Is Northrop Frye a Smart Bitch?

Jonathan A. Allan

July 14, 2012 marks the Centenary of Northrop Frye’s birth. Frye remains, without doubt, one of Canada’s most important literary and cultural critics, standing alongside Linda Hutcheon, J. Edward Chamberlin, Marshall McLuhan, and undoubtedly others. The Centre for Comparative Literature and the Department of English at the University of Toronto will host an international conference in honour of the Centenary (Educating the Imagination: A Conference in Honour of Northrop Frye on the Centenary of His Birth). Originally, I had intended to participate in the conference and present a paper called “Is Northrop Frye a Smart Bitch? Northrop Frye and the Development of Popular Romance Criticism.” Unfortunately, things have changed and I am unable to participate. Thus, I provide here some initial thoughts on Frye and popular romance criticism.

Most students of literature will read aspects of Northrop Frye’s theory of literature, likely taken from Anatomy of Criticism, and almost certainly about “archetypes.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, for instance, offers “The Archetypes of Literature.” Frye, of course, wrote about much more than archetypes. His writings on genre, and romance in particular, remain essential reading.

It could be argued that the most concise and enduring definition of romance comes from Northrop Frye. Frye’s theory of romance is convincing, I believe, because of its malleability and its translation across literary traditions, national traditions, and the erroneous concepts of “high” and “low” literature. Frye’s structuralism and archetypes are useful because they so often lend themselves to literary examples beyond the scope of Frye’s own writing. These, however, are just my opinions; what do other critics think?

In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Fredric Jameson writes, “Frye’s theory of romance […] is the fullest account of the genre.” In A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Pamela Regis, “the conventions of romance are very stable; the basic story, as Frye notes, has not changed in the centuries that followed its advent in ancient times.” Corinne Saunders, in her introduction to an anthology on romance, writes, “most influential in developing a grammar of romance has been Northrop Frye.” David Fuller, echoing Saunders, refers to Frye as “one of the most influential critics of the mode.” Likewise, Raymond H. Thompson writes that Frye is “the most influential among theoreticians.” Even in disagreement, critics like Doris Sommer have to admit that “Frye’s observations about masculine and feminine ideals are to the point; they point backward to medieval quest-romance where victory meant fertility, the union of male and female heroes.” Finally, Frye’s observations cut across traditions as Lois Parkinson Zamora recognizes “twentieth-century magical realism is a recent flowering of the more venerable romance tradition that Frye describes.” Indeed, though this is just a brief survey of Frye in criticism, it does seem certain that Frye is essential to romance scholarship.

But what can be said of Northrop Frye and popular romance criticism? Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel is, as we likely know, very much engaging with Frygian thought. Regis takes Frygian ideas about romance and applies them to the popular romance novel. Laura Vivanco’s For Love and Money: The Literary Art of Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance draws heavily on Frye’s early statements on romance.

To provide just one more, and final, example – Northrop Frye and the Smart Bitches. Wendell and Tan have summarized the romance novel as: “boy meets girl. Holy crap, shit happens. Eventually, the boy gets the girl. They live happily ever after.” Though the definition may lack a certain ‘academic prose,’ the definition itself flirts with Frye. Frye writes, “there is a social as well as an individual theme which must be sought in the general atmosphere of reconciliation that makes the final marriage possible.” Wendell and Tan, like Frye, recognize the importance of the concluding moments, the moments when the narrative comes together. Indeed, Pamela Regis notes this as well, “a novel that ends with the hero and heroine not in love, not betrothed, is simply not a romance novel.”

Frye, unfortunately, has fallen out of fashion in the literary academy. Perhaps many have not yet read through Frye’s theory of romance. There is, however, hope. Eric Selinger and Sarah Frantz remind us in their introduction to New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction that Northrop Frye was “the great early theorist of ‘Romance’ in the broadest sense.”

From my perspective, the importance of Northrop Frye in popular romance criticism cannot be denied, and perhaps like Fredric Jameson, we must recognize that “any reflection on genre today owes a debt – sometimes an unwilling one – to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism” (and I would add The Secular Scripture).

Teaching with "For Love and Money," part 2

--by Eric Selinger

I just sent my students in ENG 383 (Women and Literature: Popular Romance Fiction) a list of paper topics, and as you'll see in this post and the ones that follow, these topics draw on our initial experiences with Laura's For Love and Money. The papers will be 6-8 pages long--and once I have them in hand, I'll have more ideas about how the students have responded so far to the secondary text. My sense so far, based on class discussion, is that For Love and Money not only introduces students to some very useful ideas about the genre, but also models the application of those ideas in the form of good, thoughtful close readings. So far, in short, so good!

The first chapter in For Love and Money treats the five "modes" of literature identified back in the 1950s by Northrop Frye, discussing each of them (myth, 'romance,' high mimetic, low mimetic, and irony) with examples of how they show up in and shape one or more HMB romance novels. Since 2006 I've opened almost every one of my romance classes with a discussion of these modes, since they give me the opportunity to nudge students away from thinking of low-mimetic literary realism as the "norm" against which to measure other forms of fiction, usually in order to find them wanting in some way. For Love and Money makes teaching these modes and their relationships to one another very, very easy, and it primes students to look for them in the texts they go on to read.

The book then proceeds to discuss how and why romance novels also use "modal counterpoint," the interplay of contrasting modes in a single novel. This, too, is a topic that I've tried to approach in other classes, with mixed success, mostly when I teach Suzanne Brockmann's novel Unsung Hero. For Love and Money makes the concept very clear, and since modal counterpoint is quite vividly on display throughout The Duke is Mine, this was a godsend. Rather than balk at or get bewildered by the contrasting tones in the novel, students approached them as a deliberate aesthetic feature of the text--which meant that, in discussion, they could discuss the relationship between this feature (multiple modes in one text) and other multiplicities and doublings in the novel.

Here's the paper topic, then, which I hope will provoke some interesting close reading from the students:

1. The first chapter in Laura Vivanco’s For Love and Money sets out the five “modes” of literature identified by Northrop Frye and shows how attending to the “modal counterpoint” in a romance novel can make sense of its shifting tones, metaphors, and rhetoric. These modes (and modal counterpoint) can be understood from a purely aesthetic standpoint, in terms of the structure and individual character of any given novel, but they may also be looked at from other perspectives: for example, Vivanco argues that the use of hyperbolic metaphors and allusions to “romantic” and high mimetic mythoi might aim to capture something of the experience of “romantic illusion,” which demonstrably forms a part of falling in love, at least for some (see pp. 65-69).

Write an essay on the use of modal counterpoint in The Duke is Mine, using ideas from Vivanco, from class discussion, and from your own insight to understand how James deploys a variety of modes in the novel, playing them off against one another. Your essay can be comprehensive, drawing on scenes and passages from various parts of the novel to illustrate James’s use of various modes, or it can focus on the counterpoint between various modes in a single scene, attending closing to a single chapter or passage. In either case, please keep in mind the guiding principle of our class: you want to make the novel seem as interesting as possible, whether by showing that it is more complexly coherent and artfully constructed than it might seem at first glance or by showing that it is more interestingly self-divided, conflicted, and ambivalent.

We also spent some time on Chapter 2, which focuses on what Frye called mythoi. More on that chapter, and the paper topic that came out of it, in my next post!

