Fiction / Romance / Truth in "For My Lady's Heart"

Eric M. Selinger

A nicely thoughtful post by Noah Berlatsky this morning over at The Hooded Utilitarian, all about issues of truth and fiction, romance and the real, in Laura Kinsale's novel For My Lady's Heart.  I haven't read the novel in years, but recall loving it, and wishing it were in print and teachable; evidently it's been available for two or three years now as a Kindle book, and also in paperback, but my syllabus hasn't caught up.  Perhaps I'll give it a shot this summer, or next fall, when I get back to teaching romance.

I'm also struck by how casually and effectively Berlatsky uses two of Pam Regis's "8 elements" to talk about some of the structural features of the novel.  It's a throwaway line, only a sentence ("the declaration and marriage come somewhat early on in the book"), but a sign, also, of how that terminology has made its way from academia into more general interest discussions of the genre.

Eric Murphy Selinger's Playfulness

Jonathan A. Allan

Eric Selinger and Sarah Frantz have been called “the Marx and Engels” of romance scholarship. If this is the case, perhaps it is time to turn attention to the ways in which our very own Marx and Engels theorize and write about romance. In this regard, I offer a “playful” engagement with Eric Selinger’s essay in New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction (now available for $9.99 on Kindle).

Selinger’s wonderful essay – an essay that is not anxious, not attempting to slay various precursors, not defensive of the genre, and makes no apology for studying romance – provides a challenge to scholars (and common readers) of the romance novel. Throughout his chapter, Selinger speaks of the possibility of “close reading” the romance novel, even if only to see “what would happen.”

Anecdotally, I must reluctantly admit that I have recently heard “close reading” used as a dismissive judgment on scholarship. To say that a critic hasn’t engaged in a “close reading” is to suggest, at least so it seems, that the critic has been overly theoretical. Theory becomes a symptom for a reading that isn’t close enough, theory is an illness that the reader needs to be cured of because the critic is missing the forest for the trees, the text for the words.

Indeed, I often find myself asking questions about theory, criticism, and popular romance fiction: What is the place of theory and criticism? Can we “close read” literary criticism and theory? Can we “close read” theory the same way we “close read” fiction? What would happen if we did “close read” theory and criticism?

To these ends, I turn my attention to Selinger's essay in New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction. In his essay, “How to Read a Romance Novel (and Fall in Love with Popular Romance),” Selinger offers a close reading of Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm (1992) and draws on ideas of intertextuality, particularly with respect to Milton’s Paradise Lost. The governing question of Selinger’s essay is: “What would “close-reading a romance” (as opposed to “reading the romance”) look like in practice?” And this is precisely what Selinger does throughout the essay.

Flowers from the Storm invokes [Milton] by name, stops by his house, and vividly associates Paradise Lost with Maddy’s parents and with Jevaulx’s hidden intelligence. If we want to know “precisely where we are” as we read the novel, we will need to think about Milton – so, at least, I teach my students to read the scene.

I am struck by how closely Selinger reads Flowers from the Storm. Indeed, I am taken aback—almost surprised—by the closeness of the reading. Selinger provides a series of intertextual relations between Flowers from the Storm and Paradise Lost, which consistently (and without fail) demonstrate the relation between these two texts. There is, of course, an academic (and political) game taking place: if the popular romance novel is able to “play” with Paradise Lost, then surely there must be some intelligence in these novels, something that makes them worthy of scrutiny and scholarship. But, there is something more catching, at least for me, about Selinger’s piece. Selinger “plays,” and “plays” quite a bit.

• Speaking about Dixon’s discussion of romance, Selinger writes, “this ‘way’ bears little resemblance to the subtle, playful strategies that we may have acquired in order to understand poetry or literary fiction, postmodern or otherwise.”

• Selinger later writes, “to read such a romance closely would not be to resist or dismiss it, but rather to let the mind of love we see at play in the text spark an interesting excitement, an ‘erotic curiosity’ of our own.” 

• About Kinsale’s novel: “You don’t have to read very far into Flowers from the Storm to note Kinsale’s play with romance conventions made famous by The Flame and the Flower.”

• Kinsale’s novel, but now in discussion with Dixon: “But the minute we accept Kinsale’s exegetical challenge, playing along with what we might either call (with Dixon) the novel’s ‘postmodern game-playing’ or (with Roberts) its ‘interplay with the art of the past,’ we realize the Miltonic echoes are everywhere in the text."

• Once more, Selinger invokes play: “To praise Kinsale’s novel, I may well want to
play the ‘games’ I find in it, to use Dixon’s term, just as I play the postmodern mind games of A. S. Byatt’s bestselling Possession: A Romance, published just two years before Flowers from the Storm.

• Incidentally, in his “Rereading the Romance,” (2007) Selinger writes, “But the fundamental questions of pleasure at play in romance novels strikes me as yet to be posed in a way that is both robustly theorized and practically applicable, able to account for the novels or the experience of reading them in their range, variety, and charm.”

I admit that what struck me about this “playfulness” was a passing moment in Selinger’s paper, “a good enough author can use ‘nostalgia’ precisely in order to raise the sort of ‘large’ questions that Gornick wants novels to explore: “how we got to be as we are, or how the time in which we live to be as it is.” “Good enough author” recalls, alludes to, and perhaps is consciously aware of, D. W. Winnicott’s formulation of the “good enough mother,” which is so carefully considered in his book Playing and Reality (1971).

I want to suggest that Selinger’s use of “play” is important, not because of the way he critiques notions of “play," but because Selinger is carefully and playfully playing with play. Selinger might very well be attempting to recuperate the “playful” quality of literary analysis. I think this “recuperative” practice is important for Selinger. At one point in a very playful spirit, Selinger writes:

Kinsale’s phrase “pirate mouth” may be inscrutable on its own (a mouth with an eye-patch? a mouth that says “arrrr”?), but it makes sense as stock-response shorthand, a way to trigger the sort of associations spelled out at greater length by Woodiwiss and intensify them through brevity and juxtaposition.

What could be more “playful” than the brief meditation on the “pirate mouth”? (As a reader, I am imagining Captain Hook, and I think there are some invocations of Neverland – “the opportunity to return, night after night, to some duty-free zone of the imagination” – to be found in the essay as well.) Selinger challenges his readers learning “How to Read a Romance Novel (and Fall in Love with Popular Romance),” to think “playfully” and to think about what that might mean. But, isn’t “play” childish?

