New to the Wiki: Interview with Mary Jo Putney, Lesbian Romance Comics, Male and Female Sentences

Laura Vivanco

I've just made 3 new additions to the Romance Wiki Bibliography:

Faktorovich, Anna, 2015. 

Gender Bias in Mystery and Romance Novel Publishing: Mimicking Masculinity and Femininity. (Stone Mountain, GA: Anaphora Literary P.). [You can "look inside" via Amazon.co.uk]

It is a linguistic, literary stylistic, and structurally formalist analysis of the male and female “sentences” in the genres that have the greatest gender divide: romances and mysteries. The analysis will search for the historical roots that solidified what many think of today as a “natural” division. Virginia Woolf called it the fabricated “feminine sentence,” and other linguists have also identified clear sex-preferential differences in Anglo-American, Swedish and French novels. Do female mystery writers adopt a masculine voice when they write mysteries? Are female-penned mysteries structurally or linguistically different from their male competitors’, and vice versa among male romance writers? The first part can be used as a textbook for gender stylistics, as it provides an in-depth review of prior research. The second part is an analysis of the results of a survey on readers’ perception of gender in passages from literature. The last part is a linguistic and structural analysis of actual statistical differences between the novels in the two genres, considering the impact of the author’s gender.

Faktorovich, Anna, 2015. 

"Interview with Mary Jo Putney, Best-Selling Romance Author." Pennsylvania Literary Journal 7.2

This is available in full for free online and in it Faktorovich comments that

In my research for a book on gender bias in romance and mystery publishing, I found that most female romance novelists were married, while most female mystery novelists were divorced or otherwise had many negative relationships in their past.

Putney remarks that

A good thing about genre romance is that the happy ending is guaranteed, so it’s a safe space to explore topics that can be painful such as domestic abuse and alcoholism. Such stories interest me, so that’s what I write.

Wood, Andrea, 2015. 

"Making the Invisible Visible: Lesbian Romance Comics for Women." Feminist Studies 41.2: 293-334. [Excerpt]

And there are also 2 new items which I've added to the "in the media" section of the bibliography:

Gracie, Anne, 2015. 'Opinion: Romance rethlink', Good Reading, Jul 2015: 26-28. Abstract only:

Frou-frou fables for people starved of real love, or empowering stories that bring hope and happiness? Romance novels are perhaps more loved and more derided than any other book genre. Anne Gracie, a bestselling romance writer herself, recounts how she went from sneering at romance to writing it.

Grimaldi, Christine, 2015. '“Happily Ever After” for African-American Romance Novelists', The Rumpus, August 18th, 2015.

It's a long article which gets more interesting (I think) once it gets past the first couple of paragraphs, about the Popular Romance Project's launch at the Library of Congress. For instance, Grimaldi notes that the

publishing industry [...] self-identifies as 89 percent white, 3 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic, and just 1 percent African-American, according to a 2014 Publisher’s Weekly survey. Case in point: At the conference, Jenkins shared a story about feedback she received on one of her manuscripts. “We all know what ‘[keeping it on the] down low’ means, right? Well, the copyeditor did not,” she said. Judging from the laughter in the room, the audience, and especially her fans, got it. “And she sent me back a little note that said, ‘This is not correct. You should say, ‘Keep it on the low shelf.’ And I said, ‘How about I don’t say that?’ So you know, you’ve got to have a sense of humor to do this.”

It's available in full, for free, online here.

Makeovers, Disguises and Cross-dressing

Here's notification of a call for papers which might be of interest to some of you, and which got me thinking a bit more about fashion in the romance genre:

The focus of the 2007 RMMLA [Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association] panel on "Literature & Fashion" is open regarding genre and period; however, we are specifically interested in papers that explore the "materiality" of clothing in shaping the context of identity and in shaping the practices that continually [trans]form identity--or, adversely, impede its transformation or essentialize it--for either/both wearer and observer.

