Insights Into the Taste and Manners of a Nation

Laura Vivanco

John Ryley, writing about early nineteenth-century Leeds, commented that

Public amusements, especially those of the Drama are calculated to give us an insight into the taste and manners of a nation; in popular Tragedies, we trace the refinement of the passions; Comedies are often satires on existing follies and fashions of the times; and even Pantomimes generally exhibit caricatures of the frivolities of the day. (61)

Although Ryley focuses on drama, the idea that cultural works in some way respond to, or give insight into, the "taste and manners of a nation" is one that has been widely accepted. Here's what John G. Cawelti had to say about the issue in his Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (1976):

Certain story archetypes particularly fufill man’s needs for enjoyment and escape. [...] But in order for these patterns to work, they must be embodied in figures, settings, and situations that have appropriate meanings for the culture which produces them. One cannot write a successful adventure story about a social character type that the culture cannot conceive in heroic terms; this is why we have so few adventure stories about plumbers, janitors, or streetsweepers. It is, however, certainly not inconceivable that a culture might emerge which placed a different sort of valuation or interpretation on these tasks, in which case we might expect to see the evolution of adventure story formulas about them. (6)

Now maybe I'm going to be guilty of making some generalisations to go along with the assumptions, but it seems to me that although I have come across some romance heroes who are carpenters and builders, they're usually depicted as small business owners (even if these are one-person businesses). I don't recall having read a romance which featured a hero who worked in a foundry, down a mine, or on an assembly-line. The only janitor hero I've encountered is to be found in LaVyrle Spencer's Then Came Heaven (here's an AAR review which gives an overview of the characters and setting). I suspect this novel is one of the exceptions which proves the rule that romance heroes are generally not employed in the kinds of proletarian jobs which would be celebrated in socialist realist statues of the kind pictured above.¹ I'm fairly sure that socialist realist art also has professions that the artists "cannot conceive in heroic terms."

Just out of interest, and because I want an excuse to include the following portrait, has anyone written a novel about a hero who's a tailor? I don't count The Tailor of Gloucester, as the tailor requires the assistance of some very compassionate and hardworking mice, and I'd consider them, rather than the tailor, to be the heroes of that story.

Romance heroines, in contrast to romance heroes, are not infrequently lowly members of the working classes (they may work as waitresses, secretaries, low-paid providers of care to infants and the elderly etc), but rather than setting up a workers' co-operative or joining a union, a downtrodden heroine will generally be freed from exploitation in the labour market by marrying her boss or some other male who will be able to support her and their children in relative comfort. Of course, many heroines do have professional jobs, enjoy their work and continue working after marriage, but they couldn't be romance heroines if they didn't give a higher priority to their romantic relationships and, often, children. In part that's due to the demands of the plot. After all, a romance wouldn't be a romance if the protagonists decided that their idea of "happily ever after" consisted of walking off into the sunset in opposite directions in pursuit of their careers. That applies to both heroes and heroines. However, I suspect the characterisation of heroines also owes quite a bit to social expectations of women, and character traits and behaviours which may be permissible, or even deemed admirable and/or sexy in a hero, may not be seen the same way if demonstrated by a heroine. Abby Green, in a description of her The Spaniard’s Marriage Bargain, writes that she

can’t remember exactly where the idea sprang from originally, but I know that I was thinking something along the lines of: what would be one of the most unforgivable things a woman/mother could do? For me, it would definitely be to walk away from her baby, or child.
Men seem to get away with doing that a lot easier than women in many cases, but for a woman to turn her back on her baby? It’s extremely hard to forgive, after all, women are all hardwired to be the nurturers aren’t they?
Well, of course we all know it’s never as black and white as that.

We may know it's "never as black and white as that" but judging by the characterisations of romance heroes and heroines a double standard does seem to exist around the issue.