Play may very well be childish, but as Winnicott notes, “play is immensely exciting.” This is precisely what readers of “How to Read a Romance Novel” will find: play and excitement. For Selinger, the romance is “immensely exciting” because of the ways the romance can “interplay” with other texts, other forms of nostalgia, love, and longing. As Winnicott notes, “playing is an experience, always a creative experience, and it is an experience in the space-time continuum, a basic form of living.” Indeed, I wonder if it is not possible to misread Winnicott; could not “play” also be a “basic form of reading and criticism”? Literary critics are certainly engaged in a “creative experience” of reading the text, and Selinger’s turn to “play” is important to the way in which he believes we might “fall in love with popular romance” just like “[his] adolescent self, first falling in love with poetry.”

“Play isn’t simply fun, and neither are the intenser reaches of pleasure” as Michael Moon has recently written.  Indeed, I am tempted to suggest that Selinger not only teaches his readers “How to Read a Romance Novel (and Fall in Love with Popular Romance),” he also teaches them (and us) “how to play with a romance novel.” Selinger carefully puts “play” back into literary criticism and theory precisely because play, like studying the popular romance novel, “is immensely exciting.”

Personality Tests

Laura Vivanco

"I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too"

There's been quite a bit of theorising and discussion about readers' personalities and preferences which I wanted to see if I could piece together. Since I'm going to touch on controversial topics and describe reader responses which are not my own, comments which offer clarification and corrections will be particularly gratefully received.





Which of these two columns best describes your personality?

Column One	Column Two
Very independent Not at all emotional Very objective Not at all easily influenced Very dominant Likes math and science very much Very active Very competitive Very worldly Very direct Very adventurous Can make decisions easily Almost always acts as a leader Very self-confident Very ambitious	Very talkative Very tactful Very gentle Very aware of feelings of others Very religious Very interested in own appearance Very neat in habits Very quiet Very strong need for security Enjoys art and literature Easily expresses tender feelings [adapted from Broverman et al,  page 63.]

If you're a woman who feels as though you ought to say column two, but would really like to let loose the column one characteristics you've repressed, perhaps you’re the kind of reader whom Laura Kinsale and Linda Barlow describe in their essays in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women.
In “The Androgynous Reader,” Laura Kinsale asks

What does it mean to a woman to feel – to want keenly to feel – what the male character feels as she reads?

I think that, as she identifies with a hero, a woman can become what she takes joy in, can realize the maleness in herself, can experience the sensation of living inside a body suffused with masculine power and grace [...], can explore anger and ruthlessness and passion and pride and honor and gentleness and vulnerability [...]. In short, she can be a man. (37) 

Kinsale believes that what many readers “savor [...] is the freedom to expand into all the aspects, feminine and masculine, of their own being” (40). In “The Androgynous Writer: Another View of Point of View,” Linda Barlow, who is

not ashamed to admit that I’ve always been one of those die-hard fans of the old-fashioned, hard-edged romances which feature a feisty heroine who falls into love and conflict with a dangerous hero with sardonic eyebrows and a cruel but sensual mouth. (45)

argues that this type of romance hero is actually “a significant aspect of feminine consciousness itself” (46) and she adds that he provides female readers with

the means of facing and accepting the angry, aggressive, sexually charged components of our personality that we have been taught to associate with masculinity. From childhood, males have more outlets for their aggressions – sports, horseplay, roughhousing, the rite of passage schoolyard fight and resultant black eye that parents (especially fathers) seem willing to tolerate. They also have more outlets for their sexuality, the expression of which is not only tolerated but encouraged. Females, on the other hand, are instructed from childhood to control, repress, or even split off their aggressive and erotic drives. (49-50)

In other words, he embodies the traits in column one. If Kinsale and Barlow are right, then while romances which pair ultra-feminine (albeit feisty) heroines with ultra-masculine heroes ostensibly endorse gender stereotypes, they simultaneously allow readers to experience a fuller range of emotions and behaviours than they are permitted by gender stereotypes.
Recently there have been discussions about how "the m/m genre is in a very large part, hostile to (fictional) women" (Voinov) and there has also been controversy (beginning here and continued here and here) about readers of m/m romance who really only want to read cis-m/cis-m romance. ["Cis" is a term used to "refer to someone who is comfortable with the gender assigned to them at birth. Same for cissexual. If you’re comfortable with the sex assigned to you at birth, you’re probably cissexual" (Bran).]
Neither Kinsale nor Barlow discuss m/m romance but I can't help but think about their theories on androgynous readers and wonder if trans* protagonists are being rejected for similar reasons to those which cause some readers and writers to turn to m/m fiction. Could it be that the presence of a heroine would serve as a constant reminder to an "androgynous reader" that women are still expected (to a greater or lesser degree) to express the characteristics in column two? And is it perhaps possible that a trans* protagonist in a m/m romance would also make explicit issues of gender which the "androgynous reader" would rather not deal with when attempting to "realize the maleness in herself"?
Joanna Russ once observed that female authors writing m/m slash are

in disguise. They’re disguised as a man. I once noticed that in slash there are so many references to these characters’ penises that it’s like a little label that says “Hello, I am” and the name. [...] I think it’s something like this. As I said, the characters are not exactly male. They’re disguises of some sort, kind of like “I have the proper genitals so I am male, please remember that.” (Francis and Piepmeier)

Could it perhaps be that some "androgynous" authors and readers feel that the anatomy of trans* protagonists would not serve so well as a disguise for female authors and readers? In addition could the "abhorrence of what's called 'girly bits' or 'girl parts', or 'vay jay'" (Voinov) in m/m romance and a marked preference for cis-male protagonists, stem from the cultural associations of different types of genitalia? Braun and Wilkinson "posit that experiences of the biological body are constructed by social/cultural/historical context and that interpretations of bodies need to be considered within context" (18). Part of that context is that

The vagina is often represented as part of the female body that is shameful, unclean, disgusting. [...] Women 'are brought up in a society which tells us that our bodies smell' (Smith, 1987, p. 21). Genital slang often invokes smell (e.g. stench trench) (Braun & Kitzinger, 1999a; Mills, 1991); to be called a 'smelly cunt' is a horrible insult (Smith, 1987). Laws (1987, p. 13) noted that 'many women hate their discharges, and find them very smelly and unpleasant . . . These attitudes come from our culture’s making out that women’s bodies are dirty, mysterious, oozing strange fluids - different from men’s, therefore wrong.’ (21-22)

In contrast, as Kyra Kramer and I have noted,

while “generally ethnographers have concluded that few men actually equate their manhood with their genitalia, nonetheless many studies indicate that they are a favorite point of reference” (Gutmann 396). Regardless of the cause of the conflation,

The penis is what men have and women do not; the phallus is the attribute of power which neither men nor women have. But as long as the attribute of power is a phallus which refers to and can be confused […] with a penis, this confusion will support a structure in which it seems reasonable that men have power and women do not. (Gallop 97)

Perhaps to some readers and authors no less than two penises capable of provding the reader with a "money shot" can symbolically ward off "shameful, unclean, disgusting" femininity and allow access the access to the personaity traits in columnn one?
-----

• Barlow, Linda. "The Androgynous Writer: Another View of Point of View." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 45-52.

