New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: Gothic Romances, Heyer, Medical Women, Pakistan, Sexuality, Spain, The Sheik

Ali, Abu-Bakar, 2018. 

"Agency, Gender, Nationalism, and the Romantic Imaginary in Pakistan", Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing. Ed. Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 225-235. Abstract

Arnold-Forster, Agnes and Alison Moulds. 

"Medical women in popular fiction", The BMJ Opinion, September 26, 2018. [Includes details about Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892), a medical romance written by one of the earliest "registered female practitioners"]

Drakulić-Ilić, Slavenka. 1984. 

“Zašto žene vole bajke?” [“Why do women like fairy tales?”], Smrtni grijesi feminizma. Ogledi u mudologiji [Mortal Sins of Feminism. Essays on Testicology]. Zagreb: Znanje, 1984. 33-45. The article was first published on the pages of Start, no. 299. 3 July 1980. [Details from Lóránd Zsófia's dissertation, "“Learning a Feminist Language”: The Intellectual History of Feminism in Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s", Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, 2014, in which it is stated that "In the essay “Why do women like fairy tales?” Drakulić argues that despite their simplicity, trivial romance novels mean an escape from the everyday reality of state socialism." (208-209) and "examines the popularity of trivial romances (in Serbo-Croatian: herz-roman) available at the newsstands and also published in women’s magazines as a series. She sees “erotic” men’s magazines as a counterpart to the cheap romantic stories, as both started to flourish on the market as a result of the “sexual revolution” [...] and both use traditional and stereotypical images of women, which do not exclude, but complement each other (36). It shows both the double-faced nature of the sexual revolution and the consistency in the logic of patriarchy. Drakulić describes the basic plot of the romance novels and how they present clichés of femininity and masculinity, romantic love and happy marriage (35). Despite their triviality, Drakulić emphasises their social relevance: only one title, Život [Life] was sold in 3.600.000 copies in 1978 (34). There is a demand for the genre, what cannot be left out of consideration, even if there was not domestic, Yugoslav production of these, those available were mostly imported from Western, English-speaking countries. Besides the presentation of traditional gender roles, a regular objection against the trivial romances is their low literary quality: the media should inform and educate, and one’s free time should be used creatively [...]. Drakulić analyses an unpublished survey by the publisher Vjesnik on the readers’ habits and remarks of reading trivial romances. All in all, the conclusion is that the majority of the readers are overburdened women who do not have either time or strength to read anything more complexly written, whereas they do notice the poor literary quality of the novels. These readers, adds Drakulić, lack real relationships and love – exactly the dream, the “fairy tale” offered by these booklets. Drakulić claims that simply “by abolishing and stigmatising this kind of a press, we do not abolish the demand/need” of women in Yugoslavia (44)." (232-33)]

 

Paige, Lori A., 2018. 

The Gothic Romance Wave: A Critical History of the Mass Market Novels, 1960-1993. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2018. Excerpt

 

Pérez-Gil, María del Mar, 2018. 

"Representations of Nation and Spanish Masculinity in Popular Romance Novels: The Alpha Male as “Other”", The Journal of Men’s Studies. Online First September 23, 2018. Abstract

Suwanban, Pauline, 2018. 

"From Exhalation to Transformation: The Female Body in the Orientalist Romance". Dandelion: Postgraduate Arts Journal & Research Network 9.1 Abstract and link to pdf

 

Wei, Po-Yu, Rick, 2018. 

‘“She is a Jade”: A Georgian Gaming Woman Re-imagined in Georgette Heyer’s Faro’s Daughter’, Crossings 9: 122-131.

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: Feminism, Love, Heyer and Orientalism

Laura Vivanco

Arvanitaki, Eirini, 2017. 

"Postmillennial femininities in the popular romance novel." Journal of Gender Studies. Published online: 28 Aug 2017. Abstract

McAlister, Jodi, and Hsu-Ming Teo, 2017. 

"Love in Australian Romance Novels." The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia. Ed. Hsu-Ming Teo. North Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly Publishing, pp.194-222.

McLeod, Dion, 2017. 

"'Try-error-try-it': Love, loss, and the subversion(?) of the heteronormative romance story in Will Grayson, Will Grayson." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 25.1: 73-94. Abstract

And in the section of the Romance Wiki bibliography for items in languages other than English:

Bianchi, Diana, 2017. 

"I gentiluomini si prendono per la gola: cibo e identità nei romanzi di Georgette Heyer". Lingua, Traduzione, Letteratura 1: 75-89. [Diana wrote to me to notify me of the publication of this article and her translation of the title is: "The way to a gentleman's heart is through his stomach: food and identity in Georgette Heyer's novels."]

林芳玫/Lin, Fang-mei. 

"性別化東方主義：女性沙漠羅曼史的重層東方想像/Gendering Orientalism: Women's Desert Romance and the Multiplicity of Oriental Imagination." Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, vol. 13, no. 1-2, 2016, pp. 174-200. [There is an abstract in English, even though the paper is not.]