Northrop Frye on Romance

Jonathan A. Allan

Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye (1912-1991) remains a preeminent voice in literary criticism and has found – or, is finding – a renewed interest because of the publication of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Eric Selinger has previously posted on Frye here at Teach Me Tonight. In his post, Eric writes: “Here’s the most recent version [of a handful of passages from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism] – I hope it’s useful to someone out there! If anything here strikes a chord, I’d love to hear about it.”

In Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, readers find Frye defining an entire system of literature one that is understood in terms of modes, genres, symbols, and myths. In his later book, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, readers encounter Frye trying to understand one specific genre: romance. Though Frye is concerned with the history of romance from its late classical origins through to its contemporary manifestations, his work continues to provide, to my mind, some of the most potent defences of the romance. He writes:

Popular literature has been the object of a constant bombardment of social anxieties for over two thousand years, and nearly the whole of the established critical tradition has stood out against it. The greater part of the reading and listening public has ignored the critics and censors for exactly the same length of time. This is an issue which we shall have a look into, because the bulk of popular literature consists of what I have been calling sentimental romance. (23, CW XVIII:19)

For Frye, the sentimental romance is “a more extended and literary development of formulas of naïve romance” (3, CW XVIII:5) – the naïve romance being “the kind of story that I found in collections of folk tales and märchen, like Grimms’ Fairy Tales” (3, CW XVIII:5). Thus, for Frye, there is – it would seem – a distinction to be found between the fairy tale and the romance, despite the fact that “romance is the structural core of all fiction” (15, CW XVIII:14).

But throughout the opening chapter of The Secular Scripture, readers find various defences of the romance:

Any serious discussion of romance has to take into account its curiously proletarian status as a form generally disapproved of, in most ages, by the guardians of taste and learning, except when they use it for their own purposes. The close connection of the romantic and the popular runs all through literature. The formulas of New Comedy and Greek romance were demotic and popular formulas, like their counterparts now, treated with condescension by the highbrows, one form of condescension being the writing of such tales themselves, as academic write detective stories. (23, CW XVIII:19-20)

Frye, though talking about romance in general – thus including the detective story, mystery novel, science fiction – offers some remarkable thoughts with regard to the popular romance novel of the amorous tradition:

The central element of romance is a love story, and the exciting adventures are normally foreplay leading up to sexual union. Hence romance appears to be designed mainly to encourage irregular or excessive sexual activity. This may be masturbation, which is the usual model in the minds of those who speak with contempt of ‘escape’ reading, or it may be a form of voyeurism. Most denunciations of popular romance on such grounds, we notice, assume that the pornographic and the erotic are the same thing: this overlooks the important principle that it is the function of pornography to stun and numb the reader, and the function of erotic writing to wake him up. (24, CW XVIII:20)

Clearly there is much to be said about such a paragraph and perhaps readers of Teach Me Tonight can begin to consider Frye’s observations. What is clear is that in 1976, as Frye gave this series of lectures, the same criticisms of popular romance existed that continue to dominate over studies of romance. To these ends, Frye remains an important critic of the popular romance novel, and perhaps, no where is this more clear than in Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel which often engages with Frye’s theories of romance.

Frye’s goal in The Secular Scripture: “I am trying to suggest a literary perspective on [romance] which may help to bring it into the area of literary criticism instead of confining it to linguistics or to the less fashionable suburbs of sociology” (26, CW XVIII:21).

He concludes his first lecture from The Secular Scripture observing that,

Literature is the human compulsion to create in the face of chaos. Romance, I think, is not only central to literature as a whole, but the area where we can see most clearly that the maze without a plan and the maze not without a plan are two aspects of the same thing. (31, CW XVIII:25)

Having been introduced to romance through Frye, it seems to me that he remains an influential voice (especially if we hope to develop a greater acceptance of popular romance in the academy).

Romancing Northrop Frye

Jonathan A. Allan

When I came to study "Romance," it was because of Northrop Frye's The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1976). Indeed, much of my blogging has been over at The Educated Imagination where I write mostly about Frye and the Academy. As such, to start my blogging here, I present a preliminary Call for Papers, not an official CFP, but rather one which aims to get people thinking about what they might present at this conference.

***

Educating the Imagination: A Conference in Honour of Northrop Frye on the Centenary of His Birth.

September 27-30, 2012, University of Toronto

Twenty years after his death, Northrop Frye, the author of Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism, continues to be one of the most read and the most quoted of literary critics. His attention to form, specifically to genre and mode, and his understanding of literature as a totality have directly influenced two later generations of critics, including Hayden White, Fredric Jameson, and Franco Moretti. In order to celebrate this ongoing legacy, the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Frye’s home throughout his career, have organized a three-day symposium in his honour.

There will be panels devoted to Frye’s specific legacy, which we are now in a better position to appreciate because of the completed publication of theCollected Works in thirty volumes. But we also invite speakers to take inspiration from Frye and to consider literary and cultural topics such as:

1. Educating the Imagination when the Humanities are under threat

Frye and Comparative Literature

2. the place of Western Literature and theory in a global context.

The spread and the provincialization of Europe.

The limits of the Great Code

3. Contemporary manifestations of traditional literary modes:

the popular romance

contemporary tragedy

irony after postmodernism

4. the place of the Bible in an era of fundamentalism and secularism

5. The survival of the literary imagination in a digital age

6. Canadian literature in a postnational age

7. The Great Code and Islam

8. History as Narrative

9. Frye and Ecology

10. Local literature, local forms

Organizers: Alan Bewell, Chair, Department of English (a.bewell@utoronto.ca)

Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature (neil.kortenaar@utoronto.ca)

Reading from the Gut

Laura Vivanco

I've read some books recently which just didn't work for me because of my emotional response to them, and while I was thinking about that, I also pondered a few statements that were made during a heated discussion at Dear Author about Linda Howard's Death Angel. MS Jones wrote that

good writing can make us suspend dismay with the underlying philosophy/world view. I think the better the writing, the easier it is to swallow values at odds with our own. [...] the rake hero/virgin heroine characterization, which has got to be the most pervasive trope in the entire romance genre) doesn’t work for me (and please, I’m not judging readers who buy it). But I really liked Lord of Scoundrels, [...] Chase redeems these clichés with her excellent characterization and witty writing.

I'm not sure how we could arrive at a non-subjective definition of what constitutes "good writing" but as I was thinking about the idea of "gut reactions," the metaphor of good writing helping readers to "swallow values at odds with our own" was interesting. Can good writing sweeten a bitter pill of medicine which is good for us? Or must we beware of it lest it coats a poisoned pill of values that might harm us? Is brain candy tasty but badly written? Is too much of it harmful? What's so special about our guts and what do we really prove when we eat the pudding? I might have to spend some time digesting all those metaphors.

Lets get back to the question of whether or not, if a reader enjoys a book containing a premise that would usually annoy her or him, it's a possible indicator of "excellent characterization and witty writing." In some cases it might suggest that, certainly, but perhaps it could also suggest that something in the characterisation appeals to that reader, or that something about the way it's written seems witty to that reader and that the pleasure the reader derives from these qualities over-rides their lack of appreciation for the underlying premise. The judgements about the quality of the characterisation and the wittiness of the writing may remain subjective ones.

