Come Now and Look at Me

Laura Vivanco

Not so long ago Jessica wrote a post titled "“Come for me, baby”: orgasm on command" in which she asked

Why is this phrase (and its variations) so ubiquitous in romance? You don’t believe me? Well, here’s a list complied ONLY from my bookshelf of maybe 30 titles. I bet you can think of many more.

Of course there's an element of dominance/control involved, and as Jessica asks, "was it the Office of Alpha Hero Protection that issued the dictum (heh) that in order to enhance Alphaness, heroes must control even this aspect of lovemaking?" But I suspect there might also be an element of bonding involved, of becoming, in the words of Matthew 19, and repeated in the marriage ceremony "one flesh."

Jessica's post reminded me of another frequent command issued by heroes, namely that the heroine look at him as she has her orgasm:

The blood was pounding in his head, roaring in his ears, yet his body continued to move slowly with hers. Balanced on the edge, David said her name a last time.
"Aurora, look at me." When her eyes opened, they were dark and aware. "I want to see where I take you." (Roberts 591)

And here's a similar example:

Byron realized suddenly that it was not enough for there to be pleasure given and taken. He wanted Victoria to be aware of him, as aware of him as a man as he was of her as a woman. She was beautiful like that [...] beautiful with her tightness clasping him intimately, as if she would turn them both into one marvelous animal. But he did not want her to plunge into ecstasy alone. He wanted her with him as she went over the edge - he wanted to be a part of that beauty at its climax. [...] "I'm here," he whispered. "Look at me. Remember - I am with you."
She opened her eyes and met his gaze. "For now," she agreed. (Joyce 67)

Again, I think the command is part of an attempt to bond the two more closely. I wonder if there's any lingering literary and emotional significance derived from much earlier medical/scientific ideas about the power of the eyes. In the Renaissance it was thought that eyes could potentially have a powerful effect:

"Love's arrows," held in high esteem by the French poets of the Pleiade, were not, for Ficino, a mere metaphor. They were equipped with invisible pneumatic tips able to inflict severe damage on the person shot. Had not Plato already said that love was a kind of ocular sickness (ophthalmia: Phaedo, 255c-d)? And did not Plutarch ascribe to sight a "miraculous force"?
Regarding the "evil eye," fascination or jettatura, its etiology is the same:

Fascination is a force which, emanating from the spirit of the fascinator, enters the eyes of the fascinated person and penetrates his heart. Spirit is therefore the instrument of fascination. It emits from the eyes rays resembling itself, bearing with them spiritual quality. [...]

So speaks Agrippa of Nettesheim, after Ficino. (Culianu 30)

As mentioned above, this scientific explanation of the function of the gaze influenced literature:

In late medieval literature [...] the arrow does not always proceed directly to the heart, but strikes the lover first in the eyes. This bizarre trajectory becomes more comprehensible when we realize that the poets have associated the arrow of Love with either the glance or the image of the beloved, which enters through the lover's eyes but pierces deep within. (Stewart 13)

Donaldson-Evans clarifies that this imagery has a very long literary history:

when love is born not simply as a result of seeing the Beloved but by the active participation of the Beloved's glance, then we are dealing with a specific tradition which can be traced back to early Greek classical literature. It is, in fact, a topos which, since it has gone unnamed until now, we propose to call the Aggressive Eye Topos. (202)

Its scientific basis, according to Donaldson-Evans, contributed to its longevity:

such imagery is rooted in a theory of vision which extended from classical antiquity up to the seventeenth century. This scientific authority (it is only for us that it is pseudo-scientific) undoubtedly accounts for the popularity and extraordinary longevity of this particular literary tradition. (203)

I'd like to suggest that, even if we would now consider the scientific authority underpinning the Aggressive Eye topos to be merely archaic pseudo-science, the tradition perhaps lives on in literary form in the romance genre. Heroes who ask or command heroines to look deep into their eyes seem to be trying to create an emotional connection (they may not at this point think of it as love) between them. When the hero ensures that they orgasm together while looking into each others eyes, he is perhaps trying to join them both physically and optically (body and soul), and in coming together in this way they are perhaps almost literally made, at least for a short space of time, into "one flesh."

• Culianu, Ioan P. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Trans. Margaret Cook. U of Chicago P: 1987.
• Donaldson-Evans, Lance K. "Love's Fatal Glance: Eye Imagery and Maurice Scève's Délie." Neophilologus 62:2 (1978): 202-211.
• Joyce, Lydia. The Veil of Night. New York: Signet, 2005.
• Roberts, Nora. Mind over Matter. 1987. Going Home. Richmond, Surrey: Silhouette, 2004. 401-649.
• Stewart, Dana E. The Arrow of Love: Optics, Gender, and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry. Bucknell UP: 2003.

The image of the eye is from Wikimedia Commons.

