The "Good Life" in the Romance Genre: A Philosophy or Religion of Love?

Laura Vivanco

Jessica at Read React Review is posing the question "What Does The Romance Genre Say About the Good Life?" She lists the following as aspects of "the view of the good life found in the romance genre":

• "romantic love"
• "material welfare"
• "physical and mental health"
• "physical beauty"
• "affiliation"
• "autonomy"
• "integrity"
• "moral virtue"

It's a thought-provoking list and one which will probably have people searching their minds for exceptions (whose very scarcity may end up proving Jessica's point). She also notes a few things which aren't on the list, including "spirituality." Catherine Roach, however, in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, suggests that the genre's view of love shares a template with "the Christian religious tradition":

The love of a good woman (or man, or God, or Son of God) heals all wounds, forgives all sins stretching back to the stain of original sin, resurrects a dead man, saves a lost soul, integrates false persona and true self, can make a real man—or real woman—out of you. The belief in the healing power of love is the central trope of erotic faith, western Christian culture, and romance novels alike. Whether the romance narrative borrows this belief from the Christian religious tradition or whether the latter takes this perennial belief and incorporates it as central to its theology is a chicken-and-egg question that need not concern us here. Either way, love, in various forms of agape, phile, and eros, is the central emotional dynamic in the life quest for meaning, happiness, and—the point on which I want to focus—the crucial category of wholeness or healing.

When the reader leaves the romance protagonists at the end of the novel, they have generally achieved what Jessica calls the "good life" or, in the terminology of Roach's argument,

an eschaton of love, commitment, completion, fulfillment, happiness, generational continuity, maturity, and hope. The happily-ever-after ending functions as a foundational psychological component of human wish-fulfillment: we yearn for this ideal paradise where we are loved, where the quest for wholeness is granted, where wounds are made right, where pleasure and security reign guaranteed.

Both Jessica and Roach's conclusions are based on generalisations, but it seems to me that those generalisations are nonetheless relatively accurate descriptions of a high proportion of the genre. If any of those conclusions seem at all troubling, perhaps the reasons why can be discussed at Read React Review and JPRS.

Well, thanks for letting me know...

Laura Vivanco

Sometimes, I get the impression the author is trying to embed what she thinks is a nugget of worldly wisdom into a novel. Unfortunately, I'm not always grateful for those nuggets. How do you feel about this description of one heroine's mother, for example?

Laura Stanford was not much like her daughter. Although they were of a similar height and build, Laura's hair was brown and undistinguished, and now she wore it dragged into a rather severe knot which added years to her age. She wore horn rimmed spectacles, too, and looked every inch the university lecturer she was. Tamsyn had sometimes wondered whether it was her mother's lack of femininity which had driven her father into the arms of a woman who hadn't an original thought in her head. She couldn't really understand how they had ever got married at all. They were not alike. Her mother was so much that breed of American woman who needed to feel intellectually superior to her mate. (Mather 11)

Have you ever wondered what "breed of [...] woman" (or "breed of man") you are? If not, this is the kind of passage that might make you start wondering. And if you're female and happen to wear horn-rimmed spectacles and/or your hair in a "rather severe knot" you've now been warned! People you meet may think you lack "femininity." Or perhaps they'll offer you the kind of career advice John Sawyer dispenses in Barbara Delinsky's The Dream Comes True:

"You make time for what you want," he stated in a voice that was deafeningly clear. "You give a little here, give a little there. It may mean that one thing or another takes longer to achieve, but it all comes out in the wash."
"One thing or another," Nina echoed. "You mean work. If a woman is willing to sacrifice her career, she can have the husband and kids."
"She doesn't have to sacrifice the career," he insisted, "just defer the ultimate gratification. And that doesn't mean there isn't gratification along the way, simply that the achievements may not be as high until the kids are grown and out of the house."
"She's an old lady by then."
"No way." He sat back and linked his fingers, seemingly more relaxed, as though confident he had the argument won. "Take that woman. She had kids in her mid-twenties. They're out on their own by the time she's fifty. Fifty is not old."
"It's too old to start building a career."
"She's not starting. She started years ago. She may have taken a leave when the kids were babies, but after that she worked part-time, maybe full-time as the kids got older. Okay, so she didn't go running off on business trips, or push past a forty-hour week, and maybe that held her back a little. But look what she has. She has a solid career. She has a solid marriage. She has kids who probably give her more satisfaction than anything she does at work. And she's only fifty."
With barely a breath, he raised a hand and went on. "Then again, take the woman who put her career before everything else. She got out of school, entered the marketplace and worked her tail off. She started climbing the ladder of success, and the drive became self-perpetuating. The higher she climbed, the higher she wanted to be. The more money she earned, the more she needed. There was always something more, always something more."
"Her being a woman didn't help," Nina put in. "A woman has to work twice as hard."
To her surprise, John agreed. "You're right. And that made her all the more determined to make it. So she put off thoughts of getting married, since she didn't have time for that. And she put off having kids, because she didn't have time for that. Then she reaches her mid-forties, when theoretically she should be up there on the threshold of the president's office, only there are suddenly four other candidates vying for the job and one of them is the new son-in-law of the chairman of the board. So she misses out. And then what does she have?" He raised a finger. "She doesn't have the corner office." Then another. "She doesn't have a husband." Then a third. "And her childbearing years are gone." He dropped his hand to his lap. "Do you think she's happy?"
His eloquence left Nina momentarily speechless.
"She's alone, Nina," he said more quietly. "She's alone, and she's getting older, and she's beginning to wonder what she'll do with herself if she ever has to retire. Happy? My guess is she's scared to death." (165-66)

John's "eloquence" left me "momentarily speechless" too. But not for long. I wonder if he would direct this kind of helpful advice at men? At women who don't want to have children? Or who don't want to marry (and the assumption is that the marriage would be to a man)? Is he assuming (a) that a woman needs a husband and children to make her happy and (b) that a post-menopausal woman couldn't find a husband? Oh, and Nina the career-woman almost dies from a ruptured appendix, since she didn't stop working to get it checked out, and John's career-woman first wife "was driving home very late one night after a three-day symposium, fell asleep at the wheel and hit a tree. Death was instantaneous" (163). Strangely enough, I can't help but see this as a not so subtle hint that career women are risking death by not slowing down to marry and care for children. Personally, though, I'd argue that it makes a better case for implementing a working time directive.