* performance (in any of its many [dis]guises)
* the process/act of dressing--or of being dressed
* cross-dressing
* how one 'wears' one's gender, class, age, sexuality, etc. and the prejudices this wearing of identity invites
* the relationship between clothing and 'passing' (racial, class, gender, sexual, age, religious, etc.)
* not having the proper clothes, being stripped of one's clothing or unclothed, undressing as an unmasking of identity/ies; clothing as "trappings," being trapped in/by clothes, etc.

Proposals should be submitted by 1 March 2007. More details about the conference are available here, and the full call for papers is here.

I've already blogged about fashion, so I'll not repeat myself on that topic, but there are a lot of romances which feature cross-dressing and disguises and All About Romance has a list of some of them. Makeovers were recently discussed by Mary Jo Putney:

My Regency era books almost always have a makeover scene because I enjoy them so much. [...] It’s said that clothes make the man. This may be even more true of the woman. Since female power has historically been tied up with being attractive and desirable, it’s not surprising that we enjoy makeovers. There is power in beauty. (The dark side of the princess fantasy is that generally the princess is passive, valued for her looks and title rather than any inherent intelligence or competence. [...])

I'm not nearly so keen on makeovers in novels, perhaps because I'm wary of that 'dark side' of this kind of scene, and often I see them as an unfortunate (but necessary) part of the story if the heroine needs new clothes. But there are times when, as Mary Jo Putney says, they function in a positive way, giving the heroine confidence in her own abilities and changing her previously negative view of her own looks and body. One of my favourite transformations resulting from a makeover can be found in Eloisa James' Your Wicked Ways. Eloisa, like Mary Jo Putney, says that 'I adore Cinderella makeovers and have to stop myself from putting a version in every novel'. This book is the fourth novel in the Duchess Quartet which features heroines with a variety of different body shapes (including one with a disability) and each discovers (or has already learned about) her own sensuality and how to dress to enhance her body's beauty. Helene, Countess Godwin, is one of the less voluptously endowed heroines:

Helene plucked at the front of her gown. "Esme, there's nothing here!" She waved her hand in front of Esme's chest. "Just compare you and me." There was no question that Esme won that sweepstakes. [...]
"But gentlemen are not only attracted to large bosoms, you know."
"They like curves. I don't want to get excited about impossibilities. I don't have curves. I can't flirt in that way you have, as if you were - [...] Promising them things. [...]
Esme bit her lip [...] "You'll have to feign desire," she said bluntly. "Because it matters far more to a man that you desire him, than that you have a large chest." (2004: 27)

As Esme points out, it's not just clothes that make the woman attractive, but they can do a great deal to enhance her appearance and raise her self-esteem. Here's a description of Helene in one of her new dresses:

Everyone looked [...] It had a fairly high neck, trim around the neck of a slightly darker color and short sleeves. In all ... unexceptionable. Appropriate for a debutante, really. Except ... except...
Except it was almost transparent.
Where two layers clung together, one could see nothing other than the outline of Helene's body, which was revealed to be slender but not angular. She had curves: her waist curved in, and her breasts curved out. The thin silk of Madame Rocque's gown hugged each of those curves in a way that revealed them to be delicously rounded. (2004 : 46)

Helene is clearly convinced that she needs 'curves' in order to be attractive. The make-over demonstrates that she does, in fact, have 'curves', even though they're not the same as Esme's. I think I'd call this an ugly duckling makeover rather than a 'Cinderella makeover', because the problem isn't that Helene's has dirty clothes and that all she needs is some nicer ones in order to catch a prince. What she needs is a different set of aesthetic criteria by which to judge her body. The ugly duckling has the same problem - as a duckling, everyone thinks he's ugly, but if you think of him as a cygnet, he's beautiful. If you compare this picture of a duckling with this picture of a cygnet, neither is at all ugly, unless you're of the opinion that only blonde chicks are cute.

