Eric Rereads the Romance

Laura Vivanco

Eric's had a review article on romance criticism published, so I thought I'd discuss its contents here. The full reference is Selinger, Eric Murphy. “Rereading the Romance.” Contemporary Literature 48.2 (2007): 307-24 and if you have an Athens password you can read it online here.

Eric defends the genre, observing that the fact "That romance novels can, themselves, display intelligence, worthy politics, and aesthetic accomplishment remains one of the best-kept secrets in literary study, however easy to find and read the books themselves may be" (308-09) and noting that "Romance novels have rarely, if ever, been treated by scholars as aesthetic objects, but rather as fungible, even standardized products" (313).¹ The article is, however, primarily a review of the following recent works on the romance genre:

• Juliet Flesch, From Australia with Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels. Fremantle, Australia: Curtin University Books, 2004.
• Sally Goade, ed., Empowerment versus Oppression: Twenty-First Century Views of Popular Romance Novels. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Scholars, 2007.
• Deborah Lutz, The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2006.
• Lynn S. Neal, Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006.
• Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003.

Eric begins by putting this new romance criticism in its historical context, and very kindly mentions me and a comparison I've made in the past between medieval Castilian cancionero love poetry (which was, for a time, the butt of many an insult from the academic community) and the modern romance genre (312-13). As this is my blog post, I'm going to expand on this extremely minor point from Eric's essay, which I am sure he only made because he's kind and wanted to refer to as many of the new wave of romance scholars as possible.

The typical criticisms of cancionero love poetry were summarised by Keith Whinnom, who quoted some of the insults that dripped from the pen of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, who attacked both poets and poetry:

"versificadores débiles y amanerados", [...] "la mente de sus autores, extraviada por el mal gusto" [...] "de más interés histórico que poético" [...] "el convencionalismo a que todos rendían parias" [...] "ausencia de verdadero pensamiento." (Whinnom 9)

"weak and mannered writers of verse" [...] "the mind of their authors, gone astray down the path of bad taste" [...] "of more historical than poetic interest" [...] "the conventionality to which they all rendered tribute" [...] "lack of any real thought"

Whinnom argued that the criticism was wrong, because "ha sido equivocado el modo de aproximarse a la cuestión" ("it has approached the question in the wrong way"; 11) and he suggested that cancionero love poetry should instead be judged in terms of its own style and aims, not by comparison with other forms of poetry which are more varied in their vocabulary, or appear to the critics to be more realistic and sincere in their expression of emotion.

Eric observes that early critics of the romance genre similarly conducted their work while under the influence of certain prejudices about what literature ought to be about, what made it good and what its purpose was: "the first twenty years of serious analysis of romance fiction treated it and its readers with ambivalence at best, and often with undisguised contempt" (309-310). Janice Radway, for example, critiqued the genre because it "fails to supply the reader with 'a comprehensive program for reorganizing her life in such a way that all needs might be met'" (Selinger 310), yet, as Eric points out, "As a rule, comprehensive programs for reorganizing life are the stuff of self-help books, theology, and political manifestos, rather than literature" (310).

Eric then contrasts the newer works he reviews with the older works of romance criticism. He finds that Pamela Regis's book "answers the need for an expansive, theoretically grounded account of the genre and bids fair to be the standard introductory text for romance-fiction study in the coming decade" (311) and "Even those primarily or exclusively interested in ideological, psychological, and philosophical approaches to romance fiction will want to have Regis’s precision tools in their kit" (313).

In Lynne S. Neal's book about inspirational romance "the appeal, aesthetics, and cultural work of such romances receive her attention, since Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction attends primarily to readers and reading practices rather than to texts" (314-15), bringing "a new, dispassionate aplomb to the ethnographic analysis of readers" (316).

Empowerment versus Oppression: Twenty-First Century Views of Popular Romance Novels is a collection of essays edited by Sally Goade. These include an essay by Guy Mark Foster in which he "takes up 'black women romance novelists and the taboo of interracial desire,' arguing that 'no other literary form has thus far attempted to take up the vexed question of interracial sex as it relates to black women' with 'the commitment and purpose' of popular romance" (317).² Emily Haddad's essay "looks at how the enduring subgenre of 'Arab abduction romances' changed in the years just before and after 9/11" (317). Jayashree Kamble's "Female Enfranchisement and the Popular Romance: Employing an Indian Perspective" "reports on the ways the Indian readers whom Kamble surveyed in 2005 both perceive and use the genre" (317).

Eric describes Juliet Flesch's From Australia with Love as "The most fully developed exploration of romance from a comparative perspective, at least so far, [...] a crisp historical inquiry into “whether there is such a thing as ‘Australian romance’” (318).

Deborah Lutz is a contributor to Sally Goade's volume and the author of a book that's been discussed on this blog previously and which Eric refers to as "a radically new way to attend to the genre, and one as needed as the aesthetic turn we find in Regis" (324).

Some other newer works of romance scholarship are also mentioned in passing:

• “What ‘Race’ Is the Sheik? Rereading a Desert Romance,” Susan L. Blake’s "superb new historical reading of the E. M. Hull best seller in light of the debates over race and divorce in the 1910s and 1920s" (316) in Doubled Plots [2003], edited by Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden.

• The "groundbreaking [...] economically focused" (316) “Desire and the Marketplace: A Reading of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower” by Charles H. Hinnant, also in Doubled Plots.

• The "delightful" (316) “What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Book Like This?” by Stephanie Burley, "an exploration of 'homoerotic reading and popular romance'" (316), again from Doubled Plots.
  