Jane A., meanwhile, stated of the comments about Howard's novel that "One readers “garbage” is another readers “treasure” and I don’t think a mediocre writer could engender such a response." I'm not at all sure how one determines the exact criteria by which to judge excellence, mediocrity and total lack of talent. The comments about the book mostly seemed to me to demonstrate that the writer had included some things in her text which greatly annoyed some readers but pleased (or at least didn't displease) others. If a text gives lots of readers gut troubles, is that really a sign of literary excellence?

Of course we may wish to believe that the books we like best are the ones that are the best written, and some people may also like to think of themselves as connoisseurs with refined palates who are able to appreciate flavours that wouldn't appeal to those with more common tastes. Northrop Frye made some rather biting comments on the topic:

Shakespeare, we say, was one of a group of English dramatists working around 1600, and also one of the great poets of the world. The first part of this is a statement of fact, the second a value-judgement so generally accepted as to pass for a statement of fact. But it is not a statement of fact. It remains a value-judgement, and not a shred of systematic criticism can ever be attached to it. (20)

and "Rhetorical value-judgements are closely related to social values, and are usually cleared through a customs-house of moral metaphors: sincerity, economy, subtlety, simplicity, and the like" (21) and

The hesitant reader is invited to try the following exercise. Pick three big names at random, work out the eight possible combinations of promotion and demotion [...] and defend each in turn. Thus if the three names picked were Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley, the agenda would run:

1. Demoting Shelley, on the ground that he is immature in technique and profundity of thought compared to the others.
2. Demoting Milton, on the ground that his religious obscurantism and heavy doctrinal content impair the spontaneity of his utterance.
3. Demoting Shakespeare, on the ground that his detachment from ideas makes his dramas a reflection of life rather than a creative attempt to improve it.
4. Promoting Shakespeare, on the ground that he preserves an integrity of poetic vision which in the others is obfuscated by didacticism.
5. Promoting Milton, on the ground that his penetration of the highest mysteries of faith raises him above Shakespeare's unvarying worldliness and Shelley's callowness.
6. Promoting Shelley, on the ground that his love of freedom speaks to the heart of modern man more immediately than poets who accepted outworn social or religious values.
7. Promoting all three (for this a special style, which we may call the peroration style, should be used).
8. Demoting all three, on the ground of the untidiness of English genius when examined by French or Classical or Chinese standards.

The reader may sympathize with some of these "positions," as they are called, more than with others, [...] But long before he has finished his assignment he will realize that the whole procedure involved is an anxiety neurosis prompted by a moral censor, and is totally devoid of content. (23-24)

In other words, as satirist Stephen Colbert might say, very often readers and critics make judgements on the basis of what their "guts" tell them but they then appeal to apparently objective standards to justify those gut reactions. I certainly wouldn't argue that our guts are wrong, because clearly they're right about what appeals to them, but I do think it's helpful to be aware that gut reactions may attempt to disguise themselves as statements of objective fact.

Some are easier to spot than others. The Smart Bitches recently posted about Robert DeMaria's The College Handbook of Creative Writing. He writes that

Trivial literary entertainments such as thrills and romances and television dramas [...] have a role to play in the lives of many people, [...] though significance in such works is clearly minimal. Their aim is to thrill, chill, and titillate. Frank Lloyd Wright once described television as “chewing gum for the eyes.” It’s an excellent description of that medium and might also apply to most of our light literature. Chewing gum gives you a lot of action but no nourishment. Great literature, on the other hand, is full of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual nourishment.

It's apparent to romance readers that he's writing from his gut (and not just because he uses the metaphor of "nourishment"). He's generalising and not providing any textual evidence that all the works he dismisses truly lack the ability to "nourish" the brain as well as the gut.

We may dislike certain styles of writing, certain types of humour, particular character types or plots etc, and it's valid to note these gut reactions. In addition, because I'm probably one of that group of what Colbert dubbed "brainiacs on the nerd patrol" (and yes, he was being satirical, and there's a full transcript of his speech here) I think it's interesting to use our brains to explore why we have those gut reactions. As Robin wrote during that debate about Linda Howard's novel, "I definitely think these discussions are worth having, not only because they’re interesting textually, but also because we ALL harbor ideological views we’re not fully aware of."

Whether a particular novel is, or isn't, "badly written," however, is really quite a separate issue. Frye writes that

Comparative estimates of value are really inferences, most valid when silent ones, from critical practice, not expressed principles guiding its practice. The critic will find soon, and constantly, that Milton is a more rewarding and suggestive poet to work with than Blackmore. But the more obvious this becomes, the less time he will want to waste in belaboring the point. For belaboring the point is all he can do: any criticism motivated by a desire to establish or prove it will be merely one more document in the history of taste. (25)

I'd suggest that even that needs some qualification, because perhaps there's a critic out there who would find Blackmore "a more rewarding and suggestive poet to work with than Milton." I've certainly been finding that many romances are much more complex and rewarding to work with than many people had previously imagined was possible. And for anyone who's interested in reading TMT and Northrop Frye's collected thoughts on what literary critics should do (rather than offering up their gut reactions to texts in the guise of arguments about literary merit), we've got more here.

• Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Oxford: Princeton UP, 2000.

The image is from Wikimedia Commons and is of part of a human duodenum. I thought it was rather pretty, really, and certainly much more rewarding to look at than I'd imagined part of a gut could be.

Reviewing, Literary Criticism, and "Bad Taste"

Laura Vivanco

This post was one I was going to put up directly after the Internet Event of Stupendous Proportions, but the rather more serious Internet Event of Even More Stupendous Proportions Concerning Allegations of Plagiarism intervened.

However, the original Event did spark some thoughts which still seem relevant. They're mostly Sarah's thoughts, so I'll quote from her at length, but I'll also throw in something that Sandra wrote recently, as well as mixing in a good stiffening of Northrop Frye and a sprinkling of quotes from a variety of other sources. I hope the end result won't be too indigestible.

Sarah wrote that:

The one thing this exercise has done for me is show me again how different are the tasks of reviewing and literary criticism. [...] I can analyze a book I despise (did it for my dissertation!), because it’s not about personal taste, but about what I can say about the book’s _______ (construction, organization, historical context, images of gender/class/race, etc.). When I was a baby graduate student, one of my advisers said “It’s not about whether I like the book, but whether I can say anything interesting about it” and I was horrified! Shocked, I tell you! And I promised myself I’d never get to that point. But getting to that point was what learning how to be a literary critic was all about. And I actually ended up arguing in my dissertation that analyzing books we dislike is *important* to understanding the culture we’re trying to analyze. It’s just as important, in fact, as analyzing books we love. [...]

As my husband just pointed out to me as I read this to him, you’ll notice that Laura and Eric and I never said in our posts whether we liked the book. That came up later in comments [...]. Because in reading the book in order to analyze it, liking it or not was not part of my thought process. [...]

All this is to say that I really love reading the reviews [...] but it’s a completely different skill from literary criticism (which is not to say you guys don’t analyze–you do, but in totally different ways from what we do at TMT), and that fact boggles my mind every time I read a really good review, even (especially?) if the book is awful (or, more likely, just not brilliant).