New to the Wiki: Shades and The Sheik

Laura Vivanco

I've decided I should put up a post whenever I add (or someone else adds) an entry to the Romance Wiki bibliography because items are added quite frequently and I don't tweet or blog about them all individually, so people may not be aware of how often new items are added or what they are. In today's post, I'd like to draw attention to an issue of Women: A Cultural Review which should be of interest to romance scholars. I haven't actually been able to get hold of copies of these articles myself but the argument in the article about Heyer, in particular, seems controversial:

Deal, Clare H., 2015. 

"‘Throbb[ing] with a consciousness of a knowledge that appalled her’: Embodiment and Female Subjectivity in the Desert Romance", Women: A Cultural Review 26.1-2: 75-95.

Here's the abstract:

This article examines the relationship between the desert and embodiment in E. M. Hull’s international best-seller The Sheik (1919). This novel, a desert romance, has been the focus of feminist scholarship for decades because of its controversial rape narrative. Drawing on theories of embodiment, in particular the work of Elizabeth Grosz, the author interrogates how the desert is paradoxically presented as a space of liberation and oppression within which female sexuality could be explored despite the gendered violence of pre-existing patriarchal frameworks. Ultimately, the author provides a reading of Diana in terms of her transition from an androgynous ‘girl’ to a sexually desiring, seemingly feminized ‘woman’, and examines the connotations associated with this. The author establishes a connection between the transient nature of the desert and the liberation offered to women within this liminal space. Through an in-depth examination of the protagonist Diana’s corporeal subjectivity over the course of the novel, the author positions The Sheik as offering a voice to female sexuality and erotic fantasy, demonstrating Hull’s depiction of the desert as an appropriation of that space through which to explore female desires. This opens up new understandings of what constituted innovative literature in interwar Britain and marks Hull’s book, with its overtly erotic content and specific focus on female desire, as a political and social departure.
 

Gillis, Stacy, 2015. 

"The Cross-Dresser, the Thief, His Daughter and Her Lover: Queer Desire and Romance in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades", Women: A Cultural Review 26.1-2: 57-74.

Here's the abstract:

When romance fiction consolidated as a genre in the 1920s and 1930s, a series of generic conventions concerning the heterosexual imperatives came about. This article considers how these heterosexual imperatives function as a mask for queer desire in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades (1926).  Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the article identifies in the novel a detailed account of male–male desire through arguing that while the romantic narrative is concerned with the Duc of Avon and Léonie, his former cross-dressing page, the substantial sexual tension in the novel occurs in the meetings and exchanges between Avon and Léonie’s biological father, Henri Saint-Vire. While These Old Shades ends with the presentation of Léonie by Avon as his duchess, it is male–male desire which has (queerly) driven this romance plot to its ‘natural’ conclusion of marriage.  The article thinks through what happens when the rivalry, explicitly about desiring a woman, is an implicit homosocial bond and how this functions within the heterosexual imperatives of the romance novel. The article questions how desire functions in the romance novel and, more crucially, how romance fiction can be read as resisting, at least in part, that which has been traditionally understood as their raison d’être—the heterosexual imperative.

And in the same issue there's another item which may be of interest, though I won't be adding it to the Bibliography because I've not been adding Fifty Shades scholarship to it unless there's a clear link made to romance novels:

Booth, Naomi, 2015.

"The Felicity of Falling: Fifty Shades of Grey and the Feminine Art of Sinking", Women: A Cultural Review 26.1-2: 22-39.

Here's the abstract:

This article explores the frequent faints depicted in the Fifty Shades novels in the context of a long history of feminine swooning in the popular novel, and in light of Alexander’s Pope’s famous description of bathos as ‘the felicity of falling gracefully’. Pope’s satirical treatise describes not just a sinking from the high to the low, but from the present to the past, through a process of bathetic literary travesty. The author argues that the Fifty Shades novels travesty their literary precedents, troping in particular on past moments of female powerlessness and producing bathos through depictions of the fainting female form. The novels depend in particular on (mis)readings of Tess of the D’Urbervilles: their celebration of Tess’s abjection strips Hardy’s novel of its most complex and disturbing elements, euphemizing a bloody and tragic struggle as a swoon of ecstatic submission. At stake in this discussion is the question of how popular fiction deals with its past—in this case, how the novels deal with a history of exploited femininity iconized in the swoon. The Fifty Shades novels simultaneously invoke and deny the past, celebrating female abjection in a manner that disavows the specificities of that abjection, and denying the materiality of the materials they draw upon. E. L. James’s approach to her historical referents is contrasted with Angela Carter’s, through which the texture of the past (and the motif of feminine fainting) is vividly engaged with in an attempt to transform the future.

 

Personality Tests

Laura Vivanco

"I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too"

There's been quite a bit of theorising and discussion about readers' personalities and preferences which I wanted to see if I could piece together. Since I'm going to touch on controversial topics and describe reader responses which are not my own, comments which offer clarification and corrections will be particularly gratefully received.





Which of these two columns best describes your personality?