It's not just characters who are affected by underlying social assumptions. As Cawelti observed, "for these patterns to work, they must be embodied in figures, settings, and situations that have appropriate meanings for the culture which produces them." This passage from The Seduction Business (1999) by Charlotte Lamb seems to me to reveal some of the settings "that have appropriate meanings" in romance:

The sound of his voice made her heart sing, but she was still afraid. When he'd begun making love to her in her bedroom the other night she had lost control within seconds; had been going crazy, burning up with desire as he touched her.
She wanted him now, in the cold light of day, in her office, sitting at her desk. It wasn't necessary to have moonlight, or music, or for her to have been drinking wine ... The desire she felt was constant, instinctive, deep. (157, emphasis added)

I think it would be safe to assume that the heroine is listing here some typical components of what might be considered the kind of truly "romantic" setting that is deemed particularly conducive getting a woman in a receptive mood for sexual activity. Phillip Vannini has observed that

Romantic love is one of the defining sentiments of our culture. [...] As production and consumption have expanded, mass communication has been transmitting to the public a visual idea of love as a spectacle. The romanticization of commodities occurs when media portray certain products and services as romantic. A cheap fast-food meal is not romantic, but the consumption of a candle-lit three-course meal at a French restaurant is. [...] Beside self-expression, romance allowed those who had learned to consume it properly to feel liberated from the drudgery of work. This is the image of the "date" as an outing to a restaurant, a movie theater, or a romantic getaway at the seaside or at a luxurious (and romantic) hotel. (171)

Again, I think there tend to be gender-related assumptions about the efficacy of romantic gestures and settings. The romance genre, and ideas about women's sexuality, have moved on since Germaine Greer wrote that "Flowers, little gifts, love-letters, maybe poems to her eyes and hair, candlelit meals on moonlit terraces and muted strings. Nothing hasty, physical [...] Mystery, magic, champagne, ceremony, tenderness, excitement, adoration, reverence – women never have enough of it" (173) but there is perhaps still a lingering impression that women need to be coaxed and wooed into having sexual feelings, or may be very occasionally overwhelmed by immense passion if they meet The One, whereas the common misperception, debunked by Snopes, is that "men think about sex every seven seconds" and, presumably, have no need of romantic music, wine, moonlight etc in order to get in the mood.

The range of personality traits embodied in heroes and heroines, and the aspirational aspect of romance reading, shape the types of settings, characters, and outcomes we tend to find in the genre. Some jobs, some social groups, some settings, are not ones that are seen as socially desirable. They're not aspirational. Ancestral mansions and white picket fences are aspirational, ballgowns and candle-lit dinners are romantic, strong rich men are desirable, virginal-yet-sexy-and-beautiful-yet-not-vain women are aspirational, but men who stack shelves in supermarkets and non-white women are generally not considered aspirational. At least, having read quite a lot of romances, that's the impression I'm left with.

Black heroines can, of course, be found in the African-American romance sub-genre, but they're not at all common in romances aimed at non-African-American readers. I wonder if this is because while black women are expected to be able to identify with a black heroine, and it's thought understandable that a black heroine can represent an ideal for a black woman, it's somehow not expected that a white women would find it easy to think of a black woman as the embodiment of an ideal she should aspire to. I could be wrong about that, but I'm offering it up as a hypothesis. It was certainly the case that in the nineteenth century

people sometimes spoke of civilization as if it were itself a racial trait, inherited by all Anglo-Saxons and other "advanced" white races.
Gender, too, was an essential component of civilization. Indeed, one could identify advanced civilizations by the degree of their sexual differentiation. [...] Civilized women were womanly - delicate, spiritual, dedicated to the home. And civilized white men were the most manly ever evolved - firm of character; self-controlled; protectors of women and children. In contrast, gender differences among savages seemed to be blurred. Savage women were aggressive, carried heavy burdens, and did all sorts of "masculine" hard labor. (Bederman 25)

This stereotype does not seem to have entirely disappeared:

According to essayists in “Critical Studies in Media Communication,” one of the things that reality television producers tend to do is to choose contestants, manipulate situations and use editing to reinforce racial stereotypes.
In an October 2008 issue devoted to the subject, theorist Robin Boylorn argued that black women are recruited and their content edited to conform to images through the history of movies and television. One predominant stereotype is the black woman as “aggressive, loud, rude and pushy. Other negative images include divas, hoochies, weepers, waifs, antagonizers, shrills, welfare queens and freaks.” (Cummings)

-----------

• Anreus, Alejandro, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg. The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere. Penn State Press, 2006.
• Bederman, Gail. Manhood & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. 1995. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1996.
• Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.
• Cummings, James. "Commentary: Reality TV reinforces racial stereotypes." Dayton Daily News. 22 August 2009.
• Greer, Germaine. 1970. The Female Eunuch. London: Paladin, 1971.
• Lamb, Charlotte. The Seduction Business. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 1999.
• Ryley, John. The Leeds Guide; Including a Sketch of the Environs, and Kirkstall Abbey. Leeds: Edward Baines, 1806.
• Vannini, Phillip. "Will You Marry Me?: Spectacle and Consumption in the Ritual of Marriage Proposals." Journal of Popular Culture 38:1 (2004): 169-185.