Lydia Joyce - The Veil of Night (2: The Food of Love)

Laura Vivanco

No, not music or even the many foodstuffs which are allegedly aphrodisiacs. Many months ago Eric mentioned the way in which descriptions of food and eating take the place of sex in Mary Stewart's Madam, Will You Talk. He also touched on the functions of food in Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me. Literary metaphors and imagery linking sexuality and food have a long history. For example,

The numerous images of food in [Shakespeare's] Troilus and Cressida and their association with love and lust have been remarked upon by many critics. Troilus himself passes from a giddy anticipation of "the imaginary relish" of consummation to the bitter discovery that "the fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics" of Cressida's pledge of love have gone to Diomedes. (Rowland 1970: 191)

The Veil of Night includes many descriptions of food and in general, as with other physical matters, this is dealt with in a very earthy, realistic manner. An example of this realism is the inclusion of the detail that the hero notices that the sleeping heroine has 'an endearing, commonplace hint of dampness on one cheek. Byron smiled despite himself at the thought that she could forget herself even in her sleep so much as to drool' (2005: 138). Although such prosaic details might not please some readers, Byron finds it 'endearing' and similarly the heroine, having seen that the hero is 'just a man, a mere man, tired and frustrated and approaching middle age' (2005: 166), realises 'that his moment of weakness - of reality? humanity? - had done nothing to stifle her desire for him' (2005: 167).

Some romances seem rather perfunctory in their descriptions of the more physical aspects of desire and the erotic, and although they may use somewhat euphemistic phrases, such as 'a scent that was uniquely his' to refer to the hero's body odour, they fail, at least in my opinion, to fully explore the physicality of their characters.* Maybe it's because many readers are somewhat squeamish and prefer a sanitised, more 'romantic' portrayal of such matters. Mary Reed McCall, for example, once commented that

Even in contemporaries, I've read more than one lovemaking scene that takes place first thing in the morning, before either h/h has used the bathroom or brushed their teeth. The reality of that is quite off-putting, but the fantasy of it, provided one doesn't focus on those little details, can seem romantic [...] each reader's threshold for sexual situations/realism is different, and it sounds like yours is fairly high on the reality side. Mine is pretty high, too, I think - though I do find myself glossing over, even as I'm writing lovemaking scenes, some things (i.e. my stories are set in the middle ages, when of course sanitation, deodorizing soaps, teeth cleaning etc aren't exactly high on the list of living conditions, and yet I don't make a point to have the h/h chewing on mint leaves right before they end up making love, or even always bathing directly beforehand - though I do admit to trying to work a bath in prior to a lovemaking scene whenever possible

Lucy Blue, quoted in the same At the Back Fence Column, had a rather different opinion:

About all those personal hygiene issues – people giving oral sex after conventional sex without stopping for a bath, etc. – again, it’s fantasy, so the writer may consider personal hygiene pretty much a non-issue to be ignored, like hairy legs in a medieval. But personally, I find it sexy, not gross, and not unrealistic – there are heroes out there that do that kind of stuff, and heaven bless them for it.

We've taken a look at the distinction between the high and low mimetic styles a number of times, so I won't repeat myself, but it seems to me that what Mary Reed McCall is describing isn't really at the low mimetic end of the spectrum: one can get more considerably more realistic, and that's what Lucy Blue appreciates.

In Lydia Joyce's The Veil of Night the hero touches the heroine's nose: 'No one had ever touched her nose with such delicate inquisitiveness before. It was strange and somehow almost more intimate than a flagrant caress' (2005: 40) and reviewers on Amazon had very strongly divergent opinions about this. For SusieQ, 'the whole line just made me laugh out loud. Her NOSE? I could maybe see a man touching a woman's BREAST with "delicate inquisitiveness", but...well, maybe I shouldn't go there!!'. Shereads, on the other hand, thought that this passage demonstrated one of the strengths of the novel: 'I disagree adamantly with the notion that touching a nose instead of a breast isn't erotic. In the right hands, tying shoelaces can be erotic. The fact that the love scenes veer away from a well-worn path is one of my favorite things about this book'.**

The scene is an interesting one, in which the couple are involved in verbal exchanges, eating and physical exploration. No-one could accuse Joyce of only going skin-deep. Instead she chooses to describe the way in which the heroine 'put a slice of roast into her mouth and bit down hard, her jaw muscles bulging slightly with the force of her anger' (2005: 41) and, later, she 'seemed to look through his skin, too, to the sinews that bound his muscles to their bones, to the surface of his brain where his thoughts were read as they flashed fleetingly across. Could she also see the hidden debility, the one no doctor could ever understand?' (2005: 43-44). Perhaps for some people this level of detail, of engagement with the physical, is unromantic, even repugnant?

