The Evolution of the Alpha Male

Laura Vivanco

In the introduction to How Well Do Facts Travel?: The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010) Mary Morgan explains that sometimes accepted "facts" are false or unreliable. While the spread of facts is to be welcomed, that of false "facts" is more troubling:

Constraints on the travels of facts may be seriously detrimental to our well-being. Yet the free market may be equally problematic. The internet is such a free market, but one in which - as is well known - it is difficult to recognise trustworthy facts from untrustworthy ones, an age-old problem of open (or free) product markets that has lead to their habitual regulation, for example to prevent the use of poisonous additives to make bread white, or, in the case of travelling facts, to regulate the claims made for the efficacy of medicines.

Chapter 16 of How Well Do Facts Travel?, which focuses on the romance genre's alpha male, is by Heather Schell, and is available online (in a form which does not include the official pagination). That chapter and a recent post by Jessica at Read React Review about evolutionary psychology both emphasise the importance of examining one's evidence carefully.

Jessica's post raises some questions about the methodology used by evolutionary psychologists and was written in response to a recent post about the romance genre by evolutionary psychologist Maryanne Fisher (based on some research I've already analysed). Jessica also adds that "folks might be interested to know that several HQN authors, such as Sharon Kendrick and Penny Jordan, felt very positively about the study" by Fisher. I'm not sure that's an entirely fair assessment of what Kendrick and Jordan reportedly said: Kendrick's comment that "[Their] research into book titles shows that women gravitate towards ones which depict a loyal, fit, rich and sexy bloke. Funny, that! That would be as opposed to a commitment-phobe wastrel who plays around?" certainly isn't devoid of irony, and it isn't an explicit endorsement of the evolutionary psychology underlying the study's conclusions.

Nonetheless, Jordan's mention of

a bedrock instinctive 'feeling' within women that a man who is male and powerful enough to be desired by many women (ie not a stalker type) and who wants to commit himself exclusively, is the gold standard when it comes to the foundations for couple happiness

is not inconsistent with evolutionary psychology, which would explain such a "bedrock instinctive 'feeling'" by reference to the species' evolutionary past.

Schell's analysis of the romance genre's alpha male suggests reasons why some romance authors may find the evolutionary psychologists' approach to the genre attractive. Unfortunately, or perhaps appropriately given that it appears in a book about trustworthy and untrustworthy facts, Schell's account appears to contain some unreliable facts about the genre, including an assertion that "Harlequin [...] owns almost every romance publisher in North America, as well as Mills and Boon." I imagine that "fact" would come as rather a surprise to readers of single-title romances and romances published initially as ebooks.¹ Schell states that

Before the early 1980s, there were not many facts about romance novels. [...] Romance novels had not received any of the attention that scholars had begun to direct towards other types of mass culture; there was thus no contention among academics about what these novels meant. Romance writers themselves weren’t engaged in any collective soul-searching about the meaning of their work, either, in part because the conditions of their labour weren’t such as to foster dialogue: Romance novels were written by hundreds of women working in isolation, without agents, connected individually to their publishing houses through correspondence and through the written guidelines to plot and character (i.e., the “formulas”) to which prospective authors had to adhere. The facts about romance novels in the 1970s were limited to industry-generated data about sales and distribution.
That situation changed dramatically in the 1980s, for two reasons: romance writers organised, and scholars began to write about the genre and generate facts about what it meant. First, in 1980, Romance Writers of America (RWA) was founded.

This account appears to overlook Peter Mann's 1969 survey of Mills & Boon readers (unless any information about readers counts as "data about sales and distribution") and any analysis of the genre published during the 1970s, including Germaine Greer's scathing attack on it in The Female Eunuch and a variety of articles about Gothic romances. Schell also leaves unmentioned the rather important fact that

The Romantic Novelists’ Association was set up in 1960 [...].

They wanted respect for their genre. In her inaugural address, Miss Robins said that although romantic novels, according to the libraries, gave the most pleasure to the most people, the writers almost had to apologise for what they did. This had to stop. (Romantic Novelists' Association)

Schell then positions Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women (a volume of essays by romance writers which was edited by Jayne Ann Krentz) as "a multifaceted rebuttal of feminist criticism" of the sort to be found in Tania Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance. At the heart of that rebuttal is the

Alpha Hero. In an essay entitled “Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness,” Krentz described alpha males as “the tough, hard-edged, tormented heroes … at the heart of the vast majority of bestselling romance novels.… These are the heroes who carry off the heroines in historical romances. These are the heroes feminist critics despise” (Krentz 1992b, 108–9). Note that Krentz defined the Alpha Hero in two contexts: as he related to romance novels and to feminist critics. Insofar as he would come to be used as the fact that definitively rebutted feminist criticism, the Alpha Hero was indeed the feminist critics’ enemy. She did not take credit for naming this hero, but suggested merely that he was “what has come to be known in the trade as the alpha male” (1992b, 107). In another chapter, Laura Kinsale cited Krentz as the source of the term and quoted an earlier definition of the alpha-male hero: the “retrograde, old-fashioned, macho, hard-edged man” (1992, 39). Kathleen Gilles Seidel, in the same volume, offered a slightly different origin story: “The term ‘alpha male’ came into use, I believe, because some authors were engaged in a struggle with editors about a certain type of hero and needed a vocabulary for the discussion” (1992, 178). Seidel liked the term in part because she saw it as “the only piece of jargon that has originated from the authors themselves” (1992, 178). None of these stories acknowledge the alpha male as a construct originating in a scientific community.

I'd like to quote Seidel in full and in context, because I believe she may be transmitting an unreliable fact. She writes that "what makes romance heroes romantic" is that "They surprise you, they unsettle you, they bring drama and excitement, but in the end they make you feel safe" (163). Her comments about the term "alpha male" appear in a footnote to that statement:

Which aspect of the hero is emphasized the most determines whether he is an "alpha male" or a "wimp." What interests me about this distinction is that, so far as I know, this is the only piece of jargon that has originated from the authors themselves, even though we are a close-knit community with astonishing lines of communication.
I view this lack of jargon as evidence of two things. First is the absolute sincerity with which we view our books. Glib, dismissive jargon does not feel appropriate. Second is that we view each book as unique. What matters to us is how each book differs from the others, something that jargon does not account for.
The term "alpha male" came into use, I believe, because some authors were engaged in a struggle with editors about a certain type of hero and needed a vocabulary for the discussion. (178)

There is, however, an alternative story of the romance genre's adoption of the term "alpha" which both challenges the view that it "originated from the authors themselves" and "acknowledge[s] the alpha male as a construct originating in a scientific community":

Although the modern Mills & Boon romance, tied to a specific formula, did not yet exist in the 1930s, it is apparent that Charles Boon did set down a few ground rules for his authors. Some have survived, and were passed down through the years in the firm by two names: 'Lubbock's Law' and 'the Alphaman'. Both still have an impact today. [...] The 'Alphaman' was based on what Alan Boon referred to as a 'law of nature': that the female of any species will be most intensely attracted to the strongest male of the species, or the Alpha. (McAleer 149-150)