1 I haven't done a comprehensive search for art and literature celebrating "plumbers, janitors, or streetsweepers" but I have come across a reference to a work in the American social realist style, which perhaps challenges a few preconceptions about which jobs are heroic:

Cesare Stea's 1939 relief Assembling for a sewage-disposal plant in Queens [...]. It shows four men working together on a length of sewage pipe. Their shirtsleeves are rolled up and their pants are tight, so that their muscular frames are accentuated. [...] Such an image is clearly meant to celebrate the New Deal's emphasis on putting Americans back to work, and its egalitarian rhetoric. (Anreus, Linden & Weinberg 121)

The first image is a cropped version of William Bell Scott's painting, Iron and Coal, which can be seen in its entirety at The Victorian Web. The photo of the "construction and industry statue on the Green Bridge, Vilnius [...] Lithuania" is from Wikimedia Commons, though again, I've done a bit of cropping. The third image is Giovanni Battista Moroni's The Tailor,

The portrait is a late work, probably around 1570, and the most famous of Moroni's portraits [...].
The colourful costume of the tailor is contrasted with the black material marked with chalk lines that he prepares to cut. Most of the sitters in Moroni's later portraits are dressed in black in the Spanish fashion that persisted into the following century. The tailor's head, lit from above to the left, dominates the painting, the eyes, as in the majority of Moroni's portraits, looking directly at the spectator with shrewd appraisal. (National Gallery)

I found this particular photo of the painting at Wikimedia Commons.

The Milk of Human Kindness

Laura Vivanco

World Breastfeeding Week is celebrated every year from 1 to 7 August in more than 170 countries to encourage breastfeeding and improve the health of babies around the world. (WHO)

So, in honour of World Breastfeeding Week, and on the principle that it's better to post something late than never, here are some examples of breastfeeding in the romance genre, and a short discussion about them.

In LaVyrle Spencer's Morning Glory Elly breastfeeds her baby (Lizzy) while Will looks on:

She sat on one of the overstuffed chairs with Lizzy in the crook of her arm. Will rolled onto his belly, crossed his wrists beneath his chin and observed as his wife looked down, took a nipple between two fingers and guided it to the baby's open mouth. His eyes became dark as onyx, his body aroused as he imbibed the image, both maternal and sexual. (279)

Here Will "imbibes" the image, not the milk, but there are some romances in which heroes do imbibe breastmilk. The attitudes of heroes who watch breastfeeding and/or drink breastmilk can differ significantly: "Hayden's desire for access is the 'typical' masculine desire for female breasts as secondary sexual characteristic, not Hawk O'Toole's desire for the maternally sexual/sexually maternal female, nor Trey's desire for the glory of the God(dess)'s love" (Frantz 29).

Another breast-feeding hero can be found in Lisa Kleypas's Dreaming of You. In the epilogue we learn that "Motherhood had brought a new radiance to Sara's features, while her achievements in her work had given her maturity and confidence" (366). However, motherhood has made Sara less confident about her sexual relationship with Derek:

She could find no way to explain her reluctance to him. She had gone through so many changes ... She was a mother now ... She wasn't certain that making love with him would be the same at all, and she didn't want to find out. She was afraid of disappointing him, and herself, and it was easier to keep putting off the event than to face it. She shrugged lamely. "I'm afraid it won't be the same as before." (370)

Derek's response is to undress her and kiss her until

She stirred in awakening desire, clasping him closer. To her sudden mortification, a few milky droplets seeped from her breasts. Pulling away with an apologetic gasp, she tried to turn from him. Derek pushed her shoulders down and bent over her breasts. His breath flowed in deep gusts as he stared at her. The moist nipples were a darker pink than before, surrounded by a delicate tracing of veins. The lustily maternal sight sent a wave of aching excitement through him. He touched the tip of her breast with his tongue, teasing and circling, then fastening his lips over the tautness. Gently he pulled with his mouth.
"Oh, you mustn't," Sara gasped as she felt a tingling ache in her breast. "It's not decent ..."
"I never said I was decent."
She gave a breathless moan, caught beneath him as he drew a surge of milk from her body. (371)

I can't help wondering if Sara's disinclination to resume sexual relations after becoming a mother has a lot to do with something I mentioned in an earlier post about motherhood: "Images of motherhood in western society have most often ignored maternal sexuality, notwithstanding the sleight of hand that this entails" (Pascoe). This scene in Dreaming of You certainly brings maternal sexuality to the forefront of the reader's attention: the breast is a "lustily maternal sight" and Derek and Sara learn that post-partum sex is "not the same as before ... It's even better" (372).

