and kicked, snoods and bodices (well, gunnas) have been ripped, and Hlynn has been gang-raped. “You are mine, I am your master,” Ragnor slurs, drunken, into Aislinn’s neck as his naked body pins her down—and with that, the first chapter ends.
The sexual violence in these opening scenes serves a number of functions in this novel, and in others like it from the period.
Structurally, it serves as a baseline of awfulness, against which the reader can measure subsequent events and encounters, especially sexual encounters. When we meet Wulfgar, we know that we’re supposed to prefer him to Ragnor; the latter is repulsive and a vile rapist while the former is attractive and, we’re told, his kisses and later sex with the heroine spark pleasure in her, first unwilling, and finally exultant. (The trajectory of the novel runs from sexual victimhood to sexual agency, from “unwilling” pleasure to actual enjoyment, with recurrent threats of rape from Ragnor and others to keep the book’s distinctions clear.)
Politically, we might say that it gives us a justification for patriarchy and for particular negotiations with it. The alternative to Wulfgar is not freedom, not equality, but anarchy, to which women are particularly vulnerable. We might say that this subgenre of romance includes both a critique of patriarchal violence, or at least of male violence, as well as a vision of how to triumph, not over, but within those parameters, largely through connection with and transformation of the strongest male around. (Given the context of the early 1970s, we might say that such novels place themselves somewhere to the left of The Total Woman, but well to the right of Fear of Flying; they have My Secret Garden somewhere in their view as well.)
Psychologically—well, here things get dicey, for me. Had I but world enough and time, I’d use Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination to discuss this deployment of sexual violence. Briefly, if to be a woman in this context is to choose between bad choices, hawk and wolf (as Aislinn puts it on p. 43, forced to pick either Ragnor and Wulfgar) then it’s both logical and tempting for the heroine to affiliate, or even identify, with a man who claims to respect one’s fighting spirit, who insists on “taming a shrew” (56) through pleasure as well as force, and so on. Yet this does little to explain the appeal of such scenes to the reader, or the use of them to affect the reader. Is there some clue to be found in Laura Kinsale’s essay on “The Androgynous Reader,” or in Deborah Lutz’s notion that the “dangerous lover” serves as a distant mirror of the heroine, who “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” (xi)? Perhaps a fantasy of resilience is at work: the heroine endures, resists, and triumphs over horrors, and we identify with that? One last, less fraught explanation might come from the well-documented psychological phenomenon of “misattributed arousal.” Through fear the text triggers an adrenaline rush—pounding heart, physiological excitement, emotional frangibility—and for some readers that excitement then gets associated with the hero / heroine relationship, perhaps. (Clearly I need help with this—but I don’t think I’m the only one who does!)
There is more to say, of course, about the Woodiwiss, but in the interests of time, let me turn now to Virgin Slave, Barbarian King.
You don’t have to read very far into Allen's novel for it to feel a bit familiar—not a bad thing, in romance aesthetics—or for its softening, revisionist moves to begin. Let me start with the familiarities, the signals this novel sends that it has an older, “bodice-ripper” version of historical romance somewhere in its ancestry.
Like Woodiwiss, Allen begins with a date--"24th day of August, AD 410"--, which marks a moment of crisis. In both novels an invasion has occurred, and in both war has stripped away the veneer of civilization, revealing the sorry truth that Hobbes warns about in Leviathan, quoting the Roman author Plautus: in the absence of authority, homo homini lupus est, man is wolf to man. A nameless slave, about Hlynn’s age, has already been the first victim, here killed before she could be forced. Before the second page is through we see the requisite, genre-defining tug at our heroine’s neckline: “His fingers grasped the neck of her tunic and yanked downwards, his sweaty hand sliding over the bared flesh” (8). When our hero appears, he is again a leader of the pack: a figure who is not simply powerful, but also (the narrator assures us) “alien, utterly male” (10). Within a few chapters we hit such familiar topoi as the erotic bathing scene (62-5), a hero who is “angry enough to turn [the heroine] over his knee” (60) and who wonders whether he will need to “break her spirit” in order to “bend her to his will” (61), a pervasive rhetoric of ownership (“mine,” “my woman,” “”you are mine” declared “with the arrogance that never failed to take her breath away” [99]), and any number of scenes in which sexual passion is described as “savage” (193), laced with “violence” (164), and so on. I do not, I should emphasize, list these as a criticism of the book; rather, I see each as a generic marker, a set piece, even, that places this novel in the sub-genre of erotic historical romance. They offer Allen an opportunity to repeat and vary generic conventions, just as the set scheme of a pentameter line allows us to spot and savor metrical substitutions. Allen seizes this opportunity, revising her material through a series of substitutions and gestures of containment.