In an earlier essay by McAleer we find the alpha male contrasted with the "wimp" (but note the lack of reference to Charles Boon):

The two main company guidelines for writers (still in use today) are called 'Lubbock's Law' and The Alphaman'. Lubbock's Law endorses the views of the literary critic Percy Lubbock, who argued that stories should be written from the heroine's point of view; that would promote reader identification and increase suspense and interest accordingly. The Alphaman', according to the Boon brothers, is based upon a 'law of nature': that is, the female of any species will always be most intensely attracted to the strongest male of the species, the alpha. In other words, the hero must be absolutely top-notch and unique. The wimp type doesn't work. Women don't want an honest Joe,' Alan Boon said. (275)

If McAleer's facts are correct, then it begins to seem unlikely that Krentz was, as Schell suggests, "the author who introduced the term 'alpha male' to the romance community" and Schell would also be incorrect in stating that "Feminist literary criticism was the original goad that prompted romance writers to seek alternative explanations of romance novels’ appeal, and, via a somewhat indirect path, led to their discovery of the Alpha Hero." Of course, it might be that American romance authors adopted the term entirely independently of any input from the Boons and the editors who'd worked for them at Mills & Boon. It's possible, I suppose, since for quite a long time after Harlequin took over Mills & Boon the company didn't have many US authors.

An earlier date for the adoption of the term "alpha" (whether in the form "Alphaman," "alpha male" or "alpha hero") to describe a particular type of romance hero would not invalidate Schell's facts about the spread of the term in the US around the time of the publication of Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, nor its definition in that context. The Boons' version(s) of the Alphaman, based on their belief that the "laws of nature" which apply to many species of animals also apply to humans, may have differed from the alpha males created by romance authors who, Schell suggests, were influenced by evolutionary psychology, as evidenced by their references to 'cave days' and 'the ancestral hunter' in descriptions of the alpha hero. On the other hand, even if they weren't aware of Boon's term for him, it seems impossible that US authors could have remained unaware of the Mills & Boon "Alphaman" as a character type, since Harlequin had been publishing romances edited in in the UK by Mills & Boon for some considerable time before the publication of Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women.

Schell's focus on evolutionary psychology as the unmentioned source of the "alpha" hero, and her assumption that he emerged in response to feminist criticism of the genre, leads her to conclude that

once the battle with academic feminism was over, there simply was not as much need for the facts about sexual strategies. Even as the animal behaviour model gained ascendancy in American popular culture, the Alpha Hero’s star began to fade within the romance writing community.

and

No longer a staple in mainstream romance, the Alpha Hero survives primarily in the paranormal subgenre, in which, in his dual role of monster and lover, there is no doubt that he is a fantasy character and not a fact.

I suspect that many romance authors and readers would be rather surprised to learn that alpha heroes survive "primarily in the paranormal subgenre." Of course, it depends on how one defines the "alpha" hero. If one assumes an "alpha" hero must be based on cavemen and male hunter-gatherers, then perhaps that's true. But if the term "alpha" is being used primarily as the opposite of "wimp" (i.e. "beta"), or as a shorthand for a range of qualities which make him "absolutely top-notch and unique" then there is room for the term itself to continue to have relevance, even as the heroes to which it refers change over the decades.

I have the feeling, though, that Schell's real interest is in the "facts" of evolutionary psychology, and all the preceding facts (both reliable and otherwise) about the romance genre are given in order to provide background for her analysis of the ways in which evolutionary psychologists have attempted to use the romance genre as proof that their theories are correct:

the truth status of the Alpha Hero facts for evolutionary psychology is based on the facts’ freedom from the influence of human culture. If instead it was clearly understood that the romance community had adopted and perpetuated the Alpha Hero facts, then the heroes of romance novels might cease to embody the facts. The novels would no longer look like “a window into our natural preferences” (Salmon 245) – that is, a clear, transparent, unmediated view of our true selves, untainted by culture. Even if the Alpha Hero facts could survive, they would be messier, equivocal facts, tainted with human intent.

If it was the Boons, rather than Krentz, who popularised the concept of the "alpha" hero, Schell's case is perhaps even stronger, since McAleer provides clear evidence of the ways in which the Boons provided their authors with considerable editorial direction.

Has anyone else got some reliable facts about when or how the term "alpha" came to be used to describe romance heroes? Has the meaning of the term changed over time? And do you think the alpha hero himself is in decline, or has he just evolved quite quickly since the 1980s?
---------

• McAleer, Joseph. "Scenes from Love and Marriage: Mills and Boon and the Popular Publishing Industry in Britain, 1908-1950." Twentieth Century British History 1.3 (1990): 264-288.
• McAleer, Joseph. Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
• Morgan, Mary S. "Travelling Facts." How Well Do "Facts" Travel?: The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge. Ed. Peter Howlett and Mary S. Morgan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. [Quotations from unofficial version available here (pdf).]
• Schell, Heather. "The Love Life of a Fact." How Well Do "Facts" Travel?: The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge. Ed. Peter Howlett and Mary S. Morgan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. [Quotations from unofficial copy available here (doc).]
• Seidel, Kathleen Gilles. "Judge Me by the Joy I Bring." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 1992. 159-179.

1 I also find the following description of single-title romances rather unsatisfactory: "Single-title novels can be longer, sometimes offering Dickensian casts and plots that span generations." It seems to me that if romantic novels contain plots (not simply "casts") which "span generations" they'd be classified as romantic sagas rather than as romances, since romances focus on a central romantic relationship (although they may also depict secondary romantic relationships between other characters).

The image illustrating human evolution came from Wikimedia Commons.

Call for Papers--Deadline Extended!

Eric Selinger

If you're reading this, you may already have heard about the upcoming 2010 Film & History Conference: Representations of Love in Film and Television, November 11-14, 2010. The deadline for submissions has been extended from 1 March 2010 (i.e., today) to 1 June, 2010, and since I've only gotten a couple of submissions so far, I must admit, I'm very glad to hear it!

The full list of panels can be found here. My own panel is on Sons of the Sheik: Global Perspectives on the Alpha Male in Love. I'm not a film scholar by training, so if you're interested in slipping out of your usual area of expertise to try something new, your proposal will fall on sympathetic ears. Also, the panel is open to talks about movies that play with or entirely subvert the "alpha male" concept, as you'll see from the trailer above and the description below. (The links that Laura added are still embedded--you can use them to see the range of films I have in mind.)

Masterful, confident, erotically charged, the “Alpha Male” has been a cinematic icon from Rudolph Valentino’s Sheik Ahmed ben Hassan (The Sheik, 1921) to Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown (1999) and Hritik Roshan’s elusive criminal, “Mr. A” (Dhoom 2, 2006). As the hero in romantic films, this ideal of masculinity has proven enduringly popular with both male and female viewers, even as successive waves of feminism, in the West and around the globe, have challenged the sexual politics he implies.