So, after all this instruction on how women should change their appearance and behaviour, I was intrigued when I picked up Sharon Kendrick's One Husband Required! and saw this comment from the heroine:

there was no way he would look twice at her. Men like Ross Sheridan were never attracted to women with unfashionably curved bodies of softly cushioned hips, and breasts which looked like overripe melons. They liked their women slim. No. Skinny. With plenty of bones showing, like sleek race-horses. Classy women. (8-9)

I hadn't thought about the possible class connotation of slimness, so that was interesting. However, would Ursula be proved right about the preferences of "Men like Ross Sheridan"? No, because apparently he thinks she's "a beautiful woman [...] like a rich, ripe, beautiful peach" (172). But immediately after having had sex for the first time, which provides her with irrefutable proof that men like him can indeed like women who resemble ripe (or over-ripe) fruit, Ursula realises why she had remained a virgin into her late twenties and why she had acquired this body shape:

'When I was growing up, men frightened me. I knew so little about them. I'd grown up in an all-female household - my father died too young to be any kind of role model. [...] And all the other men on the estate where I grew up seemed to think of women as being good for just one thing.' That had been the beginning of her plumpness, she realised now. A cushioned body had protected her and meant that the ferret-eyed boys had left her alone. (175)

It reminded me of Susie Orbach's Fat is a Feminist Issue, in which Orbach suggests that "There is also something positive to be gained from being fat that we must explore. I am not suggesting that the desire to be fat is a conscious one. Indeed, I would argue that people are largely unaware of it" (42). She reports that "the most common benefits that women saw in being large had to do with a sexual protection. In seeing herself as fat, a woman is often able to desexualize herself; the fat prevents her from considering herself as sexual" (43). Orbach herself found that once she had thought about her underlying attitudes towards food and fat, she gradually began to lose weight. Something similar happens to Ursula: following her insight into why she ate

'[...] I just kind of lost interest in food. I never really found the time to snack once I started living with Ross.'
'You mean that sex replaced food?' queried Amber bluntly.
Ursula blushed. 'There's no need to put it like that!'
'Well, it's true, isn't it?'
Yes, it was true. Ursula's world had changed immeasurably - Ross had seen to that. It had become brighter, sharper, clearer - more real than real. Mealtimes had lost their allure as the focus of her day. Not that she had become an unsightly skinny-ribs - a woman obsessed with the amount of calories she put in her mouth - or anything like that. No, it was just that the rounded hips had melted away to firm curves, and she definitely had an hourglass shape now! (182-83)

Again, I think there's a lot one could say about this. But my conclusion from this week's reading is that if, as is often said, romance is written by women, for women (although RWA's latest statistics suggest that "men make up 9.5 percent" of the readership, and there are male authors), then perhaps in some ways the genre's the textual equivalent of a feminist consciousness raising group crossed with a storytelling session at which women reveal their internalised sexism.

Internalized sexism refers to women‟s incorporation of sexist practices, and to the circulation of those practices among women, even in the absence of men. [...] Everyday conversation is woven from the conventions, motivations, and negotiations that make up life in cultural communities. When sexism is part of a culture, sexism, and the internalized sexism that accompanies it, becomes one of the threads out of which conversations are woven. (Bearman, Korobov and Thorne 11)

----

• Delinsky, Barbara. The Dream Comes True. Don Mills, Ontario: Harlequin, 1990.
• Bearman, Steve, Neill Korobov, and Avril Thorne. "The Fabric of Internalized Sexism." Journal of Integrated Social Sciences 1.1 (2009): 10-47.
• Kendrick, Sharon. One Husband Required! Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 1999.
• Mather, Anne. Chase a Green Shadow. 1973. London: Mills & Boon, 1980.
• Orbach, Susie. Fat is a Feminist Issue ... How to lose weight permanently - without dieting. 1978. Feltham, Middlesex: Hamlyn, 1982.

My thanks to Tumperkin, who gave me the Delinsky and the Kendrick.

Covers in Motion

Laura Vivanco

Thanks to the Smartbitches I came across a short clip of a video by Robert Arnold, who

explores the concept of "continuous loop" video in works such as The Morphology of Desire (1999), which explores romantic love in popular culture illustrated on the covers of dime-store, romance novels. This work has won numerous awards, including the Best Animated/Experiment Film, Boston Underground Film Festival (2002); Grand Prix, Videoformes International Video & Multimedia Festival, France (2000); Best Experimental Film, Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Sweden (1999). (University of Wyoming)

Arnold

often found myself in the aisle of a grocery store where there would be rows of books. I noticed that in the romance section, the images on the covers of these books were always nearly identical. And that’s one of the aspects of the illusions of motion in film — that the successive frames are nearly identical, but there’s some small degree of difference between them. I imagined that if you pushed your shopping cart down the aisle that had the romance novels, and you blinked in time with the passage of each one of those books, instead of a bunch of books going by, you would see, like a zoetrope, one couple in motion.

I decided to test that hypothesis. I actually had to collect romance novels — I started going to thrift stores where you could buy them for $.25 apiece or $1 for a box of them. I ended up building a collection of about 1,000 of them, so that I could start to look for the relationships between these different covers, and likewise organize them as a massive flipbook. I wanted simultaneously to assert that these were separate individual covers of separate individual books, but at the same time allow them to blend together, so it appears that it becomes one couple that’s moving in space, but is also shifting from a brunette to a blond, to one with green eyes, then blue eyes, in this constant transformation of all those identities merging together.