Consider, for example, the wolf we meet in the opening scene. It is not wild, nor does it attack, although it may guide and warn. “The animal had [Julia’s] arm between its jaws,” Allen writes in the opening chapter. “It was not biting, just holding on with a pressure that would not crack an egg, yet which had all the potential to rip her flesh from her bones” (17). Obviously this serves as a figure for Wulfric, powerful enough to rape or kill Julia yet bound by honor and simple kindness, never threatening either. (Wulfric starts, as a character, with the traits that Wulfgar must struggle to achieve.) Less obviously, I take it that the wolf’s hold is a figure for the “hold” that the rhetoric of male strangeness, heroic arrogance, sexual power struggle (see 66), and erotic possession has over the reader, or at least over the genre. In their wild state, uncontrolled, these would be terrible; to be useful, they must retain just enough strength to lend a shiver of the illicit, the lawless, the extreme. The novel invokes them repeatedly, along with familiar claims about impulses that are “fundamentally” male and female—but the reader who goes to Virgin Slave, Barbarian King for the strum und drang of a Woodiwiss novel will be disappointed. The novel may gesture towards the high drama of sexual difference, but it treats this material awfully sweetly, lightly, even naively. It’s costume jewelry, like the chains--“light, and of a precious metal, naturally”--that Julia imagines in a brief, soft-focus fantasy of herself as a “sex slave” (107-8). Or, to draw another metaphor from the book, it’s like the dormant volcano on whose slopes the couple first make love. When Julia comes, she wonders, “Did the volcano explode?” ( 130). It hasn’t, it doesn’t, and the erotic “force beyond her understanding” it represents doesn’t really seem that far beyond her understanding, after all (130).
At its heart, Virgin Slave, Barbarian King is a domestic, even domesticated romance. I mean by this not only that its treatment of eros and sexual difference tends to moderation, not extremity, but also that the novel consistently longs for and valorizes a particular version of “home.” Julia has no real home as the novel begins—we are repeatedly told that she is lonely in her life in Rome, that she has no network of relationships to make her happy there, and still worse, no work to do that anyone values, that matters to anyone. (Allen frames Julia’s captivity as an opportunity for her to prove her strength and learn to fight (20), to show her strength, as she would never have done in the safe confines of Roman society.) Among the Visigoths she finds all of these—it’s as though she had been carried off to a bourgeois Forest of Arden, and as though the reader were carried off, while she reads, to a similarly supportive community, not all that different, finally, from “real life.” Wulfric has a place among the Goths, friends and family and work to do, but the community itself is homeless, nomadic, and he’s essentially a public figure there, with no separate private, domestic life. (No life without wife, as Mr. Kohli says in Bride and Prejudice.)
The foundation of the home this couple creates lies partly in their demonstrated care for one another, and partly in a sexuality for which we have, I think, a less famous, less elaborated, less dramatic, and potentially less sexy rhetoric to draw on: a mix, as the novel puts it, of “innocence and trust and desire” (124). What shall we make of this combination, their “esteem enlivened by desire,” to quote the poet James Thomson, from The Seasons (Spring)?
In her essay on the novel’s account of masculine honor, Sarah refers to what she sees as its jarringly anachronistic version of marital love. Whether or not it is in fact an anachronism, their notably egalitarian, affectionate love match fits quite nicely into the book as a “new foundation myth,” as Laura puts it in her own impressive piece. Just as Milton writes a (for his time) modern notion of companionate love into the story of Adam and Eve, the origins of mankind, Allen inscribes companionate love into a deep, foundational moment in European culture, “the basis of the Europe we live in today” (294).