How do representations of the Alpha Male in love differ across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries? How have they changed across the past century, responding to historically- and regionally-specific shifts in gender roles and ideals? What happens to the Alpha Male hero when he stars in a romantic comedy, as opposed to a drama or melodrama? How much can we use this iconic figure to track the power of the female gaze or women’s desires, as has been done with the Alpha Male hero of popular romance fiction, given the fact that men continue to predominate in the writing and direction of the films (as opposed to the overwhelmingly female authorship and audience for romance novels)?

This area, comprising multiple panels, welcomes papers and panel proposals that examine all forms and genres of films featuring “Alpha” protagonists in love, as well as films which challenge, revise, or subvert the conventions surrounding this character. Possibilities include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Sheiks, Captains, Emperors, (The Sheik, Persuasion, Jodhaa Akbar)

• Alpha Male meets Alpha Female (The Thomas Crown Affair [1999], Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)

• Austen’s Alpha: Darcy and his Descendants (Pride and Prejudice)

• Sink Me! He’s an Alpha in Disguise! (The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro)

• Alpha / Beta Reversals and Alter-Egos (Rab Ne Bana di Jodi, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na)

• Suspicious Minds: the Alpha Criminal and Detective (Devil in a Blue Dress, The Big Sleep, Breathless)

• Athlete Alphas (Love & Basketball, Bull Durham)

• Alpha Lovers in Space (Han Solo, James T. Kirk)

• You’ve Got Male: Alphas in “Chick Flicks”

Please send your 200-word proposal by e-mail to the area chair:

Eric Murphy Selinger
Associate Professor
Dept. of English
DePaul University
802 West Belden Ave.
Chicago, IL 60614
eselinge@depaul.edu (email submissions preferred) Panel proposals for up to four presenters are also welcome, but each presenter must submit his or her own paper proposal.

Links: Authors and Alphas

Laura Vivanco

I've been following the discussion at Dear Author which was started by Robin, who posed the question "Do authors have ethical responsibilities beyond beyond the book?" She began by asking

Straight off the top of your head, do you think that authors have any ethical or moral responsibilities beyond the book?

I’m guessing that the vast majority of you answered this question the same way I did for a long time, with a fully articulated, deeply resounding NO.

Janine, one of her co-bloggers at Dear Author, responded

Wow. I have to say these opening paragraphs took me aback, because my answer would have been a deeply resounding YES. Authors have the same ethical and moral responsibilities that all other human beings have, no more, no less, so why on earth would their moral and ethical responsiblities begin and end with their books? I can’t see why they should get a free pass from the responsibility to treat others fairly.

and Laura Kinsale stated that "I do think hard about the things I believe are important, but I don’t owe it to anyone but myself."

By coincidence, Rosy Thornton's just posted about the topic too:

freedom of expression means that an author is free to write about whatever characters she chooses, and to endow them with whatever views and attitudes she wishes. Besides which, we have to be true to our characters, don’t we? We have to reflect the world as it exists. A novel is not a soapbox.

But my personal version of the ‘ethics of care’ tells me that the flipside of freedom of expression is responsibility for what we choose to express; that as writers we have a duty to think about the potential impact of our work on those who read it. Societal attitudes are influenced not only by upbringing, family, friends and workmates, and by the news media, but also by the ambient culture: by film and television, and by the books we read.

That's just an excerpt of her post, and if you're interested in the issue, I'd encourage you to read it in full.

Rosy mentions that "I would not write a moody 'alpha' hero who is mean and even cruel but whose meanness is portrayed in a sexy light," but they're the subject of a panel that Eric will be chairing at the 2010 Film & History Conference: Representations of Love in Film and Television, November 11-14, 2010. The Calls for Papers are out, and the deadline for submissions is 1 March 2010. The full list of panels can be found here. Eric's panel is on Sons of the Sheik: Global Perspectives on the Alpha Male in Love. Here's a bit more about it [I've added the links. Where there was more than one film with the same title, the link is to a list]:

Masterful, confident, erotically charged, the “Alpha Male” has been a cinematic icon from Rudolph Valentino’s Sheik Ahmed ben Hassan (The Sheik, 1921) to Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown (1999) and Hritik Roshan’s elusive criminal, “Mr. A” (Dhoom 2, 2006). As the hero in romantic films, this ideal of masculinity has proven enduringly popular with both male and female viewers, even as successive waves of feminism, in the West and around the globe, have challenged the sexual politics he implies.

How do representations of the Alpha Male in love differ across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries? How have they changed across the past century, responding to historically- and regionally-specific shifts in gender roles and ideals? What happens to the Alpha Male hero when he stars in a romantic comedy, as opposed to a drama or melodrama? How much can we use this iconic figure to track the power of the female gaze or women’s desires, as has been done with the Alpha Male hero of popular romance fiction, given the fact that men continue to predominate in the writing and direction of the films (as opposed to the overwhelmingly female authorship and audience for romance novels)?

This area, comprising multiple panels, welcomes papers and panel proposals that examine all forms and genres of films featuring “Alpha” protagonists in love, as well as films which challenge, revise, or subvert the conventions surrounding this character. Possibilities include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Sheiks, Captains, Emperors, (The Sheik, Persuasion, Jodhaa Akbar)

• Alpha Male meets Alpha Female (The Thomas Crown Affair [1999], Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)

• Austen’s Alpha: Darcy and his Descendants (Pride and Prejudice)

• Sink Me! He’s an Alpha in Disguise! (The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro)

• Alpha / Beta Reversals and Alter-Egos (Rab Ne Bana di Jodi, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na)

• Suspicious Minds: the Alpha Criminal and Detective (Devil in a Blue Dress, The Big Sleep, Breathless)

• Athlete Alphas (Love & Basketball, Bull Durham)

• Alpha Lovers in Space (Han Solo, James T. Kirk)

• You’ve Got Male: Alphas in “Chick Flicks”

Please send your 200-word proposal by e-mail to the area chair:

Eric Murphy Selinger
Associate Professor
Dept. of English
DePaul University
802 West Belden Ave.
Chicago, IL 60614
eselinge@depaul.edu (email submissions preferred)

Panel proposals for up to four presenters are also welcome, but each presenter must submit his or her own paper proposal.

----
The photo of the cover of Marquis W. Child and Douglass Cater's Ethics in a Business Society was taken by cdrummbks and was made available at Flickr under a Creative Commons licence.

Come Now and Look at Me

Laura Vivanco

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

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

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

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

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

And here's a similar example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The image of the eye is from Wikimedia Commons.