Another of my favourite makeovers is in Jenny Crusie's Fast Women and here friends swap outfits. On a practical level this reminds us that clothes are expensive but it also suggests that the women have more in common emotionally than might be apparent at first glance: Margie tells Nell "[...] I like trying on this stuff. In the suits, I'm you, and in the sweaters, I'm Suze" (2002 : 140) and then Suze starts wearing Nell's suits and Nell begins to wear Suze's clothes with their bright colours and 'The blue sweater made her hair seem even brighter, and the short skirt showed a lot of her legs, which were terrific' (2002: 148). Nell is sloughing off the greyness of her depression and coming back into life and colour, as well as opening herself emotionally to new sexual relationships. And Suze starts to wear Nell's clothes: 'the grays and grayed-blues [...] made Suze look like a sophisticated and potentially dangerous woman instead of a college kid' (2002: 172). She was a 'college kid' when she met and married her husband, and this new look is one that 'Suze said Jack hated' (2002: 172), perhaps because he wonders if it means she's growing up and away from him.

Mary Jo Putney said that 'female power has historically been tied up with being attractive and desirable', but it's not just heroines who get makeovers: heroes can have them too. In Georgette Heyer's Powder and Patch Philip Jettan is rejected by Cleone Charteris, his childhood playmate, because

However masterful and handsome he might be - and Philip was both - he was distressingly boorish in many ways. [...] Philip's speech was direct and purposeful, and his compliments were never neat. His clothes also left much to be desired. Cleone had an eye for colour and style; she liked her cavaliers to be à la mode. Sir Matthew Trelawney, for instance, had affected the most wonderful stockings, clocked with butterflies; Frederick King wore so excellently fitting a coat that, it was said, he required three men to ease him into it. Philip's coat was made for comfort; he would have scorned the stockings of Matthew Trelawney. He even refused to buy a wig, but wore his own brown hair brushed back from his face and tied loosely at his neck with a piece of black ribbon. No powder, no curls, unpolished nails, and an unpainted face - guiltless, too, of even the smallest patch - it was, thought Cleone, enough to make one weep. (1965: 17)

Six months later, after his transformation has taken place, 'Scalding tears dropped on to Cleone's pillow [...]. Philip had returned, indifferent, blasé, even scornful! Philip who had once loved her so dearly, Philip who had once been so strong and masterful, was now a dainty, affected Court gallant' (1965: 99). I have the impression that Heyer much preferred Regency fashions for men.

Philip's clothing after his transformation is, in a sense, a disguise, because underneath the paint, powder, satins, silks, lace and jewels, he is much the same man he ever was. Heyer also wrote other novels which feature disguises. One of these is The Masqueraders (synopsis here and extract here) in which Prudence, the heroine, is disguised as a man, while her brother Robin, the secondary hero, is disguised as a woman. It's not a role which is new to her, however:

Ludicrous to think of security with Mr Colney for sire. She reflected ruefully that her father was somewhat of a rogue; disreputable even. A gaming house in Frankfort, forsooth! She had a smile for that memory. Hand to mouth days, those, with herself in boy's clothes, as now. The old gentleman had judged it wisest, and when one remembered some of those who came to the gaming house one had to admit he had reason. A dice box in one pocket, and a pistol in the other, though! Proper training for a girl just coming out of her teens! (1971 : 36)

It is this background of long years spent learning the necessary skills for her to 'pass' as a man which make the disguise credible. Her brother Robin's is even better. His disguise also consists of far more than a change of clothing: 'You're incomparable,' Prudence said frankly. 'You've even more female graces than ever I could lay claim to, even in my rightful petticoats.' (1971: 41), 'She had coached him to the best of her ability [...] His curtsys were masterpieces of grace; the air with which he held out a hand to young gallants so consummate a piece of artistry that Prudence was shaken with silent laughter. He seemed to know by instinct how to flirt his fan, and how to spread his wide skirts for the curtsy (1971: 43).