I'm reminded of a couple of passages in C. S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress. The pilgrim has come to Zeitgeistheim, 'home of the Spirit of the Age which is Freudian reductionism' (from here) and the pilgrim is thrown into jail where:

Every day a jailor brought the prisoners their food, and as he laid down the dishes he would say a word to them. If their meal was flesh he would remind them that they were eating corpses, or give them some account of the slaughtering: or, if it was the inwards of some beast, he would read them a lecture in anatomy (1944: 61)

Reason then appears and rescues the Pilgrim and reassures him, but even she has to admit that 'Such pictures are useful to physicians. [...] there is truth mixed up with the giant's conjuring tricks' (1944: 71). Joyce, however, rather than dismiss this aspect of existence as being 'ugly sights' (1944: 71), seeks to uncover the beauty that may be found beneath the first impression of ugliness, the truth in the material and in the quotidian realities of daily life. Back to SusieQ, 'And who ever thought of ending a romance novel with the heroine's telling the hero she has her period? [...] Sure, they end up together, but...EWWW' and Shereads, 'It's simply true-to-life. A serving of reality on the banquet table of happily-ever-after. I'm always grateful when an author trusts her readers that way.'

Another meal they share is also described in somewhat unappetising terms:

He uncovered one of the dishes, revealing cold tongue, pallid boiled vegetables, and some sort of potatoes that looked grayish and unappetizing. But the smell that wafted out was at least wholesome, if not tantalizing. (2005: 107)

Joyce has said of one food item described in the novel that: 'I admit it. I hate English food. This isn't what the aristocracy normally dined upon, but there was such a great potential for horridness that I could not pass it up. The cook is dreadful, and she will be gently retired between the last chapter and the epilogue.' While this 'unappetizing' , if wholesome, food may not appeal to some, it is nonetheless welcome fare to Victoria and Byron; much as they may appear physically 'unappetising' at first glance to others, they are 'wholesome' for each other.

Though not the most visually appealing of desserts, the peach crumble they are served next is more obviously sensual, and Joyce has said that 'I decided that I'd been giving them enough terrible food that they deserved something good, and, well, this is what happened.' It's 'The best peach crumble north of Manchester' (2005: 110):

The cinnamon-rich syrup flowed onto her tongue, and when she bit down, the firm peach flesh yielded in a rush of juice. "Oh!" she said when she'd swallowed. "That's lovely." The taste of it lingered, sweet and enticing. (2005: 110)

Victoria may claim that she doesn't deserve 'Sympathy, kindness, compassion' (2005: 115) and Byron may respond wryly 'Heaven preserve us from our just desserts' (2005: 115) but they are literally and metaphorically going to get their 'just desserts': the succulent flesh of the peaches in crumble and the physical enjoyment and love they find in each other as they 'shrug [...] off the confines of ordinary existence to grab at the rich, sweet fruit of life' (2005: 118).

Whether we find this sort of romance romantic really depends, I suppose, on how processed and purified we like the food at our banquet to be. Do we wish to share the ambrosia served to the Gods, or will a thick broth prove more to our taste? Perhaps sometimes we crave one, and sometimes the other?

• Joyce, Lydia, 2005. The Veil of Night (New York: Signet Eclipse).
• Lewis, C. S., 1944. The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (London: Geoffrey Bles).
• Rowland, Beryl, 1970. 'A Cake-Making Image in Troilus and Cressida' , Shakespeare Quarterly, 21.2: 191-194.

* Sweat may also glisten over muscles, usually the hero's. Heroines seem to sweat much less frequently, perhaps because according to the old saying 'horses sweat, gentlemen perspire, ladies glow'. Incidentally, 'A study of budgerigar sex-appeal has found the feathers on the crowns of both sexes emit a fluorescent sparkle that is invisible to humans but is an alluring signal to would-be lovers of the avian world' (The Independent).

** Byron touches Victoria's nose again later on, when he asks her to trust him by telling him her secret: 'Raeburn traced the line of her nose, resting his finger briefly on its tip' (2005: 103). There is a tenderness in this touch, and while the nose is is a sensual organ, it is also a part of the face which is not usually touched by strangers, or focused on by others, so there is a strange intimacy to the gesture.

The image of the muscles of the pharynx and cheek is from the 1918 edition of Gray's Anatomy, available at Bartleby.com. According to Wikipedia this and other images from the 1918 edition are in the public domain because the copyright has expired. It seems appropriate given the descriptions of the act of eating, and Victoria at one point says that in revealing her secrets to Byron she's 'spread myself out bare for you, like an eager cadaver on an anatomist's table' (2005: 214).

Lydia Joyce - The Veil of Night (1: Home and Heart)

Laura Vivanco

Lydia Joyce 'achieved bestsellerdom with The Veil of Night' (Publishers Weekly), her first published novel. Here are some reviews: an extremely positive one from A Romance Review, a fairly good one from All About Romance, and a not quite so positive one from The Romance Reader. You can also find an excerpt here.

As usual, this is not a review, and I may include spoilers. I want to focus on just one aspect of the novel: the imagery and symbolism of buildings.