Northrop Frye also described this difference between the task of the reviewer (whom he called "the public critic") and that of the literary critic. He stated that

It is the task of the public critic to exemplify how a man of taste uses and evaluates literature, and thus show how literature is to be absorbed into society. But here we no longer have the sense of an impersonal body of consolidating knowledge. The public critic tends to episodic forms like the lecture and the familiar essay, and his work is not a science, but another kind of literary art. (8)

If reviews are "another kind of literary art" that may explain why some of them, the better ones, can entertain, infuriate, amuse and/or move us, even though we may never read the novel the reviewer is writing about.

Literary critics, on the other hand, are much less likely to move their reader emotionally, although we may frequently be irritating and can occasionally attempt to amuse our readers. Literary criticism at its best creates a sense of intellectual awe at the way in which the critic has succeeded in marshalling the evidence from the text and other relevant sources into an orderly, logical form. Frye asks:

What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a "pure" or "exact" science, of course [...]. The writing of history is an art, but no one doubts that scientific principles are involved in the historian's treatment of evidence, and that the presence of this scientific element is what distinguishes history from legend. (7)

It seems absurd to say that there may be a scientific element in criticism when there are dozens of learned journals based on the assumption that there is, and hundreds of scholars engaged in a scientific procedure related to literary criticism. Evidence is examined scientifically; previous authorities are used scientifically; fields are investigated scientifically; texts are edited scientifically. Prosody is scientific in structure; so is phonetics; so is philology. (8)

Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows that the mental process involved is as coherent and progressive as the study of science. A precisely similar training of the mind takes place, and a similar sense of the unity of the subject is built up. (10-11)

Yes, and those like Sandra, who are forced to read the work of fledgling literary critics are more than aware of quite how much training is required in order to master the rules of the subject:

1. Document your frigging sources! ALL of them!!! No matter whether you use direct or indirect quotations. (If you don't document your sources, your teacher will be p.o. and you will fail the class.)
2. Prove your statements by referring either to the primary text(s) or to secondary sources.
3. It helps if you stick to the facts that are mentioned in the primary text: if the hero's childhood is never mentioned anywhere in the text, analysing the hero's childhood is ... not such a good idea.
4. Fictional characters are not real people.
5. Making sweeping statements about the historical background of a literary text is usually not a very good idea either: because if you do, you have not only failed to stick to Rule #2, but in most cases you are also spectacularly wrong.
6. Logic is a fine thing. Apply it freely and apply it often.
7. All primary and secondary sources you use in your paper should be listed in the bibliography.
8. The bibliography is supposed to consist of more than one secondary source.

The implication of Frye's assessment that literary criticism is a science is that:

at no point is there any direct learning of literature itself. Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism. It is therefore impossible to "learn literature": one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature. Similarly, the difficulty often felt in "teaching literature" arises from the fact that it cannot be done: the criticism of literature is all that can be directly taught. Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study [...]. Criticism [...] is to art what history is to action [...]: a verbal imitation of a human productive power (11-12).

The reviewer, however, is giving a description of his or her experience of reading a text (for example whether it was a disappointment or a gripping read, how the reviewer related to the characters, whether the plot carried the reviewer along or whether her suspended disbelief crashed to the ground through a plot hole). SB Candy recently wrote a post about "bad taste" in which she stated that

unlike the absolute relativists (how d’you like THAT particular turn of phrase, eh?), I do think there’s such a thing as objective measures for how good or bad a book is, and that sometimes, you love something absolutely terrible, and other times, you dislike something that’s actually good.

The literary critic, as Sarah noted, does not primarily concern him or herself with his or her experience as a reader of the text, or with making declarations about "good" or "bad" taste, but instead relates to the texts in a very different, much less emotional way: placing the text in a literary context, providing textual evidence for his or her assertions, and not deliberately distorting the evidence by omitting to mention counter-evidence also present in the text.

Although there were some dissenting voices, the majority of reviewers seemed to feel, with Candy, that "Wulfric is a politically correct hero, and hot damn, does that ever make him tiresome," and Meriam observed that there is something "deeply ironic [in the fact] that a novel which disproves many of Bindel's charges against romance failed to satisfy so many romance readers. What can you do?" Some time ago Jayne Ann Krentz wrote about some young editors who tried to change the genre in response to criticism like Bindel's:

The first target of these reforming editors was what has come to be known in the trade as the alpha male. These males are the tough, hard-edged, tormented heroes that are at the heart of the vast majority of bestselling romance novels. These are the heroes who made Harlequin famous. These are the heroes who carry off the heroines in historical romances. These are the heroes feminist critics despise.
[...] Why did we dig in our heels and resist the effort to turn our hard-edged, dangerous heroes into sensitive, right-thinking modern males?
[...] We did it because, in the romance genre, the alpha male is the one that works best in the fantasy. (107-108, emphasis added)

I'm a literary critic, not a psychologist, so I'm not going to venture into in-depth discussions of people's fantasies, particularly when they're ones I don't share, but I think this internet event has been more than a condensed version of that long-ago experiment described by Krentz. As Sarah said, it's illustrated the difference between reviews and literary criticism, and from the point of view of literary criticism, as Eric said on the Romance Scholar list:

This really is a big deal [...] because for the first time that I know of romance readers and reviewers and scholars are all focusing, however briefly, on the same book at the same time, as part of a concerted effort. (It's also the first time that I know of when a single category romance has been written about at length by multiple scholars. Few romance novels get any critical attention at all; I'd love to see this as a model for future group efforts.)

• Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Oxford: Princeton UP, 2000.
• Krentz, Jayne Ann. "Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 107-14.

The image is of Christine de Pisan giving a lecture. It's taken from Wikipedia. She wrote poetry, prose and engaged in literary criticism:

As a feminist, Christine de Pizan directly challenged the destructive and demeaning attitudes towards women of a popular book of her day, Le Roman de la Rose, by writing Epistres du debat sur le Roman de la Rose (c. 1402), and arguing rather for the equality of women. (A Celebration of Women Writers).

As we've been discussing ferrets, I can't help but note that this latter work included the line "And do you not know that a small weasel is able to attack and destroy a great lion?"

Fairytales vs. Bible Stories

Laura Vivanco

I'm certainly no expert on the inspirational romance sub-genre but it seems to me that, just as with the genre as a whole, it may be helpful to look at it in the light of Northrop Frye's comments about how literature is on a spectrum from the high mimetic, which 'seems to be connected [...] with [...] myth' to the low, which has a 'tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description' (Frye 2000: 51). In this context Frye describes the Bible as 'a definitive myth' (2000: 315) which 'presents a gigantic cycle from creation to apocalypse, within which is the heroic quest of the Messiah from incarnation to apotheosis' (2000: 316).