However, although it may be positive for maternal sexuality to be acknowledged and celebrated, "cultural notions of the female breast as a primarily sexual object place the act of breastfeeding in a controversial light and can be one of the most influential factors in a woman's decision not to breastfeed" (Rodriguez-Garcia and Frazier). As Cindy A. Stearns has written,

Breastfeeding is an embodied experience that is likely to provoke important insights and apparent contradictions concerning women's bodies. Breastfeeding, like being pregnant, is a state in which the body is in some ways a public good and thus open for public comment. However, unlike pregnancy and childbirth, the expression of breastfeeding is a continuous activity that requires the ongoing participation of another person. To the extent that breastfeeding occurs in the presence of others and/or symbolizes good mothering, it is also a visual performance of mothering with the maternal body at center stage. [...]

The prominence of the sexualized breast poses a problem for breastfeeding women and their maternal bodies. The good maternal body is not commonly believed to be simultaneously sexual, despite the obvious facts of human reproduction (Davis-Floyd 1992; Newton 1977). The sexual aspects of women and the maternal aspects of women are expected to be independent of each other. Thus, breastfeeding raises questions about the appropriate uses of women's bodies, for sexual or nurturing purposes. (308-309)

Romances in which breastfeeding heroines are "both maternal and sexual" would, then, seem to challenge ideas about what is "decent." At the same time, however, if they sexualise breastfeeding without showing heroines breastfeeding in public, it could be argued that they leave unchallenged, or perhaps even reinforce, the idea that breastfeeding should be performed in private. I don't think romances should be instruction manuals on how to breastfeed (just as I don't think, pace Quilliam, that it's fair to judge romance novels primarily in terms of whether they provide "sex and relationships education" (179)), but I'm fairly sure that there are plenty which include discussions about breastfeeding and/or have scenes of public breastfeeding. Right at the moment, though, I can't think of any examples. Can anyone help?
-------

• Frantz, Sarah S. G. "'Expressing' Herself: The Romance Novel and the Feminine Will to Power." Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America. Eds. Lydia Cushman Schurman and Deidre Johnson. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002. 17-36.
• Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: UP, 2000.
  
• Kleypas, Lisa. Dreaming of You. New York: Avon, 1994.
• Pascoe, Caroline Myra. Screening Mothers: Representations of motherhood in Australian films from 1900 to 1988. PhD thesis. University of Sydney, 2006.
• Quilliam, Susan. " 'He seized her in his manly arms and bent his lips to hers…': The Surprising Impact that Romantic Novels Have On Our Work." Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care 37.3 (2011): 179-181.
• Rodriguez-Garcia, Rosalia and Lara Frazier. "Cultural Paradoxes Relating to Sexuality and Breastfeeding." Journal of Human Lactation 11.2 (1995): 111-115. [Unfortunately I didn't have access to this journal, so I've quoted from the abstract.]
• Spencer, LaVyrle. Morning Glory. 1989. New York: Jove, 1990.
  
• Stearns, Cindy A. "Breastfeeding and the Good Maternal Body." Gender and Society 13.3 (1999): 308-325. [Excerpt]
  

The illustration is by Hans Sebald Beham and is from Wikimedia Commons (there's a detailed description of it here, which is mostly in German). It illustrates the story of Cimon and Pero, which has inspired a number of artists. Some other artistic interpretations of the story of Cimon and Pero can be found here. According to Wikipedia "The story is recorded in Memorable Acts and Sayings of the Ancient Romans, Book Nine (De Factis Dictisque Memorabilibus Libri IX) by the ancient Roman historian Valerius Maximus, and was presented as a great act of filial piety and Roman honor." The Rijksmuseum describes Reubens' painting of the story like this:

At first this seems a strange subject for a painting: a young woman giving her breast to an old man tied up in chains in a bare prison cell. In fact it is a story from Roman history: the tale of Cimon and Pero. Cimon is Pero's father. He is in prison awaiting execution and has been given nothing to eat. Pero has recently had a child and saves her father from starvation by secretly giving him her breast. This relatively large picture was painted by the famous Antwerp artist, Peter Paul Rubens. To enliven the scene, Rubens has added two prying prison guards on the right.