As history, this may be bunk. I’ll need to spend a day or two with Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage: a History and Jean Hagstrum’s Esteem Enlivened by Desire: the Couple from Homer to Shakespeare to judge, and even then I’d probably be bluffing. (More on this anon.) As literature, though, such transpositions serve a worthwhile purpose, and even have a fancy theoretical name, courtesy of Harold Bloom, the critic I came in with. In Bloom, a move like this is called a “metaleptic reversal”: a rhetorical turn whereby something later (a text, an idea, whatever) claims to be in fact earlier than its temporal precursor, or even manages to seem the original, with the previous text simply a falling off or secondary instance. Surely it’s no accident that Allen’s hero and heroine end up living together in Provence, home of the troubadours, or that their imagined villa lies “in the shadow of Mont Ventoux” (294), a mountain internationally famous thanks in large part to the poet Petrarch.
In Allen’s foundation myth, as in Milton’s, companionate love is older than troubadour fin amors or unrequited Petrarchan longing--just as, to be too clever by half for a moment, her novel's merger of cultures antedates the one enacted in the Woodiwiss novel. In fantasy, it is not a new turn in marriage, circa 1750; rather, it is at the very least contemporary with the colder-hearted thought that marriage is a move in the struggle for power, with every wife, in Julia’s words, “a gaming piece on the board where family and civic status was decided” (103). It is, therefore, an original version of love, perhaps the original, and thus the one to which subsequent "revolutions "actually, and quite properly, return.
It’s true, it’s true: the historical romance novel is alive and selling! In the words of a buyer from one of the major chains, historicals are “trending up” for the first time in a while. This is especially true of the bestselling authors of historical romance, and booksellers are closely watching the numbers of new and midlist authors in this sub genre, because increased sales from those authors is the sign that the trend is real and lasting. Terrific news for the hundreds of writers and millions of readers of the beloved historical.1
I've written about history in historicals before, but I just came across the current issue of Working Papers on the Web (Volume 9, December 2006), on the topic of Historicising the Historical Novel and apart from being interesting in its own right in its analysis of historical fiction, it also raised some issues which are equally relevant to historical romances. According to Chris Hopkins "for both authors and critics, the form of the historical novel seems unavoidably caught up in doubts, assumptions and debates about the nature and status of history and of fiction, about relationships between past and present". Gillian Polack questioned a number of authors of historical fiction and concluded that
writers who use the Middle Ages in their fiction are more likely to have an emotive link with the period or to consider it as a tool to enhance their fiction than to have a purely empirical approach. The 'facts' of the past are subsets of a dedication to bringing a higher truth to the public or to telling a story or to exploring a personal love for a place a time or a person.
This, and the fact that the novels are published by "publishers supposedly interested more in marketability than in the subjective emotive value of a texts [...] possibly gives the fiction writers' Middle Ages a stronger claim to being the mainstream Middle Ages in wider cultural terms than the scholarly Middle Ages". There are bound to be exceptions, of course, and Sharan E. Newman was one scholar who, irritated by the "wide gap between what scholars learn and teach about the Middle Ages and what the average person believes [...] decided to take another tack in presenting my research to the world: I wrote it into fiction".2
For the literary critic who wishes to analyse historical novels, it may be difficult to determine which historical inaccuracies are deliberate, intended to facilitate the plot, heighten the readers' enjoyment, make a point about contemporary society, or highlight a character's exceptional nature, and which are simply the result of a connection with the "mainstream" of popular knowledge/perceptions of the historical period in which her novels are set.
Carol Thurston studied "Fifty-six titles published between 1964 and 1981 by twelve publishers, of which approximately 87 per cent were published from 1976 to 1980" (37) all of which were what she termed "erotic historical romance novels" ( i.e. novels such as Kathleen Woodiwiss' 1972 The Flame and the Flower and Bertrice Small's 1980 Skye O'Malley). She found that
Most heroines have more education than other females of their time; more than two-thirds experience sexual intercourse before marriage and with more than one man (the range was 2-7 different men), and more than half were raped. One out of three became pregnant before marriage, married more than once, and posed as a man or boy at some time during the story. (37)
erotic historical romance heroines could be characterized as feisty women of integrity fighting for independence, equality and respect in a "man's world". [...] They show a strong determination to be accepted as individuals in their own right, not defined by marriage or family lineage [...]. In addition, heroines recognize that they have sexual needs as strong as those of their lovers and are not ashamed to seek satisfaction of those needs. (41)
Thurston notes that there is "strong evidence that changing social values in today's society have been imposed on these historical settings" (43) but she was not concerned with "the question of what the creator may have intended" because "ultimately the impression the reader is left with - what the reader thought was said and done, and by what kind of people - may be the more significant information" (35-36).3
Authors can certainly use history to make points about contemporary society and politics. Lisa Hopkins' paper on Dorothy Dunnett explores the ways in which
during the course of the novels she develops a vision of the historical novel as neither Scottian nor nostalgic but a manifesto for the future of Scotland, in which it is seen not as a small and geographically isolated northern country but as a lively and thriving part of a wider European culture.