Secular modern romances which are closer to the high mimetic end of the spectrum may draw on myths, legends and fairytales. Jenny Crusie has observed that

There is something in the fairy tale that resonates in the romance [...] Former Harlequin editor Sherie Posesorski has said that all romance novels are “built on” fairy tales, and romance author Tiffany White writes that “fairy tales were the beginning of my love affair with the romance genre” (Crusie 1998)

Some romances display their debt to fairytales quite openly, some draw on them in more subtle ways and yet others, those which are low mimetic, seem to be grounded almost completely in 'real life'. And although the secular romances at the high mimetic end of the spectrum may not often be described as having didactic elements, neither they nor the fairytales from which they draw their inspiration are value-free. As Zipes says,

We tend to forget the socio-historical frameworks of control when we talk about reading and especially the reading of fairy tales. Both socialization and reading reflect and are informed by power struggles and ideology in a given society or culture. (1991: 55)

Fairytales tend to have a didactic purpose:

one can speak about the single literary fairy tale for children as a symbolic act infused by the ideological viewpoint of the individual author. Almost all critics who have studied the emergence of the literary fairy tale in Europe agree that educated writers purposely appropriated the oral folk tale and converted it into a type of literary discourse about mores, values, and manners so that children would become civilized according to the social code of that time. (Zipes 1991: 3)

The guidelines for inspirational romances tend to make it quite explicit that these texts will reflect the authors' religious beliefs and have a didactic, inspirational purpose. The editors of Harlequin's Steeple Hill lines, for example, 'are looking for authors writing from a Christian worldview and conveying their personal faith and ministry values in entertaining fiction that will touch the hearts of believers and seekers everywhere'.

High mimetic Christian works take their inspiration from the Christian equivalents of myth, legend and fairytales, namely Bible stories and parables, but there are also low mimetic inspirational romances. Michael Kechula's Shotsie is low mimetic, in that the characters are ordinary people (it's a revenge of the nerd story). It's got a rather hyperbolic opening metaphor, but that's in keeping with the first person narrator's voice and I certainly didn't find it 'preachy': in fact, the ending has a rather funny twist.

The picture which accompanies this post is the equivalent of writing which falls somewhere in the middle of Frye's two poles, since its religious subject matter is depicted in a way which makes this less than obvious at first glance. It's Caravaggio's Magdalene and

there are none of the usual signs of a religious scene such as a halo. A young girl, seen from above, is seated on a low stool [...]. Discarded jewellery - a string of pearls, clasps, a jar (perhaps holding precious ointment) - lies on the floor. The girl's hair is loose, as if it has just been washed. Her costume, consisting of a white-sleeved blouse, a yellow tunic and a flowery skirt, is rich. Bellori, who gives a careful description of this picture [...] regards its title as an excuse; for him it is just a naturalistic portrayal of a pretty girl. This seems to show a willful failure to understand Caravaggio's intention or the wishes of the man who commissioned it, Monsignor Petrignani. The repentant Mary Magdalene, like the repentant Peter, was a favourite subject of Counter-Reformation art and poetry, which valued the visible expression of the state of contrition 'the gift of tears'. Caravaggio's heroine is sobbing silently to herself and a single tear falls down her cheek. She is, as it were, poised between her past life of luxury and the simple life she will embrace as one of Christ's most faithful followers. (Web Gallery of Art)

Lacey, the heroine of Diana Mylek's Hook, Line & Sinker, regularly hears messages from God which, I think, makes her not quite usual and there's a framework of Biblical symbolism, yet Lacey's not a high mimetic heroine and her quest is a very domestic one. God tells Lacey that she should 'go buy a bass boat'. She accepts His advice and, when her sister Emily raises objections, points out the parallel with Noah:

Emily shook her head in confusion. “It sounds kind of…weird to me.”

“Yes, like building an ark. But look what happened to Noah for obeying.”

Lacey had been praying for God to give her guidance on 'what I needed to do to attract a man' and the bass boat idea is scripturally appropriate. Noah match-made the animals, pairing them up before they were told to go forth and multiply (Genesis 8: 16-17). Lacey's plan also means that she becomes a fisher of men (Matthew 4: 19). The humour that results from Lacey's 'fishing' is tempered by her sister Emily's need to escape from an abusive relationship. Her boyfriend has destroyed her self-esteem and as one character puts it, 'She needs to learn the difference between meek and weak'. Domestic violence and emotional abuse are clearly issues which affect a wide range of people, but religious beliefs can add an extra layer of complexity. According to Dr Lynne Baker of the University of Queensland:

“Christian women, particularly those from more fundamentalist denominations, can suffer more because of their faith,” [...].

“They may experience exactly the same issues as secular women, but have the added pressure of Christian faith, which when handled correctly can be a help, but can often serve as an extra burden.”

The fact that Emily's faith hinders her escape is touched on in this story.

I'd place J. Kathleen Cheney's haunting, bitter-sweet romance Stains of the Past (which could probably be classed as an inspirational fantasy romance) at the high mimetic end of the spectrum. Both the inspirational nature of the work, and the element which makes it high mimetic are revealed its opening paragraphs:

I believe in redemption. Every week when I go to confession, the priest tells me my sins are forgiven. I am a new person now, he has explained, and my penitence has created in me a clean heart. [...] When I touch people, I know their hearts. I know their motivations, their dreams, and their fears. That talent made me successful in my former career, for I could easily judge what a man wanted of me.

Both heroine and hero have powers which are uncommon and which remove the story from the realm of the low mimetic. And, to return to the artwork with which I began the post, the heroine's spiritual journey is reminiscent of Mary Magdalene's (at least, in the version of her story in which Mary is identified as a repentant prostitute), while the hero, like Christ, suffers for her sins. As in the Gospels, touching is sometimes associated with physical and emotional healing, but it can also be forbidden, as it was when Jesus said to Mary Magdalene, 'Touch me not' (John 20: 17). Touch, then, both in this story and in the Bible has symbolic, emotional, spiritual and physical effects and meanings.

Though this story, like Shotsie, is told in the first person, it's not just the distance between the high and low mimetic forms which separates the two: the open-endedness of the story and the depiction of sexuality are also very, very different.

• Frye, Northrop, 2000. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, with a new forword by Harold Bloom (Princeton: Princeton University Press). First published in 1957.
  
• 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.

My thanks to Brenda Coulter and posters at her blog who gave me links to online inspirational romances. Reading them has helped me to feel slightly less ignorant about this sub-genre. If you'd like to read more online inspirational romances there are novellas and short stories, by a variety of authors, available here and Brenda has a list of several more here.

Good, Bad, Myth and Realism

Laura Vivanco

A post written by Barbara Samuel at Romancing the Blog on the topic of the RITAs has now spawned a somewhat wider-ranging discussion at the Smart Bitches about how one judges what's 'good' and 'the best' in romance. I'd like to take a closer look at some of the comments made there, along with some of the comments made here as a result of my last post, in the light of some of Northrop Frye's ideas about literature (which we discussed some time ago on the blog, but I hope those who read them then will forgive the repetition).

Sandra commented that she couldn't think of 'any romance in which the heroine's soft, small body wasn't contrasted with the hero's tall, muscled body' and Bill then asked 'why does a person’s body structure necessarily have to suggest being or feeling “helpless?”' Meanwhile, over at the Smart Bitches, Robin set this phenomenon in a broader context:

there is a tendency to do what I call “shorthand Romance” these days—to cue the reader with specific descriptions and types (i.e. flame red hair = feisty, dark craggy features = brooding hero), leaving it up to the reader to fill in the rest. And quite a few readers, who have these incredible stores of generic information and emotional receptivity to Romance, cue very easily, IMO. Lots of readers, IMO, don’t notice the difference, for example, between showing and telling because they are so open to receiving the emotional payoff in a Romance that they don’t realize they’re generating it themselves in many instances (I think this is especially a problem with ever-shrinking page and word counts). I sense that this may be especially true of readers who tend to gravitate toward the same sub-genre and type of Romance novel—that the vocabulary of those Romances is so much a part of their reading experience, that the reader can take on a portion of the craftsmanship responsibilities without even knowing or caring. Please note that I’m not suggesting that these readers are mindless, stupid, ignorant, or possessing of bad taste—only that they are so schooled in the genre and so open to its promised emotional payoff that they automatically fill in whatever is absent from the book itself

Now maybe I'm being a Pollyanna, but I think that although one could accept that this "shorthand Romance" is an indication of the authors' failure at writing complex characters, it may at times be due to the fact that different romance authors have very different aims and styles.