I'd like to take a very quick look at the convention of the cross-dressing heroine (and the occasional hero) in the romance genre in the light of Sarah's discussion of cross-gender reincarnation in Nora Roberts' Midnight Bayou. Sarah commented that 'all romance heroes, are, of course, created by women. They're "reincarnations" of women in the image of what we wish men could be'. So we have women writing men who may represent 'what we wish men could be' and/or, who may, as Laura Kinsale has suggested, represent aspects of the female reader:

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 (adjectives very commonly applied to heroes, including my own), can explore anger and ruthlessness and passion and pride and honor and gentleness and vulnerability [...]. In short, she can be a man. (1992: 37)

Linda Barlow similarly argues that

I see them [romance novels] as psychological maps which provide intriguing insights into the emotional landscape of women. The various elements contained in them function as internal archetypes within the feminine psyche. This includes the hero, whom I see not as the masculine object of feminine consciousness but as a significant aspect of feminine consciousness itself. (1992: 46)

I suspect it's more of an 'and' than an 'or' situation, with different readers responding to heroes in different ways. For some readers the hero may be the ideal or fantasy man, for others, the romance may represent a way for her to explore sides of her personality that she normally conceals or suppresses. Either way, there's gender-bending going on, and the whole situation has the chorus of Blur's 'Boys and Girls' playing in my head.

Eric suggested that perhaps 'paranormal romance lends itself to allegorical reading, or at least metafictional reading. That is, [...] the "paranormal" part of the world correspond[s] in some way to the world of romance experienced by the reader while reading the book itself'. I think the same may be true of romances featuring cross-dressing heroines and heroes. Cross-dressing by romance heroines can perhaps be read metafictonally as a device which corresponds to the reader's experience of 'becoming' a man. If one is reading these romances in a pragmatic, literal frame of mind however then, as Anne Marble observes,

Most cross-dressing pants already have to work hard to convince the reader. First, we're supposed to believe that no one can see through her disguise, or that only the hero can see through it. Then, you have the problems of everything from an unbelievable disguise to practicalities such as "What if she has to pee?!" (At the Back Fence, 1 May 2005)

She also quotes Lynn Spencer's comments on another aspect of romances featuring a cross-dressing heroine: 'in many of them, the heroine is seen as bright and capable while in disguise, but as soon as her gender is revealed, she must become a swooning idiot in need of the hero's protection'. This certainly suggests that the heroine is not simply putting on clothes, but also a whole gender identity, and that gender roles can be assumed and discarded as easily as the clothes. Even on a non-metafictional level, cross-dressing heroines and heroes may challenge the assumption that femininity and femaleness are inextricably linked, just as they sometimes question constructs of masculinity.

• Barlow, Linda, 1992. 'The Androgynous Writer: Another View of Point of View', in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, ed. Jayne Ann Krentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 45-52.
• Crusie, Jennifer, 2002. Fast Women (New York: St. Martin's Press).
• Heyer, Georgette, 1965. Powder and Patch (London: Pan Books).
• Heyer, Georgette, 1971. The Masqueraders (London: Pan Books).
  
• Kinsale, Laura, 1992. 'The Androgynous Reader: Point of View in the Romance', in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, ed. Jayne Ann Krentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 31-44.
• James, Eloisa, 2004. Your Wicked Ways (New York: Avon).
  

Sin and Redemption

Yesterday Sarah commented that 'Persuasion is my favorite *Austen* [...] but I still think P+P makes a better ROMANCE'. Of course, I could just have asked her why she thought that, but I didn't. Instead I sat around pondering the comment, and as I was also reading Mary Jo Putney's Thunder and Roses, of which Putney has said ' I love all my stories, but must admit that for pure romance, it's hard to beat Thunder and Roses', some ideas began to appear.

As Eric noted not so long ago, there is a

deep, deep link between all the various genres of romance--the link that makes all romance "inspirational," I suppose, even if it isn't all exactly Christian. That's a topic I'll try to come back to as the year goes by.

I hope Eric does have time to come back to this. It was touched on briefly by Rev Melinda, a poster at the joint blog to which Putney contributes, who said that

romances in general often deal with issues that could be viewed as "spiritual" if not religious—love, death, meaning, trust, betrayal, redemption, self-sacrifice, reconciliation, cruelty, kindness, generosity of spirit—and did I mention LOVE [...]?

So as Putney added, there is therefore 'at least an implicit element of spirituality in most romances' and in some, as in Thunder and Roses, it's quite explicit: 'In my book, Clare’s spiritual dilemma is her secret belief that her faith is not what it should be'.