One may suspect that the "prying prison guards" are not simply impressed by the "filial piety" of Pero's motives but rather have a more sexual interest in the scene. Byron, though, focused on its 'purity':

The starry fable of the milky way
Has not thy story’s purity; it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,
And sacred Nature triumphs more in this
Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds: — Oh, holiest nurse!
No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss
To thy sire’s heart, replenishing its source
With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe. (Childe Harold, Canto IV, Verse CLI)

Breastfeeding takes place in a similar context in a story in Barnaby Rich's Farewell to Military Profession (1581), although the plot is more similar to that of a modern romance since it features a wronged woman and the man who must learn to appreciate her goodness:

In the seventh story, ‘Of Aramanthus born a leper’, King Rodericke believes false accusations of adultery against his pregnant wife Isabell and sends her into exile, but when he is overthrown and imprisoned by the Turks she leaves her baby and returns in disguise to help him. In a graphic image of female nurturance, she comes to his prison each night, where ‘She would leane her self cloase to the grate, and thrustyng in her Teate betwene the Irons, the kyng learned againe to sucke, and thus she dieted him a long season’ (p. 175).
Because of Queen Isabell’s disguise, ‘Neither wiste the kyng what she was, that bestowed on hym so greate grace and goodnesse: yet he blessed her more then a thousande tymes a daie.’ While his companions in prison die for lack of sustenance, his gaolers observe him miraculously growing in strength from his unseen nightly ‘banquettes’. The episode has much of the resonance of mediaeval iconographies of the Virgin sustaining adult believers with her milk. (Hackett 88-89)

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.

Romance Revised in Teaching American Literature

Laura Vivanco

Since I first posted about the essays on romance authors which had been published in the journal Teaching American Literature there have been some changes made. Most of the essays have been renamed and restored to their original (in some cases significantly longer) lengths:

• Gillian Mason's "Rosemary Rogers: The Positive Power of Romance and Sexual Fantasy" is now "Rosemary Rogers."
  
• Suzanne Milton's "Danielle Steel: Bringing Family Issues to Light" is now "Danielle (Fernande) Steel."
  
• Sarah S. G. Frantz's "Suzanne Brockmann: The Military and the Romance" is now "Suzanne Brockmann."
  
• Wendy Wagner's "Jennifer Crusie: Romance as Academic Question" is now "Jennifer Crusie."
  
• Fahamisha Patricia Brown's "Beverly Jenkins: African American History and the Romance Novel" is now "Beverly Jenkins."
  
• Patricia Kennedy Bostian's "Amanda Scott: Bringing History to Life" keeps the same title and url.
  
• Leslie Haynesworth's "Janet Evanovich: Comedy and Romance" is now "Janet Evanovich."
  

These essays have also been joined by:

• Fahamisha Patricia Brown's "Anita Richmond Bunkley." Brown notes that

  Anita Richmond Bunkley identifies herself as the author of nine book-length novels, two romances, three novellas, and one work of non-fiction. While it is difficult to say which two titles she would characterize as romances, what is certain is that all of her novels contain an element of romance. (1)

  Given that one of her novels, Suite Embrace, (published in 2008) "is a Kimani romance novel (Harlequin’s African American series)," that's possibly one of the two that Bunkley would classify as romances.


• Lee Anna Maynard's "LaVyrle Spencer." I was particularly interested in Maynard's description of
  

  themes and motifs in The Fulfillment, most notably in the characters’ connections with the seasonal cycles on the farm. Life on a farm is dictated by the seasons, with they and not the farmer controlling the timeline of planting, cultivating, and harvesting, but Spencer forges a much deeper symbolic connection in her novel. (2)

  and her observation that, in Forsaking All Others,

  With sly self-referentiality, Spencer opens her novel with a breakthrough assignment for Allison – shooting a lusty cover for a romance novel Allison finds herself absorbed in reading, although she bristles at the tidy, happily-ever-after ending and what she imagines will be its surefire appeal to women readers. (4)

  Maynard also discusses the symbolism of "the rejuvenation of a house" in two of Spencer's novels.
  
  
• Diana Stout's "Karen Robards." In the very first paragraph, Stout informs the reader that "Robards claims that she doesn’t write under any formula, and has never sold any of the cookie-cutter romances produced by such publishers as Harlequin and Silhouette" (1). I wonder if this is Stout's paraphrasing of the following exchange between Robards and an interviewer:

  Did you ever write for the big formula-type romance publishers?
  