Yet it is also true that, as Alison Light observed of the historical romances she read as a teenager,
The class politics of many of these novels are often difficult to tease out. Even if we wanted to, they cannot merely be read off from content, not least because many of the settings deliberately pre-date modern class references or terminology and are thereby mystified. (66)
The study of popular fictions will always founder on the rock of ideological purity, clung to in political desperation. Not least because the identifications which all literary texts offer are multiple and conflictual, even irreconciliable. [...] What's clear is that the capacity to fantasize which novels encourage, is notoriously unbiddable, and that for those of us who judge novels by their messages, moral, social or political this has always been a mixed blessing. (69-70)
Nonetheless, Light observed that there was a special focus on women's lives:
historical novels gave me a history I could appreciate. The focus within them is ultimately upon individuals, but especially upon femininities, upon women's lives and loves, their families and their feelings. What the novels manage is to give the concerns of the so-called private sphere the status and interest of history. (59)
In most historical romances the politics of a historical period are rarely foregrounded,4 and this often makes it still more difficult to "tease out" the class politics. Nonetheless, as was the case with the novels read by Light, women and their concerns and interests are placed at the centre of historical romances and, as Thurston found, they may use the historical context to present on a magnified scale some of the challenges which face modern women.
Medieval settings are perhaps more overtly threatening to a heroine, because she may be married off against her will by her father, or abducted by an enemy knight. The armed power of the male characters may present a very clear threat, but it is one which the heroine can be shown to overcome, perhaps through her own mastery of "masculine" skills and/or through courage, intelligence and lateral thinking. In Isolde Martyn's short free online story, Heart of Gold, the Demoiselle Madeleine de Bellegarde-sur-Cher demonstrates all these qualities and abilities. The story shows us a couple who are well-matched, both in archery and in their mental abilities (both are described as "too clever"), and the archery takes on a symbolic as well as a literal meaning.
We can contrast this medieval story with another by Isolde Martyn, A Loving Matter, set in a very much later historical period (it's very short, so I'm not sure if it's set in the Victorian period or slightly earlier). I wonder if the associations readers have of this period, at least in part due to reading "trad Regencies" is that this was a time of strict social conventions. Women in this period run the risk of becoming inspid or spiteful, and in the face of the challenges posed to her autonomy and success the heroine tends to respond with intelligence, witty repartee and a willingness to bend the rules at least a little. Both in the Regency, where the rules governing entry to Almack's were determined by an all-female committee, and in the Victorian period, when Britain was once more ruled by a Queen, the social rules and the threat to an independent-minded heroine may come as much from women as from men. In Martyn's story their presence may only be inferred, but what is more than clear is that the hero himself poses no threat.
I'm aware that I'm generalising wildly about romances set in both these periods but I think it's fair to say that each historical period has a particular "flavour" for readers5 which allows authors and readers to explore issues related to women's roles, femininity, masculinity and male/female relationships in a different way.
The Regency period is great fun to write about in part because of the codes that governed the behavior of men and women regarding marriage, courtship, adultery, etc. It’s a challenge to create characters who are historically accurate (or reasonably so) and still engage the sympathy of thoroughly modern women. It’s also a challenge to design the courtship of two characters who are not supposed to be private together or even kiss. I started thinking about the Georgian period because there were so many fewer strictures. Basically, society was a lot wilder.