Women Writing Men Doing Men

After the reference to Blur in my last post, I couldn't resist that title. Anyway, here's another call for papers and some of my thoughts on the topic:

Writing Across the Gender Boundary: SAMLA Women's Studies Panel

Throughout literary history writers have explored the perspectives of genders other than their own. This panel will explore works by both male and female writers who choose to cross the gender boundary in their writing and the effects of such border crossings. Writers might be viewed as crossing gender boundaries when they construct first person narratives of genders other than their own or when they focus on the experiences or worldview of another gender through third person perspectives or on the stage. Gender crossings can also be diversely defined as shifting from male to female or female to male, as well as explorations of queer, heterosexual, or trans genders from writers who might identify otherwise.

The closing date for proposals is 1 March 2007 and further details are available here.

Sarah posted a while ago about the fact that 'male/male erotica (or m/m/f) is certainly the growth industry in the online erotica publishing houses' and she suggested that the reason why straight women might 'be attracted to gay male romance and/or gay male sex' is

Because, if, as I argue in my article, romances are actually about watching the hero figure out and confess his feelings, if they're about watching him move from the "masculine economy of use" to the "feminine economy of exchange," then watching TWO men have to figure it out for and with each other is more than twice as wonderful as watching one man figure it out for and with a woman

I recently came across some of Jules Jones' work. Jules Jones is a woman, according to the biography at the Romance Wiki, and she writes 'science fiction and erotic romance, mostly with m/m themes. Much of her work is cross-genre, being science fiction or fantasy with a strong romance element'. These particular stories are really erotica rather than erotic romance, because they're too short to show the full development of a relationship, but they hint at further possibilities. They're also very explicit, so anyone likely to be offended or upset by explicit descriptions of gay sex shouldn't click on the links.

Lord and Master is a short story about the boss/secretary relationship, except there's a twist, because usually the secretary isn't male. The differences are stated by the narrator:

Yes, I'm a man, fulfilling the functions normally fulfilled by a woman. I sit here, looking decorative, smiling nicely at people who treat me like dirt because I'm only a secretary. It's worth it, because I fulfill all the traditional functions of that secretary, including that one. And let me tell you, I enjoy working for a man who has the balls to install a pretty little thing as his personal assistant and tell the world to think of it what they may. And I really enjoy working for a man who has the power to get away with it. And I'm better off than my female counterparts down the hall, because I don't harbor dreams of my boss marrying me [...]. He can't, not unless the laws change.

The boss is an alpha male, as is one of the characters discussed in Sarah's post: 'He's alpha male, with an aura of casual, unselfconscious power. He's king of the hill, and he knows it, and he doesn't feel the need to make an issue of it, make everyone else acknowledge it. He just is.' And yet, in line with Sarah's observation, there's a shift from 'the "masculine economy of use"'. The secretary and boss are, despite the poignant reference to the lack of a possibility of the most traditional sort of HEA, not immune from heading towards 'the "feminine economy of exchange"': the secretary can't help but wonder how his boss feels about him: 'But there's one thing I don't know, have never asked. Does he think about me when he's at home, lying in his bed?'. The question isn't answered in this story, but it may well be in Jules Jones' forthcoming novel with the same title.

In One Size Fits All the characters tentatively move towards emotional intimacy. It reminds me of something I said a while ago, having read some short erotic romance stories online: 'In the erotic romances acceptance of, and enthusiastic participation in, the other's fantasies is an indication not just of sexual broadmindedness and physical compatibility, but of emotional connection and trust.' Again, this is a story which contains explicit descriptions of gay sex, but the ending is 'optimistic', so it's closer to romance than the previous short story.

It begins when

Gavin checked the corridor one last time, and, satisfied that it was clear, slipped inside the bedroom. It would never do if Hugh caught him — Hugh had a strong sense of privacy, to the point of preferring to go to Gavin's place rather than his own. But since he'd given Gavin a key, and agreed to meet here tonight . . .

I don't want to spoil the story, but that 'key' isn't just a necessary tool to open a door: it also functions metaphorically as a key to greater emotional intimacy. It raises questions about Hugh's feelings and intentions in giving Gavin the key. Is Gavin looking at things Hugh would rather he didn't see? Or is Hugh hoping that Gavin will explore, so that Hugh doesn't have to put his desires and needs into words?

The Romance Genre and Second and Third Wave Feminism

Elizabeth Bevarly posted yesterday about what it was like to be a girl coming of age in America in the 1970s. Particularly relevant to the romance genre was the message she, and many of her peers, received,

that if we wanted to reach our fullest potential, if we wanted to be strong, independent women, we had to do it ALONE. Movies like “An Unmarried Woman” and “My Brilliant Career” (both of which I loved) told us in no uncertain terms that we had to make a choice: Either fall in love and remain personally unfulfilled forever, or live a solitary life and find complete personal satisfaction.

She adds (in a comment attached to the original post) that: 'I’ve identified myself as a feminist since I learned what the word meant. I still consider myself such. But I think that’s the one place where the women’s movement went wrong. They should have told us, “Hey, we’re all equals now, so let’s work together to achieve great things.”'

Jenny Crusie's written about what it was like to grow up in an earlier decade:

I graduated from high school in the sixties. [...] The madness that defined women's lives back then was based on four Big Lies:

1. A woman wasn't a real woman until she was married.
2. A woman had to distort herself and deny her own identity in order to catch a man to marry. (Remember girdles, spike heels, inane laughter, playing dumb, and flunking math?)
3. Any husband was better than no husband.
4. Staying in a bad marriage was better than divorce because God forbid a woman should be unmarried again once she'd finally achieved the goal.

In many ways, the attitude that Elizabeth Bevarly describes was part of the backlash against the assumptions about women and marriage that Crusie describes. So what happened next? Well, I think that's where Third Wave feminism comes in. It's impossible to give a strict definition of Third Wave feminism, just as it's not possible to give a single definition of Second Wave feminism. Each is complex and comes in many different varieties, because as Jane Freedman, in her introduction to feminism makes clear, there is a huge diversity of thought covered by the term ‘feminism’:

as soon as you attempt to analyse all that has been spoken and written in the name of feminism, it becomes clear that this is not one unitary concept, but instead a diverse and multifaceted grouping of ideas, and indeed actions. [...] Any attempt to provide a baseline definition of a common basis of all feminisms may start with the assertion that feminisms concern themselves with women’s inferior position in society and with discrimination encountered by women because of their sex. Furthermore, one could argue that all feminists call for changes in the social, economic, political or cultural order, to reduce and eventually overcome this discrimination against women. Beyond these general assertions, however, it is difficult to come up with any other ‘common ground’ between the different strands of feminism. (2001: 1)

Broadly speaking,

If the First Wave comprised women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the Second Wave gave us Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Shirley Chisholm, then the Third Wave includes young women who've grown up with the ideas of feminism but who are trying to define what it means for them now.(Baumgardner and Richards)

If you're looking for a quick (and therefore not very nuanced) breakdown of some of the differences between the Second and Third Waves you could look at this article by Alana Wingfoot. Third Wave feminists are often, I think, more concerned with sexism than they are with 'women's rights'. It's not that Third Wavers don't care about the rights gained by the struggles of Second Wave feminists, more that many Third Wavers take them as a given. My own favourite definition of feminism is by bell hooks: ‘Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression’ (2000: viii). As she makes clear, this includes the sexist stereotypes which tell men what is ‘manly’, just as much as the sexist stereotypes which tell women what they must be and do in order to be considered ‘womanly’. Such stereotypes ignore, or seek to disguise, the huge diversity of interests and abilities among men and women. [In earlier posts I've discussed gender and 'stereotype threat' as well as gender and male authors of romance novels.]