The result was Morphology of Desire, and you can see a clip of it here. That's only a small part of the whole, unfortunately, but here's a description of it:

The video is split up into various episodes, each introduced by a statement. In beautiful flourishing letters, texts such as 'She hovered between mistrust and the urgent will to believe…', and 'His gaze swept over her, hot and victorious…' set the tone for the images that follow. [...] Gradually, the thread of this video becomes clear, with the actions of the main characters growing more explicit. You can see their desire conflicting with any rational reticence, but inevitably, they are heading for the moment of surrender. The physical distance between the characters becomes smaller and smaller, and their glances less and less ambiguous. Eventually, all doubt disappears from their eyes, and it is clear that they only want one thing. Then, in the final episode, you can hear the sonorous sound of a church clock striking, and the rumble of thunder in the distance. The thought that something ominous is about to happen springs to mind, but the lovers are untroubled by this. The final image fades away with a shot of a knowing wink from a supremely happy blonde. (Netherlands Media Art Institute)

The clip from Morphology of Desire reminds me of Philip Scott Johnson's 500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art:



A full list of the music and paintings used in the making of that video can be found here.

Challenging the Beauty Myth

Laura Vivanco

In my last post I took a look at how some romances reinforce the beauty myth. Today I've chosen some examples of romances and, in the case of Austen, pre-cursors of the modern romances (Sarah's already made a good case why Austen's novels can be read as romances) which challenge the beauty myth.

Jane Austen - Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice

For me these two novels have always seemed to suggest that beauty is not an absolute but is "in the eye of the beholder" because in both cases once the hero who's doing the beholding falls in love, he considers his beloved beautiful even though he previously had doubts about her attractiveness.

Felix Moses summarises the changes in Anne Elliot's appearance

When Anne and Wentworth first meet in Ch. 4, Jane Austen describes them as follows: "He was, at that time, a remarkably fine young man, and Anne an extremely pretty girl." When the engagement breaks up, even Anne's beauty is affected: "an early loss of bloom and spirits had been their lasting effect" (Ch. 4). On his return after more than seven years, Wentworth is contrasted with Anne, who is no longer beautiful: "no; the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages. She had seen the same Frederick Wentworth" (Ch. 7). However, as Anne gradually "learns" romance, Wentworth notices an improvement in her physical attractiveness: "she was looking remarkably well; her very regular, very pretty features, having the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind which had been blowing on her complexion, and by the animation of eye which it had also produced. . . . [Wentworth] gave her a momentary glance . . . which seemed to say. . . ‘and even I at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again'" (Ch. 12). The fact that Anne has regained her former beauty is underscored by Jane Austen, when Lady Russell, a neutral observer, fancies in Ch. 13 that "Anne was improved in plumpness and looks" and hopes "that she was to be blessed with a second spring of youth and beauty."

Moses does not clarify whether the restoration of Anne's beauty is the cause or an effect of the restoration of Wentworth's love towards her. The following quotation, however, suggests that although happiness may have improved Anne's appearance, the real reason for the change of Wentworth's opinion of it is his change of heart:

"I was six weeks with Edward," said he, "and saw him happy. I could have no other pleasure. I deserved none. He enquired after you very particularly; asked even if you were personally altered, little suspecting that to my eye you could never alter."

Anne smiled, and let it pass. It was too pleasing a blunder for a reproach. It is something for a woman to be assured, in her eight-and-twentieth year, that she has not lost one charm of earlier youth: but the value of such homage was inexpressibly increased to Anne, by comparing it with former words, and feeling it to be the result, not the cause, of a revival of his warm attachment. (Chapter 23)

Rather than falling in love again because of her beauty, it is his love for Anne which causes him to consider her beautiful.¹ I think this argument is strengthened by a comparison with Pride and Prejudice, in which Darcy at first describes Elizabeth as only "tolerable":

"You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room," said Mr. Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet.

"Oh! she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you."

"Which do you mean?" and turning round, he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, "She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me. (Chapter 3)

His opinion of her physical beauty is altered, however, by his growing appreciation for non-physical aspects of her personality (intelligence and playfulness):

Occupied in observing Mr. Bingley's attentions to her sister, Elizabeth was far from suspecting that she was herself becoming an object of some interest in the eyes of his friend. Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. Of this she was perfectly unaware; -- to her he was only the man who made himself agreeable nowhere, and who had not thought her handsome enough to dance with. (Chapter 6)

He is soon after "meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow" (Chapter 6) and by the end of the novel, having fallen in love with her, he is convinced of her beauty, as he makes clear in this exchange with Miss Bingley:

"I remember, when we first knew her in Hertfordshire, how amazed we all were to find that she was a reputed beauty; and I particularly recollect your saying one night, after they had been dining at Netherfield, 'She a beauty! I should as soon call her mother a wit.' But afterwards she seemed to improve on you, and I believe you thought her rather pretty at one time."

"Yes," replied Darcy, who could contain himself no longer, "but that was only when I first knew her; for it is many months since I have considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance." (Chapter 45)

I do wonder if there's any link between this process of coming to believe the beloved is beautiful and the recent finding that

Sexiness evolves according to what we see over and over. This mechanism, Winkielman noted in a statement, “accounts for cultural differences in beauty — and historical differences in beauty as well — because beauty basically depends on what you’ve been exposed to and what is therefore easy on your mind.” (Alexander)²

Perhaps once these heroes began to feel attraction towards their heroine's personality (her intelligence, wit, goodness etc) they look at her more often. Darcy certainly spends quite a bit of time staring at Elizabeth. The result is that he may be resetting his beauty ideal, so that whereas before he compared her (unfavourably) to society's standard of beauty, now her appearance is the standard by which he judges beauty.

Georgette Heyer - The Quiet Gentleman

Tania Modleski noted that

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger, Marxist art critic, screenwriter, and novelist, has discussed the way in which the display of women in the visual arts and publicity images results in

a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

(qtd. in Modleski 37)

The following passage from Heyer suggests that women's self-perception is also affected by the fiction they read. Drusilla Morville has fallen in love with the Earl of St Erth, but, having compared her own appearance to that of the heroines she's read about, she finds herself lacking:

a candid scrutiny of her own face in the mirror soon lowered her spirits [...]. She could perceive no merit either in the freshness of her complexion, or in her dark, well-opened eyes, and would willingly have sacrificed the natural curl in her brown hair for tresses of gold, or even of raven-black. As for her figure, though some men might admire little plump women, she could not bring herself to suppose that St Erth, himself so slim and graceful, could think her anything but a poor little dab of a girl. [...] 'Depend upon it, you are just the sort of girl a man would be glad to have for his sister! You don't even know how to swoon, and I daresay if you tried you would make wretched work of it, for all you have is common-sense, and of what use is that, pray?'
This embittered thought brought to her mind the several occasions upon which she might, had she been the kind of female his lordship no doubt admired, have kindled his ardour by a display of sensibility, or even of heroism. This excursion into romance was not entirely successful, for while she did her best to conjure up an agreeable vision of a heroic Miss Morville, the Miss Morville who was the possessor not only of a practical mind but also of two outspoken brothers could not but interpose objections to the heroine's actions. [...] 'You would do better to put him out of your mind, and return to your parents,' she said. 'No doubt he will presently become betrothed to a tall and beautiful woman, and forget your very existence. [...].' (229-30)

