Laura Vivanco

Romance VI: Risky Business: Love, Abuse, and Violence

Domestic Abuse and Violence in the Works of Nora Roberts

(Pavla Stefanska, Masaryk University)

Love overcomes everything. Everything is fair in love and war. There is a fine line between love and hate. These and similar sayings may evoke an impression that there is a close connection between love and violence. Apart from that, they also represent some of the beliefs which permeate western culture’s ideas of love and relationships. As people have the tendency to accept these sayings at their face value and rarely question where these ideas come from and how they affect their behavior, they seldom realize that these beliefs pose a potential threat to their intimate relationships.

Based on the article by Julia T. Wood “The Normalization of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships: Women’s Narratives of Love and Violence” in which she cites western gender and romance narratives as responsible for the high number of women who stay with abusive partners, this paper examines several novels by Nora Roberts, one of the most popular romance writers of our time, in which the author uses domestic abuse in hero’s or heroine’s past as a barrier which stands in the way of their HEA. The paper explores whether Roberts’ portrayal of the domestic violence corresponds to the narrative categories proposed by Wood, and is looking in more detail at the ways in which the after effects of the trauma caused by the abuse are dealt with in terms of reclaiming one’s own identity and re-establishing oneself not only within the narrative of a successful romantic relationship, but also within the much wider narrative of one’s place in community and society, to show that are differences at Roberts’ descriptions which mirror the changing trends in society and the de-tabooing of the issue of domestic abuse in the last thirty years. 


“It Felt Like A Kiss”: Violence and Violations in Jo Beverley’s An Unwilling Bride

(Angela Toscano, University of Iowa)

The title of this paper is taken from The Crystals’ 1962 single, “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss).” This was a song that was not popular even in its own time, and it garnered criticism for its supposed endorsement of spousal abuse. Yet, the song is not simply an unthinking approval of domestic violence. Rather, it reveals something—both in its tonality and its lyrics—about how love and violence intertwine and tangle until one becomes the metonymic stand in for the other. Similarly, discussions of Jo Beverley’s 1992 novel, An Unwilling Bride, question whether the book simply endorses violence as being synonymous with love.

Somewhere, someone once called An Unwilling Bride a novel that puts “the alpha male on trial.” Yet, it this what is being tried? What Beverley’s novel tries are the boundaries between love and violence, passion and anger, anger and abuse. These terms are alternately collapsed and separated throughout the course of the novel. What distinguishes an act of violence from an act of abuse? What is abuse? How are both related to passion? While romance community discussions of the novel have focused on either the acceptability of the hero’s actions or the believability of the novel’s HEA, my paper will argue that the novel plays out the logic of violent love in order to untie that metonymic bond between the two terms.

The Witch Must Die---- Gaze, Female Transgression and Misogyny in Linda Howard’s Dream Man

(Adam Tang, Springly Seasons International Publishers)

Linda Howard’s Dream Man, published in 1994, highlights the issue of misogyny toward female transgression through a combination of thrillers and popular romances. The story focuses on a number of female victims whose occasionally ill manners offend the male serial killer and thus are doomed to death as punishment. Howard explicitly depicts the bloody murder scenes as well as the irrational gender-specific hatred, which is rarely specified in popular romantic narratives.

Death and murder has long been a part of romantic narrative since Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Unlike the detectives or mystery, however, popular romances focus on the relationship development between the heroine and the hero rather than the process or motives of the murder itself. Mostly, murder in popular romances is never the center of romance readers’ gaze, functioning only as the story background or plot stimulation. The purpose of death and murder in romance narrative serves for the protagonists to recognize their love for each other as well as for the readers to contrast the expected happy ending. Hence, the murder depicted in popular romances is usually personally motivated. The cause of death is comprehensible and definite, lest the uncanny death threat should shadow the happily ever-after.

Yet Howard’s Dream Man portrays an irrational serial killer whose victims have little personal involvement with him. Through the heroine’s psychic sight/ gaze, the readers are presented with detailed bloody processes of murders. The murders become the center of romance readers’ gaze and none of the deaths is out of personal causes but of misogyny. This essay aims to elaborate the treatment of murder and misogyny in Linda Howard’s Dream Man and how it celebrates the female strength through a modern version of witch hunting.