Column One	Column Two
Very independent Not at all emotional Very objective Not at all easily influenced Very dominant Likes math and science very much Very active Very competitive Very worldly Very direct Very adventurous Can make decisions easily Almost always acts as a leader Very self-confident Very ambitious	Very talkative Very tactful Very gentle Very aware of feelings of others Very religious Very interested in own appearance Very neat in habits Very quiet Very strong need for security Enjoys art and literature Easily expresses tender feelings [adapted from Broverman et al,  page 63.]

If you're a woman who feels as though you ought to say column two, but would really like to let loose the column one characteristics you've repressed, perhaps you’re the kind of reader whom Laura Kinsale and Linda Barlow describe in their essays in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women.
In “The Androgynous Reader,” Laura Kinsale asks

What does it mean to a woman to feel – to want keenly to feel – what the male character feels as she reads?

I think that, as she identifies with a hero, a woman can become what she takes joy in, can realize the maleness in herself, can experience the sensation of living inside a body suffused with masculine power and grace [...], can explore anger and ruthlessness and passion and pride and honor and gentleness and vulnerability [...]. In short, she can be a man. (37) 

Kinsale believes that what many readers “savor [...] is the freedom to expand into all the aspects, feminine and masculine, of their own being” (40). In “The Androgynous Writer: Another View of Point of View,” Linda Barlow, who is

not ashamed to admit that I’ve always been one of those die-hard fans of the old-fashioned, hard-edged romances which feature a feisty heroine who falls into love and conflict with a dangerous hero with sardonic eyebrows and a cruel but sensual mouth. (45)

argues that this type of romance hero is actually “a significant aspect of feminine consciousness itself” (46) and she adds that he provides female readers 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, the rite of passage schoolyard fight and resultant black eye that parents (especially fathers) seem willing to tolerate. They also have more outlets for their sexuality, the expression of which is not only tolerated but encouraged. Females, on the other hand, are instructed from childhood to control, repress, or even split off their aggressive and erotic drives. (49-50)

In other words, he embodies the traits in column one. If Kinsale and Barlow are right, then while romances which pair ultra-feminine (albeit feisty) heroines with ultra-masculine heroes ostensibly endorse gender stereotypes, they simultaneously allow readers to experience a fuller range of emotions and behaviours than they are permitted by gender stereotypes.
Recently there have been discussions about how "the m/m genre is in a very large part, hostile to (fictional) women" (Voinov) and there has also been controversy (beginning here and continued here and here) about readers of m/m romance who really only want to read cis-m/cis-m romance. ["Cis" is a term used to "refer to someone who is comfortable with the gender assigned to them at birth. Same for cissexual. If you’re comfortable with the sex assigned to you at birth, you’re probably cissexual" (Bran).]
Neither Kinsale nor Barlow discuss m/m romance but I can't help but think about their theories on androgynous readers and wonder if trans* protagonists are being rejected for similar reasons to those which cause some readers and writers to turn to m/m fiction. Could it be that the presence of a heroine would serve as a constant reminder to an "androgynous reader" that women are still expected (to a greater or lesser degree) to express the characteristics in column two? And is it perhaps possible that a trans* protagonist in a m/m romance would also make explicit issues of gender which the "androgynous reader" would rather not deal with when attempting to "realize the maleness in herself"?
Joanna Russ once observed that female authors writing m/m slash are

in disguise. They’re disguised as a man. I once noticed that in slash there are so many references to these characters’ penises that it’s like a little label that says “Hello, I am” and the name. [...] I think it’s something like this. As I said, the characters are not exactly male. They’re disguises of some sort, kind of like “I have the proper genitals so I am male, please remember that.” (Francis and Piepmeier)

Could it perhaps be that some "androgynous" authors and readers feel that the anatomy of trans* protagonists would not serve so well as a disguise for female authors and readers? In addition could the "abhorrence of what's called 'girly bits' or 'girl parts', or 'vay jay'" (Voinov) in m/m romance and a marked preference for cis-male protagonists, stem from the cultural associations of different types of genitalia? Braun and Wilkinson "posit that experiences of the biological body are constructed by social/cultural/historical context and that interpretations of bodies need to be considered within context" (18). Part of that context is that

The vagina is often represented as part of the female body that is shameful, unclean, disgusting. [...] Women 'are brought up in a society which tells us that our bodies smell' (Smith, 1987, p. 21). Genital slang often invokes smell (e.g. stench trench) (Braun & Kitzinger, 1999a; Mills, 1991); to be called a 'smelly cunt' is a horrible insult (Smith, 1987). Laws (1987, p. 13) noted that 'many women hate their discharges, and find them very smelly and unpleasant . . . These attitudes come from our culture’s making out that women’s bodies are dirty, mysterious, oozing strange fluids - different from men’s, therefore wrong.’ (21-22)

In contrast, as Kyra Kramer and I have noted,

while “generally ethnographers have concluded that few men actually equate their manhood with their genitalia, nonetheless many studies indicate that they are a favorite point of reference” (Gutmann 396). Regardless of the cause of the conflation,

The penis is what men have and women do not; the phallus is the attribute of power which neither men nor women have. But as long as the attribute of power is a phallus which refers to and can be confused […] with a penis, this confusion will support a structure in which it seems reasonable that men have power and women do not. (Gallop 97)

Perhaps to some readers and authors no less than two penises capable of provding the reader with a "money shot" can symbolically ward off "shameful, unclean, disgusting" femininity and allow access the access to the personaity traits in columnn one?
-----

• Barlow, Linda. "The Androgynous Writer: Another View of Point of View." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 45-52.