These changes within society and within feminism have affected both the contents of romance novels (many romance novelists, for example, consider themselves feminists) and the way that the romance genre is perceived by academics. As Kay Mussell observed in 1997,

Twenty or so years ago, when academic feminists first became interested in the romance genre, there was wider agreement among feminists themselves on what the feminist agenda should be - and conventional romantic relationships, widely assumed to be discriminatory toward women, were not part of it. Thus romances were seen as threatening to female autonomy. But as feminism has matured - and as feminist scholars have come to recognize a broader range of female experience - some scholars have challenged those earlier notions in productive ways.

Mussell pinpoints unease with and suspicion of 'conventional romantic relationships' as the source of much of the feminist criticism of the romance genre. As I mentioned in an earlier post, many (particularly First and Second Wave) feminists have believed that marriage is inherently patriarchal and oppressive to women, and in the romance genre, the Happy Ever After ending usually involves marriage. However, as I also mentioned in that earlier post, not all feminists believe that marriage and feminism are incompatible and, as one Third Waver says about her wedding:

the second wave of feminism is bedrock to us. Wedding traditions carry the vestiges of male dominance, but they also have beauty and power that I feel entitled to. Two rings are better than none. The white dress signifies new life, not virginity. Sexual commitment enriches our pleasure in each other. We both kept our names. Two glasses broke under two heels at the ceremony's conclusion, claiming our cultural tradition but discarding the asymmetry. We took what we wanted from tradition and left the rest.

The feminist critique wasn't just about the institution of marriage, though, it was also about the power imbalances and gender expectations which shaped heterosexual relationships:

Romantic love as most people understand it in patriarchal culture [...] supported the notion that one could do anything in the name of love: beat people, restrict their movements, even kill them and call it a “crime of passion”, plead “I loved her so much I had to kill her.” Love in patriarchal culture was linked to notions of possession [...] Within patriarchy heterosexist bonds were formed on the basis that women being the gender in touch with caring emotions would give men love, and in return men, being in touch with power and aggression, would provide and protect. Yet in so many cases in heterosexual families men did not respond to care: instead they were tyrants who used their power unjustly to coerce and control. (hooks, 2000: 101)

Romance authors and readers were forcibly confronted with these issues in 1999 when:

The close-knit romance writers' community was devastated by the news of Richards-Akers' murder. It was the third such death by domestic violence among romance writers in the past three years (novelists Pamela Macaluso and Ann Wassall were also shot by their husbands in 1997 and 1996) (Salon, 1999)

When, in 1992, Mary Jo Putney described the appeal of the romance genre, her description contained many of the words which hooks used to criticise heterosexual relationships under patriarchy, and these are aspects of the genre which came under intense scrutiny in the aftermath of Richards-Akers’ murder, as discussed in the Salon article. This, though, is what Putney had to say in 1992:

Often the dark hero is obsessed with the heroine, driven by a primitive passion to possess her in every sense of the word. An aura of potential – and sometimes actual – violence hovers over such books. As Jayne Ann Krentz says, the male protagonist of a romance is often both hero and villain, and the heroine’s task and triumph is to civilize him (1992: 100)

She adds that:

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

Unfortunately not all readers make this distinction between fantasy and reality. One feminist reader of romances wrote that:

I knew from the time I was 11 and got my hands on Victoria Holt's House of a Thousand Lanterns exactly what I wanted in a man: he had to be a rake, but not just any rake-oh no. He had to be a rake ready to settle down, a rake I could reform. He would meet me and all the many women he'd known before would fade into the past as he became swept away by my purity and goodness.

I didn't explicitly understand that romance novels were shaping me, but looking back the pattern is clear. I tried to be pure; I tried really hard. To little avail, but still I tried. And I found the worst men I could possibly find. Gorgeous and horrible, men who treated women like objects or angels of mercy but who never, as I learned only too late, had any intention of reforming.

[...] I could not break free from the stories about gender and romance those novels had embedded in my mind. Even when I knew they were unrealistic and sexist, still they stayed with me, as part of me, shaping who I looked to as attractive and who I looked past as unattractive.

One 2001 study of women in violent relationships, conducted by Dr Julia Wood found that:

People commonly use stories to make sense of their lives, placing themselves within those stories, said Wood: "Some of the images of men and women in these romance novels are entirely consistent with the dynamics of violent relationships."

Even if Prince Charming doesn’t hit, he often shares plenty of characteristics with the real-life man who does, Wood wrote: "Prince Charming is strong, powerful, sure of himself and commanding … control, domination and even violence fit equally well with Prince Charming and the Prince of Darkness. Women who seek to sustain a relationship that is fraught with chaos have available to them culturally legitimated narratives that reconcile what is irreconcilable, make sense of what is not sensible. These narratives … simultaneously license women's oppression."

A recently published book on rape law in Australia compares and contrasts these laws with the situations described in romance novels and, according to one reviewer :

For Larcombe, the critical link between rape scripts in law and romance fiction is the way romance fiction reproduces ‘gender hierarchy and a fiction of vulnerable feminine subjectivity’ (6). Larcombe explores the writing, production, distribution and content of Harlequin Mills and Boon fiction in Australia, arguing that love is the critical element that allows for the modification of ‘the hero’s desires’ the renegotiation of the ‘terms of heterosexual exchange’ (34). Despite responsiveness ‘to readers’ desires and preferences and to changes in women’s social and familial roles’ (138), these fictions continue to represent the negotiation of that heterosexual exchange as ‘the ultimate guarantor of feminine satisfaction’ (138). (Maher 2005)

Clearly there are many, many romance readers who do not find their romance reading problematic in the ways described above, and, in addition, it could be argued that romance has changed significantly over the past few decades. There are huge numbers of romances which do not feature abusive/possessive heroes. It nonetheless seems that some romances do tell stories which justify, or can be used to justify, the oppression of women, and which may be damaging for readers who see these novels as recipes for how to find a successful mate. Perhaps the way the alpha male has become more frequent in paranormal romances, where he not infrequently makes an appearance as a werewolf or vampire will help to signal more clearly the difference between the fantasy and reality.