As with the self-surveying woman described by Berger, Drusilla is aware of the conventions surrounding female behaviour. In relating her reality to that of fiction, she perhaps reveals both the way in which so much of life may feel like a performance, and the way in which each of us may refrain from casting ourselves in a particular role if we feel we lack the correct appearance, temperament, or both. Drusilla believes she lacks the beauty she feels is required in a heroine, as well as lacking what we might now describe as the Too Stupid to Live tendencies that afflict so many heroines. Heyer, however, by making Drusilla the heroine of the novel, challenges us to accept a wider range of heroines and, as a result, to consider the possibility that we too may play the heroine in the drama of life.³

Heyer seems to be subtly suggesting that character and personality, rather than physical beauty, are the true indicators of a person's nature and that there is hope that this will be recognised and valued by those who have the intelligence to look deeper than surface beauty. Like the poster Whitney Calvert created for Love Your Body Day (it's the image at the top of this post), The Quiet Gentleman can be read as an argument for seeing a woman's true beauty as an amalgam of her intelligence, strength, love, generosity etc.

Jennifer Crusie - Anyone But You

I couldn't possibly omit Anyone But You from a list of romances which challenge the beauty myth. Crusie addresses the problem head on:

Max said [...] "[...] Women do not handle turning forty well."
Alex looked at him with contempt. "And you know this because of your vast experience in dating hundreds of women twice."
"No," Max said, sounding not at all perturbed. I know this because I'm a gynecologist. [...] Forty is when they start rethinking plastic surgery. [...] They look at magazines and see all those damn seventeen-year-old anorexics in push-up bras, or they go to the movies and see actresses with tummy tucks and enough silicone to start a new valley, and then they look at their perfectly good bodies and decide their sex lives are over." (158)

Crusie's heroine is forty, and despite all her concerns about her appearance her sex-life is just about to to be restarted most satisfactorily.

So, which romances would you add to the list?
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1 Anne learned of Frederick Wentworth's initial negative opinion of her appearance thus:

after the Miss Musgroves had returned and finished their visit at the Cottage, she had this spontaneous information from Mary --

"Captain Wentworth is not very gallant by you, Anne, though he was so attentive to me. Henrietta asked him what he thought of you, when they went away, and he said, "You were so altered he should not have known you again." (Chapter 7)

The juxtaposition of his assessment of her and a description of his emotions towards her perhaps suggests that, as with his later, positive opinion of Anne's beauty, his negative opinion is at least partly the result of his feelings of resentment:

Frederick Wentworth had used such words, or something like them, but without an idea that they would be carried round to her. He had thought her wretchedly altered, and in the first moment of appeal, had spoken as he felt. He had not forgiven Anne Elliot. She had used him ill, deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shewn a feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. (Chapter 7)

2 Winkielman, Halberstadt, Fazendeiro, and Catty state that

our findings suggest that part of the preference for prototypicality arises from a general mechanism linking fluency and positive affect. This mechanism has been shown to contribute to several preference phenomena in psychology (Winkielman et al., 2003) and aesthetics (R. Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004). From our perspective, prototypicality is simply one fluency-enhancing variable; others include repeated exposure, perceptual and conceptual priming, contrast, clarity, increased duration, and symmetry. This explanation of prototypicality preference does not rely on considerations of value for mate selection (Halberstadt & Rhodes, 2000, 2003). (805)

3 Heyer also has Drusilla examine whether masculine beauty has played too great a role in creating her love for St Erth:

Drusilla's heart was not untouched [...] it had crumbled under the assault of the Earl's first smile. 'In fact,' Drusilla told her mirrored image severely, 'you have fallen in love with a beautiful face, and you should be ashamed of yourself!' She then reflected that she had several times been in company with Lord Byron without succumbing to the charms of a face generally held to be the most beautiful in England. (228-29)

The implication would seem to be that although beauty may play a part in creating an attraction, it should not be the sole, or even primary, foundation for love.

• Alexander, Brian. "Why beauty is in the eye of the beholder: Cultural images influence our perception of attractiveness." MSNBC, 5 Oct. 2006.
• Austen, Jane. Persuasion. The Republic of Pemberley.
• Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. The Republic of Pemberley.
• Crusie, Jennifer. Anyone But You. 1996. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2006.
  
• Heyer, Georgette. The Quiet Gentleman. 1951. London: Pan, 1966.
  
• Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. 1982. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Moses, Felix. "Learning Romance The Jane Austen Way: The Semic Code at Work in Persuasion." The Victorian Web, 12 August 2001.
  
• Winkielman, Piotr, Jamin Halberstadt, Tedra Fazendeiro, and Steve Catty. "Prototypes Are Attractive Because They Are Easy on the Mind." Psychological Science 17.9 (2006): 799-806.

The poster for Love Your Body Day was created by Whitney Calvert and can be found at the NOW Foundation's website.

Hometown Cinderella and the Beauty Myth

Laura Vivanco

October 15th 2008 is Love Your Body Day:

Do you love what you see when you look in the mirror?

Hollywood and the fashion, cosmetics and diet industries work hard to make each of us believe that our bodies are unacceptable and need constant improvement. Print ads and television commercials reduce us to body parts — lips, legs, breasts — airbrushed and touched up to meet impossible standards. TV shows tell women and teenage girls that cosmetic surgery is good for self-esteem. Is it any wonder that 80% of U.S. women are dissatisfied with their appearance?

Women and girls spend billions of dollars every year on cosmetics, fashion, magazines and diet aids. These industries can't use negative images to sell their products without our assistance.

Together, we can fight back.