The first chapter opens with the words

Graceless and sprawling, Raeburn Court was a pile of mottled limestone atop the bald hill. Lady Victoria Wakefield spied it while the coach was still some distance off, and she watched it steadily as they approached the park gate; after all, there was nothing else in the bleak landscape to catch her eye. As they drew near, the squat manor house grew only more blunt and ugly, its saw-toothed crenellations pierced by random, unbalanced spires stabbing the slate-gray sky. (2005: 3)

It would appear to match its master, Byron Stratford, Duke of Raeburn. The Court is 'sprawling' and when we first meet Byron he reclines at his ease, waiting for Lady Victoria's approach and later his signature 'sprawled across the sheet' (2005: 27), a word which appears again in another description of the house of which he is the centre: 'there was more unknown in the room behind her [where she has left Byron] than in all the rest of the sprawling, rotting manor house' (2005: 28).

During that first encounter Byron's 'presence filled the room' (2005: 24) in the same way that his house dominates the surrounding terrain, while his eyes match the colours of the landscape, 'brown or moss-coloured' (2005: 25). Joyce describes him in architectural terms:

The lineaments of his face were bold and strong - almost crude, as if he'd been blindly carved of stone - but they were no less attractive for a lack of patrician daintiness. How old he was she could not guess: certainly younger than the roughened skin of his face suggested. It was not marked with the scarring left by youthful blemishes but with a deeper weathering, as if he had stood barefaced to wind and sun for a score of years. [...]
His appearance was certainly unconventional, but it was also compelling (2005: 25, my emphasis)

Externally, then, Raeburn Court matches the appearance of its master. As for the interior, it parallels Byron's reputation:

Victoria took the opportunity to survey the room. The vast, unlit chamber stretched before her--the manor's original great hall, no doubt--its deep shadows scarcely pierced by the gray light filtering through the filthy mullioned windows, which trembled in their frames as another peal of thunder cracked overhead. Ancient, moldering tapestries flapped like living things in the steady draft flowing through the room, and enormous cobwebs fluttered against the black rafters in the dim recesses of the ceiling. (2005:7-8)

Such decay and neglect might seem to indicate Byron's immorality. He has a 'well-deserved reputation for being a dissolute reprobate' (2005: 12). Lydia Joyce provides the online equivalents of footnotes to the text, and one of those notes states that Raeburn Court,

has no "real world" model. I didn't like the traditional castle-ish construction so common in Gothics, so instead, I made it a mishmash of styles from many periods, which would give it a suitable spookiness without following the cliché too closely.

That unconventional 'mishmash of styles' might in architectural terms make the isolated Court not dissimilar to Byron who's 'a pariah not because of the acts he committed but because of the conventions he failed to keep' (2005: 4).*

Despite the apparent similarities between Byron and Raeburn Court, he only intends living there until the renovation of the Dowager House is complete. Victoria thinks it 'Strange that he should want to leave a house that seemed to suit him so well' (2005: 37), but Byron has reached the conclusion that it 'had been inhabited far too long by other men who had left their impressions upon it more indelibly than he could ever hope to. That was the secret of Raeburn Court, he had finally decided; it always made one feel a stranger' (2005: 72).

While the Court may resemble Byron's exterior appearance, it is the Dowager House which, as Victoria quickly realises, represents his inner life: 'She had the growing sensation that the house was a portrait of the duke, done in such precise detail that every idiosyncrasy in his nature was laid bare, if only she knew how to look at it.

Commenting on the Dowager House, Joyce admits that

I am an architecture freak. [...] Philip Speakman Webb [the architect] was part of the aesthetic movement in architecture that eventually birthed the Arts and Crafts style. In its early forms, it was simple and medievalist, though it had a number of characteristics that any Craftsman enthusiast would immediately recognize and appreciate. I wanted something that worked for Byron and spoke of who he was, and this movement really spoke to me. [click here for a short biography of Speakman Webb and links to photos of some furniture he designed]

The Dowager House 'speaks of who Byron is' because it combines the historical and the modern, making use of rich colours which are in keeping with Byron's connection with his lands:

She stood at the midpoint of a long, narrow chamber, once a hall, now divided by furniture and rugs into two distinct parlors decorated in tones of scarlet, purple, and umber. Like a Yorkshire sunset, she thought [...].
She crossed into the parlor [...] noting the heavy, simple lines of the furniture and the archaic paintings that hung on the walls. But the most striking feature was the narrow stained glass windows that flanked the fireplaces at the ends of the hall, four jewel-toned glowing pictures of slender, long-faced women with intricately draped robes and tumbling hair. [...]
"It is very different," she said. [...] "Most people would have made the house lighter, more delicate. This seems positively medieval." (2005: 86)

It is, literally 'positively medieval'. In Victorian medievalism

"[...] The Middle Ages were idealized as a period of faith, order, joy, munificence, and creativity [...] The Middle Ages became a metaphor both for a specific social order and [...] for a metaphysically harmonious world view. [...]" Chandler [...] convincingly shows us how the nineteenth turned back to the past as a way of criticizing the present and as a means to a better future. (Landow, quoting Chandler, 1973: 366)

I can't help but think that the stained-glass of the house (as contrasted with the covered windows of the Court) represent Byron's spirituality. He may appear evil to those who judge on appearances and he has 'behaved with the flamboyance of a born reprobate' (2005: 100) and encouraged all the 'mysterious rumors' (2005: 100) about him, but in truth it is simply the case that for him the seeing 'through a glass, darkly' (1 Corinthians 13: 12) is literal as well as metaphorical.