  No. I never did.¹

  Even if the description of Harlequin/Silhouette romances as "cookie-cutter" is the result of Stout's paraphrasing of Robards's response to the interviewer I'm still rather taken aback by it because it seems extremely dismissive of a great many romance novels and authors, including Nora Roberts (discussed below), who began by writing category romances. It has always seemed very ironic to me that, in a genre whose readers often complain that their novels are unfairly dismissed as "trash" or "fluff," some readers of single title romances often seem to be equally willing to take a negative, broad-brush attitude towards category romances.
  
  
• Wylene Rholetter's "Nora Roberts." One of the many interesting details about Roberts's career which are included in this extremely comprehensive essay is that "Roberts's name has come to be associated with connected stories during her more than twenty-year career, but, according to Isabel Swift, Vice President, Editorial, Silhouette, the concept was new in category fiction when Reflections and Dance of Dreams appeared in 1983" (2).
  
  Another unusual aspect of Roberts's career is that The Last Honest Woman "was Roberts's fiftieth title for Silhouette, and Roberts herself served as the cover model for Abigail O'Hurley Rockwell, the novel's heroine" (6). I've included a photo of the cover in question, as well as a near-contemporary photo of Roberts, for comparative purposes.²
  
  For all Roberts's success, the following claim seems overstated: "When Roberts entered the field in 1981, category romance was successful as a genre, but individual works within the category format had a shelf life of about thirty days. Nora Roberts challenged that limitation. She has proved that twenty-year-old category fiction still sells" (26). While it is certainly true that Roberts's novels for Harlequin have been repeatedly republished with impressive frequency and in impressive numbers, the Harlequin Classic Library had already reissued category romances which twenty or more years old. Juliet Shore's Doctor Memsahib, for example, is #4 in the Harlequin Classic Library. The publication details reveal that the novel was first published as a Mills & Boon hardcover edition in 1958, the first Harlequin edition was published in 1960, the "Golden Harlequin Library" edition was published in 1972 and the Harlequin Classic Library edition was published in March 1980. Lucy Agnes Hancock's Community Nurse was first published in hardback in 1944. The first Harlequin edition, in paperback, dates from 1953, and it seems to have been reprinted a couple of times between then and 1982, when it was added to the Harlequin Classic Library.
  
  As Rholetter notes, people often describe "Roberts as a 'publishing phenomenon'" (22) but the statement that "The MacKades with their expletive-rich language, quick tempers, tender hearts, and steady love for family suggest that in the creation of male characters, as in other areas, Roberts has moved far beyond the limits of formulaic romance" (12, emphasis added) seems to me to do more than simply praise Roberts's skill at characterisation. It raises questions about what constitutes "formulaic romance," and how many other authors in the genre have "moved far beyond" its limits. Rholetter's clearly not alone in elevating Roberts by comparing her and her novels to an anonymous mass of other romance writers and their books: "According to Thomas Kellner of Forbes, Putnam's Phyllis Grann believed Roberts's books were 'much more complex and textured' than typical romance fare" (9). This got me thinking about how scholars who appreciate the genre can write about its outstanding proponents without wording that appreciation in ways which might be interpreted by others (particularly those who do not know and love the genre as we do) as a dismissal of much of the genre. I think Rholetter gets the balance right here: "Margo [...] is a familiar type to romance readers, the beautiful woman fully aware of her sexual power and accustomed to using it. What sets Roberts apart from lesser talents is the skill with which she uses the type yet creates a distinctly individual character" (13). Here Rholetter carefully distinguishes between the use of traditional plot types (which are neither denigrated nor praised, but simply mentioned as an integral part of the genre) and the skill of a particular author in bringing something new to their use.

1 Stout included the interview “Karen Robards: The Romance Writer & Her Crystal Ball” in her list of sources. The web address Stout gave no longer seems to be working, so it's possible the version I found may be different.

2 The photo of Nora Roberts came from Claire E. White's 1998 "A Conversation With Nora Roberts" at Writers Write. The image of the cover of The Last Honest Woman is a customer image provided on Amazon.com. This is the cover of the "September 1990 reprint of "The Last Honest Woman" by Nora Roberts, Silhouette Special Edition No. 451, April 1988." The original cover features the same picture, but without the inset portrait of the heroine/Roberts.