In my next post I'm planning to take a look at Elizabeth Bevarly's The Thing About Men, to see what it has to tell us about gender and relationships.

----

• Freedman, Jane, 2001. Feminism (Buckingham: Open University Press). Sample chapter available as a pdf document here.
• hooks, bell, 2000. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press)
• Maher, JaneMaree, 2005. ‘Scripts of Rape’, review of Wendy Larcombe’s Compelling Engagements: Feminism, Rape Law and Romance Fiction (Sydney: The Federation Press, 2005). Hecate’s Australian Women’s Book Review, 17.2.
  
• Putney, Mary Jo, 1992: ‘Welcome to the Dark Side’, in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, ed. Jayne Ann Krentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 99-105.

Jessica Hart - Mistletoe Marriage

Jessica Hart's Contracted: Corporate Wife won the Romantic Novelists' Association Romance Award 2006 and her Christmas Eve Marriage won a RITA in 2005, in the Best Traditional Romance category.

Mistletoe Marriage has not, as far as I know, won any awards; the one reader review at Amazon.com is lukewarm, describing it as 'pretty standard fare for a Harlequin romance', while at the Romantic Times the reviewer's final comment that the novel 'triumphs over its oft-used premise, finding some lovely, genuine emotional levels' may be read either as damning with faint praise or as an accurate summary of the novel's main strengths. In my opinion Hart's novel makes use of traditional plot and character contrasts in ways which query some of those traditions, much as Austen uses contrasts in Sense and Sensibility to critique aspects of Romanticism, or, in Emma, contrasts the furtive romance between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, with the long-standing friendship, which changes to romantic love, between Emma and Mr Knightley. Among the fairytales I know, Mistletoe Marriage reminds me of the story of Snow White and Rose Red. In the version told by the Brothers Grimm there are two sisters:

one was called Snow-white and the other Rose-red. They were as good and happy, as busy and cheerful, as ever two children in the world were, only Snow-white was more quiet and gentle than Rose-red. Rose-red liked better to run about in the meadows and fields seeking flowers and catching butterflies [...] The two children were so fond of each other that they always held each other by the hand when they went out together, and when Snow-white said, “We will not leave each other,” Rose-red answered, “Never so long as we live,” and their mother would add, “What one has she must share with the other.”

Sophie, the heroine of Mistletoe Marriage reminds me of Rose-red:

Sophie's hair [...] was a bit like her personality - wildly curling and unruly [...] At first glance her hair was a dull brown, but if you looked closely you could see that there were other colours in there too: gold and copper and bronze where it caught the light.
The quirkiness of Sophie's personality was reflected in her face. Vivid, rather than strictly pretty (2005: 7)

Like Rose-red, Sophie loves the countryside, whereas her sister Melissa, 'In spite of growing up on a farm [...] had never been a great one for getting her hands dirty' (2005: 26) . Melissa is more like Snow-white: 'She was sweet and fragile and helpless, and few men were immune to her appeal' (2005: 14) with 'her hair like spun gold and her violet eyes and that smile that made the sun come out' (2005: 26). These sisters are also devoted to each other: Sophie makes a 'sacrifice' that 'few sisters would have made' (2005: 16), breaking off her engagement to Nick when she realises that Nick and Melissa have fallen in love, and Melissa truly appreciates this and 'was [...] bound up in guilt about what she called 'stealing' Nick' (2005: 53).

In the fairytale the sisters have a playmate, who also calls himself their lover, and who is a bear:

They tugged his hair with their hands, put their feet upon his back and rolled him about, or they took a hazel-switch and beat him, and when he growled they laughed. But the bear took it all in good part, only, when they were too rough, he called out,

“Leave me alive, children,
“Snowy-white, Rosy-red,
Will you beat your lover dead?”

The bear first makes his appearance in the winter, the season in which Mistletoe Marriage is set. Bram, the hero of Mistletoe Marriage gives hugs which are

incredibly comforting [...] when he held you enclosed in those powerful arms you felt safe and secure, and insensibly steadied. He didn't need to say a thing. You could just cling to his strong, solid body and feel the slow, calm beat of his heart and somehow let yourself believe that everything would be all right (2005: 5-6)

Bram, like the bear, is not an exotic creature: 'He had never lain on a tropical beach under a leaning coconut palm and he didn't want to. Give him a hillside and a gorse bush in bloom any day' (2005: 19). His name, 'Bram', is, therefore extemely appropriate since according to one baby-naming website the name is 'of Scottish, Irish and Gaelic origin, and its meaning is "bramble; a thicket of wild gorse'.

In the fairytale the two sisters encounter a very grumpy dwarf, who expects them to rescue him, but who gives them no thanks for their efforts. Finally the bear kills the dwarf:

“I am a King’s son,” he said, “and I was bewitched by that wicked dwarf, who had stolen my treasures; I have had to run about the forest as a savage bear until I was freed by his death. Now he has got his well-deserved punishment.” Snow-white was married to him, and Rose-red to his brother

Bram was once engaged to Melissa, but the engagement was broken off. What Sophie and Bram come to realise is that a bear is really much, much better off with a woman who loves the countryside, and what Sophie needs to learn is that beneath the surface of her beloved friend the bear is an extremely attractive man. I'm afraid that Melissa, in Jessica Hart's story, falls in love with someone who is more like the dwarf, but disguised as a prince, and while both of the sisters fall in love with him, Sophie (whose name means 'wisdom') is the one who recognises Nick for what he is: a grumpy, self-centered man who selfishly puts others to great trouble (at one point in the story he needs to be rescued, rather like the dwarf in the fairytale). Bram metaphorically 'kills' the dwarf when Sophie's love for Nick dies.

Jennifer Crusie has said that romance is 'a genre that relies heavily on the tradition of the tales even while requiring their revision for reader satisfaction' (This Is Not Your Mother's Cinderella: The Romance Novel As Feminist Fairy Tale) and on this blog Sandra has examined the way in which 'romance fiction employs various elements of fairy tales'. It seems to me that even if Jessica Hart was not deliberately re-writing the story of Snow-white and Rose-red, her novel can be read as a reworking of various elements that are common in fairytales (two sisters, prince in disguise, grumpy dwarf, marriage). Sophie's friend Ella says 'So what if it's not a fairy tale? Make your own fairy tale' (2005: 101), and that is what Jessica Hart does for Sophie, by reworking the fairytale and questioning many conventional ideas about what's romantic. Bram, for example, chooses a ruby engagement ring for Sophie, rather than a conventional diamond one. This reinforces the colour difference between Sophie (redish hair) and Melissa (blonde) in a way which changes the fairytale to suit Sophie:

It was perfect. Cinderella must have felt the same uncanny sense of rightness as the glass slipper had been slipped onto her foot. The ring sat on Sophie's hand as if it had been made for her finger. [...] 'It's different, isn't it? But that's what makes it special.'
'Like you.' (2005:116)