• Bran. "The Language of the Rainbow: Introduction." Embrace the Rainbow. 8 March 2012. 

• Braun, V. and S. Wilkinson. "Socio-cultural Representations of the Vagina." Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 19.1 (2001): 17-32.

• Broverman, Inge K, Susan Raymond Vogel, Donald M. Broverman, Frank E. Clarkson, and Paul S. Rosenkrantz. "Sex-Role Stereotypes: A Current Appraisal." Journal of Social Issues 28.2 (1972): 59-78. 

• Francis, Conseula and Alison Piepmeier. "Interview: Joanna Russ." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.2 (2011).

• Kinsale, Laura. "The Androgynous Reader: Point of View in the Romance." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 31-44. 

• Vivanco, Laura and Kyra Kramer. "There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).

• Voinov, Aleksandr. "The purity of fear, prejudice, and intolerance (the m/m rainbow has only one colour: gay)." 21 March 2012. 

The image is of "The Gripsholm Portrait, though[t] to be Elizabeth I of England" (via Wikimedia Commons). The caption is taken from a speech she gave in 1588 as the Armada approached England's shores.

Links: Authors and Alphas

Laura Vivanco

I've been following the discussion at Dear Author which was started by Robin, who posed the question "Do authors have ethical responsibilities beyond beyond the book?" She began by asking

Straight off the top of your head, do you think that authors have any ethical or moral responsibilities beyond the book?

I’m guessing that the vast majority of you answered this question the same way I did for a long time, with a fully articulated, deeply resounding NO.

Janine, one of her co-bloggers at Dear Author, responded

Wow. I have to say these opening paragraphs took me aback, because my answer would have been a deeply resounding YES. Authors have the same ethical and moral responsibilities that all other human beings have, no more, no less, so why on earth would their moral and ethical responsiblities begin and end with their books? I can’t see why they should get a free pass from the responsibility to treat others fairly.

and Laura Kinsale stated that "I do think hard about the things I believe are important, but I don’t owe it to anyone but myself."

By coincidence, Rosy Thornton's just posted about the topic too:

freedom of expression means that an author is free to write about whatever characters she chooses, and to endow them with whatever views and attitudes she wishes. Besides which, we have to be true to our characters, don’t we? We have to reflect the world as it exists. A novel is not a soapbox.

But my personal version of the ‘ethics of care’ tells me that the flipside of freedom of expression is responsibility for what we choose to express; that as writers we have a duty to think about the potential impact of our work on those who read it. Societal attitudes are influenced not only by upbringing, family, friends and workmates, and by the news media, but also by the ambient culture: by film and television, and by the books we read.

That's just an excerpt of her post, and if you're interested in the issue, I'd encourage you to read it in full.

Rosy mentions that "I would not write a moody 'alpha' hero who is mean and even cruel but whose meanness is portrayed in a sexy light," but they're the subject of a panel that Eric will be chairing at the 2010 Film & History Conference: Representations of Love in Film and Television, November 11-14, 2010. The Calls for Papers are out, and the deadline for submissions is 1 March 2010. The full list of panels can be found here. Eric's panel is on Sons of the Sheik: Global Perspectives on the Alpha Male in Love. Here's a bit more about it [I've added the links. Where there was more than one film with the same title, the link is to a list]:

Masterful, confident, erotically charged, the “Alpha Male” has been a cinematic icon from Rudolph Valentino’s Sheik Ahmed ben Hassan (The Sheik, 1921) to Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown (1999) and Hritik Roshan’s elusive criminal, “Mr. A” (Dhoom 2, 2006). As the hero in romantic films, this ideal of masculinity has proven enduringly popular with both male and female viewers, even as successive waves of feminism, in the West and around the globe, have challenged the sexual politics he implies.

How do representations of the Alpha Male in love differ across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries? How have they changed across the past century, responding to historically- and regionally-specific shifts in gender roles and ideals? What happens to the Alpha Male hero when he stars in a romantic comedy, as opposed to a drama or melodrama? How much can we use this iconic figure to track the power of the female gaze or women’s desires, as has been done with the Alpha Male hero of popular romance fiction, given the fact that men continue to predominate in the writing and direction of the films (as opposed to the overwhelmingly female authorship and audience for romance novels)?

This area, comprising multiple panels, welcomes papers and panel proposals that examine all forms and genres of films featuring “Alpha” protagonists in love, as well as films which challenge, revise, or subvert the conventions surrounding this character. Possibilities include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Sheiks, Captains, Emperors, (The Sheik, Persuasion, Jodhaa Akbar)

• Alpha Male meets Alpha Female (The Thomas Crown Affair [1999], Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)

• Austen’s Alpha: Darcy and his Descendants (Pride and Prejudice)

• Sink Me! He’s an Alpha in Disguise! (The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro)

• Alpha / Beta Reversals and Alter-Egos (Rab Ne Bana di Jodi, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na)

• Suspicious Minds: the Alpha Criminal and Detective (Devil in a Blue Dress, The Big Sleep, Breathless)

• Athlete Alphas (Love & Basketball, Bull Durham)

• Alpha Lovers in Space (Han Solo, James T. Kirk)

• You’ve Got Male: Alphas in “Chick Flicks”

Please send your 200-word proposal by e-mail to the area chair:

Eric Murphy Selinger
Associate Professor
Dept. of English
DePaul University
802 West Belden Ave.
Chicago, IL 60614
eselinge@depaul.edu (email submissions preferred)

Panel proposals for up to four presenters are also welcome, but each presenter must submit his or her own paper proposal.

----
The photo of the cover of Marquis W. Child and Douglass Cater's Ethics in a Business Society was taken by cdrummbks and was made available at Flickr under a Creative Commons licence.

Syllabub

The new quarter starts Monday, here at DePaul, so I'm hard at work on the syllabus for English 469: Topics in American Literature: Popular Romance Fiction.

At the moment, our Required Texts are:

Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Natural Born Charmer
Laura Kinsale, Flowers from the Storm
J. R. Ward, Dark Lover
Joey Hill, Natural Law
Victoria Dahl, Talk Me Down
Ann Herendeen, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander
Beverly Jenkins, Captured
Nora Roberts, Montana Sky

I say "at the moment" because I've just heard that the Victoria Dahl may have been hard for the bookstore to come by. NOT that I heard this from the bookstore, mind you--but I've called to follow up, and won't rest easy until I know for sure that it's in stock. (If it isn't, I'll use another Dahl--but the topics I wanted to pursue with Talk Me Down don't come up the same way in the next two books in that series, so I'll be thrown off, just a little. "Recalculating," as the GPS unit likes to say.)

