Change We Need

Laura Vivanco

Change is key to the development of a romance. You can't have a romance without a "Central Love Story," that love story "centers around two individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work" (RWA), and so, by definition, the relationship changes over the course of the novel. That kind of change, to borrow one of President Obama's campaign slogans, is the "Change We Need."

That may not, however, be the only kind of change some readers need. When SmartBitch Sarah recently gave Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy a "D" grade I wasn't at all surprised that this was partly due to the anti-Semitic portrayal of Goldhanger, the Jewish moneylender. We have, after all, discussed that before here at TMT. I was, however, surprised by the following criticism of the novel:

Sophy doesn’t change or grow or evolve. She gets her way, and everyone around her is probably better off for her involvement, and they’re all happy, but Sophy doesn’t develop. She achieves through her own machinations, which, while entertaining, was not as satisfying as having her develop or grow as a character.

Although I had noticed that, in many romances, both the hero and heroine are greatly altered by the end of the novel, it had never occurred to me that change in the protagonists was necessary to any readers' enjoyment of romances. With this revelation still in the back of my mind, I came across the following:

When our immigrant ancestors arrived on America's shores they hit the ground running, some to homestead on the Great Plains, others to claw their way up the socio-economic ladder in coastal ghettos. Upward mobility, westward migration, Sunbelt relocation - the wisdom in America is that people don't, can't, mustn't end up where they begin. This belief has the moral force of religious doctrine. Thus the American identity is ordered around the psychological experience of forsaking or losing the past for the opportunity of reinventing oneself in the future. (Engle 337)

While there are likely to be plenty of non-American readers who have a preference for protagonists who change a lot, I wonder if the romance genre, as it has developed in North America, does tend to reflect the belief "that people don't, can't, mustn't end up where they begin."

Virginia Kantra, for example, states that

At the center of every story is a protagonist who wants to do, accomplish or change...something. In pursuit of his goals, our protagonist must struggle, learn and grow to become a more self-realized, self-reliant, autonomous character. This is the character arc.

But as readers and writers of romance, we expect, we celebrate, the development of the pair bond from attraction through exploration to emotional intimacy and sex. This is the romance arc. [...]

As romance writers, our job is to develop all three arcs, the hero's, the heroine's, and the relationship's, in an emotionally satisfying way.

Jennifer Crusie found the genre powerful and important because it

gave me female protagonists in stories that promised that if a woman fought for what she believed in and searched for the truth, she could strip away the old lies about her life and emerge re-born, transformed with that new sense of self that’s the prize at the end of any quest. And when the heroine emerges transformed from the romance story, so do I. So do all romance readers.

Leslie Wainger, author of Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies and Harlequin editor believes that

Static characters are boring: Your heroine (and yes, your hero, too) can't remain static over the course of the book. As the plot progresses, you need to make your heroine develop, change, grow, and discover things about herself and her abilities — especially how to love and live with her hero. If your heroine starts out perfect, she has nowhere to go. But if she has insecurities, past failures to put to rest, doubts about herself and her abilities, or an out-and-out bad habit — maybe a quick temper, or impatience that leads to rash, unwise decisions — she has room for progress, and readers will want to see how she masters the challenges of the plot and the romantic relationship.

I'm still not convinced, though. If the characters are intrinsically interesting, why do they need to change? Isn't it enough to see how their relationship develops? In Heyer's The Nonesuch, for example, neither the heroine nor the hero become "more self-realized, self-reliant." They don't change their personalities; what changes is how they feel about each other. And, as Sunita recently said,

For readers who enjoy context and setting, this novel has a lot to offer. There isn’t much in the way of plot: Ancilla and Sir Waldo slowly fall in love; Linden’s initial adoration of Tiffany dissipates and he moves on to a deep, long-lasting love for a more appropriate object of his affection; and Tiffany eventually gets her comeuppance, in a way that engenders some sympathy from the reader.

One of my favourite romances (as I've said many times) is Austen's Persuasion in which, when Captain Wentworth observes that

"You were not formerly, I know. You did not use to like cards; but time makes many changes."
"I am not yet so much changed," cried Anne, and stopped, fearing she hardly knew what misconstruction. After waiting a few moments he said - and as if it were the result of immediate feeling - "It is a period, indeed! Eight years and a half is a period!" (Chapter 22)

The years have made Anne more confident in her own judgments but in the essentials of their personalities, she and Wentworth remain basically unchanged:

they exchanged again those feelings and those promises which had once before seemed to secure everything, but which had been followed by so many, many years of division and estrangement. There they returned again into the past, more exquisitely happy, perhaps, in their reunion, than when it had been first projected; more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other's character, truth, and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting. (Chapter 23)

The changes in their circumstances which make it possible for them to marry are more than enough change for me, and what change there has been in their personalities is the sort of gradual change I can believe in.