• Sarah S. G. Frantz's "'Expressing' Herself: The Romance Novel and the Feminine Will to Power" in Scorned Literature (2002) in which she "draws on Michel Foucault and Hélène Cixous for an inquiry into romance and the 'feminine will to power.' Her analysis of romance novel scenes in which the hero breast-feeds from a nursing heroine is as vivid and counterintuitive as the scenes themselves, and through old-fashioned close reading of such scenes, she demonstrates the subtlety with which authors have invited readers to identify across boundaries of both gender and power" (317).

----

• Selinger, Eric Murphy. “Rereading the Romance.” Contemporary Literature 48.2 (2007): 307-24.
  
• Whinnom, Keith. La poesía amatoria de la época de los Reyes Católicos. Durham Modern Languages Series, Hispanic Monographs, 2. Durham: UP, 1981.

1 To go off-topic, the word "fungible" is one of those which comes up at FreeRice.Com. FreeRice "has a custom database containing thousands of words at varying degrees of difficulty. There are words appropriate for people just learning English and words that will challenge the most scholarly professors". To play the game, an individual has to "click on the answer that best defines the word. [....] If you get it right, you get a harder word. If wrong, you get an easier word. [...] For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program."

2 There may be "commitment and purpose", but, as noted in a recent newspaper article on race and the romance genre by Brian Miller, "A Billion-Dollar Romance Novel Industry, And Its Lonely Black Author: The Fabio business finds itself short on diversity", published in the Seattle Weekly yesterday, romances by black authors are usually segregated, shelved in African American sections. This tends to leave the romance sections of bookshops filled with books among whose "covers, where yearning maidens cling to strapping lads with gilded locks, it's nearly impossible to find an African-American face. Nor any Latina features, nor any Asian figures, nor any sign that love exists for nonwhite women."

Romance, Pleasure, and Poetics

Hello, everyone. I've been gone so long, this blog feels unfamiliar: a bit like visiting home for the holidays after one has actually moved out of the house, out of state, into adulthood. Not that what I'm up to elsewhere has been particularly adult; in my other (so-called) professional lives I've been teaching glum undergraduates, grading exams, and working my way through a two-foot stack of poetry by Latina/o American poets, looking for a lead for my next piece. This weekend, though, a discussion of pleasure and poetry got me thinking and writing about romance again, and I thought I'd continue those musings, and that conversation, here. I hope that you all can bring some fresh perspectives to the debate!

A graduate-student blogger named Josh Corey kicked things off with an introspective post about the disparate pleasures he takes in fiction and poetry; or, to be more precise, in certain kinds of fiction and certain kinds of poetry. As my old friend Mark explains,

Josh contrasts the “absorptive” or “immersive” pleasure of your average well-written novel (the “vivid continuous dream” evoked by John Gardner) with the more thorny pleasures offered by “anti-absorptive” poetry – writing in which the language does not “disappear” from the page, to be replaced by an evoked or described world – writing, in short, that foregrounds its own materiality as language, that won’t let us forget that we’re after all reading.

Like many essayists and theorists, alas, Josh doesn't just distinguish between these pleasures; he ranks them. Unlike many others, however, Josh quickly checks himself, refusing to let the hierarchy he sets up pass unchallenged:

Most readers (on airplanes or elsewhere) are after the infantilizing dream-state [offered by "immersive" fiction], and yet I can't blame others or myself for wanting to be nurtured by certain reading experiences rather than pricked into greater consciousness. A healthy diet, so to speak, probably requires both. But isn't the moral content that creeps into my language here interesting? Immersive fiction as trans-fats, innovative writing as leafy greens. I am loath to become a scold, urging children to read Language poetry [my link: ES] because it's good for you. Is the pleasure of anti-absorptive writing simply the masochistic pleasure of self-denial, of anorexia? Is it a "higher" pleasure because further from the pleasures of the flesh? And yet the anti-absorptive is closer to the body of language than immersive fiction is: we savor the materiality of phonemes and syntax and sentences, provoked into the kind of apperception that requires us to look up from the book now and then and figure. One type of reading is active and closer to writing; the other is passive and demands our submission—there's a masochism for you.

Now, on my Say Something Wonderful blog I took issue with Josh over a lot of this. I find his description of "immersive" fiction rather sloppy; it can't account, for example, for my vivid sense, this past weekend, of snuggling up with two entirely different authorial "voices" as I read Eloisa James's Pleasure for Pleasure and Pam Rosenthal's The Slightest Provocation. His sexual and culinary metaphors are both somewhat casual, and likewise won't hold up on close inspection. How, though, shall we talk about the different pleasures of reading different sorts of literature? Are there other discourses available?

In search of them, I'm heading off to read an essay from Sally Goade's forthcoming collection on romance fiction, Empowerment vs. Oppression (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007): "Forms of Pleasure in the Reading of Popular Romance: Psychic and Cultural Dimensions," by Eva Y. I. Chen. I'll let you know what she says, and how it helps. In the mean time, I notice that the theorists and philosophers who get cited in these debates are all men, all modern, and all European: Freud, Lacan, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Theodore Adorno. Who are the women I should read? Who are the non-European thinkers? Who are the ancients, the medieval rhetoricians, the neo-classicists, the Romantics? Who thinks about pleasure outside the literary sphere, in disciplines from psychology to, I don't know, marketing?

I'd love your suggestions, and promise to make use of them!