I'd also love to read Sarah's explanation of why she thinks Pride and Prejudice is a better romance than Persuasion but in the meantime, here are some of my thoughts on romance and religion.

It's impossible not to notice that a lot of romances have titles which refer to theological concepts and beings including: sin (An Invitation to Sin, One Little Sin, Lady of Sin, Lord Sin, etc) ; wickedness (When He Was Wicked, Your Wicked Ways, Wicked Widow, Ways to be Wicked, etc); temptation (Welcome to Temptation, Slightly Tempted, My Fair Temptress etc); devils (Devil's Cub, The Devil's Bargain, Devilish, etc); angels (Angel in a Red Dress, Angel in My Bed, Kiss an Angel, etc). Pride and Prejudice, of course, has one of the seven deadly sins in its title, and the hero of Thunder and Roses is known as 'Old Nick' and is part of a group known as the 'Fallen Angels'. In this context, Persuasion seems a very mild title, and while it does include a misunderstanding between the hero and heroine, a bit of caution and timidity on her side, and a bit of misunderstanding and pique on his, it can't compare with the very much stronger disagreement between Darcy and Elizabeth, and the sin of pride.

It would seem that as well as having at a hero who is strongly associated with sin/wickedness, it helps if a romance also has at least one evil villain or villainness. Pride and Prejudice has the wicked Wickham who lies, cheats and seduces; Persuasion has Mr Elliott, who admittedly has been instrumental in the downfall of Mr and Mrs Smith, and makes Captain Wentworth jealous, but he hardly reaches the level of depravity attained by the hero's first wife in Thunder and Roses.

The actions of villains often create the tormented/tortured hero so beloved of many romance readers. Robin Uncapher has observed that

If you read many historicals you will be hard pressed to find a hero without a terrible hurt in his past. They all seem to have at least one, but I don't think that they are all tortured. To this reader, "tortured" reflects the way the hero deals with the problem. A tortured hero tortures himself. He may be wracked with guilt. He may be bitter or angry. [...] A hero I see as not tortured, is one who is mentally healthy, often in spite of the awful things that have happened to him.

What they all have in common, according to Robin Uncapher, is 'a terrible hurt'. Darcy has Wickham's betrayal to deal with, Putney's 'Old Nick' has a past full of misery and betrayal, but Captain Wentworth's biggest emotional trauma is only a postponed engagement and, as he discovers, his (very minor) pride and misunderstanding are the causes of it:

a question has suggested itself, whether there may not have been one person more my enemy even than that lady [Lady Russell, who persuaded Anne not to marry Wentworth years before]? My own self. Tell me if, when I returned to England, in the year eight, with a few thousand pounds, and was posted into the Laconia, if I had then written to you, would you have answered my letter? Would you, in short, have renewed the engagement then?"

"Would I?" was all her answer; but the accent was decisive enough.

"Good God!" he cried, "you would! It is not that I did not think of it, or desire it, as what could alone crown all my other success; but I was proud, too proud to ask again. I did not understand you. I shut my eyes, and would not understand you, or do you justice. (Chapter 23)

and as a man who describes himself as having 'been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself on honourable toils and just rewards', he gives no indication of either great suffering or a tormented soul.

Another feature shared by both Pride and Prejudice and Thunder and Roses is that the hero is redeemed/'tamed' as a result of his association with the heroine and in many romances the importance of the heroine is saving the hero is demonstrated in a scene in which he has to 'grovel' or beg her forgiveness. Here is Darcy, for example:

I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing -- to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight-and-twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you I was properly humbled. (Chapter 58)

Anne Marble writes that 'many fans read romances with tortured (or even "alpha heel") heroes because they want to read the "grovel" -- the part where he apologizes to the heroine and redeems himself in her eyes' and she's written more about 'redemption romances' at All About Romance, where she quotes from one of the readers of the board who had defined the core of this sort of romance as being 'about someone who for whatever reason has behaved badly in systematic fashion - has been a bad person, and by the end of the book has been redeemed'. Marble notes that 'heroines don't get to be redeemed as often as heroes. In fact, heroines tended to be the saviors rather than the saved'.