• Bran. "The Language of the Rainbow: Introduction." Embrace the Rainbow. 8 March 2012. 

• Braun, V. and S. Wilkinson. "Socio-cultural Representations of the Vagina." Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 19.1 (2001): 17-32.

• Broverman, Inge K, Susan Raymond Vogel, Donald M. Broverman, Frank E. Clarkson, and Paul S. Rosenkrantz. "Sex-Role Stereotypes: A Current Appraisal." Journal of Social Issues 28.2 (1972): 59-78. 

• Francis, Conseula and Alison Piepmeier. "Interview: Joanna Russ." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.2 (2011).

• Kinsale, Laura. "The Androgynous Reader: Point of View in the Romance." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 31-44. 

• Vivanco, Laura and Kyra Kramer. "There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).

• Voinov, Aleksandr. "The purity of fear, prejudice, and intolerance (the m/m rainbow has only one colour: gay)." 21 March 2012. 

The image is of "The Gripsholm Portrait, though[t] to be Elizabeth I of England" (via Wikimedia Commons). The caption is taken from a speech she gave in 1588 as the Armada approached England's shores.

"Cherishing the Chains of Their Bondage"?

Laura Vivanco

Germaine Greer states of the romance hero that "The traits invented for him have been invented by women cherishing the chains of their bondage" (180). The word "bondage" here was almost certainly intended to mean "the state of being a slave" (OED) but it could perhaps equally well be read as implying a connection between the romance genre and the "sexual practice that involves the tying up or restraining of one partner" (OED). If the latter meaning was implied, it certainly wouldn't have been the first time that BDSM themes had been detected in the genre.

Ethel M. Dell was a successful romance author whose first novel was published in 1912. In 1922

A Bookman feature on the [...] novels of Ethel M. Dell argued that 'the less intelligent and less sensitive girl dreams of an ardent lover and gets a humdrum fellow who makes love without spirit and without inventiveness. To such a girl the Dell hero is a whiff of romance. She responds to him with a sort of masochistic delight.' (Melman 45-46)

Published in 1919, E. M. Hull's The Sheik is one of the most famous of the early 20th-century romance novels;

The Literary Review described the book as 'a poisonously salacious piece' and added that Diana Mayo, the heroine, was 'a sister under the skin of [the Marquis De Sade's] Justine.' (Melman 90)

Billie Melman adds that

One of the bawdiest burlesques [of The Sheik] [...] the anonymous Young Men out of Love (1928), [...] relates, at great length, the abduction and rape of Ali Bim-Seid-Amarcujian by a sex-starved débutante, a comic reversal of the roles of abductor and abducted. [...] The parody is crude and its implication overt: feminine relish in masochism is universal. And, the more emancipated and modern a woman is, the greater her desire to be humiliated and violated. This assumption is quite explicit in the noisy publicity campaign for Valentino's films: 'Shriek or the Sheik will strike you' cried street placards in New York and all over America. (93)

Elizabeth Gargano's analysis of the novel implies that in it sadism is linked to masculinity:

For Hull, as primitive cruelties and brutalities have been "refined" out of the character of the civilized European, erotic power too has diminished. Repeatedly, The Sheik tests the hypothesis that cruelty, passion, and potency are inextricably linked in the psyche. Thus the novel's sadomasochism is not simply an over-the-top extravagance, a flamboyant excess growing out of an erotic escapist daydream. Instead, the sadomasochistic fantasies of rape and attempted suicide that frame the narrative are at the core of the project. (184)

If masculinity has been defined as tending towards the sadistic while femininity has been associated with the masochistic, this may explain the persistence of this type of power dynamic in romantic fiction. Certainly Alison Assiter seems to imply that the romance heroines of the 1980s have a masochistic streak. In "Romance Fiction: Porn for Women?" she suggests that porn

is the representation of the eroticisation of relations of power between the sexes [...]. Thus, what is wrong with porn is that it reinforces men's desire to treat women as 'objects' or at least as a means of satisfying of their desire. (103)

She asserts that

porn for women could not, as some feminists have suggested it might, involve a reversal of the customary male/female roles. Though there are cases where this happens, fantasising 'crushing' a man under her would be, for most women, too risqué, too immoral, too far removed from her experience. (106)

In her opinion romances are porn for women "because they paint a picture of the woman wanting nothing so much as to be desired; they present an image of the woman as passive, responding" (106). And since "porn reinforces the subordination of women, in reading these works women are contributing to the reproduction of their oppression" (101).

What I think Assiter is doing is using "porn" as a shorthand term to refer to any sexual/sensual work of fiction which "reinforces the subordination of women." Sarah, AgTigress and I have all written posts explaining why we don't think it makes sense to classify romance as "porn" so I don't see much point in repeating those arguments. What's really at stake here is not whether romance is "porn" but whether

(a) fiction affects readers' attitudes and behaviours once they close the pages of their books
(b) romance heroines are presented as "passive, responding."
(c) there is no place in the genre for fantasies of a woman "fantasising 'crushing' a man under her."