Of those, I've taught five before (SEP, Kinsale, Ward, Hill, Herendeen); three are new, although I have a ringer in my class to help with the Roberts: An Goris, who's writing her dissertation on NR, has come to Chicago to work with me this year.

Here's the tentative Course Description:

American academics began to study popular romance fiction seriously in the 1980s, with the publication of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance and Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, by Tania Modleski. The conventions, genres, and readership of romance fiction have all evolved dramatically since this time, however, and critics have not always kept pace with them. In this course, we will explore some of the varieties of popular romance fiction (and of romance criticism) currently published in the United States. Using tools from cultural studies, feminist psychoanalysis, the philosophy of love, and aesthetic analysis, we will learn to read popular romance from a variety of contemporary authors and subgenres; in the process, we will get to know something about the lively, reflective on-line romance community. Our challenge, week by week, will be to make the novels as interesting as possible, by any means necessary.

As for the Course Requirements:

All students in this course will be expected to do three things:

• Come to class with the books and / or articles read, and contribute to class discussion;
• Deliver a thoughtful, well-organized in-class presentation on one of our novels—think of this as a succinct mini-lecture, about 10 minutes long, with an accompanying handout of quotations from critics, discussion questions, or anything else that can provoke subsequent discussion; and,
• Write a scholarly or creative nonfiction essay (12-15 pp.), probably based on the presentation, that uses critical approaches studied in class to analyze one of the course texts.

My next big task is to assemble the secondary texts we'll read in the first couple of weeks.

Week 1: Introduction to the class, to each other, and to the novels we will study. Initial assignment of presentations. Discussion of "romance" as a literary term, especially in American literary history, with passages from Hawthorne, James, and Northrop Frye.

Week 2: Introduction to some of the critical debates surrounding popular romance fiction.

• Germaine Greer, selection from The Female Eunuch (1970)
  
• Tania Modleski, “Mass Produced Fantasies for Women” and “Harlequin Romances” (Loving with a Vengeance, 1982)
• Janice Radway, “from New Introduction” (1991), “The Readers and their Romances,” and “The Act of Reading the Romance: Escape and Instruction” (Reading the Romance, 1984; rpt. 1991)
• Laura Kinsale, “The Androgynous Reader”; Linda Barlow, “The Androgynous Writer”; Susan Elizabeth Phillips, “The Romance and the Empowerment of Women” (Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, ed. Jayne Ann Krentz, 1992)
• Tania Modleski, “My Life as a Romance Reader” (Paradoxa, 1997)
• Jennifer Crusie, “Romancing Reality: the Power of Romance Fiction to Reinforce and Re-vision the Real” (Paradoxa, 1997), “Defeating the Critics” (1998), and “Let Us Now Praise Scribbling Women” (1998); available on line at http://www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays.
• Pamela Regis, “The Romance Novel and Women’s Bondage” and “In Defense of the Romance Novel” (A Natural History of the Romance Novel, 2003).
• Eric Selinger, “Re-reading the Romance” (essay-review of recent criticism, 2008)
• Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, selections from Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches Guide to Romance Novels (2009).

That's the list I have so far--but it's more or less the same list I used two years ago, which leads me to believe that I've missed a few things. If you can think of anything for me to add, let me know!

After that, we turn to the novels themselves. Here's the order so far:

Week 3: Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Natural Born Charmer (Contemporary)

Week 4: Laura Kinsale, Flowers from the Storm (Historical)

Week 5: J. R. Ward, Dark Lover (Paranormal)

Week 6: Ann Herendeen, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander (Historical—mmf)

Week 7: Victoria Dahl, Talk Me Down (Contemporary)

Week 8: Joey Hill, Natural Law (Erotic—BDSM)

Week 9: Beverly Jenkins, Captured (Historical—African American)

Week 10: Nora Roberts, Montana Sky (Contemporary)

If anything occurs to you about the sequence, let me know that as well. (I've been wondering whether to assign the Dahl before or after the Hill, for example.) I'll begin assembling ideas for secondary reading, topics, questions, etc., as the next week proceeds.

Studies Show ... That Eric's Got a New Post Up

Eric's over at Romancing the Blog today, taking some studies with a pinch of salt and receiving encouragement from others:

it’s got me thinking–not at all scientifically–about one of the novels I taught for the first time this quarter, here at DePaul: Laura Kinsale’s Prince of Midnight.

As the novel ends, our hero and heroine, S.T. Maitland and Leigh Strachan, are trying to figure out what love means, or at least what their love means, and why S.T. should stay with Leigh, despite the flaws that he thinks forbid him to marry her.

“What can I give you in return?” he demands of her. “Give me your joy,” she responds. “Give me all your mad notions and your crazy heroics and your impossible romantical follies. And I’ll be your anchor. I’ll be your balance. I’ll be your family. I won’t let you fall.”

Studies have shown that this is one of the most moving betrothal scenes in all of romance. OK, maybe no one’s studied that. But the notion that one test of a couple is how they deal with differential happiness, spreading the wealth, rings deeply true to me.

Readerly Desires and Aspirations

Laura Vivanco

In the responses to my most recent post we've been exploring how different readers relate in different ways to their reading material. GrowlyCub, for example, commented that

I get intensely involved with the story lines and characters. And I've literally thrown books against the wall and been horribly upset, even though I know very well the story and characters are fictional

whereas AgTigress revealed that

I enjoy reading fiction, regarding it as a pleasant leisure activity, but it is clear that I simply do not become emotionally engaged with it to anything like the same degree as other readers. I actually find it quite hard to imagine being caught up in a fictional tale in the same way as the rest of you. I am always removed, standing back, from what I am reading, in the sense that I am an onlooker, never a would-be participant, and therefore never become deeply emotionally involved.

This has brought to mind a discussion Tumperkin and I had not so long ago about heroes, heroines, and how readers relate to them. First of all, Tumperkin pondered

whether [the] heroine represents for the reader what she wants to be while the hero represents what she desires. For both, it's aspirational but a different type of aspiration.

and she later observed that

one of the things that I love about romance [is] that the things readers like are so very often not the thing itself but what it represents

I think her second point may be very important in untangling the ways in which some readers respond to romances. If we accept that some things and people in romance may have meanings on more than one level, we need to provide more layers of explanations. Some readers may find that romances evoke responses on two or more levels simultaneously, while at other times, or for other readers, responses may only be evoked on only one of the possible levels.