Some time ago Eric posted a series of quotations from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Pertinent here is the following:

the mimetic tendency itself, the tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle’s word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth. [...] We note in passing that imitation of nature in fiction produces, not truth or reality, but plausibility, and plausibility varies in weight from a mere perfunctory concession in a myth or folk tale to a kind of censor principle in a naturalistic novel. (2000: 51-52)

Frye explains the difference between the high and low mimetic modes. If the hero 'has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature' then he 'is the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy' (2000: 34). If, on the other hand, the hero is

superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet [or author] the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience. This gives us the hero of the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction. (2000: 34)

Certainly a novel which is intended to be written in the low mimetic mode fails if the characters are, as in fairytales, lacking in verisimilitude. But if an author, rather than attempting to create 'realistic fiction', is hoping to create a high mimetic romance novel, akin to myth and fairytale, then the use of techniques such as 'shorthand' references to hair-colour, reliant on the reader's prior understanding of the conventions of the genre, are in keeping with the traditions of this mode.

Neither the high nor the low mimetic mode is superior, but some readers may have a strong preference for one or the other. It seems to me that criticising a romance novel written in the high mimetic mode for using shorthand is, in a sense, criticising it for not being something it was never intended to be. Romance, as Sandra observed, is a form which, particularly at the high mimetic end of the spectrum, is very close to fairytales. Romances, even the high mimetic ones may not go so far as to give their characters only 'nicknames like Little Red Riding Hood or commonplace names like Jack/Hans, Gretel', but there are certain names which are considered more 'appropriate' for heroes, just as certain physical attributes have become associated with different character types (see this post for more details).

I may have a personal preference for romances of the low mimetic type, and I may have some concerns about the ways in which certain romance 'shorthands' may reinforce society's existing binary oppositions such as those between male and female, dark and light or right and wrong (not all uses of the shorthands do this, but some may), but I don't think that one can automatically assume that they are a mark of low literary value. If we take Lorca as an example, 'Perhaps the most significant features of Lorca's rhetoric are his brilliant metaphors and his use of archetypal symbols' (Palley 1967: 74). Lorca's Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding) relies for its impact on the viewer's knowledge of symbolism and 'None of the characters in the play have names except for the lover, Leonardo - the rest are named according to who they play, such as La Novia (The Bride), El Novio (The Bridegroom) and La Madre (The Mother)' (Wikipedia).

• Frye, Northrop, 2000. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, with a new forword by Harold Bloom (Princeton: Princeton University Press). First published in 1957.
• Palley, Julian, 1967. 'Archetypal Symbols in Bodas de Sangre', Hispania 50.1: 74-79.

The pictures are an icon of the Theotokos and Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez's 1619 The Adoration of the Magi. I've included them not because they have much to do with the romance genre but because the two paintings depict the same subject (the Virgin and Child) and yet are in very different traditions. Is the icon 'worse' art because it's not as realistic looking as the Velázquez? One can, of course, find examples of both icons and more realistic paintings which are worse than others, just as one can find better and worse romance novels at both ends of the mimetic spectrum, but the tradition in which they are painted/written is not in itself an indication of either failure or lack of quality.

P.S. If you click on the Velázquez you'll be able to see it in much more detail. At something of a tangent, as the 25th March 2007 is

the 200th anniversary of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. This Act outlawed the slave trade throughout the British Empire and made it illegal for British ships to be involved in the trade, marking the beginning of the end for the transatlantic traffic in human beings (UK Government website)

I thought it seemed appropriate to point out that in this painting King Balthasar is depicted as a black man. As Wikipedia notes, 'Occasionally from the 12th century, and very often in Northern Europe from the 15th, the Magi are also made to represent the three known parts of the world: Balthasar is very commonly cast as a young African or Moor, and old Caspar is given Oriental features or, more often, dress'. Velázquez had a black servant (or possibly slave), Juan de Pareja, of whom he painted a portrait.

My Romance Class (chapter 2)

Well, we had our second meeting last week in DePaul's Senior Seminar on Romance (SSR, for short). I kicked things off in Watcher mode, reminding my students that they'd spent several years and thousands of dollars learning to be English majors, and that after all of that training they really should be able to say more interesting things about a book, about any book, than anybody else. Most of their posts to the class website, however, sounded like the posts they might have done in high school, I continued, and from now on I expected better. I then reassured them that my colleague teaching the Senior Seminar on Ulysses was giving his students the same lecture this week--and in fact he'd written me an email to that effect the night before.

We then opened Bet Me to page 1, chapter 1, and read:

Once upon a time, Minerva Dobbs thought as she stood in the middle of a loud yuppie bar, the world was full of good men. She looked into the handsome face of the man she'd planned on taking to her sister's wedding and thought, Those days are gone.

"So," says I, "what can you do with that?"

The conversation that followed focused initially on the idea of this book as a "fairy tale": a story that alludes, syncretically, to many, many fairy tales, rather in the mode of Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods, which Crusie mentions explicitly in chapter 9. (It is Min's and Cal's favorite Sondheim, we learn in the opening pages of that chapter; it seems also, tidily enough, to be the musical that Quinn's high school will put on in Crazy For You. I smell a paper topic!) The proliferating, even overwhelming number of fairy tale references in the novel seemed to convince some of the more skeptical students that this was, if not a High Modernist text, at least a self-consciously crafted one: an impression that was reinforced when we turned to the ways that the events of the novel bear out not only Bonnie's sense of love as a fairy tale, but also Cynthie's contrasting empiricist account of the "four stages of love."

Some lovely insights emerged from this latter discussion, notably a glimpse of the novel's symmetrical model of amorous psychology. In it, hero and heroine serve as compensatory replacement parents for the failed (or simply critical, pessimistic, and belittling) parent in each other's lives. Cal rebuts and replaces Min's mother; Min, Cal's father. We also honed in on a lovely passage in which we glimpse the source of Min's unconscious "assumption" about what sort of partner / relationship is right for her: namely, the relationship she witnessed, as a girl, between her grandparents, and saw modeled for her in the art-object of the Mickey and Minnie snow globe:

When he was gone, Min walked over to the snow globe and wound it. It began to tinkle the first bars of "It Had to Be You," and she looked into it, and tried to get her breath back. The dome was heavy and perfect, sitting atop a black art deco base, and inside silver glitter and tiny silver stars swirled as Minnie beamed out at her, happy to be in Mickey's arms, and Mickey beamed at Minnie.

Maybe that's what I loved, she thought. That she was so happy and he thought she was wonderful. Plus there was that swirling pink dress Minnie was wearing and the great pink shoes to match. Well, the shoes were a little plain. Min tipped the globe to see, and the glitter and stars swirled again as the song slowed down and ran out.