The most famous humbling scene in the New Testament is probably St Paul's, which takes place on the road to Damascus, and the idea that it is precisely those who are the most sinful who should be the focus of attention and redemptive efforts is at the core of the New Testament's message:

[the] scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?
And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.
I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Luke 5: 30-32)

In Catholic theology, the Virgin Mary is sometimes described as a 'co-redemptrix'. The term is often misunderstood, and it does not imply that she took over Christ's work or was equal to him, but rather that 'she suffered WITH the Redeemer in his act of saving us' (Vidal, 2001). The romance heroine also often suffers greatly and she may bear some resemblance to the Victorian 'angel in the house'. For the Victorians 'the ideal of femininity was encapsulated in the idea of a "woman's mission", which was that of playing a model mother, wife and daughter. Women were also seen as moral and spiritual guardians' (Nead 2004). Perhaps these female role models contribute to the scarcity of romance heroines in need of redemption?

The hero's redemption is complete when he acknowledges his love for the heroine. As John states, 'love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God' (1 John 5: 7). Of course, John was probably not thinking of love as depicted in romance novels, but as Pope Benedict XVI recently wrote in his first papal encyclical, Deus Caritas Est,

eros and agape—ascending love and descending love—can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized

With regard to the romance genre, some readers would appear to prefer stories in which the hero is sinful and inflicts suffering on the heroine because the greater his sin, the more powerful her redemptive work is shown to be. However, as the plentiful examples in this At the Back Fence column demonstrate, even among these readers there are limits on how much they will accept with regards to both the hero's behaviour (and, consequently, whether or not they believe he really has been redeemed) and the heroine's virtue (which, in extreme cases might be described as naivety) .

Not all romances are like this, but I wonder if this type is seen as a 'better ROMANCE' because it has come to be seen as the essence of what a romance story should be, both by romance readers and the general public. Is this the sort of storyline that those who mock the genre expect to find within the covers of a romance novel? And is their mockery due to a lack of belief in the hero's redemption? Or is it that these stories simply seem so extreme and incredible to them that they cannot believe in the heroine's exemplary virtue and love for the hero? I do have some sympathy for this point of view since, as noted above, many romance readers themselves would consider some heroes in this type of romance to be bullies, while their heroines may sometimes be designated TSTL (Too Stupid to Live).

But could it be that what really motivates some of these critics' scorn for the genre is their lack of belief in True Love? Scrooge declares that Christmas is 'Humbug' because 'What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough. [...] I live in such a world of fools [...]. What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money [...]?', and I think many people look at romance readers and think us fools for not paying enough attention to the divorce statistics.* Maybe, then, some of the criticism of romance is due to its 'inspirational' nature which irks these non-believers.

Literature often requires some suspension of disbelief, but is enjoyment of the romance genre dependant on a sort of faith?

-----
* Stephanie Coontz suggests, however, that 'Throughout Europe and North America, divorce rates rose hand in glove with sales of romance novels'. I'm not sure what evidence she has for this, but her argument is that divorce rates rose precisely because of an increase in the belief in love as the basis for marriage because 'once marriage was based on love, people began to wonder if it wasn't better to be single than to marry or stay with someone you didn't love'.

Of Men and Monsters

Paranormals allow us to read about characters who are extremely unusual and may be termed ‘monsters’ in the sense that they resemble humans, and are yet non-human. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a couple of definitions of ‘monster’ which are relevant here: ‘Originally: a mythical creature which is part animal and part human, or combines elements of two or more animal forms, and is frequently of great size and ferocious appearance’ and, now obsolete, ‘Something extraordinary or unnatural; an amazing event or occurrence; a prodigy, a marvel’.

There are no doubt plenty of reasons for the popularity of paranormals, including the fact that they open up new scenarios and plot possibilities, and they allow authors to world-build (and if set in a 'historical' setting they’re less likely to be termed ‘wallpaper’ historicals or, if set in the contemporary period, to be critiqued for inaccuracies, since the world depicted is clearly a fantastical one). From an academic perspective, however, the popularity of these stories emphasises two important, and interconnected, aspects of the genre.