Thus, in addition to recognising that some readers have much more profound emotional responses than others, we need to bear in mind different ways of relating to the characters and the situations in which they find themselves. Readers who relate to the characters and their situations in a more literal way, for example, may have very different responses to a scene of forced seduction than will readers who respond to the same scenario as though it was a sexual fantasy.

It may also be that different readers seek out different books, with different types of characters, in order to get the kind of experience they prefer. Tanya Gold suggested that

Mills & Boon heroines are like madams in brothels. They essentially have to facilitate a sexual encounter between two other people – the reader, and the hero. They are the third person in the romance.

Michelle Styles, who had been giving Tanya advice on how to write a Mills & Boon, later said on her blog that

the heroine as a conduit is something I learnt from the editors years ago. With Modern/MH [Harlequin Presents in the US], the heroine is the conduit. With Romance [the M&B and Harlequin Romance line], the reader walks in the heroine's shoes.

On the most obvious level of sexual attraction, a heterosexual female reader might be expected to want to be the heroine i.e. she wants to take the place of the heroine, and experience much of what the heroine experiences, but there's obviously a difference in the level of identification with a "conduit" and with someone in whose shoes one walks. In the guidelines to authors who wish to write for the Romance line, the editors ask

Do you want to walk in your heroine’s shoes?
We celebrate women: their lives, triumphs, families, hopes, dreams…and most importantly their journey to falling in love. These are heroines every woman can relate to, root for, a friend you can laugh with and cry with. There should be a sense that the story really could happen to you!

Readers of this line seem to be expected to identify with the heroine. In the guidelines for the Modern line, however, the editors state that

Modern Romance is the last word in sensual and emotional excitement. Readers are whisked away to exclusive jet-set locations to experience smouldering intensity and red-hot desire. [...] A Modern Romance is more than just a book; it’s an experience, an everyday luxury. Let the pleasure and passion envelop you as you take a ride in the fast lane of romance!

This is the heroine as conduit, as a "placeholder" who permits the reader herself to be "whisked away" to experience "desire", "pleasure and passion."

Whether the heroine is identified with, or is a purer form of placeholder/conduit, there seems to be some consensus that

the reader [...] does not identify with, admire, or internalize the characteristics of either a stupidly submissive or an irksomely independent heroine. The reader thinks about what she would have done in the heroine's place. The reader measures the heroine by a tough yardstick, asking the character to live up to the reader's standards, not vice versa. (Kinsale 32)

I'm not sure that placeholding and identification can be entirely separated out, because readers perhaps would prefer not to be put in the place of a heroine who acts in ways they dislike.

Lisa Kleypas [...] firmly believes, based on her own experience, that the heroine is indeed a placeholder for the reader:

I believe the heroine is the placeholder [...]. I've gotten so many comments throughout my career from readers who complain about the heroine's actions in terms of "I wouldn't have made the choice she did ... she didn't react like I think she should have ... why didn't she just ..." and all of these comments are evidence to me that the reader generally experiences the story from the heroine's POV even when the hero's POV is strongly represented.

And it's the trickiest part as an author to create a heroine that most readers will like, and it's not always possible. (Wendell and Tan 60-61)

It's tricky in part because some readers want to identify with the heroine, but at the same time the characterisation mustn't be too obtrusive, lest it prevent some readers from slipping easily into her place. These readers want the novel to read as though it were their own story, enabling them to fall in love with the object of the own (as well as the heroine's) desires: the hero. To quote Tanya Gold again,

I can have virtual sex with a non-existent man who is made of paper. So I retreat to my bed with The Venetian's Moonlight Mistress and live in a perfectly etched fantasy world where I get everything I want.

If, however, we look at the hero, not as himself (i.e. as a sexually attractive male) but in terms of what he represents, the relationship between the reader and the characters looks rather different. According to Cohn,

Romance fiction tells the story of the heroine and to that extent romance is about the heroine. But the dominant character in contemporary romance is always the hero. In the character of the hero inhere the excitement, the glamour, and the power of the desired. [...] The contemporary hero is a fantasy construct [...]. For romance readers he represents the satisfaction of all those desires that our culture both fosters and disappoints for women. Our culture values individualism, success, money, power, but has traditionally granted only to men the right to pursue them. (Cohn 41)

Readers, then, might still desire the hero but, as Laura Kinsale has suggested, they may also desire to be him in order to experience the "satisfaction of all those desire" that he, as a romance hero, can experience:

I think that, as she identifies with a hero, a woman can become what she takes joy in, can realize the maleness in herself, can experience the sensation of living inside a body suffused with masculine power and grace [...], can explore anger and ruthlessness and passion and pride and honor and gentleness and vulnerability [...]. In short, she can be a man. (37)

But if the hero represents all the power and emotions denied to women and which women readers desire to incorporate into their own lives, what does that mean for the heroine? What does she represent? Kleypas notes that "a heroine cannot be a bitch and be afforded the same forgiveness [as would be afforded a hero who was "a complete jerk"]. I still haven't decided why - it's possible that most readers like the heroine to be an idealized version of themselves?" (Wendell and Tan 61). Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie have written that

Women in day-to-day life face a lot of pressure to be the “right kind of women” (i.e., the ones men want). For celebrity women, the heat is turned up a lot … because, of course, celebrity women are the yardstick with which people measure the women they know, the yardstick by which the rules of sexiness, attractiveness, and appropriateness are determined.

Perhaps the romance heroine often resembles the "right kind" of celebrity women in that she may not be exactly who we as readers want to be (because at least some readers would like to have more freedom to experience the hero's "masculine" emotions), but she's who we as readers feel culturally pressured to be. She's the ideal to which we can never match up but against which we judge ourselves and other women. Sometimes she's a more accessible, relatable, ideal than others: some heroines are less than perfectly beautiful, for example, and some have minor character flaws (she's adorably clumsy! she's a little bit forgetful!) but taken as a whole, heroines aren't generally permitted to have the kind of serious flaws that heroes have.

So at this level, if the heroes represent what we want to be, and the heroines represent what we (the mostly female readers) feel we ought to be (in order to be "good", socially acceptable women), we're offered freedom during the course of reading the novels to experience "masculine" emotions, but we're also being reminded of those outside pressures to conform to feminine ideals.

I should perhaps conclude by admitting that, when I read, I'm neither the hero nor the heroine. I don't enter into the hero and heroine's sensual experiences, even though I may sympathise with them in their pain, or rejoice with them in their happiness. I'm an emotionally-involved fly on the wall, albeit one who (a) has the power to mind-read and (b) feels she might be more socially acceptable if she looked or behaved more like the heroine (people can have such negative responses to flies!). Looking back at a post I wrote several years ago, about voyeurism as part of romance reading, I wonder if my preference for romances in which the bedroom door is kept shut is due at least in part to being a fly who conforms to certain social norms; I feel as though I ought to give the protagonists some privacy. I was also intrigued by a possible conclusion that could be drawn from Laura Kinsale's statement that "When placeholder and reader identification merge, the experience of the story is utterly absorbing and vital; analytical distance recedes" (35). Could it be that flies find it easier to be literary critics?