It is Melissa who has a beauty that in most fairytales would make her the heroine and, like fairytale heroines, 'it was hard to get past her beauty to the person underneath' (2005: 106): 'Melissa was someone to be adored, so fragile, so lovely, that you feared she might dissolve into a dream if you reached out for her' (2005: 112).* Nick is the epitome of tall, dark and handsome: 'Nick was a dream come true [...] with his good looks and his glamour and his smile that made her go weak at the knees' (2005: 97), he has 'dark good looks [...] daredevil arrogance' (2005: 126) and is 'Alpha man incarnate' (2005: 126). Nick and Melissa fall in love in the most romantic of ways: 'He saw Melissa. He took one look at her and fell [...] in love with her' (2005: 14) and 'Melissa fell in love for the first time when she saw Nick [...]. She looked completely bowled over. She couldn't take her eyes off him' (2005: 15). But, despite all this perfection and the way they seem to be the most romantic of couples, they are not the hero and heroine of this particular fairytale romance, and in fact there are shown to be problems in their marriage. Slowly, the illusion of perfection that surrounds them, and unquestioning acceptance of the conventional trappings of romance, are peeled away. Sophie compares Bram's common-sense proposal, made for practical reasons, across the kitchen table, with Nick's (prior to him meeting Melissa): 'Nick had arranged a romantic restaurant, candlelight, soft violins playing, even a rose... Didn't that indicate a lack of imagination on his part?' (2005: 97). Nick's choice of ring was equally conventional: Bram asks, 'disparagingly', 'I suppose Nick bought you a diamond?' and Sophie replies 'He did, as a matter of fact' (2005: 120). Nick later insists that diamonds are 'what a real engagement ring should be' (2005: 132), while Melissa realises how well the ruby ring suits Sophie. The point isn't that diamond rings, or proposals made over candle-lit dinners, are intrinsically unromantic, but rather that all of Nick's choices show a lack of thought about Sophie's personality. Instead of choosing what will appeal to her and showing his love and understanding of her through his choices, he simply follows convention.

Bram observes that 'You can make anyone believe anything if the trappings are right [...] It's all about appearances' (2005: 120), but Sophie isn't interested in appearances. She says that 'Surely the important thing is that Bram and I are marrying each other [...] The rest of the wedding stuff doesn't really matter, does it?' (2005: 103). Even though she says this before she falls in love with Bram, her feelings about the details of the wedding don't change. When she adds that 'I'm sure no one will care what our wedding is like' (2005: 103) her mother sighs at her 'naivety' and replies 'You've always been such a romantic' (2005: 103). Sophie, then, is a true romantic because her interest is not in the usual outward signs of love such as the white wedding dress or the diamond ring, which, because of their conventional nature, may not best suit the particular bride or her circumstances. Sophie would rather have a

dress so stunning that it had been given the window to itself. Cut low over the shoulders and close around the waist, it fell in a flurry of chiffon layers in gold and copper and bronze and red. It glowed like a flame, so warm and so vibrant you could almost hold out your hands and warm yourself on its richness and its colour.
Sophie took one look at the dress and fell in love with it. Now, there was a dress to be married in - a dress that would make you feel joyous and sexy and vibrant. Surely the way you should feel when you were getting married. (2005: 107)

The dress matches the colour of her hair, and again made me think of Sophie as Rose-red, the imagery used to describe it matches that used to describe Sophie's love for Bram, as well shall see. This dress suits Sophie's vibrant personality, and Bram recognises that and buys the dress for her. Sophie's mother, on the other hand, insists that Sophie 'look the perfect conventional bride' (2005: 109), so on her wedding day Sophie wears the dress her mother's chosen for her, but on that occasion she barely cares what she's wearing: she turns up wearing 'black rubber boots, liberally splattered with dried mud, that peeked out from beneath the ivory silk' (2005: 185). When her mother complains, Sophie declares 'I'll get married in my socks' (2005: 186), which is what she does. For Sophie, then, the conventional trappings of romance are hardly important at all: 'Bram was everything that she needed. Her best friend. Her lover. Her husband.' (2005: 186).

Sophie's feelings about Nick remind me of the discussions we've been having here about mystery, power imbalances, risk and the erotic:

Being with Nick had never felt safe [...] There had always been an element of risk in their relationship. [...] She had never been able to relax completely with Nick for fear that she would lose him. Even when she had been at her happiest it had felt as if she were on [the] point of exploding with the sheer intensity of it all. It had been a dangerous feeling, but a wonderful one too. Loving Nick had made her feel electric, alive. (2005: 25)

With Bram, however

This wasn't the desperate, dramatic love she had felt for Nick. In the very fibre of her being Sophie knew that her love for Bram was deeper, truer, stronger than that. Loving Nick had been a firework that had exploded in her world in dazzling colours, only to fizzle out without trace. [...] Loving Bram was a flame that had glowed steadily deep inside her, growing so slowly that she hadn't even noticed until it burned in every part of her (2005:161-162)

• Hart, Jessica, 2005. Mistletoe Marriage (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited).

* As Crusie notes, fairytale heroines tend to lack personality, though they are always beautiful:

Well, I had Sleeping Beauty, who got everything she'd ever wanted because she looked really good unconscious. Or there was Snow White, who got everything she'd ever wanted because she looked really good unconscious. Or there was Cinderella, who should be given some credit for staying awake through her whole story, but who got everything she'd ever wanted because she had really small feet.

The Evolution of the Alpha?

Over at Michelle Buonfiglio's Romance: By the Blog this week there was an interview with Stephanie Laurens. She said that:

one thing I’ve noticed over the past 15 years is that our alphas – just like us – have evolved. [...] It used to be that just getting the alpha to bend the knee to love was the culmination of the romance. Now the fantasy goes one step further – he must recognize the heroine as an equal partner and be prepared to negotiate in shaping their future lives.

I see this change in my own alphas, and those of many other major authors, presumably reflecting changing female perceptions of the ultimate romantic challenge. But what do you think?

Given that I tend to avoid alpha heroes, and I haven't been reading romances for long enough to detect trends, I can't say I've noticed this sort of change. Have you?

What did occur to me, though, when reading this comment was that maybe it's not just about 'the ultimate romantic challenge'. Maybe women's ideas and fantasies about the ideal relationship have been changing? Maybe there are fewer and fewer readers who would believe in a Happily Ever After for a relationship in which the hero will never treat the heroine 'as an equal partner', and isn't 'prepared to negotiate in shaping their future lives'? As Monica Jackson rather provocatively puts it:

How about rich, dominant Harlequin Presents type heroes who will go to any lengths to possess you? He throws you on the bed and pounds you into a glob of quivering flesh, begging for mercy. He glowers at any man who speaks to you, including the waiter, his smouldering eyes shooting jealous sparks and catching tablecloths in five star restaurants on fire.