Jo Beverley concurs with this characterisation of the Georgian period, describing it as "a bawdy, amoral age, especially for the rich. It seems inevitable, therefore, that my Georgian romances have erotic elements" and she contrasts this with the early Middle Ages, in which
They had the arts, yes...but most people, even the nobles, were working hard for food, shelter, and security. In my medieval books, therefore, sex is fairly simple. Gentle at times, even playful, but down-to-earth. I don't think most people had time or energy for decadence!
----1According to Jane at Dear Author the situation may not be quite so promising: "Tommy Dreiling, the buyer for Barnes and Noble, [...] said that the trends are similar to those reported at Borders. [...] Historical romance sales were author driven, meaning that some authors like Sabrina Jeffries, were selling tremendously well but others were not".
3 There, are, of course, problems involved in determining what 'the reader' thinks or feels about a text given that reader perceptions differ.
4 I discussed politics in contemporary romance novels here, and an example of a historical romance which devotes considerable space to an exploration of the politics of the period is Carola Dunn's Crossed Quills.
5 Whether or not this "flavour" is historically accurate is an issue I'll have to leave to historians to determine.
Thurston, Carol. "Popular Historical Romances: Agent for Social Change? An Exploration of Methodologies." Journal of Popular Culture 19.1 (1985): 35-45.
The paintings are both by Edmund Blair Leighton. The first is "Stitching the Standard" and the second is "A Favour", and both are from Wikimedia Commons. In 1897 Gleeson White, "a writer and journalist on art" wrote that Leighton's paintings were "the pictorial equivalent of light literature, of belles letters, of graceful novels".
In a comment several days ago, I wrote that "A romance novel's aesthetic interest, at least to me, often lies in how wittily or inventively or simply freshly a novelist selects among and deploys the givens of the genre." Laura posed a couple if searching questions in reply:
Eric, this part of what you said's been intriguing me, because although I think I'd usually be able to detect when a romance was breaking a convention of the genre, I've always steered clear of analysing humour or satire. Humour seems so hard to pin down. Do you have any techniques which academics should bear in mind when studying this aspect of texts?
I also wonder about the 'freshness' aspect you mention, because again I think that could be subjective, and it's also quite dependent on what you (generic you) have read in the past. [...] In the past I've studied old texts, and 'freshness' wasn't something I was looking for. How you go about identifying it and demonstrating to a reader of an academic article that it's present in the text you're discussing?
These are hard topics to pursue without sounding like a US commercial for feminine hygiene products ("sometimes a novel doesn't feel so 'fresh'"), but let me see what I can do, especially since the key terms of your questions, Laura, open a whole new set of issues for us as academic readers of romance.
When I read poems, I feel confident--probably too confident--in proclaiming that this or that poem is "fresh" or "witty" (in the sense of "clever" or simply "intelligent," more than "humorous"or "satirical") in its deployment of conventions. These are subjective judgments, however objective my rhetoric may be, but I make the claims based on thirty years of reading poetry, and at least twenty, maybe twenty-five, of studying the history and criticism of the art. During those years, I have internalized a narrative about how the art of poetry has developed, at least in English; I have also seen how critics disagree with one another, so that one critic's major poet is another's minor figure, and one critic's innovation is another's period piece. I've watched literary historians recover largely-forgotten poets (Mina Loy, Edwin Rolfe), and watched critics then wrangle over their value and interest, and slowly but surely I've grown confident enough to pass judgment myself. If I'm wrong, what's the worst that can happen? Someone will disagree with me, maybe disprove me--either with evidence, if I'm making an empirical claim, or with more persuasive rhetoric, if I've made the case for some poem's value--and then the conversation will go on.
When it comes to romance, I'm at a double disadvantage. I haven't read the genre very long, and there isn't much criticism out there for me to draw on as a shortcut. When I tell the story of the genre to my students, I depend on claims I've found in the histories that I have read so far: for example, that The Sheik is a reasonably good place to start the story of modern popular romance fiction, or that The Flame and the Flower changed the shape of romance publishing and inaugurated the age of the "bodice-ripper" or "erotic historical romance." I haven't done the research to test either of these statements myself, nor am I likely to do so. There are huge gaps in my romance reading: gaps I sometimes work to fill, as when I doggedly read Sweet Savage Love this summer (not a book I'd have finished, except for its historical significance as the second of those erotic historicals); gaps I haven't started to address, and may never, as when I tack past the shoals of Nora Roberts books, unsure how to set my course and explore them.