Edited to add: Had I not been so busy thinking about the implications of being a fly, I would have asked a few more questions, so here they are:

Do you read in the same way across different genres? Or does placeholding only work for you in romance?

The theories about readers' responses to romances tend to assume that most readers are heterosexual women but of course this excludes other possibilities. How do different variations in reader and protagonist gender and sexual orientation affect the reading experience? Tania Modleski, for example, has written that after an "encounter" (26) with a

woman from my past I found myself as I read the lovemaking scenes identifying with the lover of woman as well as the woman herself and found myself vicariously experiencing the touch, taste, and smell of a woman's body. (26-27)

There are also plenty of female readers and authors of romances about two male protagonists.

If you're male, how does that affect your reading of romances with regard to identification and placeholding? What if there are two male protagonists in a romance? And do you read romances differently from other genres?

• Cohn, Jan. Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women. Durham: Duke UP, 1988.
• Edison, Laurie Toby and Debbie. "Women Athletes: Choose Between Strong and Sexy." Feministe 23 August 2009.
• Gold, Tanya. "Confessions of a secret Mills & Boon junkie." The Guardian 11 Sept. 2009.
• Kinsale, Laura. "The Androgynous Reader: Point of View in the Romance." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 31-43.
• Modleski, Tania. "My Life as a Romance Reader." Paradoxa 3.1-2 (1997): 15-28.
• Wendell, Sarah, and Candy Tan. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels. New York: Fireside, 2009.

The image was created by Egon B and I downloaded it from Wikimedia Commons.

Princeton Romance Conference

Sarah S. G. Frantz

I'm going to do things backwards and post about the Princeton Conference first, then go back and post about PCA. I want to do Princeton before the 31 pages of Twitter stream for #romcon disappear. I will link to about where the Twitter stream starts for each of the papers. It is listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent posts (ie: later in paper) at the top of the screen. Go to "newer" posts to progress in the paper.

I'm also going to talk about Friday's papers first, then go back to Thursday evening's panel. I've got to type that one up--I took real, hand-written notes because I didn't have my computer! :)

Romance and Religion: SB Sarah has already blogged this panel in detail.

What fascinated me about this panel was how well it interacted and intersected with my own research into BDSM romance. The catch phrases of BDSM (bondage, discipline, domination, submission) kept coming up again and again through these papers. I'm going to have to hunt down Lynn's book, especially, to see if there's anything I can use.

Lynn S. Neal: What is Inspirational Romance? Twitter starts about here.

Redeeming Love: The love is between man and woman and the couple and God. Conflicts are about God and represent a deeper spiritual malaise. Transformation that seems magical in other books are brought about by the power of God’s love. Neal interviewed 50 female readers of Inspirational romance. It was the readers’ religious choice to read these books. IR represents entertainment and escape and a redemption of popular culture that affirms the values of the readers. IR is an attractive option for both fun and upholding boundaries of faith. It is “wholesome entertainment: pleasing to God because it has scripture and it’s clean. It is a Godly way of self-entertainment, of sacrilizing all of life. They are able to forget about impure books that offer danger rather than safety and instead have an opportunity to combine love of reading and love of God. It’s a “Brain break.” However, the drive may well be escapist, but its fulfillment may not be. Instead, it’s a way through which readers achieve spiritual change. They gained little realizations that helped foster everyday piety. The effectiveness of inspirational romance comes from its utility. How does it establish an emotional connection between the heroine and the reader? It transforms hearing into knowing, doubt into certainty, and a vague sense of God into everyday reality. A Christian romance novel helps readers envision and encounter God’s love and care. Christian romances are a filter for interpreting God and the Bible. The Bible becomes a romance.

Pam Regis: Writing the History of the American Romance Twitter stream starts about here

Regis is trying to put Inspirational romance in larger context of American novel. Inspirational romance is one of the foundations of the American romance writ large. In fact, the form endorses one of the highest forms of freedom: Christian liberty. In romance in general, when characters choose to overcome the barrier, it’s an expression of freedom and the reader feels joy. Regis is writing “The History of the American Romance.” Issues: Have to figure out who is American and who isn’t. Is the form “invented” by M&B and HQN. Is the “form” merely a marketing tool. There are also so many books and such different books—it’s impossible to choose a representative book. There is no bibliography. What was first romance, how far back does it go? Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is first romance novel in America, it was abridged early and often in ways that usually put moralizing at end. Holding an old early-US copy of Pamela feels like holding a HQN romances: that’s how big they are. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s book Vivia: secret of power is faith—definitely inspirational. Regis trying to do books that aren’t covered by everyone else. Highsmith’s The Price of Salt: first popular lesbian romance. Beverly Jenkins: AA romances write very different ending to and are in conversation with previous AA writers or about AA characters (Harriet Jacobs’s Life of a Slave Girl and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Elements of Form: What do barrier and ritual death say about faith in the American romance? Ritual death: mythic moment when union seems least possible between courting protagonists (dark moment). EDEN Southworth’s Vivia: or, the Secret of Power: sentimental romance. Sentimental values: home, affection, connection, family, kinship, sympathy, emotion especially love, Christianity. Part bildungsroman. Barriers (especially between secondary characters) include melodrama, class, disability, separation, deceit. Values of the American romance, both secular and inspirational: Freedom, Individuality, life eternal vs. Death and perversion. Christianity is not on list. Life eternal does mean Christian values in Vivia, but in romance novels it’s the promise of children in epilogues. Inspirational romances are purest form of American romance. Faith—religious, secular, or both—suffuses the American romance (even atheists have faith in love). Freedom and faith are not in conflict in the American romance. Religion is not a tributary of American romance, it’s a source.