In addition, it becomes clear that Byron's medievalism extends to his attitude towards his tenants. The estate is in some difficulty as a result of the Industrial Revolution:

"I can't even find tenants for two tracts, and I've had to cut the rent on the others. There's not the money in wool there used to be, and the Raeburn flocks are poor at best. [...] Stoneswold and Weatherlea are half deserted because the weaving is all done in factories in Leeds. The weavers' families have all left or been reduced to menial labor."
Victoria realized that he cared - not just about property and income, but about the common villagers, too. There was perhaps something medieval in his concern, but if it was stained with feudal overtones, it had a certain chivalric element as well and was rather touching. (2005: 108)

While Byron's exterior appearance and his inner soul are symbolised by the two houses, Victoria, who owns no houses, nonetheless has a similarly deceptive 'façade of imperturbability' (2005: 10) which is later replaced by clothing which more accurately reflects her real personality. As far as society is aware, Victoria is what she appears to be:

she was fair [haired] and dowdy [...] austere to the point of severity [...] almost fiercely self-contained. [...] Every line of her bearing declared that she was a respectable old maid, from her tight, pale blonde bun and her prim, haughty smile to the hideously unflattering carriage dress. (2005: 11)

No-one apart from Victoria knows that her clothes 'had been marked by unrelieved austerity for fifteen years now, first from an excess of puerile anguish, then from self-abhorrence, and now partly from habit and partly from the intangible security such a uniform offered' (2005: 5). Byron, however, quickly notices that:

From the back, not even the awkward lines of her unflattering corset could disguise the grace of her lithe figure, the unconscious seductiveness in the arch of her neck.

The prim dress and severe bun angered him suddenly. He saw them thrust between them as a barrier, keeping him beyond her spinsterish defenses. (2005: 19)

The crinoline and corset are 'defences': the dress and crinoline forming the outer walls, while the corset is an inner barrier, all demonstrating the severe austerity of a medieval castle. Byron is sure that Victoria has chosen to 'lock herself' (2005: 22) within them and looks at her with a 'proprietary gleam [...] in his eyes, that of a lord surveying territory soon to be his' (2005: 40). He senses that which is hidden within her walls: 'the soul of the wind-mad woman who escaped the stifling parlors and drawing rooms of Rushworth Manor to gallop across the tenants' most distant fields' (2005: 22). What he doesn't realise is that Victoria has 'locked herself' within the citadel of her clothing because, 'There was no barrier, no stronghold of virginity to interrupt his entrance' (2005: 66-67).** What she had hidden within the fortress of her austere clothing was not her virginity, but her sexuality, and when Byron buys her new clothes 'there was a native sensuality that permeated the air about her now that she no longer imprisoned it behind walls of whalebone and black taffeta' (2005: 79, my emphasis).


* Regarding the 'mishmash' of styles:

The first time he'd seen the building [...] he'd seen the hideousness of it, the sprawling wings of every imaginable age of architecture appended to the main mass of limestone at haphazard angles. Yet even then, it had called to him. Even then, it had whispered of secrets and darkness and ancient passions burned into the rock. (2005: 72)

** I touched briefly on the metaphorical aspects of virginity as depicted in romance in my post about metaphorical medicine and 'the sexual metaphor which casts woman as a castle besieged by suitors is a commonplace in the erotic literature of the classical world and Middle Ages (it is the metaphor that underpins the whole of the Roman de la rose)' (Foster Gittes 2005: 21).

• Foster Gittes, Tobias 2005. '"O vendetta di Dio": The Motif of Rape and Retaliation in Dante's Inferno', MLN, 120.1: 1-29.
  
• Joyce, Lydia, 2005. The Veil of Night (New York: Signet Eclipse).
• Landow, George P., 1973. 'A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. By Alice Chandler. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. pp. 278', Modern Philology, 70.4: 366-369.
  

I apologise for using the Foster Gittes, and Landow's review of Chandler's book. I could no doubt have found more authoritative texts dealing with these subjects, including Chandler's book, but as I'm blogging rather than writing an academic paper, I tend to use sources I can access via the internet.

The picture on the cover of the book is taken from 'a photograph of a famous mission in Arizona'.

The castle is Krak des Chevaliers, a '"concentric castle" in which each ward was placed wholly within another which enveloped it' (Wikipedia). It 'was built by the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem from 1142 to 1271' and is now a World Heritage site.

Location, location, location

Over on the listserv we've been discussing settings and whether they affect sales. Location, as we all know, is very important when buying and selling property:

"Location, location, location," is a common and almost hackneyed phrase in real estate literature. Your agent may even throw it at you when you ask for advice about buying a home. However, what does "location, location, location," actually mean? Why repeat it three times?