Fifty Shades of Anti-Feminism: The Distortion of the Fetish and the Romance Novel in Post-Feminist Culture

(Kalauren McMillan, Winthrop University)

Fifty Shades of Gray, an erotic novel by E.L. James, tells the story of Ana Steele, who is forced via her attraction and dynamic position into an abusive, pseudo-BDSM relationship with Christian Gray. In my paper, I argue that the novel promotes a harmful trend of disempowerment of women through distorting the BDSM lifestyle, glorifying an oppressed heroine, and textually placing Ana in forceful passivity to Christian.

I start my presentation by surveying how romance novels are traditionally seen as anti-feminist. However, scholars have proven that this is not a requirement of the genre. Romance novels may contain feminist facets. I argue that James does not incorporate feminist literary techniques, but has shaped aspects of the novel toward oppression. The BDSM aspect of the novel does not conform to the tenets of the lifestyle and distorts the subculture into a mode of abuse and feminine disempowerment. In addition, Ana has no defense against the aforementioned factors due to her naivety and lack of self.

I conclude that the impetus of this novel is the post-feminist movement. The rise of post-feminism has allowed James’ novel to gain popularity with many female readers. These women, as a result, exalt the characteristics that allow and encourage Ana’s oppression via Christian. In light of Ana idolizing Christian for aesthetic beauty and perceived perfection and ameliorating his abusive and non-consensual sexual tendencies, I conclude female readers of the novel now see this portrayal of the “ideal” man as a potential romantic partner. Seeing Christian as the height of sexual and relationship pleasure, women are encouraged through the novel to seek oppression and disempowerment as “happiness” and “liberation.”

On Target

Laura Vivanco

Jackie C. Horne has just put up a post at Romance Novels for Feminists  in which she takes a close look at what Linda Howard and Linda Jones's Running Wild has to say about guns and gun control. She concludes that,

In order for gun advocates to successfully deploy the figure of the woman in their rhetoric, they must balance between two apparently opposing visions of femininity. Women must be constructed as in danger, subject at any time and for no apparent reason to the violent behavior of marauding male criminals such as Brad. Yet they must also be shown as believing that gun ownership will empower them, will allow them to protect themselves and others from any such depredations. Howard and Jones demonstrate how conflating romance and gun ownership might just make this ideological tightrope that much easier for gun rights activists to walk.

I'd encourage you to read the whole of "Guns, Love, and Ideology in Romantic Suspense."

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.

Definition of Paranormal Romance

Jane at Dear Author asked me about the definition of paranormal romance, about what that definition might include and what it doesn't. I was surprised at how much I actually ended up writing, and thought that some of my ideas were worth blogging, so here you go.

I think the RWA's definition of romance as a story containing both a central love story, and also an emotionally satisfying AND optimistic ending has to hold true for any romance, no matter the sub-genre. So, as much as Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series may be all about the relationships she has (with SOOOO many men/males), the central focus of each story is not on that one relationship (even if it's a threesome) that can be resolved with a HEA, so the books don't count as romances per se (although I certainly think their success can be attributed to romance readers' interest in the stories because of the focus on relationships, but that's a whole 'nother blog).

So, if we're going to discuss paranormal romance, it is important to remember that the romance is vital to that combination. More on this later.

Paranormal, of course, means "beyond" normal, or anything that cannot be explained by science. I would personally add "in our world," meaning that a totally different world, with magic or whatever, is not paranormal by my definition. For example, then, Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake world is paranormal, because it's an alternate expression of our world with paranormal elements. The Lord of the Rings is not paranormal, even though it has magic, because it's an entirely different world. Matthew Haldeman-Time's serial m/m erotica, In This Land (sorry, had to do the plug because it's too incredible not to) is not paranormal, because it's a different world/planet. Other-world novels, then, are Science Fiction or Fantasy, depending on the novel--and I am by no means an expert on that designation. I tend to avoid SF/F.

So, if it's set in any version of our world, in recognizable cities or towns or countries, or in a community that is recognizably "Earth" but Earth that has "beyond science" elements, it's paranormal. There's different levels /types to the definition of paranormal. There's the choice of paranormal elements: stuff that humans can do (telekinesis, telepathy, clairvoyance, magic, etc.) and/or paranormal "monsters" (were-animals, zombies, ghosts, ghouls, fairies/faeries, vampires (oh, the vampires!!), etc.). There's also the choice of level of paranormality: alternative histories, where everyone knows and accepts the paranormal elements (a la Hamilton) vs. stories where paranormal elements are something only a few people possess (a la most of Nora Roberts' and Linda Howard's paranormal stories).