R. Marie Griffith (Princeton Religion Dept.) Twitter stream starts about here.

Everything she knows about inspirational romance comes from Lynn Neal. Instead, her research is on evangelical self-help manuals, diet and fitness manuals, and sexuality and marriage guides and she’ll be talking about this today. Evangelical women’s self-help literature: goes back all way into 19thC. Feminism 2nd wave: Friedan’s Feminine Mystique shows us how difficult to it was to be a woman. Friedan’s solution was to stop conforming to the traditional picture of womanhood and to enjoy life. This was seen as women’s rejection of biological roles of wife and mother and destroying all good things about America. Equality between sexes was not a Christian ideal. True liberation is found in submission to husband because of the ideal of a submissive feminine subject and all powerful masculine God. Woman’s relationship with God is shown as father/daughter relationship or marital relationship. God is/as perfect husband, which may compensate for his earthly partner’s imperfections. Can refresh and heal even the most broken marriages. God gets something out of relationship too. Following God’s commands, and flattering him fulfill women’s visions of perfect love relationship. It is a literature of hope and faith and upholds sentimental values. Christian diet and fitness lit: Human body’s fitness affects relationships between god and people—those who are thin and healthy exemplify God’s grace and reward. They caution readers against vanity: not main reason for diets. The main reason to diet has to be keeping bodies under subjection to God’s will. Happiness is found through submission: loving and pleasing God. The image of God as divine lover or husband used as tool to compel Christian women to get thin: “Slim for Him.” “More of Jesus, less of me.” There is an erotic fulfillment through getting thin for god (God as the ultimate HQN billionaire tycoon). One gains one’s happy ending through disciplining the body. There is an eroticization of the power differential. Evangelical sex and marriage guides: Christlike sex and lots of it, selling promises of love and romance. Sexual purity and bodily discipline lead to most sumptuous bodily pleasures and emotional connection.

Beth Patillo (romance author) Twitter stream starts about here.

Beth gets up and says of Griffith's research, "Dude, that's messed up!" Patillo has always kept the romance author part of her life and the minister part of her life separate but her agent said that she could sell a Christian book like that *fingersnap*. Patillo herself has a very low level of interest in personal purity. Heavens to Betsy: 25,000 copies printed in trade paperback, but because Lifeway refused to carry it b/c it was a woman minister, probably about 21,000 were remaindered, because they were trying exclusively for the Christian audience, not the romance audience. Patillo is a non-evangelical Christian writer. The Christian Book Association (CBA) is such a specialized market, but a very vocal market. Miss California: sure, she’s standing for “traditional” marriage, but there’s no comment on Fox about her parading across stage in bikini. Evangelical books: no eroticism. All physicality is about emotions, not eroticism. Christian faith must be depicted as normative but as over and above popular culture. As an author: how do you create journey for two characters who are so squeaky clean to begin with? There is an intense focus on certain pietistic practices designated as “Christian.” Hasn’t had emails about “why didn’t your characters work for justice?” Small Christian book stores are closing at the rate of 100 per year. Only 400 left. What are CBA publishers going to do when they’re dealing with Walmart and not Christian gatekeepers. What’s going to happen to Inspirational fiction when personal piety is not going to be the only definition of Christianity? There might be possibility for happy ending in Inspirational market for romance authors who are not evangelical or pious.

Eric Selinger Twitter stream starts about here. Eric discussed his path to this paper at Romancing the Blog.

Polhemus discusses erotic faith: romance as religion. Eric’s Facebook profile lists “Married” under Religious Preference. In 1990s, literary and cultural commentators announced the death of love. Allan Bloom claimed that one has to have a tin ear to describe one’s greatest love as a “relationship.” Bloom inadvertently points out where erotic faith continued to thrive: “cheap” romantic love. How did we get to be as we are? In Flowers from the Storm, Kinsale plays with long history and conventions of historical romances. Christian, Duke of Jervaulx is a mathematician, so let’s think geometrically: Chiasmus: Maddie is Christian, Christian is mad. Christian is soul trapped in body, Maddie is a body trapped by her soul. Eric is not using Milton just to show off as poetry professor, Kinsale makes the use of Milton as a motif explicit. The novel makes a fetish of Maddie’s long hair, which mirrors the view of Eve in Paradise Lost. Maddie is Eve, Jervaulx is Satan and the means of salvation is mutual human love. How does this novel layer history? Maddie and Jervaulx are 19thC couple with very 20thC conversations about freedom and equality, but those debates range back to 16thC and 17thC views of marriage. Quaker brides explicitly do not say that they will “obey” husbands. “No rule but love between them,” from William Penn. All of these historical contexts have to be kept in mind and this novel is very aware of this. It puts traditions of popular romance fiction right next to 16thC-19thC contexts and conventions.

Mary Bly's question of Pam: Mary’s uncomfortable with faith in romance that’s NOT inspirational being put together with evangelical type of romance. The burst of imagination that makes marriage work in inspirational romance is very very different from the imaginative relationship with another entity. Faith that the relationship will work out is very different from faith that we need another entity to make a relationship work. So conflating the two types of faith is very vexing.

The panel was a great start to the day and an example of all that is good and wonderful about romance scholarship today.

PCA 2009: Romance 1

Another update from Jessica at Read React Review, this time of

2126 Romance I: Romance Authorship I: Tradition and Transformation
Thursday April 9, 2:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Chair: Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University

―Me, Myself and I: Love as the Integration of Selves in the Romance Fiction of Nora Roberts
By An Goris, KuLeuven, Belgium

―A Gothic Scheherazade: The Heroine as Storyteller
By Angela Toscano, Independent Scholar

―Milton, Emerson, Kinsale, Cavell: Thinking Through Flowers from the Storm
By Eric Selinger, DePaul University

―Romance through Faith: The Enduring Stories of Grace Livingston Hill
By Darcy Martin

Optional Romance Exam

Laura Vivanco

Eric's written an end-of-term report on his romance fiction class.

Whatever the life-skills they learned or missed, students came away with more respect for the genre, and most had at least one author, sub-genre, or series they planned to read after graduation. This afternoon I’ll order the books for my next romance classes. Some new ones will join the mix: Gwyneth Bolton’s Sweet Sensation, Beth Pattillo’s Heavens to Betsy (my first in-class Inspy), and Devil’s Cub, by Georgette Heyer, comes back into print in August, just in time for the fall survey. While I get the next round of syllabi in order, you might have some fun with this: the optional final exam for my senior seminar. I gave it on Tuesday, and guess what? Nobody came! All too busy working on their papers, I guess.

If you'd like to take the exam, the questions (on Linda Howard's Mr. Perfect, Loretta Chase's Mr. Impossible, J. R. Ward's Dark Lover, Laura Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm and Joey W. Hill’s Natural Law) are up, over at Romancing the Blog!

The picture isn't of Eric's students. It's from Wikipedia.