It may help us "fight back" if we remember that

'Beauty' is not universal or changeless, though the West pretends that all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic Ideal Woman [...]. Nor is "beauty" a function of evolution: Its ideals change at a pace far more rapid than that of the evolution of species. (Wolf 12)

Susan Scott, having written a novel about "Barbara Villiers Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine, Duchess of Cleveland (1641-1709), and the most famous/infamous mistress of English King Charles II" observed that

As delighted as Barbara would be today to see her story in so many bookstores, I’m sure she would be horrified by her cropped, faceless portrait on the cover. I’ve mentioned here before that while my publisher wanted to use a real portrait of her, they felt that her much-vaunted beauty wouldn’t hold much appeal to modern readers. Tastes change. What was hot in 1660 ain’t necessarily so now, and today Barbara’s much-praised “languid eyes” look more drugged than seductive.

The beauty of Agnès Sorel, mistress of King Charles VII of France, may also go unrecognised by a modern viewer. Jean Fouquet is thought to have used her as the model for the painting of the Madonna and Child I've included here.

Given the force of the current ideals of beauty, modern women considered lacking in beauty may not stop to consider, or may not even know, that they might have been considered beautiful in other cultures/other historical periods. In addition, as Naomi Wolf has observed, it is difficult for a woman to reject negative judgements about her beauty

because "beauty" lives so deep in the psyche, where sexuality mingles with self-esteem, and since it has been usefully defined as something that is continually bestowed from the outside and can always be taken away, to tell a woman she is ugly can make her feel ugly, act ugly, and, as far as her experience is concerned, be ugly, in the place where feeling beautiful keeps her whole. (36)

In Victoria Pade's Hometown Cinderella the heroine had last met the hero when she was, in his words, "Sixteen years old and as ugly as a mud fence" (29) and "He'd figured that it served her right, that it was a warning of what was below the surface - foul on the outside, foul on the inside. It had seemed fitting" (26-27). Now that Eden is neither sixteen nor ugly, he wonders "if she also wasn't the rude, mouthy, insulting, aggravating nightmare she'd been before either" (29). In this novel, Eden's ugliness made her, as Wolf would put it, "act ugly," and her external, physical transformation and her internal, emotional transformation seem to have gone hand-in-hand. Now that there is "no reason she would be called names or taunted or teased or tormented [...] she didn't have to go into any situation armed for those kinds of battles" (14).

The romance genre has a mixed history with regards to how it depicts female beauty. Sometimes, as Wolf says, it forms part of a tradition of

Women's writing [...which] turns the [beauty] myth on its head. Female culture's greatest writers share the search for radiance, a beauty that has meaning. The battle between the over-valued beauty and the undervalued, unglamorous but animated heroine forms the spine of the women's novel. It extends from Jane Eyre to today's paperback romances, in which the gorgeous nasty rival has a mane of curls and a prodigious cleavage, but the heroine only her spirited eyes. (60)

I'd like to take a look at examples of romance novels which explicitly counter the beauty myth but I thought I'd leave them until next week because today I'm going to examine a couple of novels which embrace the beauty myth. The myth "tells a story: The quality called "beauty" objectively and universally exists. Women must want to embody it and men must want to possess women who embody it" (Wolf 12).

At times the genre can be harsh in its portrayal of women who do not conform to beauty ideals. Barbara Cartland's novels, as far as I can tell, generally feature hyper-slender young beauties as heroines. Her The Unknown Heart is slightly different. Close to the beginning of the novel there is a hyperbolic description of an obese body which depicts it as monstrous and grotesque to the point where it seems to me to be more a manifestation of the terror and fear that some people have of fat, than a realistic description. It may be interesting to note at this point that one of the symptoms of anorexia is that "there is a distortion in how the individual perceives their shape and size, with an excessive investment of their self-esteem in this, and an intense fear of being 'fat'." The heroine's mother exclaims

'Look at yourself! Take a good look!' Mrs. Clay said cruelly. 'And then find me the man who would marry you for anything but your fortune. Look! Look at yourself for what you are!'
Almost as if she were mesmerised into doing what her mother commanded, Virginia stared into the mirror. She saw her mother, thin almost to the point of boniness, with a small, elegant waist [...] a handsome woman [...] Then she looked at herself: small - hardly up to her mother's shoulder - and bulging with fat until she appeared utterly grotesque. Her eyes were lost in rolls of pink fat which puffed out her cheeks and gave her a number of double chins which almost hid her neck. Her balloon-like arms showed through the thin net of her sleeves; her hands, which went almost instinctively towards her face, were red and podgy.
She barely had a waist and in circumference she was three times the size of her mother. (12)

Soon after this, all the food Virginia had been forced to consume has "converted what was naturally a strong young body into a monstrous mountain of unhealthy flesh. Not only could your heart not stand the strain, but the poisons rose into your brain" (29) and gave her a "brain-fever" (29). When Virginia finally awakens from a coma which lasts "one year and two months" (35) she has been transformed into "a girl with very large eyes in a thin, pointed face. The cheek-bones were accentuated, the jaw-line sharp against the long neck" (32). Quite how, in a novel set around 1902, Virginia could have been kept alive while in a coma for this length of time is never fully explained, and again this creates the impression that Cartland's description owes less to reality than to attitudes towards fat and beauty. The near-death experience is presented as a positive one because it is only with a thin body that Virginia gains the love of the hero, and he comments on it admiringly: "'You are as light as the proverbial feather [...] It is not fashionable to be so thin, but you make every other woman seem fat and clumsy" (108). One can only hope that Cartland's exaltation of thinness didn't contribute to making any readers feeling "fat and clumsy" but it certainly reinforces the prevailing cultural attitudes about fat and women's bodies.