Mostly, "location" is repeated to emphasize that it is extremely important to the resale value of your home. The idea is to buy a house that will appeal to the largest number of potential future homebuyers. A careful choice of location can minimize potential negative influences on future resale value, and maximize positive influences.

Writers, particularly writers of historical romances, have definitely been getting the message that the sales value of a novel set in Regency England (preferrably a desirable location in London, with easy access to Tattersall's, Bond Street, and Gunter's) is the most likely to appeal to the largest number of potential historical-romance buyers. Is it that other locations have fewer 'positive influences' than those provided by the lady patronesses of Almack's?

Our discussion began when Eric posted a notice about a conference to be held next year:

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF ITALIAN STUDIES
Colorado Springs 3-6 May 2007

We seek proposals for our panel on “Venice in the Literary Imagination” for the upcoming American Association for Italian Studies conference, taking place in Colorado Springs from 3-6 May 2007.

"Venice has loomed large in the imagination of writers from the medieval period to postmodernity. Papers which examine the city's literary significance might explore such areas as aesthetics, gender, identity, leisure, politics, or travel, or representations of the libertine, libro d'oro, Carnevale, political prisoners, the Rialto, or the terra firma. We welcome research on authors of all periods and genres." (more details on the panels proposed for this conference can be found here)

On the listserv we did come up with some examples of historical romances set, or partly set, in Venice, including Lydia Joyce's The Music of the Night, Claire Thornton's The Defiant Mistress and Susan Wiggs' Lord of the Night. I also found some pictures of Venice for those who'd like a closer look at the real estate in question, from the Royal Collection's online exhibition of Canaletto's paintings of Venice.

It's still the case, though, that settings such as Venice remain relatively rare in romance. All About Romance, for example, has a page devoted to 'special settings', and while they include Venice, they don't include Regency London, which is, presumably, all too common. There seem to be a variety of reasons why this might be the case. Is it that readers prefer the familiar setting of Regency London? Is it that, particularly for the writer of historicals, it's more difficult to find the source material on other locations (in a readily accessible language) in order to carry out the research? Is it that publishers think that historicals set in more exotic locations won't sell? Harlequin Mills & Boon have been acquiring Roman-era romances recently, however, so clearly some publishers are willing to take a chance with a more unusual location for a historical. Is it that some settings have negative connotations for readers? Hsu-Ming Teo's article, 'Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels' suggests that:

these love stories were symptomatic of British fantasies of colonial India and served as a forum to explore interracial relations as well as experimenting with the modern femininity of the New Woman. With the achievement of Indian independence in 1947, British interest in India as a locus for romance rapidly declined, thus demonstrating that these novels were never concerned with India but with British lives and British colonialism. [...] The colonial order was necessary for the production and sustenance of romantic fantasies. With its demise, the Anglo-Indian romance genre withered. These romances were never primarily about India but about the Englishness of love and the racialization of romance whereby white love stories were cast into dramatic relief against the background of an Orientalized India.

It's certainly true that some locations provide a touch of the exotic, whether it's the desert in sheik romances (and plenty of the kingdoms over which the sheiks rule are entirely fictional, as illustrated by this map), or, for Harlequin readers living in Eastern Europe in the immediate post-Cold War era, romances set in American locations, since for them America was 'a place which symbolizes the possible wealth and affluence that the capitalist system has to offer':

The novels are fantasies of the ability to transcend economic class, a world where women enjoy working in privileged positions in the economic system of capitalism and men are the masters of this system, the power figures who take care of those less wealthy than themselves. Lack of money is never a problem in the world of Harlequin romances, and romance itself is inseparable from an abundance of wealth and possessions. The appeal of such fantasies to readers living in emerging capitalist markets like Poland and Russia is obvious.(Darbyshire 2000)

I suspect that there are many factors affecting the popularity of certain settings, but it does appear that there is a greater variety in the settings of contemporary romances than in the historicals. As we've mentioned before, Harlequin Presents 'are set in sophisticated, glamorous, international locations', and there are certainly plenty of contemporary romances in settings from Ireland to the Australian outback.

Do you have any ideas about why the locations are more varied in contemporary romances than in historicals? Do you find certain historical settings and eras offputting?

• Darbyshire, Peter, 2000. ‘Romancing the World: Harlequin Romances, the Capitalist Dream, and the Conquest of Europe and Asia’, Studies in Popular Culture 23.1.
• Teo, Hsu-Ming, 2004. 'Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels', History of Intellectual Culture, 4.1.

"Freshness," Subjectivity, and What Is To Be Done

In a comment several days ago, I wrote that "A romance novel's aesthetic interest, at least to me, often lies in how wittily or inventively or simply freshly a novelist selects among and deploys the givens of the genre." Laura posed a couple if searching questions in reply:

Eric, this part of what you said's been intriguing me, because although I think I'd usually be able to detect when a romance was breaking a convention of the genre, I've always steered clear of analysing humour or satire. Humour seems so hard to pin down. Do you have any techniques which academics should bear in mind when studying this aspect of texts?