I think, however, that my reason for the distinction between of-this-world stories being paranormal and not-of-this-world stories being SF/F is that a *primary* theme of all paranormal novels is the interaction between the "normal" of our world and the paranormal, between the mundane and the unexplainable. How does the normal woman respond, for example, when she finds out her lover is a vampire/werewolf/witch? How does a normal man respond when he finds out he's not normal when he comes into his previously latent powers or is turned into a paranormal monster? That's the distinction between paranormal and SF/F, for me. If that tension between mundane and paranormal doesn't exist, it's not a paranormal novel, even if it is set in our world. If it were an alternative history of our world where EVERYONE were paranormal, that would still be fantasy because the tension between mundane and paranormal would not exist. Hamilton's Anita Blake stories are paranormal because there are normal people and the tension of most of the novels is Anita dealing with the fact that her powers make her increasingly paranormal, increasingly "one of the monsters" rather than a normal human being. Her Merry Gentry series is not paranormal, for me, but rather fantasy, because although it starts in "our" world, most of the action takes place in a totally other world (like C.S. Lewis's Narnia series), and, more importantly, the tension of the books is not located in the clash between mundane and paranormal.

(Time travel novels, then, would seem to straddle this divide. The primary tension is in the clash between two mundane cultures separated by time, rather than by mundane/paranormal elements. So both the time traveler and the non-time traveler are mundane, but their meeting is brought about by paranormal elements. I don't consider that true paranormal. I think they're a very different genre from paranormal. But that might just be me. Suzanne Brockmann's Time Enough for Love is a brilliant time travel that is more science fiction based than the "magickal" elements of time travel in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, but in both of those, the hero and heroine are both mundane. The culture shock aspect is there, and the decision to live with the world-out-of-synch is there for the characters, but it's somehow fundamentally different for me from paranormal romance.)

My favorite paranormal series at the moment is J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood books--and I'm obviously not alone there. While the stories take place mostly in the "world" of the Brotherhood, that world is still hidden from the "normal" world and one of the tensions is the need to keep it hidden from ordinary humans. And all the relationships so far (and the future relationships that we know of) focus on the tension of mundane meets paranormal. In Dark Lover Beth might be vampire, but she doesn't know it until she makes the change. The heroines in Lover Eternal and Vishous's book (although NOT, as has been pointed out to me, Lover Awakened), and the hero in Lover Revealed are all human and the tension between human and vampire represents much of the tension in the novels. (It'll be fascinating to see if Ward ever does a book in which both characters have always known they're vampires.)

Putting these two elements together, then, a paranormal romance is a novel focusing on a close relationship in which the primary mundane vs. paranormal tension is explored between the partners in the relationship. So while a story in which both characters know of, understand, and believe in the paranormal elements of the world would technically be "paranormal," it might not be a paranormal romance because why have a romance with paranormal elements if the mundane/paranormal tension does not effect the relationship? In a paranormal romance, then, by my definition, at least one character must believe they are mundane (whether or not they are) and have to struggle within the relationship with the tension between mundane and paranormal. This definition can be represented in any number of ways, but that's what I come to when I actually try to parse out my personal understanding of the combination phrase "paranormal romance." If you think of most of Nora Roberts' paranormals (I haven't read the Morrigan's Cross series, so I can't speak for those) and Linda Howard's paranormals, each and every relationship has to get over the "I don't believe you are a ______/I don't believe you can do ________" stage. That's what makes them paranormal, in my opinion.

The climax of a paranormal novel can be the mundane partner in the relationship accepting the paranormal aspects in their lives, or it can be the antagonist getting what comes to him/her, usually with the help of the paranormal elements, after the mundane partner has accepted the paranormal, but the tension of the main relationship needs to be heavily invested in the tension between the mundane and the paranormal.

So there you have it. Does anyone else have a more or less inclusive definition of paranormal romance? How do you separate paranormal romances from Science Fiction romances or Fantasy romances? Is paranormal just anything that isn't perfectly normal? What about Time Travel romances?