As far as (a) is concerned, there does seem to be some evidence to support the idea that readers may be influenced or affected by their reading. If this is the case then it's possible that reading could have both negative and positive effects. As for (b), I think it would be fairly easy to find examples of romance heroines who are not at all passive sexually but, nonetheless, it has to be acknowledged that in m/f romances a lot of heroines but almost no heroes have been in receipt of "punishing" kisses and it has tended to be heroines who are sexually awakened by their heroes rather than vice versa. A sample of the dynamic is provided by Assiter:

'She willingly let his lips dominate hers for as long as he choose [sic]' (Strange Bedfellow, p. 164). [...] In case anyone thinks that this might be a phenomenon brought in by the relaxation of sexual taboos in the late sixties and early seventies, here is Barbara Cartland, writing in 1961: 'He crushed her to him and his lips found hers. He kissed her brutally with a violence which seemed to force the very life from between her lips' (The Runaway Star). (105)

It's (c) which most interests me, however, because it runs counter to the testimony of romance authors such as Daphne Clair:

Romantic heroes are arrogant autocrats and macho males, not because women are masochists but for the same reason that 007's enemies possess all that unlikely technology. Victory over a weak and ineffectual adversary is not worth much. But when a woman has a big, tough, powerful male on his knees and begging her to marry him, that's a trophy worth having! (Clair 71)

That kind of masculine submission may seem rather more metaphorical than the punishing kisses or even rapes inflicted on romance heroines but heroes aren't always physically dominant. In the film The Son of the Sheik (1926), "based on Hull's book Sons of the Sheik but conflating the two "sons" in one - Valentino, who also played his own father in the film [...] adds elements of masochism to the already heady erotic brew" (Garber 310):

In the famous torture scene Valentino, naked to his waist and strung up by the arms to a board, is beaten by two sadistic Germans. Apparently the audience's hysteria knew no bounds. (Melman 103)

If would seem that in Hull's work, at least, physical dominance of the heroine by the hero has its counterpoint in a scene in which the hero is dominated and tortured. Admittedly the son of the sheik isn't tortured by his beloved, but that may partly be a consequence of the fact that overt female dominance/sadism would "involve a reversal of the customary male/female roles." One can, however, find popular romances in which the heroine shoots her hero (Heyer's Devil's Cub and Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels) or has him tied up (Heyer's Faro's Daughter springs to mind).

In some romances one can perhaps discern hurt/comfort elements, with the hero as the protagonist who has been hurt. Hurt/comfort has been defined as

a fan fiction genre that involves the physical pain or emotional distress of one character, who is cared for by another character. The injury, sickness or other kind of hurt allows an exploration of the characters and their relationship. [...] Depending on the fandom and/or the author, H/C stories may also encompass BDSM elements to varying degrees. (Fanlore)

So what do you think? Are there elements of female dominance in the genre which have escaped the notice of critics such as Assiter and Greer?

----

• Assiter, Alison. "Romance Fiction: Porn for Women?" Perspectives on Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature. Ed. Gary Day and Clive Bloom. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1988. 101-109.
• Clair, Daphne. "Sweet Subversions." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 61-71.
• Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. 1992. New York: Routledge, 1997.
  
• Gargano, Elizabeth. "'English Sheiks' and Arab Stereotypes: E. M. Hull, T. E. Lawrence, and the Imperial Masquerade." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48.2 (2006): 171-86.
  
• Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. 1970. London: Paladin, 1971.
  
• Melman, Billie. Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1988.

Soft Men? Hard Women?

Laura Vivanco

In an essay I co-wrote with Kyra Kramer for the Journal of Popular Romance Studies we explored how social values are expressed through descriptions of protagonists' bodies and we noted that when the hero's penis is being described

in romances there is frequent “use of the personal pronouns — me, he, him, himself — to signify this body part […]. The seemingly unavoidable use of these pronouns is a […] curious euphemistic practice because it equates the man’s penis with the man himself” (Johnson-Kurek 119). The sentence “She cradled the rigid length of him in her palm” (Castle 172) is an example of this kind of writing: the part seems to become the whole. Conversely, when the reader is told that a hero’s body has “Long, long legs, […] a broad back that went on forever, all golden-skinned and rock-hard” (Lindsey 47), the allusion to another part of the hero that might be long, broad, and hard is not subtle.

As Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan have observed, "Heroes are never soft. They are hard. Everywhere" (94). The hardness of a hero's physique isn't just a metaphor for his sexual "hardness": it also implies that he is socially, politically, and/or physically strong. Indeed, the word "hardman" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning "a tough, aggressive, or ruthless man." Hardness, in other words, is used metaphorically to imply power of various kinds.