Where does this leave me as a critic? As Laura asks, how do I go about identifying and demonstrating "freshness" to my academic readers?
My hunch is that I'll just make declarations, based on my best sense at the time--my subjective response, in Laura's terms--and make them as ardently and cleverly and confidently as I can, as if I knew exactly what I was talking about. Then I'll hold my breath and wait for someone, probably one of you reading right now, to tell me that I'm wrong--God willing, at the peer review stage rather than when the piece is already in print, but if I make a fool of myself in public, I can live with that.
We are, after all, in the lucky position of creating the field of romance criticism, folks! There's no canon to speak of, and precious little critical orthodoxy to rein us in or weigh us down. If we say that this or that novel is worth reading and teaching, we make it so, at least for a while. If we say that Lydia Joyce's Veil of Night invokes the conventions of Gothic romance and then falters, unable to sustain their haunting and mysterious tone, then so it does, by gum--and, conversely, if we say that it invokes those conventions only to shine a debunking, rationalist light on them to witty and fresh effect, entirely conscious of its every turn, then the novel does just that. We have to decide, and make the case, and see which position wins out. (For my money, by the way, Joyce's Whispers of the Nightis a far better book--but what I mean by "better" in this case, I'd need to hash out at length, knowing all the while that there are no set criteria for such evaluations, but that any criteria I use might be the ones to be adopted as this field develops.)
We need so much in this field: terms of art for describing the genre (Pam Regis has given us some, but we need more); a good set of arguments over who are its major figures and which its major texts; some thoughtful, well-researched debunking of what "major" really means, anyway; essays on the pleasures of individual books; Barthesian reflections on "the pleasures of the text" in romance fiction; historicist readings of romance novels in relation to women's history and other contexts; philosophical meditations on love and desire that take works of romance fiction as their instigation, the way that Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness treats Hollywood comedies of the 1930s. And more, I'm sure!
My hunch is that we needn't worry about being "subjective." We need a lot of good, well-written, confidently subjective criticism in the field, criticism of insight and unabashed advocacy, just as we continue to need solid, "objective" research that keeps the rest of us honest. I wish I had specific "techniques" to suggest, but at the moment, I have only hunches and aspirations--and the sense that, in the words of Bram Stoker's Prof. Van Helsing, "There is work, wild work to be done!"
A week or so ago, to kick things off, I posted the syllabus for my first course on Popular Romance Fiction. I noted at the time that the course hadn't exactly gone as planned, and the ways that it variously succeeded and failed have a lot to do with the topics we have posted about here ever since.
Just to refresh your memory, that first course was organized by topics and genres. We had a week devoted the two-part question "What is Romance, and Why Do People Say Such Nasty Things About It?"; after that, we spent two weeks on "Alpha Males and Bodice Rippers,"two weeks on Regencies, a week on romantic suspense, a week on historical romances, and a week on a contemporary romance. In each unit, I tried to pair an earlier and a later example of the genre, and in the weeks on Alpha Males, we actually worked on three novels: The Sheik, The Flame and the Flower, and Emma Holly's Hunting Midnight, whose hero Ulric, a shapeshifting upyr, is quite literally the alpha male of his wolf pack.
As the course went on, I had to cut a number of books. It took much longer than I'd thought to set out some of the conventions of each genre and then to discuss each romance. On the other hand, we made some wonderful discoveries as we read. For example, as our first romantic suspense novel I had assigned Mary Stewart's Madam, Will You Talk at the last minute, after giving it only a cursory reading. (The one I wanted to teach, Nine Coaches Waiting, turned out to be out of print.) When I walked in to class, the students were utterly baffled by it. Where, they asked, was the romance? After the sexually explicit texts they'd read for the past few weeks, Stewart's novel wasn't just tepid; it seemed positively repressed, and the relationship between our heroine, Charity, and the hero, Richard Byron, felt elusive at best and perfunctory at worst.