What kind(s) of change do you need in a romance and what makes it change you can believe in?

• Austen, Jane. Persuasion. The Republic of Pemberley.
• Crusie, Jennifer. "Let Us Now Praise Scribbling Women."
  
• Engle, Gary. "What Makes Superman So Darned American?" Popular Culture: An Introductory Text. Ed. Jack Nachbar and Kevin Lause. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1992. 331-343.
• Kantra, Virginia. "Who's on Top?: Intimacy, Control, and Conflict."
• Romance Writers of America. "About the Romance Genre."
• Sunita. "Review: The Nonesuch by Georgette Heyer."
  
• Wainger, Leslie. "Discovering the Key to Every Romance Novel: The Heroine."
• Wendell, Sarah. "The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer."

The first photo, of "Change We Need" was taken by snowmentality and downloaded from Flickr under a Creative Commons licence. The second image, of "Change We Can Believe In," came from Wikimedia Commons.

Paranormal Romances: Better than X-Ray Vision for Critics!

I'm going to start this post the way I started my last one:

In my post on the definition of paranormal romances, Eric asked:

I wonder whether paranormal romance lends itself to allegorical reading, or at least metafictional reading. That is, does the "paranormal" part of the world correspond in some way to the world of romance experienced by the reader while reading the book itself--and, by extension, to the worlds of desire and love?

And once again my answer for Eric is an unqualified "Hell, yes!"

I've been thinking about this a lot more. Paranormal romances, evidence to the contrary, are not really my "thing." My "thing," for what it's worth, is romances with strong masculine perspective. Not necessarily the perspective of alpha males, but rather just lots and lots of the story told from the hero's point of view.

I know why this is and have actually published on it. My basic point in my article is that some women (I definitely include myself in this group) read romances in order to watch the hero fall in love, because we want to see that he's feeling the same emotions, the same pain and heartache and joy that we feel when we fall in love. We want to see ourselves (the feminine) and our emotions reflected in the alpha representative of patriarchy.(1) We also want to see the alpha male recognize, understand, and truly believe that he can't live without the heroine and without her love.(2) (This is why Susan Elizabeth Phillips' books are so powerful, in my opinion--the heroine comes to the realization that she can live without the hero, but the hero's big realization is that he absolutely can't live without the heroine--but that's another post. Or a future article.) And this need or desire doesn't have to be consciously recognized or understood by the reader by any means. But the sharp increase in the hero's perspective, especially during initial sex scenes and the final reconciliation scene, as well as the focus on masculine communities (brothers, SEALs, vampires, football players) in best-selling series are, I argue, not coincidences.

Some paranormal romances, I have figured out recently, don't need to mess around with alluding to these theoretical underpinnings of the romance. They can make them theoretical overalls that are immediately available for the critic's use and enjoyment without needing to search hard for them. They are metafictional to the nth degree and almost point neon signs to the reason for the reader's enjoyment of the romance.

Take, for example, Laura Kinsale's Uncertain Magic. The heroine is psychic and can read the mind of everyone around her. This is represented as a curse, not a blessing and the unhappy romantic fates of Roddy's female ancestors who also had the gift are explicitly described. When Roddy meets Faelan, an impoverished Irish Lord with a reputation as a madman and murderer, she cannot read his mind. She uses her incredibly large dowry to buy his proposal and marries him, convinced this is her only chance at happiness. The story is told entirely from Roddy's perspective, and because she cannot read Faelan's mind, neither can the reader. Kinsale herself says:

until the very end, the entire story is told solely from the heroine's point-of-view. Initially, I chose this technique to emphasize Roddy's inability to "read" Faelan's mind, but after I completed the manuscript, I realized what a powerful narrative technique it can be.

When Roddy finally breaks through Faelan's mental walls in the last few pages, his thoughts are almost like crack for the reader (I tried to think of a more professional way to say that, but "crack" really conveys the addictive, high-inducing nature for the reader of finally reading Faelan's thoughts).

In her recent lightning review of Kinsale's novels, Candy, one of the Smart Bitches summarizes the issue of perspective in Uncertain Magic:

I missed having Faelan’s perspective, but because of the way the story is structured and because so much of the plot hinges on solving the enigma of why Faelan’s mind is closed off, it has to be told only from Roddy’s POV.

This is where the X-Ray vision comes in. If romances are, fundamentally, about the reader's access to the hero's thoughts and emotions, Kinsale's use of the paranormal gift of mind-reading in Uncertain Magic makes this theme overt.

I've already discussed Nora Roberts' Midnight Bayou as meta-romance, but I think it's worth adding a snippet of what I said in the comments to that post:

Because all romance heroes, are, of course, created by women. They're "reincarnations" of women in the image of what we wish men could be. And Declan's unique status [as a reincarnated woman] unveils that aspect of romance novels, but still gives us our HEA.

Just as Faelan does.