A real-life example of a woman who experienced her near-death experience as at least partly positive because it made her thinner and thus more beautiful is provided by Jennifer Crusie who has described how

In 1983, as a single parent with an eight-year-old daughter, I was diagnosed with late stage colon cancer and given roughly six months to live. Through the surgeries and stress, I dropped down to pre-college levels, ten pounds below my recommended weight, and I was thrilled. I was dying, I was leaving a child behind, I was terrified and angry and exhausted and in pain, but by God I was THIN. I wore a bikini in September. Just my luck that my last six months were going to be fabulously thin and they were all in WINTER. [...] My world was being ripped out from underneath me, but I was dying svelte.(emphasis added)

The transformation of the heroine in Pade's Hometown Cinderella is nowhere near as dramatic as that in Cartland's novel, but Hometown Cinderella also seems to suggest to the reader that a woman must either be, or become, beautiful if she is to catch a man. Although I'm singling this novel out for detailed analysis as a recent romance which perpetuates the beauty myth, it should not be seen as an isolated example.¹ I have chosen it primarily because I read it recently and because its message about beauty jarred in a way that RfP has described:

Very stylized and didactic novels can jar me with how far they are from how I see the world. It's one thing to read about a fictional character's world and values, but something else to absorb the message that every woman should want to be her, be attracted to the same type of man, or want the same type of relationship. Some of that response originates with the reader, but surely some is about tone and specific messages.

There is something rather didactic about the way in which Pade describes Eden Perry's appearance, and the tone is one which takes for granted the reader's acceptance of particular beauty ideals. The benefits of being beautiful are made clear: everyone that Eden meets when she returns to her hometown seems to have an opinion to offer about the way she looks and "certainly it was a boost to her self-esteem to have everyone exclaiming over the improvements in her appearance" (113).

At high school Eden was considered ugly, the "geeky, braces-on-her-teeth, glasses-wearing, frizzy-haired, flat-chested brainiac in a grade she might have belonged in academically, but certainly hadn't belonged in socially" (11) or, as Cam Pratt, the hero recalls, as a teenager she'd had

hair that had been such a bright orange and so stick-out everywhere curly that it had looked as if it belonged on a clown wig, glasses as thick as the bottoms of mayonnaise jars, braces imprisoning crooked teeth, bad skin and a body that had been as flat as a pancake with only knobby knees and pointy elbows to give her any shape at all. (26)

Now that she's an adult:

lo and behold, the geek was gone.
No more braces - her teeth were completely straight now.
No more glasses - contacts had replaced them a decade ago and eye surgery had removed even the need for those more recently, so her ice-blue eyes were only adorned with mascara.
Her skin had cleared; in fact, there wasn't a single blemish or red mark marring it. Instead it was smooth and creamy and even-toned with just a little blush to brighten it. [...]
Her bustline had developed - there was no question that she was female now, she could fill out a bra with the best of them. Well, with the best of the B-cups, anyway.
Her hair had darkened to a burnt-sienna red - no one had called her pumpkinhead in fourteen years. And the relaxer she used eased the kinky curls into mere waves that she could keep manageable at shoulder length.
So, all in all, no, she wasn't odd-looking anymore. There was no reason she would be called names or taunted or teased or tormented. (13-14)

What really jarred me was the extent to which female beauty was depicted as being quite literally a construction. It's possible that Eden's eye surgery and tooth straightening were necessary for reasons beyond the merely aesthetic, but the fact that the alterations are judged to have improved her appearance sets a very clear standard for beauty and seems to legitimise the altering of the body should it not conform to that standard. To be beautiful, it seems, we need to have "completely straight" teeth, eyes which are not obscured by glasses, and a prominent bust which will permit us to "fill out a bra with the best of them." It's worth noting here that after they first meet as adults, even as Cam notes that her "body was better than it had been," he observes that it wasn't "centerfold better, but definitely better enough" (28).

Altering the body to make it "better," particularly through surgery of the kind which would be required by a woman whose small breasts didn't allow her to "fill out a bra with the best of them" or by a woman who wants to look "centerfold better," can be risky. For those who want to lose rather than gain flesh, and who can't stay in a medically implausible coma like Virginia's, cosmetic surgery offers the option of liposuction, of which the FDA notes that

In order to understand the size of the risk, one paper compares the deaths from liposuction to that for deaths from car accidents (16 per 100,000). It is important to remember that liposuction is a surgical procedure and that there may be serious complications, including death.²

Cosmetics aren't without their risks either:

the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics—a coalition of environmental, health, and women’s advocacy groups—had 33 name-brand lipsticks tested at an independent laboratory. The results were unsettling enough to wipe the glossy grin off anyone’s face: Fully one-third contained lead at levels exceeding the FDA’s 0.1 ppm (parts per million) limit for candy. [...]

The European Union has banned 1,132 known or suspected carcinogens, mutagens, and reproductive toxins from use in cosmetics, but only 10 such chemicals are banned in the United States, leaving us with mercury in mascara, petrochemicals in perfumes, and parabens in antiperspirants. And just as none of the offending lipsticks’ labels indicated the presence of lead, the FDA allows potentially hazardous chemicals like phthalates—industrial solvents linked to birth defects in boys’ reproductive systems and premature puberty in girls—to slip into ingredient lists under the umbrella term “fragrance.” 
(Houton)

In Hometown Cinderella, however, non-use of cosmetics is linked to patriarchal oppression since Eden's grandfather, a dour retired minister of the church who believes that "men are the rulers of the earth, women should know their place" (86) imposed a "no-makeup restriction" (82) on his wife.

The reader is given lots of detail about Eden's use of cosmetics. For example, late at night, before asking Cam for

help with her electrical outage, Eden decided that if she was going to have to be seen, she had to make sure she wasn't too unsightly [...] If she'd been about to meet up with anyone other than Cam Pratt she probably would have gone as she was - face scrubbed clean, hair stuck in an untidy ponytail. Only she wasn't meeting up with anyone else and she just couldn't go without reapplying blush and mascara. (38)

When attending a wedding she "added a taupe-colored eye shadow to her blush and mascara regimen [...] she'd been pleased with how she'd looked and had left home feeling comfortable and confident" (60). When Cam, who has spent all day with her, pops out to buy a pizza, Eden seizes the opportunity to "head for the bathroom to take her hair down [...] so she could run a brush through it. She also refreshed her blush and added lip gloss" (80-81). On another occasion she yet again makes "a speedy bathroom stop to fluff her hair and apply a little lip gloss" (114) and when she makes a decision to seduce Cam she applies "a hint of eyeliner, mascara, blush and her best lip gloss" (234).