Now, I don't know about you, but I actually love reactions like this. They make me think on my feet, and they turn the class into a knowledge-producing, rather than a knowledge-transmitting, enterprise. I sent the class on a romance treasure-hunt, and within the hour, we had put together a delightful list of discoveries, spotting displaced romance in the setting (Troubadour country in the south of France), in the character's names (Charity, from caritas; and Byron from the poet, naturally, although they didn't know this coming in), in Charity's "mother-complex" toward Richard's son David, in Charity's visit to the Temple of Diana (where she meets Richard, rather violently--with this violence also a displacement of sexual interest), in the literary epigraphs to several chapters, in various code words and phrases (Richard, like Charity's late husband Johnny, tends to be, ahem, "dictatorial"), and, most of all, in the scenes of eating and drinking. Here's the turning point, midway through the novel, when Richard has finally caught up with Charity and forces her to have a meal with him, although she still suspects, in the best gothic fashion, that he is a murderer:
"All of it," urged Richard Byron. I obeyed him, and lay back against the deep cushions with my eyes closed, letting my body relax utterly to the creeping warmth of the drink and the smell of the food and wine and flowers. My bones seemed to have melted, and I was queerly content to lie back against the yielding velvet, with the soft lights against my eyelids, and do nothing, think of nothing. I was quiet and utterly passive, and the awful beginnings of hysteria were checked.
Still from that same dimensionless distance, I heard him speaking in French. I supposed he was ordering food. And presently at my elbow I I heard the chink of silver, and opened my eyes to see the big trolley of hors d'oeuvres with its hovering attendant.
Richard Byron said something to him, and without waiting for me to speak, the man served me from the tray. I remember still those exquisite fluted silver dishes, each with its load of dainty colours...there were anchovies and tiny gleaming silver fish in red sauce, and savoury buter in curled strips of fresh lettuce; there were caviare and tomato and olives green and black, and small golden-pink mushrooms and cresses and beans. The waiter heaped my plate, and filled another glass with white wine. I drank half a glassfull without a word, and began to eat. I was conscious of Richard Byron's eyes on me, but he did not speak. (173).
This description of the meal goes on for another page or two--it's as sensual as any love scene, but my students had overlooked it entirely, looking for something more literal.
The next time I taught my romance course, I made the first half of the quarter a chronological survey, from The Sheik (1919) to The Flame and the Flower (1972); only then did we break into contemporary authors and subgenres. This time, when we reached Mary Stewart, we could talk about it in terms of the sexual politics of the mid-1950s--what Charity, and Stewart, could and could not do openly in the text--and we had the chance to think more deeply about the novel's treatment of history, too. (Not to toss out spoilers, but the novel is set in post-war Europe, and there is an important plot thread involving the Holocaust.)
Now, is Madam, Will You Talk? of historical significance? Possibly--it's Stewart's first novel, and she has been credited with creating the modern genre of romantic suspense. Is it a teachable text? Absolutely; in fact, it taught my students not only about the history of romance fiction, but about a number of literary techniques, from allusion to symbolism. (Few were English majors; most needed this education, or at least these reminders of long ago high school coursework.) Would I put it in "the canon" of romance fiction, were there to be one? Well, it's not on my list of "transcendent romances," but I do find it awfully interesting. Is that good enough?
P.S. Here are two of the paper topics I used the first time I taught Madam, Will You Talk? Feel free to borrow and transform them, and let me know how it went!
Paper topics on Madam, Will You Talk?
1. In class, we explored some of the ways that this novel displaces its “romance”—at least as far as this means sexuality, desire, passion, and so on—into various other plot elements, activities, code phrases, epigraphs, settings, and so on. Write an essay that elaborates this idea into a full-blown argument. Demonstrate that, despite one’s initial impression, this is a pervasively “romantic” romance novel, albeit in a far more subtle way than we see in, say, The Flame and the Flower.
2. Romance novels are famous for delivering, by the end, the beloved “HEA”: happily ever after. How, though, can the novelist pull this off when her novel is filled with crime, death, and tragedy? Write an essay on the final chapters of Madam which shows how they pull off this remarkable challenge, allowing us to feel that the chaos and sadness that the novel begins with, in both private and public worlds, have been replaced by coherence and at least a promise of joy. (You may want to keep in mind an idea from romance author and critic Jennifer Crusie, who has said that the happy endings of romance novels best also be understood as endings that give us a sense of “emotional justice.")
So, let's see--this is my new blog about romance novels.