Just as Harry's assumptions about love have been shaped by Cal and Min, Min's were shaped by her grandparents, and by this associated (metonymic) representation of them. Perhaps by implication the novel itself serves, or could serve, as a model for the reader? A thought worth pursuing, I think.

Our discussion ended before we came anywhere close to finishing the novel last week, so I've asked students to come back to it this week, with particular attention to Bonnie's defense of articulating your HEA, mid-novel, and to the two love scenes that frame the text: the first when Cal "forces" Min to eat a Krispy Kreme doughnut, and then the actual sex scene near the end. We'll see how that goes!

My main goal for tonight, though, is to make sure that my students all "get," and can begin to deploy, the ideas in our secondary texts: selections from Northop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism and from Bruno Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment (one of the inspirations, evidently, for the Sondheim musical!), first of all; and then, for this week, selections from Pam Regis's A Natural History of the Romance Novel and Janice Radway's Reading the Romance. At the risk of boring you, let me post here some of the study questions I sent my students over the weekend. I'd love to hear any reactions you have to them, since many would help with other romance novels as well--or so I hope (grin).

***

Bet Me as a "Fairy Tale"

Crusie's opening and closing sentence signals the genre. So what do our secondary texts tell us about fairy tales?

From Frye, we can place it on a ladder of genres, one step below myth; it is part of romance, broadly speaking, and in it we expect to find certain things, among them a displaced retelling of mythic archetypes and a set of characters and events playing out in a world where “ “the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended” (33, my emphasis).

52: “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.”

Given this placement of romance between myth and mimesis, what sorts of action, event, or character might we expect to find in Bet Me? Do we find them? Examples?

What else can we say about this genre of fairy tale / romance, from Frye? Two key terms: design and desire.

We know that romance is nearer the overt design pole of literary art; that is, it’s a genre in which the element of design, which is to say authorial desire, is visible. In realism, this element is supposed to be more or less invisible, so that it seems to us that events are simply happening as they do in real life; in naturalism, events are playing out according to some theory of “the way things are.”

Thus on 136: “Myth, then, is one extreme of literary design; naturalism is the other, and in between lies the whole area of romance, using that term to mean…the tendency…to displace myth in a human direction and yet, in contrast to ‘realism,’ to conventionalize content in an idealized direction.”

And this, on 139: “This affinity between the mythical and the abstractly literary illuminates many aspects of fiction, especially the more popular fiction which is realistic enough to be plausible in its incidents and yet romantic enough to be a ‘good story,’ which means a clearly designed one. The introduction of an omen or portent, or the device of making a whole story the fulfillment of a prophecy given at the beginning, is an example. Such a device suggests, in its existential projection, a conception of ineluctable fate or hidden omnipotent will. Actually, it is a piece of pure literary design, giving the beginning some symmetrical relationship with the end, and the only ineluctable will involved is that of the author.

What would be some examples of Crusie’s “pure literary design” in the novel? (There are many; let’s find as many as we can.) What versions of (incarnations of, names for, examples of) this “ineluctable fate or hidden omnipotent will” do we see at work in the novel, and where?

In romance we see a “tendency to suggest implicit mythic patterns in a world more closely associated with human experience,” while in what we call “realism” the tendency is to “throw the emphasis on content and representation rather than on the shape of the story,” although if we step far enough back from the text, we can often see the “mythopoeic designs” that structure the material (139-40).

What would be some examples of mythic patterns (archetypal ones, say) suggested in this novel?

In romance, as in myth, we find a tendency towards “abstraction” in the characters (good guy / bad guy, etc., as opposed to inwardness and believable psychology).

Thus “138: the interest in this sort of displaced myth “tends toward abstraction in character-drawing, and if we know no other canons than low mimetic ones, we complain of this.”

Any examples of this, in major or minor characters? Can we address any objections to the novel as “unrealistic” through this idea—or through the idea of “design”?

We will also find characters who are in some way “idealized,” that is to say, associated with (although not literally) gods, goddesses, natural phenomena, etc.

Thus on 138: “The central principle of displacement is that what can be metaphorically identified in a myth can only be linked in a romance by some form of simile: analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery, and the like. In a myth we can have a sun-god or a tree-god; in a romance we may have a person who is significantly associated with the sun or trees.”

How does Crusie establish these associations for us for her characters? Give examples!

But the notion of desire does not simply mean that the actions and characters are determined by the authorial desire for a design in the text. It also means that in such stories we can see human desires playing out in relatively overt and unfettered forms, one step removed from myth (in which anything can happen). Says Frye, in myth and romance actions occur “near or at the conceivable limits of desire” (136), and romance more specifically “is the nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfillment dream”: a form with a “perennially child-like quality” signaled by “its extraordinarily persistent nostalgia, its search for some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space” (186).

What desires does this novel articulate, or what wish-fulfillment dreams? Do we see in it this “nostalgia” for an imaginative golden age?

When we are dealing with a quest romance this proximity to wish-fulfillment allows us to read the romance psychologically, as well as mythically. “The quest romance has analogies to both rituals and dreams…. Translated into dream terms, the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality. […] Translated into ritual terms, the quest-romance is the victory of fertility over the waste land. Fertility means food and drink, bread and wine, body and blood, the union of male and female” (193-4).

Can we read Bet Me as a quest romance, for both Cal and Min? Does that quest involve a search for “fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality”? Is there, in this novel, any “victory of fertility over the waste land,” with fertility meaning “food and drink, bread and wine, body and blood,” and sexual union? What to make of Cal and Min’s desires not to have kids, then?

Now, if we’re thinking about fairy tales in terms of psychology, we’re heading into Bruno Bettelheim country. What can we find in him that’s of use?

From Bettelheim, we learn something about what fairy tales teach: a message that “a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence—but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.” Fairy tales confront us with “basic human predicaments” such as “death…aging, the limits of our existence, [and] the wish for eternal life (8). “Fairy tales intimate that a rewarding, good life is within one’s reach despite adversity—but only if one does not shy away from the hazardous struggles without which one can never achieve true identity. These stories promise that if a child dares to engage in this fearsome and taxing search, benevolent powers will come to his aid, and he will succeed” (24)

Compare that passage (above) to this, from Crusie’s essay “This Is Not Your Mother’s Cinderella”:

Theme is the spine of the story; rip that out and the whole plot puddles at your feet. And theme in fairy tales is very consistent. As Luthi has argued, the fairy tale introduction of “once upon a time,” or in the Breton, “once there was, one day there will be,” means that “what once occurred, had the tendency continually to recur,” and that the fairy tale theme is for all time (47). Propp has shown the universal fairy tale theme to be that if you have a lack in your life and you quest for an answer, you will be rewarded. And Pace in his discussion of Levi-Strauss has noted that behind the idea of Cinderella's social mobility is “the belief that there is an innate justice within the social system and that wrongs will eventually be righted” so that even though the Grimm's Cinderella is pretty much a passive wimp, she succeeds anyway because good triumphs and the world is a just place (254). These thematic aspects are present in Ross's story because, in romance, there is an underlying certainty that love really does conquer all, that (to paraphrase Pace) there is a belief in a kind of innate justice within the emotional system of human beings.