In her guide to romance writing, Kate Walker states that

the alpha male is strong, powerful, forceful, dynamic and successful ... add in all the rest of it - the cars, the money and the looks - and you have a romance hero. But at heart he's just a human being. [...]
If the hero is totally untouchable, how is he ever going to fall in love? What is it about the heroine that touches something in him in a way that no one has ever done before? [...] There must be a chink in his armour - the reason why he's doing something or the soft inner heart that he's trying to protect - through which your heroine can reach him. (109-110)

Softness, then, as in the phrase "soft inner heart," suggests emotional openness, and even if alpha heroes are allowed some emotional softness, softness is generally symbolically associated with heroines' bodies and their warm, nurturing personalities. The description of the soft and hard bodies is, then, often not simply a description of bodies, but also hints at the gender roles of the people whose bodies are being described.

Contrasts between a hard man and a soft women often serve to emphasise difference between the genders:

His body was rock solid against hers, complementing her softness, accentuating the fact that she was a woman and he was a man. (Carroll 43)

But are women's bodies really always softer than men's bodies? And what are the implications of a masculinity which requires constant "hardness" from someone who is "just a human being"?

The poet Richard Jeffrey Newman has been writing a series of posts titled "Fragments of Evolving Manhood" and one of them is a "slightly edited version" of "the conclusion to an essay about pornography called 'Inside The Men Inside "Inside Christy Canyon,"' that I published in 1994 in the now-defunct literary journal called 'The American Voice.'" In it he quotes a poem by Sharon Olds:

The Connoisseuse of Slugs

When I was a connoisseuse of slugs
I would part the ivy leaves, and look for the
naked jelly of those gold bodies,
translucent strangers glistening along the
stones, slowly, their gelatinous bodies
at my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivel
to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,
but I was not interested in that. What I liked
was to draw aside the ivy, breathe the
odor of the wall, and stand there in silence
until the slug forgot I was there
and sent its antennae up out of its
head, the glimmering umber horns
rising like telescopes, until finally the
sensitive knobs would pop out the
ends, delicate and intimate. Years later,
when I first saw a naked man,
I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet
mystery reenacted, the slow
elegant being coming out of hiding and
gleaming in the dark air, eager and so
trusting you could weep.

Olds' poem presents men, and male sexuality, as soft and easily damaged. I found it interesting how the power dynamics shift when the male, instead of having a hard shaft which he will thrust into a soft body, seems soft and vulnerable, even as he grows hard: "the sensitive knobs" never threaten the "connoisseuse of slugs," and it is she who could represents a potential threat since she knows that "they would shrivel to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt."

I don't think slug metaphors will ever become popular in the romance genre, at least not unless readers decide that slimy invertebrates which damage garden plants are romantic (and even then there might be some prejudice against them because they're hermaphrodites), but heroes are sometimes shown to be physically vulnerable, and not just because they've been temporarily injured, but because that vulnerability, that softness, is an intrinsic part of their nature as men:

His skin was surprisingly soft. She was careful to avoid the wound. Men. They thought themselves invincible with their strong bodies. They armed themselves to the teeth and clattered about in their armour, banging their shields together, riding their great horses. None of them facing the fact that underneath it all there was this, warm, soft flesh. Beautiful flesh and muscle which, while it was wholly male, remained vulnerable - male flesh could be hurt as much as it could do hurt. Men. (Townend 2009, 212)

It's also possible for a heroine to be physically hard, like her hero:

"When I first met you, I wanted to do this. I told myself that someday I would, and that when I felt your flesh for the first time, it would be as hard and firm as mine is." He allowed her breasts to fall free [...] Then both hands were spanning her ribs, sliding down into the hollow above her navel as he dipped his head low and kissed her naked shoulder. "Your skin is perfect, not soft like most women's. Whoever said soft skin was sexy? (Spencer 173)

It's probably not a coincidence that when they play racket-ball, they do so as equals: "There were men who extended the courtesy of always letting ladies serve first. It had always peeved Winn. She'd win on her own merits or not at all" (135).

--------

• Carroll, Marisa, 1995. Marry Me Tonight (Don Mills, Ontario: Harlequin).
  
• Spencer, LaVyrle, 1985. Spring Fancy (London: Mills & Boon).
  
• Townend, Carol, 2009. Runaway Lady, Conquering Lord (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).
• Vivanco, Laura, and Kyra Kramer, 2010. “There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre”, Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1.
• Walker, Kate, 2008. Kate Walker's 12 Point Guide to Writing Romance (Abergele: Studymates).
  
• Wendell, Sarah, and Candy Tan, 2009. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels (New York: Fireside).

The photo came from Wikimedia Commons. Dating from 1857, it was taken by Andreas Groll and shows a suit of armour.

Are You a Feminist or a Flower?: White Hibiscus by Rosemary Pollock

Laura Vivanco

Since we've been looking at Heather Schell's suggestion that evolutionary psychology may have been used by romance authors in the 1990s to defend the genre against feminist critics, I thought it would be interesting to look at another conjunction of feminism, romance and ideas about evolution, but this time in an older romance. Two significant differences here are that

• the focus of the discussions about biology/evolution is the heroine, rather than the alpha hero, and
• ultimately the heroine is considered to better than both feminists and other women because she seems to lack many of the traits they possess.