Those suckers scare me and they should scare you too. I always wonder why those silly heroines don’t realize that Him Big He Man is going to beat their rear-ends the next time they fling their locks and act feisty? It gets old after a while, Mary Sue. Yeah, it’s gonna get old to him too and you’re gonna be picking your butt up off the floor. Want an ice pack for that black eye? Keep the abuse hotline number handy.

This doesn't describe the heroes in the recent Harlequin Presents I've read, but I think she does raise an important issue. Control and fierce possessiveness are now recognised as a feature of many abusive relationships. Over the past couple of decades people have become more aware of the issue of domestic violence:

In October 1987, the first Domestic Violence Awareness Month was observed. That same year the first national toll-free hotline was begun. In 1989 the first Domestic Violence Awareness Month Commemorative Legislation was passed by the U.S. Congress. (US Department of State).

The BBC, for example, gives a list of possible warning signs that indicate that a relationship might be abusive. They include

* He has very rigid ideas about the roles of men and women and can't / won't discuss it reasonably.
* His mood swings are so erratic that you find yourself constantly trying to assess his mood and only think in terms of his needs. A healthy relationship has give and take.
* He makes all the decisions in your relationship and ignores your needs or dismisses them as unimportant.

Does this describe some of the earlier alpha heroes? Is Laurens right that Alphas are changing? If so, is it because getting them to treat the heroine as an equal is more of a 'romantic challenge'? Or is it that fewer women can accept a happy ending that includes a relationship so unequal that the hero, confident in his own power and intelligence, believes that he always knows best and won't negotiate with the heroine?

Of Men and Monsters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perrault himself is really quite explicit about this:

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

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

Vampires too are associated with sexuality:

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

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

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

Dorothy Owens Malek says of the human alpha hero that:

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

and Mary Jo Putney adds that:

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

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

-----

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

More Musings on the Alpha

Radway writes that

in ideal romances the hero is constructed androgynously. Although the women were clearly taken with his spectacularly masculine phallic power, in their voluntary comments and in their revealed preferences they emphasized equally that his capacity for tenderness and attentive concern was essential as well. Chodorow’s theories seemed helpful because of their capacity to explain what I thought of as the twin objects of desire underlying romance reading, that is, the desire for the nurturance represented and promised by the preoedipal mother and for the power and autonomy associated with the oedipal father. (1991: 13-14)

I’m still trying to understand why the hero who shows a capacity for ‘tenderness’ is ‘androgynous’, since this seems to me to be suggesting that a ‘masculine’ man would have a very limited emotional range. It could be that the heroes described by Radway shade into the alpha 'she-male' as described by Robin who:

finds a lot of alpha heroes bullying and condescending. Or cleverly disguised she-males, aka the alphas who drag the heroine off to their isolated mountain cabin, where they proceed to draw her a bubble bath, cook her a gourmet dinner, wash every dish *by hand*, and then empathetically anticipate her every emotional and sexual desire.

Whatever sort of alpha she was describing, though, Radway got me thinking about mothers, psychology and the alpha hero. Then, in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women one of the authors suggests that ‘the romance maps out the first segment of the journey’ that ‘Everywoman’ makes ‘from ‘virgin to mother’ (Barlow 1992: 48) and the hero represents a ‘split-off portion of the heroine’s psyche which will be reintegrated at the end of the book’ (Barlow 1992: 49). Barlow associates the masculine traits within women with the male child:

If the heroine’s primary role in the myth serves to encourage us to cope with our fears, the hero’s is to provide us with the means of facing and accepting the angry, aggressive, sexually charged components of our personality that we have been taught to associate with masculinity. From childhood, males have more outlets for their aggressions – sports, horseplay, roughhousing [...] Females, on the other hand, are instructed from childhood to control, repress, or even split off their aggressive and erotic drives. (Barlow 1992: 49-50)

So, is the hero a way for the reader to get in touch with her inner child, while the heroine, in transition from virgin to mother, represents the reader’s inner adult and (perhaps in the epilogue or a sequel where she’s a supporting character) inner parent? It’s all beginning to sound rather like transactional analysis and I’m extremely hesitant to analyse the genre this way, since I’m trained in literary criticism, not psychology. But the way the hero is described, both by Radway and in Dangerous Men did make me conclude that alpha heroes often seem rather like toddlers.

I know there are different opinions about exactly what an 'alpha' hero is, and the ways in which he differs from 'beta' and 'gamma' heroes. Some people distinguish between the true alpha and the ‘alpha jerk’, just as they distinguish between the assertive, ‘kick-ass’ heroine, and the ‘too-stupid-to-live’, ‘feisty’ heroine. But with that qualification made, when I thought about the alpha hero, as discussed in Dangerous Men, the image that came to my mind was that of a toddler. Maybe that’s because in Dangerous Men there's a lot of mention of how the alpha is 'tamed', and I've heard a lot about Dr Christopher Green’s Toddler Taming. Nonetheless, the process of the alpha hero’s development, as described by Krentz in Dangerous Men, does, it seems to me, resemble that of bringing up a child:

the heroes in the books undergo a significant change in the course of the story, often being tamed or gentled or taught to love, but they do not lose any of their [...] strength in the process. [...] The journey of the novel, many writers say, is the civilization of the male. (1992: 6)

Toddlers, like alpha heroes, can be both immensely appealing and, simultaneously, incredibly irritating. They can be extremely strong, but they don’t always know how to control their own strength. While they may behave well in a very structured environment where they know the rules (such as nursery, or, in the case of the alpha hero his group of spies, or his band of warriors), they may act out in the presence of people from whom they want an emotional response. Sometimes they behave far, far, worse with the person they love most than they would with the people with whom they interact in the structured environment. In the case of the toddler, it’s not just because the staff are strict and the parents aren't (though this is sometimes the case), but because the child wants to know that he or she will still be loved and accepted despite bad behaviour, in other words, he or she wants to know that he/she is really and truly loved unconditionally. The parent has to show the child that he or she is indeed loved unconditionally, and that there’s no need to keep testing the boundaries.

Alpha heroes sometimes remind me of toddlers, still seeking the love of their ‘mother’ and attention-seeking by throwing tantrums and acting badly. In fact, quite a few of the alpha heroes really do have ‘mother issues’, with a mother who abandoned them, or some key female figure who has somehow betrayed them. They imprint on the heroine (rather like Konrad Lorenz's ducklings, though alpha heroes are a lot pickier about who they imprint on than a duckling is) and make her the focus of their desire, much as the toddler wants the love and approval of his/her parents. But, because the alpha hero wants to know he’s loved unconditionally (and he not infrequently doubts whether he’s actually deserving of love at all) he often mistreats the heroine. The heroine, like a good mother, forgives her toddler (though she may, like all mothers, feel irritation and occasionally slap or shout back). In the end the toddler, from being a terrible, almost monstrous, chaotic creature, is ‘tamed’. Just like the alpha hero.