Well, not my blog. At least, not mine alone. Pam Regis, author of the indispensible A Natural History of the Romance Novel, will be joining me. So will other members of the RomanceScholar listserv, if they'd like--and so can you, if you're an academic who wants to post about romance fiction, whether as a critic, teacher, or fan.
I'd also love to see here--which means I'll post here--any syllabi, class notes, paper topics, or other ancillary materials you'd like to share. I do have another website under construction, "Resources for Teaching Popular Romance Fiction," where such materials could go, but alas, my webmistress is away for the summer, so that project is on hold. Bring them here, post them up, share the wealth, everyone! Or send them to me, and I'll do it for you.
To begin, then, here's the syllabus I tried for my first class on popular romance fiction, a 200-level undergraduate class that drew 40 students, more or less, from across the university: English 286: Popular Literature:Romance
Prof. Eric Murphy Selinger Fall, 2005:Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:10-11:40, LEVAN 508 Office: McGaw 217; Office Hours:Tuesday, 3-4, and by appointment
Course Description:English 286 (Romance) will introduce you to the history of the “romance novel,” to some of its major 20th and 21st century subgenres and authors, and to the critical debates that have surrounded this most popular of popular literatures, with particular attention to feminist debates over the worth, appeal, and effects of romance fiction on women readers.
Course Assignments, with Approximate Weights
1.Two short papers (5 pp.), each of which will analyze one of our assigned novels based on critical terms and concepts discussed in class and imported from your other learning.Assignment sheets will be distributed in advance:20% each
2.One group presentation OR individual “Memo to Selinger” on a genre and / or exemplary text I have not covered this quarter, but should in future classes.Topics might include a particular line of series romance, Christian / inspirational romance, paranormal romance, science fiction romance, erotic romance, gay and lesbian romance, African-American or other “ethnic” romance, Western romance, or Chick-Lit. Assignment sheets will be distributed in advance:20%
3.A take-home final exam, focused on the final novels in the class:20%
Schedule Of Classes, Topics, And Readings
Thursday, Sept. 8:Introduction to the Class and to each other.Introduction to the history of “romance.”
Topic 1:What is Romance, and Why Do People Say Such Nasty Things About It?
Tuesday, Sept. 13: Sarah Bird, The Boyfriend School; please also read the essays by Jennifer Crusie which I will link to the class Blackboard site
Thursday, Sept. 15:The Boyfriend School, continued
Topic 2:Of Alpha Males and Bodice Rippers
Tuesday, Sept. 20:E. M. Hull, The Sheik Thursday, Sept. 22:Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, The Flame and the Flower
Tuesday, Sept. 27:The Flame and the Flower, cont. Thursday, Sept. 29: Emma Holly, Hunting MidnightFirst paper due
Topic 3:Austen and Everything After (Regencies)
Tuesday, Oct. 4:NO CLASS:ROSH HASHANA Thursday, Oct. 6: Georgette Heyer, These Old Shades.
Tuesday, Oct. 11: Julia Quinn, The Viscount Who Loved Me; Thursday,OCT. 13:NO CLASS:YOM KIPPUR
Tuesday, Oct. 18: Mary Ballogh, Slightly Dangerous
Topic 4:Building a Mystery (Romantic Suspense)
Thursday, Oct. 20:Mary Stewart, Madam, Will You Talk? Tuesday, Oct. 25: Linda Howard, Mr. Perfect
Thursday, Oct. 27: Roberta Gellis, Desiree Second paper due Tuesday, Nov. 1:Beverly Jenkins, Something like Love;
Topic 6:Contemporaries and Meta-Romance
Thursday, Nov. 3: Jennifer Crusie: Bet Me Tuesday, Nov. 8:Bet Me, continued; and / or First Group Presentations
Thursday, Nov. 10:Group Presentations: individual “Memos” due Nov. 15: Group Presentations and Wrap-up;
Take-home final due back to me:Weds, November 23.
I should note, before I run, that the class didn't really look like this in practice. I dropped several books and changed the assignments, revising our priorities on the fly. Tomorrow I'll post more about why I chose these books, most of which I'm still teaching, and I'll put up the syllabi of the next two iterations of the course, with thoughts about the changes, term to term.
Right now, though, I'm through with blogging for the day. It's World Cup soccer and Tell Me Lies for the rest of the weekend, for me!