PCA 2008: Romance IV

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Romance Fiction IV: Friday, 8:00-9:30am
The Romance as Transformation (Special Session/Author Conversation)

"Romance as a Practice of Freedom" Lynn Coddington

This presentation was a chapter of Lynn's dissertation from the late 1990s. It discusses the conservation and transformation of one writer's practice as a writer. Lynn wrote her first romance in her first year of her Ph.D. program and, in doing so, discovered the most exciting community of readers and writers. She was surprised at how strongly writers were committed to improving their craft, and to marketing for and sharing with readers. Academic studies back in the late 90s just didn't "get" romance at all. She asked an RWA group how romances had changed their lives and was stunned at the variety of positive responses: one woman had started a book store that specialized in romances, one had switched gender roles with her husband so that he stayed at home and took care of the kids, and one had left an emotionally abusive relationship because of what romances had taught her. Romances are an amazing explorations of bell hook's claim that love is a practice of freedom. Academics looking at romance completely missed the power and beauty of romance novels. Lynn decided to do a small ethnographic study of a romance writers group between 1993-1997 for her dissertation. The basic theoretical frame of previous romance analysis was the belief that traditional forms of genre fiction don't invite or excite radical transformations of social change and that romances in particular didn't give women a chance to show truly transformative social realities. The theories of literacy that Lynn was working with needed to focus on personal and social transformation, not on a sweeping scale, but on a much smaller scale, and looking at romance in this way revealed many more examples of transformative, although not sweeping, social change, including the garden variety workings of changes of gendered power dynamics. Lynn asked how writing/reading romance was both conservative and transformative. She examined one writer in particular, "Katie," a 34 year old, married, college grad, RWA writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Katie had sold her first three books on one contract, and was in the process of negotiating her second three book contract. She had received lots of support from her editor and publisher but had a mediocre agent, who negotiated standard advances and boilerplate contracts and seemed to be scared to ask for anything more. Katie had just attended a local chapter meeting about negotiating with publishers and was struggling specifically with the patriarchal construction of power relationship with editor and agent, because she felt like the recalcitrant child when she was talking with them, and knew she needed to change that view. The novel "Katie" wrote during negotiations embodies the transformation that Katie was looking for in her contract negotiations. She was focusing on the emotional transformation necessary to gain power in the situation while also trying to protect that spark of validation and affirmation that writing gave her, which was why she wasn't more hard-headed about the contract negotiations. While she didn't seem overtly "feminist" from the outside, she was making choices and engaging articulately with the process, both emotional and business-wise of how to institute change in herself and her life.

"Transformation and Resistance" Kate Moore

Kate is coming at romance analysis from three different practices: teaching, reading romance, and writing romance. She has always seen romance as part of a much larger body and tradition of literature and believes that romance is connected to marriage plot (Chaucer and Homer would recognize this plot) rather than connected to fairy tales. Kate works with adolescents and from the outside one can see the potentiality for change between an 11 year old who enters her school and the 18 year old who leaves it, but the kids themselves are very suspicious of the process of change. Heroic teacher stories depend for their narrative success on the transformation of the resistance of the child who doesn't want to be educated. The narrative usually follows the path of the advantaged teacher delivering to the disadvantaged student access to the power that they hold in trust for the students. Critics say that the romance narrative does this, with the powerful, advantaged hero tutoring the disadvantaged heroine, but it's usually the opposite, with the hero being the resistant individual who doesn't want the power of love and the narrative following the transformation of the resistance to acceptance. Sophie Jordan's One Night With You had a very resistant hero and a heroine who is completely devalued and restricted in every possible way, although she has female friends who give her a ball dress to attend a masked ball, defying convention to seek her own pleasure. The heroine has tried to unite the two selves she is, trying to effect her own transformation, but it puts her back in an abject position of marriage without love. The hero makes very clear his rejection of the heroine's self, the person she is. He says over and over that he'll lose control and identity if he falls in love. When he continues to refuse to change, the heroine leaves him, refusing to be with him without transformation. He tries to fall back on the convention of the marriage of convenience, but finally has to admit, "I will cease to exist without you," claiming that the heroine has saved him. Liberation has to be mutual. In Laura Kinsale's The Dream Hunter, the heroine gains a certain amount of freedom she wouldn't have otherwise because of her disguise. She is more valued as a Bedouin boy than as a virgin aristocrat, but she wants to be Victorian lady. Her outward transformation doesn't effect an inner transformation and the hero ends up searching for her under her Victiorian lady trappings. She thinks he just sees the Bedouin boy and can't see the woman she has become. They connect in dream states. The biggest barrier between them is the contract negotiations over their marriage. The thing that gets them together is her realization that she is the only one who knows what he is and if she abandons him, he'll be lost to humanity.

I completely failed to do justice here to Kate's very nuanced interpretations of these two books, and to her discussion of transformation and resistance in the hero and heroine of romance and the power behind it. So please know that the almost telegraphic nature of this summary is all my fault, and by no means a problem in Kate's original paper.

"Parallel Scenes and Transformation: Scene Structure in Austen and Kinsale" Alicia Rasley

Alicia is very interested in how romance novels are structured and examines here parallel scenes that bracket a situation or issue in a novel; the parallel structure demonstrates the change that the characters have undergone from one scene to the parallel scene later in the book. The parallel scene doubles the issues and themes in the scenes, which is so right for romances as the genre that meshes two people into one. Parallel scenes are very similar to foils as a character device. Again, romance comes out of the same traditions as classical literature, all the way back to the Odyssey. The heroine is hugely important, obviously, but there are two protagonists, and we give the guy his time in the sun, too. Why are all the examples of male transformation? Because we're women and want the guys to change. The first example Alicia chose was the two proposal scenes in Austen's Pride and Prejudice. In the first scene, love has overcome him Darcy, an invasion of who he is. The love is presented as symbolic rape, both of him and his assault on Elizabeth, presented with no foreplay, no preparation. They both think the other is trying to make them something they're not. The letter after proposal is the first time Darcy presents himself as HIM, which starts the transformation that transforms both of them. Her change is dependent on his change. There is a change in how he presents himself, even though it goes deeper than that. Conflict is potential in a novel; the more the conflict, the more the potential for change. Laura Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm deals with issues of identity. Jerveulx's identity is stripped away from him. The parallelism in the first and last scenes are about babies that show the transformation he undergoes because of love. Both times, Jerveulx notices before the women that there's a pregnancy. The first scene is with his mistress, the second scene is with his wife and a ghostly staghound. In the beginning, he's a total rationalist; in the end he can recognize the miracle of love and family. Finally, Alicia used a quick example of Dorothy Dunnet's Lymond Chronicles, which starts with Game of Kings: the first words of the novel are "Lymond is back" in the crowd's point of view. The parallel scene comes at the very end of the six book series, from the heroine's point of view, showing the transformation of Lymond's family's acceptance of the hero. Even in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike is first introduced knocking down the "Welcome to Sunnydale" sign, while at the end, the crater that opens up when he sacrifices himself for Buffy eats the replacement of the same "Sunnydale" sign, indicating his sacrifice for a love he could never have imagined at the beginning of the show.

Overall, it was great to see three such smart women--romance writers, romance readers, and recovering academics or analytically inclined--who loved the genre they were analyzing. And they had such smart, interesting things to say about how romances were constructed.