I also wonder about the 'freshness' aspect you mention, because again I think that could be subjective, and it's also quite dependent on what you (generic you) have read in the past. [...] In the past I've studied old texts, and 'freshness' wasn't something I was looking for. How you go about identifying it and demonstrating to a reader of an academic article that it's present in the text you're discussing?

These are hard topics to pursue without sounding like a US commercial for feminine hygiene products ("sometimes a novel doesn't feel so 'fresh'"), but let me see what I can do, especially since the key terms of your questions, Laura, open a whole new set of issues for us as academic readers of romance.

When I read poems, I feel confident--probably too confident--in proclaiming that this or that poem is "fresh" or "witty" (in the sense of "clever" or simply "intelligent," more than "humorous"or "satirical") in its deployment of conventions. These are subjective judgments, however objective my rhetoric may be, but I make the claims based on thirty years of reading poetry, and at least twenty, maybe twenty-five, of studying the history and criticism of the art. During those years, I have internalized a narrative about how the art of poetry has developed, at least in English; I have also seen how critics disagree with one another, so that one critic's major poet is another's minor figure, and one critic's innovation is another's period piece. I've watched literary historians recover largely-forgotten poets (Mina Loy, Edwin Rolfe), and watched critics then wrangle over their value and interest, and slowly but surely I've grown confident enough to pass judgment myself. If I'm wrong, what's the worst that can happen? Someone will disagree with me, maybe disprove me--either with evidence, if I'm making an empirical claim, or with more persuasive rhetoric, if I've made the case for some poem's value--and then the conversation will go on.

When it comes to romance, I'm at a double disadvantage. I haven't read the genre very long, and there isn't much criticism out there for me to draw on as a shortcut. When I tell the story of the genre to my students, I depend on claims I've found in the histories that I have read so far: for example, that The Sheik is a reasonably good place to start the story of modern popular romance fiction, or that The Flame and the Flower changed the shape of romance publishing and inaugurated the age of the "bodice-ripper" or "erotic historical romance." I haven't done the research to test either of these statements myself, nor am I likely to do so. There are huge gaps in my romance reading: gaps I sometimes work to fill, as when I doggedly read Sweet Savage Love this summer (not a book I'd have finished, except for its historical significance as the second of those erotic historicals); gaps I haven't started to address, and may never, as when I tack past the shoals of Nora Roberts books, unsure how to set my course and explore them.

Where does this leave me as a critic? As Laura asks, how do I go about identifying and demonstrating "freshness" to my academic readers?

My hunch is that I'll just make declarations, based on my best sense at the time--my subjective response, in Laura's terms--and make them as ardently and cleverly and confidently as I can, as if I knew exactly what I was talking about. Then I'll hold my breath and wait for someone, probably one of you reading right now, to tell me that I'm wrong--God willing, at the peer review stage rather than when the piece is already in print, but if I make a fool of myself in public, I can live with that.

We are, after all, in the lucky position of creating the field of romance criticism, folks! There's no canon to speak of, and precious little critical orthodoxy to rein us in or weigh us down. If we say that this or that novel is worth reading and teaching, we make it so, at least for a while. If we say that Lydia Joyce's Veil of Night invokes the conventions of Gothic romance and then falters, unable to sustain their haunting and mysterious tone, then so it does, by gum--and, conversely, if we say that it invokes those conventions only to shine a debunking, rationalist light on them to witty and fresh effect, entirely conscious of its every turn, then the novel does just that. We have to decide, and make the case, and see which position wins out. (For my money, by the way, Joyce's Whispers of the Night is a far better book--but what I mean by "better" in this case, I'd need to hash out at length, knowing all the while that there are no set criteria for such evaluations, but that any criteria I use might be the ones to be adopted as this field develops.)

We need so much in this field: terms of art for describing the genre (Pam Regis has given us some, but we need more); a good set of arguments over who are its major figures and which its major texts; some thoughtful, well-researched debunking of what "major" really means, anyway; essays on the pleasures of individual books; Barthesian reflections on "the pleasures of the text" in romance fiction; historicist readings of romance novels in relation to women's history and other contexts; philosophical meditations on love and desire that take works of romance fiction as their instigation, the way that Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness treats Hollywood comedies of the 1930s. And more, I'm sure!

My hunch is that we needn't worry about being "subjective." We need a lot of good, well-written, confidently subjective criticism in the field, criticism of insight and unabashed advocacy, just as we continue to need solid, "objective" research that keeps the rest of us honest. I wish I had specific "techniques" to suggest, but at the moment, I have only hunches and aspirations--and the sense that, in the words of Bram Stoker's Prof. Van Helsing, "There is work, wild work to be done!"