Also, consider this passage from Crusie:

The generic fairy tale theme is embedded so strongly in the structure and motif of the genre that it has already become obvious in this course of this paper: society is emotionally just and good, and therefore a woman will be rewarded with unconditional love if she remains true to herself (and her culture's concept of a heroine). This becomes evident thorough a cursory survey of the romance genre over the past thirty years. Early heroines were active in their plots but passive in relationships with the heroes. Rape romances were common in the seventies, inspired by the success of Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower , but these romances, as distasteful as they seem today, actually reinforced the romance theme. For although the hero initially rapes the heroine through a misunderstanding, her innate strength and courage force him to love her unconditionally, thereby making the heroine the powerful secure figure at the end of the story. Today, rape romances are anathema at publishing houses because our culture now recognizes that there is no misunderstanding that will excuse rape, but this shift shows only that society's perception of what is acceptable in a hero and heroine have changed, not that the theme of romance has changed. The heroine still achieves security and unconditional love simply because of who she intrinsically is because her society is part of an emotionally just universe. The romance genre has planted its roots firmly in the universe of the fairy tale.

How might these descriptions of the core “theme” and “message” of fairy tales illuminate Bet Me? Detail the parallels.

Fairy tales are not about morality so much as about “assurance that one can succeed. Whether one meets life with a belief in the possibility of mastering its difficulties or with the expectation of defeat is also a very important existential problem” (10).

Does Bet Me show this issue of “assurance” in action for its characters? Does it inculcate a “belief in possibility” in this way? How might we factor in this passage from Crusie’s essay “Romancing Reality”:

Susan Elizabeth Phillips, one of the biggest names in romance today, experienced that empowerment after she was already successful. She writes that, as a best-selling novelist and happily married wife and mother, she sat down after a tense time in her life to relax with a stack of category novels. &She goes on to say that “I didn’t have to read for long before something magical happened. I felt better. Calmer. In control.” She writes that the novels did not offer the fantasy she thought romance novels would, “that of a wonderful man or a glamorous, fulfilling career. I already had those things.” Instead, she writes that the “fantasy” they gave her was “one of command and control over the harum scarum events of my life--a fantasy of female empowerment” (55). This is a beauty of a fantasy, especially since it’s not fantasy at all. Phillips already had command and control, and to this day she remains one of the most empowered women I know. The romance fiction she read simple reminded her of her own capabilities, thereby reinforcing her own experience of reality.

Bettelheim says that fairy tales will be “unrealistic,” for a reason: “In a fairy tale, internal processes are externalized and become comprehensible as represented by the figures of the story and its events. […] The unrealistic nature of these tales…is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales’ concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner processes taking place in an individual” (25).

Specifically, “in the tales’ content, inner psychological phenomena are given body in symbolic form.” We don’t take everything literally; rather, “the fairy tale offers fantasy materials which suggest to the child in symbolic form what the battle to achieve self-realization is all about, and it guarantees a happy ending (36, 39).

What would Bet Me look like if we read it this way, with every character and event the externalization of an internal process, the working-through of ambivalences and desires?

The tales offer “fantastic symbolic images for the solution of problems,” although “the problems presented in them are ordinary ones: a child’s suffering from the jealousy and discrimination of his siblings, as is true for Cinderella; a child being thought incompetent by his parent, as happens in many fairy tales….” (40). They offer symbolic narratives about the internal process of growing up: “The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue; that while what these stories tell about does not happen in fact, it must happen as inner experience and personal development; that fairy tales depict in imaginary and symbolic form the essential steps in growing up and achieving an independent existence” (73).

What sorts of real problems, symbolic victories, and unreal truths might this novel be said to offer?

So what do these tales do? First step is to take internal confusion and ambivalence and sort it out into a set of distinct, clear-cut characters: “When all the child’s wishful thinking gets embodied in a good fairy; all his destructive wishes in an evil witch; all his fears in a voracious wolf; all the demands of his conscience in a wise man encountered on an adventure; all his jealous anger in some animal that pecks out the eyes of his archrivals—then the child can finally begin to sort out his contradictory tendencies. Once this starts, the child will be less and less engulfed by unmanageable chaos” (66). This splitting is all about turning chaos into order: “As he listens to the fairy tale, the child gets ideas about how he may create order out of the chaos which is his inner life. The fairy tale suggests not only isolating and separating the disparate and confusing aspects of the child’s experiences into opposites, but projecting these onto different figures” (75).

How might all of the secondary characters in this novel “sort out” the chaotic and ambivalent parts of the reader’s self? Can we take Min (and maybe Cal) as versions of the reader, then?

In particular, these stories seem to sort out ambivalences about Mom and Dad—and maybe especially Mom? See 69: “The typical fairy-tale splitting of the mother into a good (usually dead) mother and an evil stepmother serves the child well. It is not only a means of preserving an internal all-good mother when the real mother is not all-good, but it also permits anger at this bad ‘stepmother’ without endangering the goodwill of the true mother, who is viewed as a different person. […] The fantasy of the wicked stepmother not only preserves the good mother intact, it also prevents having to feel guilty about one’s angry thoughts and wishes about her—a guilt which would seriously interfere with the good relation to Mother” (69).

Where do we see such ambivalence about Mother in this novel? How does it play out for Cal and for Min? Is a symbolic “splitting” visible?

Note Bettelheim’s description of the daughter’s relationship with the mother as represented in fairy tales:

In a girl’s oedipal fantasy, the mother is split into two figures: the pre-oedipal wonderful good mother and the oedipal evil stepmother. […] The good mother, so the fantasy goes, would never have been jealous of her daughter or have prevented the prince (father) and the girl from living happily together. […] The little girl can love her real father all the better because her resentment over his failure to prefer her to her mother is explained by his unfortunate ineffectuality (as with fathers in fairy tales), for which nobody can blame him since it is due to superior powers; besides, it will not prevent her from getting her prince. A girl can love her mother more because she puts out all her anger at the mother-competitor, who gets what she deserves—as Snow-White’s stepmother is forced to put on “red-hot shoes, and dance until she dropped dead.” (114-115)

We might particularly expect to find this splitting take place in terms of the parents’ opinion of their child: See Bettelheim on 135: “Almost every child is convinced that his parents know better about nearly everything, with one exception: they do not think well enough of him. To encourage this thought is beneficial, because it suggests to the child that he should develop his abilities—not to do better than the parent, but to correct the parent’s low opinion of the child.
In respect to excelling the parent, the fairy story frequently uses the device of splitting him into two figures: the parent who thinks little of the child, and another figure…who gives him sound advice on how to win out…. The parent is thus split into his doubting and supporting aspects, with the latter winning out.”

Can we read Bet Me in terms of this “girl’s oedipal fantasy”? What changes do we need to make to the fantasy in order to have it match Bet Me? If we read the book this way, is Cal Dad, or Mom?

Finally, consider this passage from “This is Not Your Mother’s Cinderella” about romance novels and fairy tales:

“That is what all the romance revisions of fairy tales accomplish: they take the general elements that resonate from all fairy tales and recast them using just enough concrete detail from the original tales so that the reader can recognize the tale that's being reworked. The reading of the recasting becomes tremendously satisfying because this time, the reader isn't left out of the story anymore; now it's about her.”

Can we use this to describe not only what Crusie does with fairy tales in Bet Me, but how she does it? What “concrete details” are used, and how have the stories been revised so that the reader can feel that the story is now “about her”?