Ann Rosalind Jones's essay "Mills & Boon Meets Feminism" was published in 1986 and it explores feminism and whether or not it is compatible with romance. This seems to have been an issue which preoccupied many romance authors at the time, as Jones discovered when she began her research:

reading them recently, I have confronted the most recent trends in the genre. I was astonished to find that every novel I read (sixteen, all published in 1983-4) either refers explicitly to feminism or deals implicitly with issues feminism has raised: women's work, their economic and psychic independence from men, their sexuality - or what might better be called the shifts in 'manners' around heterosexual attraction and pursuit. (197)

She also found that a significant proportion of "writers and editors are now willing to experiment in liberal-feminist directions" (211) and that,

Without any direct reference to feminism, the standard romance plot may nevertheless reconstruct relations between the sexes. By page 140 of the required 180, nurturant men and competent women occupy test situations that supersede conventional gender roles.
But overt references to feminism are much more problematic in Mills & Boon. The term itself, like the demands and debates associated with it, produces striking ambivalence in these novels, even when they register changes that are feminist in effect. (201)

and "At one extreme, Mills & Boon uses feminism in mocking or antithetical ways, to initiate a counter-movement" (202). White Hibiscus, by Rosemary Pollock, was published in 1979 and is located at this extreme end of the spectrum:

'Good evening. You're very punctual.' Turning away from her, he opened the door of the car, and while she climbed inside he held it.
'I didn't want to keep you waiting,' she said demurely.
Still frowning, he got in beside her. 'That's rather unusual.'
'Unusual? Why?'
Allowing himself a brief smile, he looked straight at her. 'I don't know many girls who believe in punctuality.'
There was a tiny pause, then she said crisply: 'I don't think women should expect pointless privileges. Keeping people waiting is just bad manners.'
Paul turned his key in the ignition, and the car swung round. 'I take it,' he observed drily, 'you're not a supporter of the Women's Liberation movement?'
'No, I'm not. I don't see why one should deny one's femininity. But being inconsiderate isn't particularly feminine.'
He nodded. That's an interesting point. (114-15)

It's an interesting passage, certainly. Given that there's no refutation of the claim that most women don't "believe in punctuality," the implications seem to be that

• most women, whether feminist (feminism is referred to in the novel as "Women's Liberation") or not, are "inconsiderate" and
• feminist women are demanding "pointless privileges" and denying their "femininity."
  

Feminism is mentioned again later in the novel when Emma is at a press conference and a journalist asks her whether she "was normally in the habit of wearing a bra - afterwards going on to ask how she felt about Women's Lib" (142). A reader is presumably supposed to know that the journalist is referring to feminist bra-burning (although this never actually happened). The overall effect of these questions and of Emma's earlier comments is to imply that feminism is ridiculous and focussed on trivialities.

Referring to other kinds of scenes in Mills & Boon romances, Jones noted that

the imagery that recurs in love scenes [...] belongs to a discourse that links sex to nature: built into the body, eternally the same. [...] But the appeal to primordial drive often has a forced quality, as if the formula is in need of emphatic reassertion. (210)

There are no explicit sex scenes in White Hibiscus, but the "appeal to primordial drive[s]" and the implication that biology is immutable are nevertheless present in the text. Paul, the hero, is Maltese, and on her arrival in Valetta, Emma (who is English) feels that there is "something primitive about the place" (14). Perhaps because of this Paul believes that he understands primitive biological drives. He initially assumes that Emma has "dubious morals" (43) and he later explains his

attitude to women. I believe that a girl like you is entirely vulnerable - morally helpless. Consciously or unconsciously, she believes that she has been put into the world to capture a man, and everything she does is motivated by that belief. She is determined to acquire a mate, and if allowed full control of her own life she will go to any lengths to achieve her ambition. A man has only to say that he loves her, and she will go away with him - because her instinct tells her that this is her destiny. Her instinct, however, is like a badly programmed computer - it doesn't understand that the man she is planning to sleep with has no intention of bringing up her children. (49)

It's almost as though Paul is an early proponent of evolutionary psychology. However, Paul's "attitude to women" presumably allows for the existence of a few women who are somewhat different because it seems that he eventually comes to agree with his sister that Emma is "such a nice girl" (42). He certainly decides that

'You are unusual. For an English girl.'
Her eyes widened. 'English girls don't drink such a lot.'
Paul laughed. 'No, perhaps they don't. But often they are very sophisticated. Very - liberated.'
'And you don't approve of liberated women.'
'Naturally not. They are all fundamentally miserable.'
'Do you really think so? [...] It's something I haven't thought about all that much. But - well, I suppose I'm "liberated". I do more or less as I like. Nobody organises my life. And I say what I think.'
He studied her. There was something in his eyes she didn't quite understand. 'That's different,' he remarked softly. 'That's just - being yourself.' (124)

I wonder if that "something in his eyes" implies that what he's really saying here, in a way which Emma fails to understand, is that he believes most English girls are promiscuous, and that this makes them "fundamentally miserable." Given that Pollock uses the term "Women's Liberation" to refer to feminism, the repeated use of the word "liberated" here perhaps also suggests that Paul's comments identify the miserable, promiscuous "English girls" as feminists.