Then there's a new paranormal romance anthology out called Over the Moon. Angela Knight's contribution, "Moon Dance," is about a female werewolf whose father insists she marry an abusive werewolf to preserve her aristocratic werewolf line. She refuses and runs away to seek protection from a "bitten" rather than "born" werewolf who is a cop and obviously alpha. After they first have sex, she muses in the morning:

All her life, she'd dreamed of a man like him. Then again, she supposed every red-blooded woman in America had dreamed of a man like Lucas Rollings--body by God, face of an archangel, a protective streak a mile wide. Who wouldn't want somebody like that by her side?

But there was more to him than great abs and an Alpha male growl. She remembered the vulnerability in his eyes when he'd described his abusive childhood. He'd gone out of his way to assuage her guilt and convince her he admired her for her battle against Stephen and her father.

When she thought about it, that little confession of his was pretty unusual all by itself. Most Alphas would rather eat glass than admit they'd ever been anyone's victim. It ran against the whole persona. (67-68)

First of all, werewolf stories make overt the fact that the heroes of romances are alpha males. And while Elena desperately needs the literal protection of Lucas' alpha status, she is also looking for a vulnerability in her hero that she (and the reader) recognizes because she feels it as well. Elena literally seeks Lucas out to solve her problems, a trait of male-male dialogue practices, but just as important to the success of their relationship is the fact that he can also empathize with her, a trait of female-female dialogue practices.(3)

Later, Lucas and Elena "spirit link." As they both change to were-form, their spirits mingle and link forever, to the extent that if one of a spirit-linked pair dies, so does the other. This process is told from Lucas' perspective:

Touching her mind was like laying naked in warm sunlight after a cold winter. His spirit unfurled with a hungry desperation, enfolding her and bringing her close.

Just as she enfolded him. Together...

Finally, a voice said deep inside him. This is what I was looking for all along.

You. (87)

The alpha male, in his pure form, is desperate for connection to the female, desperate to be enfolded within her, and this is what he has been looking for all along. The male is not complete without the intimate connection to the female, and this is a powerful concept for the reader.

Virginia Kantra's contribution to Over the Moon is "Between the Mountain and the Moon." (WARNING: Spoilers ahead!) Unbeknownst to the heroine, she is the child of a father who spent fourteen years in the Fey kingdom in the Appalachian Mountains along the Appalachian Trail until he was saved by the heroine's mother. The fey Queen who was defeated by the heroine's mother is looking for revenge and chooses to enact it against the heroine. The Queen uses her own son, Rhys, who is himself half-human, although his father "left" when Rhys was eight by abandoning his human emotions and becoming full fey.

When Rhys and the heroine, Caitlin, have sex (she's a virgin and doesn't have an orgasm!), rather than Caitlin being enchanted and therefore destroyed by the sex as was Rhys' intention, Rhys' finds himself reeling from the emotional energy of their coupling:

Instead, she had destroyed him. Challenged him. Not merely sexually--he might have coped with that--but emotionally.

He could barely forgive her for that.

Or himself. (133)

The hero--that representation of inscrutable patriarchy--finds himself stunned by the emotional importance of what he meant to be not only a one-time, casual sexual encounter, but one that was meant to devastate the heroine instead, while the heroine remains relatively untouched.

Later, Caitlin casually touches Rhys' arm:

Rhys tensed. He couldn't help himself. The sidhe did not touch except in the formal figures of the dance or the equally deliberate moves of sex. Every time Cait touched him, she breached the walls he'd learned to construct to protect the sniveling, abandoned, eight-year-old child within. (144)

Rhys' traditionally masculine defenses of emotionlessness and casual sex are systematically threatened by his heroine. He finds himself helpless in the face of the artless acceptance of the heroine.

And in the end, it is Caitlin's love for Rhys that literally saves him from being torn apart by the Wild Hunt. She confronts the Hunter King who was once Rhys' human father, finally begging him, "Please . . . You were alive once. You were in love once. Please. Let him go" (182). It is the King's memory of the human love he felt for a woman that eventually saves his son, Rhys, from Rhys' mother's vengeance.

All because of the love of a good woman.

Paranormal romances bring to the forefront the theoretical foundations of the appeal of the romance. While these foundations are present in most "mundane" romances, paranormal romances make them overt, make them--in fact--the major plot point on which the salvation of the hero depends.

(1). This summary is the quick and dirty version, without the discussion of Foucault's theory of confession. See my article, "'Expressing' Herself: The Romance Novel and the Feminine Will to Power," in Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America. Eds. Lydia Cushman Schurman and Deidre Johnson. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002. 17-36.

(2). This last argument actually comes from my article, "'If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more': Direct Dialogue and Education in the Proposal Scenes," in Talk in Jane Austen. Eds. Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinlos-Gregg. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002. 167-182.

(3). See Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand: Men and Women in Conversation).