The first is the relationship between romance and fairy/folk tales, which was discussed by Sandra not that long ago. The second is that the presence of the monster underscores the existence of those two poles of romance which were described by Northrop Frye:

We may think of our romantic, high mimetic and low mimetic modes as a series of displaced myths, mythoi or plot-formulas progressively moving over towards the opposite pole of verisimilitude, and then, with irony, beginning to move back.

Romance has always had its share of heroes who were dangerous, powerful and almost mythic in nature. In Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, Linda Barlow and Jayne Ann Krentz wrote that

A careful analysis of the physical description in most romance novels will demonstrate that, from a large lexicon of common descriptive codes, authors consciously or unconsciously choose those that best illustrate the particular archetypes with which they are working. Heroes associated with demons, the devil, the dark gods, and vampires tend to be dark-haired, with eyes that are luminous, piercing, penetrating, fierce, fiery, and so forth. Blond heroes are less common, but there is usually a fallen-angel quality about them. (1992: 24)

In the same essay collection, Mary Jo Putney observes that,

As Jayne Ann Krentz says, the male protagonist of a romance is often both hero and villain, and the heroine’s task and triumph is to civilize him, to turn him from a marauder into a worthy mate whose formidable strength will be channeled into protecting his woman and his cubs (sorry – his children). (1992: 100-101).

Putney is referring to Jayne Ann Krentz’s observations in yet another essay in the collection:

The hero must be part villain or else he won’t be much of a challenge for a strong woman. [...] Any woman who, as a little girl, indulged herself in books featuring other little girls taming wild stallions knows instinctively what makes a romance novel work. Those much-loved tales of brave young women taming and gentling magnificent, potentially dangerous beasts are the childhood version of the adult romance novel. The thrill and satisfaction of teaching that powerful male creature to respond only to your touch [...] (Krentz 1992: 108-109)

These quotations seem to simultaneously offer (a) an explanation of why Pride and Prejudice is so much more popular than any other of Jane Austen’s works (Henry Tilney and Mr Knightley, to give just two examples, are not dangerous, brooding or threatening, while Mr Darcy’s pride and reserve may be interpreted this way), (b) suggest a reason for the profusion of heroes named Wolf, Raven* or otherwise described as moving with panther-like grace, or as being a magnificent male animal, and (c) also hint at a possible reason for the popularity of the paranormal romance.** A werewolf hero may literally end up ‘protecting his woman and his cubs’, and the teeth and power of some vampires may make them rather like some of these powerful, dangerous animals too, though the vampires of the ‘elegant and deadly’ (Stuart 1992: 85) described by Anne Stuart, with ‘his pale skin and deft, delicate hands’ is clearly closer to the spirit world, a sort of ‘fallen angel’ (Stuart 1992: 85) than an animal.

While reading the werewolf novellas on Kelley Armstrong’s website, I was reminded of romance’s links with the fairytale. As Sandra observed, ‘romance fiction employs various elements of fairy tales’, particularly that of Beauty and the Beast. We may also see a connection between fairytales and romance in the figure of the wolf/werewolf. The fairytale wolf in Little Red Riding Hood may be a fearsome creature, but he also embodies sexuality. Zipes says of the Perrault version of the tale that:

the moral tells us that young girls, who are pretty, well-bred, and courteous, should never talk to strangers or let themselves go. Otherwise, they will be swallowed by wolves. In other words, they must exercise control over their sexual and natural drives or else they will be devoured by their own sexuality in the form of a dangerous wolf. (Zipes 1991: 24).

Perrault himself is really quite explicit about this:

Moral: Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say "wolf," but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.

In many modern romances, however, the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood live happily ever after in a state of sexual fulfillment.