However, even if a woman temporarily achieves the pinnacle of seductive beauty, she knows that she will age. Eden is perhaps more aware of this than most women because of her job: she's a forensic artist who's been "hired to do an age-progression" (8) of the face of a woman wanted for questioning by the police in relation to a very old case. Since the woman in question is Eden's grandmother, Celeste, when Eden discovers that Celeste has put on

"At least fifty - and maybe seventy-five - more pounds? Celeste really did gain," Eden marveled. "That takes her out of the fluffy-grandma-body and puts her into a whole other weight category."
"It would make her pretty big," Cam agreed.
"And because we share the same genes, I guess I won't have another cookie," Eden said [...].
Cam laughed [...] "I don't think you have anything to worry about," he said with enough appreciation to please her.
But still the thought of a grandmother who could be very large made her decide against any more cookies and instead she stood, brought a dish of sugar-free mints from the kitchen and popped one of those instead. (150)

And is there a racial aspect to the beauty myth? Is it just a coincidence that Eden's eyes are "ice-blue," her skin is "smooth and creamy" and her hair is now free of "kinky curls"? If "kinky curls" make a woman look "odd" and if "stick-out-everywhere curly" hair is associated with "clown wig[s]" the conclusion one might reach is that many black women naturally have "odd" hair, which looks like a clown wig.³ As The Angry Black Woman observes, there are many issues other than aesthetics hiding beneath the beauty myth:

If you don’t think that black people’s hair isn’t a battleground for issues of race and culture and assimilation and bigotry, you haven’t been paying attention to the news. When a U.S. Congresswoman can be called names because of her hairstyle (or lack thereof) and people can be denied/fired from jobs for not wearing a hairstyle that makes white people feel comfortable, there is a serious, serious problem.

More subtle, though, is a pervasive feeling of never being good enough. As Latoya Peterson writes:

In discussions of beauty - particularly those on women centered blogs - white women can understand being held up to an unrealistic standard of beauty. To be impossibly thin, impossibly blonde, impossibly clear skinned, with a body that defies the law of physics is presented as something that is attainable if you try hard enough and buy the right products, though many women find these efforts to be futile. What most of these conversations do not understand is that when black women pick up these kinds of magazines, or watch advertisements on TV, or popular television shows with popular white actresses, we do not get the message “try harder.”

The message we receive is never.

You will never look like this. Not if you straighten your hair, or lose weight, or work out every single day, or have the perfect body and the perfect wardrobe to match. Even if you fit all those requirements, you’re still “pretty for a black girl.”

The financial incentive to perpetuate the beauty myth and keep women of all races unhappy about their appearance is obvious when one considers the interests of the cosmetics, dieting, fashion and plastic surgery industries. The result, according to a YWCA report, is that

Every woman in the United States participates in a daily beauty pageant, whether she likes it or not. Engulfed by a popular culture saturated with images of idealized, air-brushed and unattainable female physical beauty, women and girls cannot escape feeling judged on the basis of their appearance. As a result, many women feel chronically insecure, overweight and inadequate [...]. Moreover, the diet, cosmetic and fashion industries are often too willing to exploit these narrow beauty standards so women and girls will become cradle-to-grave consumers of beauty products, cosmetic surgery and diet programs.⁴

Ironically Dove's recent "real beauty" campaign, which partially challenges the beauty myth, nonetheless illustrates this point:

Unlike most mass media images of beauty that we see, the Dove campaign includes women of colour, women over 40 and women who weigh more than 100 pounds. The campaign has won accolades for its social conscience, including in the feminist pop culture magazine Bitch.

However, there is a contradiction in this “Campaign for Real Beauty”. While the website and the ads are of “real women” who are proud of their “real curves,” the actual goal of the campaign is to convince women to buy “Dove Firming”: a product designed to reduce the appearance of cellulite in two weeks. [...]

Although the campaign presents more realistic role models for women than is the norm, the central message remains the same. Beauty is not something that comes naturally to women: it requires endless effort, as well as the purchase of various products designed to change or hide women’s problem areas. (Esmonde)

The financial aspect of the beauty industry helps to explain why it has been expanding to target men, too. Wolf's book was first published in 1990 and in it she warned that "Advertisers have recently figured out that undermining sexual self-confidence works whatever the targeted gender [...] advertising has begun to portray the male body in a beauty myth of its own" (288-89).

Hometown Cinderella perpetuates a muscular beauty standard for men. This may, to a certain extent, eradicate the inequality between the sexes with regards to the relentless pressure to become and remain beautiful, but it does so by putting more pressure on men. In addition, male beauty remains firmly associated with muscular power, whereas feminine beauty is associated with a slim, youthful appearance. Jane at Dear Author recently observed that

Romance alpha males are physically overpowering. In one Brenda Joyce book, the hero is described as having a “huge club-like manhood,” and a “slab” of pecs. In the last JR Ward book I read, John is described as needing “a fleece the size of a sleeping bag, an XXXL T-shirt, and a pair of size-fourteen Nike Air Shox.” In the recent Diedre Knight book, Red Fire, the hero was an ordinary 5′ 7″ until his immortal transmogrification when he became “between six-foot-four and six-foot-five. Depend[ing] on the day . . . A variety of factors.”

The disparity between heroic heights and that of the average size for men in various countries was noted by RfP. Cameron Pratt isn't a vampire or other paranormal creature, but the connection between size, muscle power and super-heroic power is mentioned explicitly in Hometown Cinderella. Eden fears that because he has "powerful pectorals [...] bulging biceps [...and] jaw-droppingly impressive shoulders" he may be "A magnificently muscled man of steel who might not technically think of himself as a super man" (93) but who nonetheless considers himself to be nearly "invincible. Indestructible" (93). Luckily Cam is aware that despite the physique that so impresses Eden, he's not endowed with paranormal or super-human abilities.