Summer Time

We’re in the middle of a heatwave here in the UK. The weather does affect our mood, as well as our bodies, but some authors manage to demonstrate this more successfully than others. In literature, of course, authors can reverse the relationship and alter the weather to suit the mood of the characters:

In literary criticism, the pathetic fallacy is the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human emotions, thoughts, sensations, and feelings. The term was coined by John Ruskin in his 1856 work Modern Painters, in which Ruskin wrote that the aim of pathetic fallacy was “to signify any description of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions."

There are other ways in which the weather can be used to enhance the mood or drive a plot and romance writers are well aware of them. For example, Maria V. Snyder, a meteorologist turned romance-writer says that:

I discovered, much to my chagrin, that forecasting the weather wasn’t one of my skills and in order to chase tornados you had to find them first. Creating fantasy worlds where I have complete control of the weather is definitely more fun.

The most obvious examples of the use of seasons in romance are those anthologies of short stories which appear around particular holidays, such as Christmas and Valentine’s Day. Then there are the dramatic weather events, such as hurricanes or snow-storms which put the couple at risk, forcing them to work together to survive, or simply trap them and keep them together long enough for them to find their HEA.

Since we’re having a heatwave, I thought I'd discuss a seasonally appropriate romance, Barbara Delinsky’s 1987 Heat Wave. This was published in the ‘Temptation’ line, so the title was an indication not just of the weather, but also of the sexual ‘heat’ between the hero and heroine. The story begins with Caroline undressing, and from the context we deduce that she’s just got back home after a long, hot day at work:

Caroline Cooper untied the wilting bow at the neck of her blouse, released its top button and peeled the damp fabric from her sweaty neck. [...] Freeing the last of the buttons, Caroline carefully separated the blouse from her shoulders and arms. [...] Caroline breathed a sigh of relief when she stepped out of her skirt and an even greater one when she rolled the nylons from her legs. [...]
Clad in panties and bra, Caroline padded wearily to the bathroom. [...] she unsnapped her bra and let it fall to the commode before rewetting the cloth and dragging it slowly over those parts of her that hadn’t breathed all day – the insides of her elbows, the curve of her waistline, beneath and between her breasts. (1987: 5-6)

It isn’t till page 7 that we’re told that ‘The dog days of summer had arrived suddenly and with a vengeance, but it wasn’t even summer. It was the sixth of June. She shuddered to think what July and August would be like.’ The slow, detailed opening pages make us feel the heroine’s sticky hotness with her, and they may also make the reader feel just a little bit voyeuristic as we ‘watch’ her slowly peel of her clothes. If so, that’s no coincidence, since the hero has also been watching the heroine from his window, fifty feet away from hers, and their relationship (or courtship) begins with them watching and fantasising about each other across the courtyard. Hot, literally and metaphorically.

But even if we’re boiling in the summer heat, poetry and prose can conjure up the mood of different seasons. Here, for example, is autumn:

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
(From John Keats’ Ode to Autumn)

Just reading that makes me feel the lazy, gentle warmth of that season.

Lydia Joyce’s The Veil of Night is a particularly good example of how weather can be used to set mood, assist in characterisation and drive the plot. There are examples of this throughout the novel, but I'll just give one example, from the very beginning, when Lady Victoria Wakefield arrives at a lonely mansion, ‘its saw-toothed crenellations pierced by random, unbalanced spires stabbing the slate-gray sky’ (2005: 3) . As she and her maid walk up the hill

A fat drop of rain fell squarely on her nose as a gust of wind caught the cage of her crinoline [...] Another drop splatted against Victoria’s cheek, then another soaked through the fabric of her wrap and the gown beneath to wet her shoulder. She pressed her mouth in a thin line of displeasure, wishing fifty hells on the arrogant duke. [...] They reached the door just as a peal of thunder shook the ground and the sky let loose, releasing a torrent of water over them. Victoria didn’t pause to knock. She jerked the iron latch down and threw her shoulder against the battered door, half stumbling inside as it opened. (2005: 6)

Victoria’s reaction to the weather gives us a clue to her resilience and determination, as well as to her unconventional side which prompts her imaginative curse and which is then demonstrated by her decision to open the door herself rather than wait for a servant to do it for her. The scene also works to create atmosphere, since it is decidedly gothic: the heroine arrives in near-darkness, accompanied by the roll of thunder, at a remote and imposing building. This is no mere pastiche of the gothic, however, instead it is a work in which appearances are shown to be deceptive, and the author, having created expectations in the reader, leaves many of them unfulfilled, thus reinforcing one of the themes of the book, about the need to look beyond the surface appearance of a person (or a book, or a house), if one is to truly understand it. Later parts of the book, which is set in September 1864, create the same impression of ‘mellow fruitfulness’ as Keats’ poem, particularly in the creative application of peaches, which the Duke uses to give Victoria her ‘just desserts’ (2005: 131) while she lies back, her blonde hair loose, like Keat’s autumn,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies

Anyone got any favourite weather scenes? And do you prefer to match the weather in the books you read to the weather you're experiencing?