Vampires too are associated with sexuality:

Modern critical accounts of Dracula, for instance, almost universally agree that vampirism both expresses and distorts an originally sexual energy. That distortion, the representation of desire under the defensive mask of monstrosity, betrays the fundamental psychological ambivalence identified by Franco Moretti when he writes that “vampirism is an excellent example of the identity of desire and fear”. (Craft 1984: 107)

Paranormal romances whose heroes are vampires, werewolves or other dangerous, powerful and extremely sexual non-human (or not-quite-human) creatures are set in a fantasy world which is quite clearly signalled as fantasy. This may well be an important factor in their popularity, since the human ‘alpha male’ whom the vampire or werewolf so much resembles is still true enough to life that he may be criticised for his actions (e.g. forced seductions) and the reader may be accused of having unhealthy sexual desires. Laurie Gold at All About Romance has recently elaborated on some comments that Jill Marie Landis made to her on this issue:

In her view some of the aspects that drew many readers into reading romance initially are so politically incorrect at this point that they dare not be used any longer. So when readers crave something that's missing from their current reading, they're actually missing what they think they don't want. And that plays, in part, into the current emphasis on Paranormals...and Romantica too. [...]
Years ago, when Futuristics and Paranormals were struggling, readers complained that they were the last refuge of the Alpha hero. At this time most of the Futuristics were about space warriors, pirates, etc. [...] Then again, with historicals sounding more alike, with fewer Medieval warriors, and fewer politically incorrect, readers who missed that type of hero rediscovered them in Paranormals.

Dorothy Owens Malek says of the human alpha hero that:

We may want a caring, sensitive, modern man in our lives, but we want a swaggering, rough-hewn, mythic man in our books. He provides the best foil; the more obdurate the hero, the sweeter the triumph when the heroine brings him to his knees. [...] I’m always amused when [...] critics accuse romances of being unrealistic – talk about missing the point! Of course they’re unrealistic, that’s why we like them. (1992: 75)

and Mary Jo Putney adds that:

The theme of the man who is “saved by the love of a good woman” is common in both life and romance. In reality savior complexes are dangerous because they encourage women to stay with abusive mates [...]. What matters in a romantic context is that healing the wounded hero is a fantasy of incredible potency (1992: 101)

Put this type of 'mythic' hero, this type of fantasy, into what is clearly a world outside the norms of everyday life, however, and the danger of the reader being misunderstood is minimised. She knows, and any observer knows, that what she is reading is fantasy. She is not endorsing or accepting a dangerous ‘savior complex’ in the real world, because she is accepting this sort of behaviour only in the context of the fantasy. It may also be easier to accept the exploration of sexual fantasies in this context, because it is marked as ‘fantasy’. Just as in the past, when the sexual nature of the vampire was hidden, and the fantasy provided a safe space to explore sexual desires, so the fantasy of the man who is also a monster allows the reader to accept behaviours which she might not find quite so acceptable if depicted taking place in the real world.

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* I’m most certainly not the only person to have spotted this about heroes’ names. For example, Sherrie Holmes at the Word Wenches recently said that:

I’ve noticed a trend I find highly amusing: the tendency of romance writers to give super macho names to their heroes. These names frequently project the subliminal power of dark, hulking animals: Raven, Wolf, Hawk, Falcon, Lyon

** Contemporary romances make up the bulk of romance sales (according to the RWA 1,371 in 2003 and 1, 468 in 2004), but paranormal romances have seen a very significant increase from 120 in 2003 to 173 in 2004.

Bibliography

• Barlow, Linda & Krentz, Jayne Ann, 1992. ‘Beneath the Surface: The Hidden Codes of Romance’, in Dangerous Men, pp. 15-29.
• Craft, Christopher, 1984. ‘"Kiss Me with those Red Lips": Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula’, Representations, 8: 107-133.
• Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, 1992. ed. Jayne Ann Krentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
• Krentz, Jayne Ann, 1992. ‘Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness’, in Dangerous Men, pp. 107-114.
• Owens Malek, 1992. ‘Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: The Hero as Challenge’, in Dangerous Men, pp. 73-80.
• Putney, Mary Jo, 1992. ‘Welcome to the Dark Side’, in Dangerous Men, pp. 99-105.
• Stuart, Anne, 1992. ‘Legends of Seductive Elegance’, in Dangerous Men, pp. 85-88.
• Zipes, Jack, 1991. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization (New York: Routledge). First published in 1983 by Heinemann Educational Books Ltd.