Cam's size and physical power are emphasised throughout the novel. Even as a teenager he'd had a "body that had been buff" (93) and he was considered "hot stuff [...] The guy every senior girl - except Eden - had wanted to end up with" (10) but he "had somehow matured into a more colossally handsome specimen than he'd been the last time she'd seen him" (15, emphasis added). Later, looking out of her window and into his gym, she catches

a glimpse of him from behind, reaching long, well-muscled arms upward and grasping the bar [...] in his huge hands. [...] he was in very, very good shape [...] Her eyes lingered on that back. On those biceps flexing, bulging within glistening skin that seemed barely able to contain them [...] The man had stamina [...] and strength and a fabulous physique that she had some kind of irrational urge to get closer to. To touch. To test for herself if those muscles were as solid and unyielding as they looked.(32-33)

This isn't a one-off description. When Cam "rolled his massive shoulders," for example, it makes Eden's "eyes nearly pop out of their sockets to see it" (86), and she follows him from the room with "her gaze glued to the rear view of shoulders that were a mile wide and looked as if they had the power to easily carry sacks of cement" (87). When his "bulky arms and thick thighs had been all pumped up [...] he'd looked so sexy she'd hardly been able to breathe" (134). In fact, his body with its "supreme derriere" (167), "rock-solid chest" (193), "iron-hard rod" (197), "Glorious, glistening broad shoulders; pectorals taut and cut; narrow waist and tight abs" (198), "big hands" (216) and "massive thighs" (240) is a frequent focus of Eden's attention. There's no question that Cam's muscled body is one that Eden finds almost irresistibly attractive.

Men are catching up with women in their levels of dissatisfaction with their bodies:

One of Britain's leading eating disorder experts says as many as one in five young men are deeply unhappy with their body image.

Dr John Morgan said that for every man with an eating disorder there were 10 more who desperately wanted to change the way they looked. [...] Dr John Morgan said he believes images of male beauty in the media are part of the problem, and that there's now just as much pressure on young men to look slim as there is on women.

"The ideal male body image has changed into quite an unhealthy shape," he admitted.

In the past blokes have been comfortable with beer bellies. Now, men and boys are under huge pressures to look good."

He explains that while the slim but muscular look, a six-pack, big arms, and a slim waist, has become the cultural 'norm', it's not a naturally obtainable figure.

Dr Morgan added: "It's completely unhealthy, and to achieve that sort of shape you've got to be either working out for hours in a gym, making yourself sick, or taking certain kinds of illegal drugs." (BBC)

It seems a good time to stop and think about how some aspects of the romance genre perpetuate virtually unattainable beauty ideals for both men and women, why they do this, what the effects of the beauty myth are, and who really benefits.

• Cartland, Barbara. The Unknown Heart. 1969. London: Arrow, 1971.
  
• Esmonde, Jackie. "The Ugly Business of Women’s Beauty." New Socialist.
• Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 1963. London: Penguin Books, 1992.
• Houton, Jacqueline. "Beauty Secrets: The New Cosmetic Cover-up." Bitch 41 (2008).
  
• Kleeman, Jenny. "This week a poster claiming cosmetic surgery 'just got easy' was banned. The truth is, even a quick nip and tuck can kill." The Guardian. 6 December 2007.
  
• Pade, Victoria. Hometown Cinderella. 2007. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2008.
• Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. 1990. London: Vintage, 1991.
• YWCA. Beauty at Any Cost. Washington DC: YWCA, 2008. The report and other resources are available from here.
  

1 For example, Tumperkin wrote a review of Julia James's The Italian's Rags-to-Riches Wife in which she observed sarcastically that despite the heroine being transformed into a beauty

there's a Big Mis that sends Laura hurtling back to England to defiantly regrow her eyebrows. Alessandro is presented with an horrific tableau when he rings her doorbell:

...She'd reverted. It was the only word for it. Her hair was hanging in lank soggy rags around her face, she wore no make up, her eyebrows were overgrown, her skin blotchy...

But no-one can accuse Alessandro of being shallow. Although he's disgusted when he sees her again, he's able to overcome his nausea. So long as he keeps his eyes shut

2 Serious complications and even death can also occur as a result of other forms of plastic surgery:

Surgery can never be easy or risk free - even when the patient can afford the very best care. [...] Kanye West lost his mother, Donda, who apparently developed complications following a tummy tuck and breast reduction. Donda was 58, a former professor of English who had given up a 31-year tenured post to manage her son's business affairs. Stella Obasanjo, the first lady of Nigeria, died in 2005, aged 59, after a tummy tuck in a Spanish clinic. James Brown's third wife, Adrienne, died in 1996, aged 47, following an undisclosed cosmetic procedure. In 2004, Olivia Goldsmith, author of the First Wives Club, suffered a fatal heart attack at 54 as she was being prepared for a chin tuck. (Kleeman)

Women also seem to be seeking surgical alteration to an increasing number of body parts and undergoing operations on which little research has been conducted:

A leading urogynaecologist has spoken out against the growing popularity of cosmetic vaginal surgery.

Professor Linda Cardozo, of King's College Hospital, London, says little evidence exists to advise women on the safety or effectiveness of procedures.

These include operations to make the external appearance more "attractive" and reshaping the vagina to counter laxity after childbirth, for example. (BBC)

3 Some of the clown wigs available for sale here and here are explicitly described as Afros.

4 Betty Friedan once asked concerning the feminine ideal of the fifties and early sixties

Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house? In all the talk of femininity and woman’s role, one forgets that the real business of America is business. But the perpetuation of housewifery, the growth of the feminine mystique, makes sense (and dollars) when one realizes that women are the chief customers of American business. (181)

As Wolf observes

Feminists, inspired by Friedan, broke the stranglehold on the women's popular press of advertisers for household products, who were promoting the feminine mystique; at once, the diet and skin care industries became the new cultural censors of women's intellectual space, and because of their pressure, the gaunt, youthful model supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful womanhood. (11)

I found the photo of the Madonna in Fouquet's Melun Diptych at Wikipedia. I feel compelled to add one final comment on Hometown Cinderella, which is that the sex scenes include some interesting phrases. One of Eden's breasts is described as a "smallish globe of yearning" (162) which Cam then starts "working [...] like a fragile mound of clay, kneading, lifting, pressing into it. Then he located that tightly knotted crest with his fingertips, tugging, tweaking, pinching, rolling it" (162). I suppose it's not completely unrelated to the topic of the post, since the globe is "smallish" and the metaphor of it as a "mound of clay" might, at a stretch, be taken to indicate the malleability of the female body.