In reversing his initial opinion that Emma is an "English model with dubious morals" (43) he admits that "when I first met you I formed a certain impression. I was wrong. [...] You are vulnerable" (87). This kind of vulnerability is presumably different from the vulnerability he mentioned earlier and defined as meaning "morally helpless" (49). In requiring Paul's protection from sexual harassment by other men, Emma demonstrates that she is not "morally helpless," just physically helpless, and this is emphasised by the fact that she also needs him to rescue her from a series of physical threats: sunstroke, drowning, and being trapped part way down a cliff.

Yet even "nice girls," with morals, are apparently ruled by some unchanging instincts, for Paul informs her that although some things have changed since "the days of Carthage" (156), "a man is always a man - that doesn't change. [...] Women, too. Even you, a child of modern England - do you believe that you are so very different from the women of the Phoenician age?" (156).

Carried away by love, however, Paul also seems to think that his beautiful, non-feminist English damsel in distress is unique (if not in the whole of history from the Phoenician age onwards, at least in his own experience): "I have never known a girl like you. You are a perfect flower that opens at the touch of the sun - a white hibiscus blossom" (172-73). The implication seems to be that unlike the "morally helpless" women who "will go away with" any man who offers love, Emma will only "open" at Paul's touch.

Emma, then, appears to be a rare women, who despite being "feminine" is not like other woman and so is not wholly at the mercy of all the biological urges which move them. This is reinforced by the fact that Steve (the first man to sexually proposition Emma) claims that "you're not such an iceberg. You can't kid me you are - not with that hair" (23)? Presumably biology is destiny and "masses of chestnut hair" (14) are to be taken as a reliable indication that a woman has strong sexual appetites. The novel does not refute this reading of Emma's hair but retrospectively one can deduce that although passionate, she shrinks from Steve's advances, because a women like a "white hibiscus blossom" will only open "at the touch of the sun" and Emma the iceberg only melts in response to the sexual advances made by Paul.

• Jones, Ann Rosalind. "Mills & Boon meets feminism." The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction. Ed. Jean Radford. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. 195-218.
• Pollock, Rosemary. White Hibiscus. 1979. Toronto: Harlequin, 1980.

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.

The Sex Lives of Romance Readers

Laura Vivanco

Laura Clawson, in her recent post about the genre, attempted to refute the "myth" that "Romance novels are just porn for women":

romance has not become a $1.37 billion business on the basis of people too embarrassed to admit that they want porn buying 400-page books for the 3-4 sex scenes within. See, they also contain characters and stories, and some people like those. In fact, and I realize this is going to sound as ridiculous as claiming to smoke a lot of pot without inhaling, I mostly skip the sex scenes. I read the books for the stories, and I doubt I'm unique in that.

Since various other romance readers commented in response that they, too, mostly skip the sex scenes, Clawson is clearly not alone in this particular reading behaviour. Still, there's obviously a perception that romances are "porn for women" and the question of how romances affect their readers' sex lives is one that seems to have intrigued many, including a few academics. What follows is a short summary of the existing research (that I'm aware of) into the sex lives of romance readers.

Coles and Shamp (1984) - In their “Some Sexual, Personality, and Demographic Characteristics of Women Readers of Erotic Romances” Coles and Shamp begin by describing the novels under discussion and they state that

Given their tremendous sales, the reading of these books must be a significant behavior for the 20 million loyal readers [...] who buy them. Since these stories are neither well written "literature" nor informative, in the sense of being original or historically accurate, their appeal can only result from some emotionally compelling quality in plots or settings. (188)

Bearing in mind that in the court case over Lady Chatterley's Lover "Penguin won their case, on the new legal grounds of ‘literary merit’ as a justification for explicit sexual content. The mere presence of sexual incidents in a book no longer defined it automatically as pornographic, obscene and illegal" (AgTigress), one might suppose that a work with "explicit sexual content" which is deemed to have no "literary merit" is likely to be labelled as pornography or erotica. Certainly Coles and Shamp write: "it can be suggested that erotic romances are so popular among their readers because they represent a socially acceptable form of mild pornography that is not recognized as such either by those who read them or by the rest of society" (207-8). I do wonder if, however, their article subsequently helped at least some sections of "the rest of society" feel secure in describing romances as "pornography."

If we turn to what Coles and Shamp have to say about readers, we find that they first surveyed "college women" and,

In support of the hypothesis that reading erotic romances is related to sexual deprivation, readers in this group who are more often married or cohabiting, report a mean frequency of 1.45 sexual acts per week, while nonreaders report 2.50 acts per week. (196)

However, the picture of romance readers changed when they surveyed older women:

Older readers reported having sexual intercourse twice as much as did nonreaders and, indeed, more frequently than the national average for all women [...]. In addition, housewife readers reported being more satisfied with sex than nonreaders. These data do not support the simplistic idea, which might have been suggested by the college sample, that lack of sex is forcing women to find other outlets through erotica. (206)

Thurston comments on this to the effect that

While the Coles and Shamp (1984) study, which was conducted in 1978 and focused on the bodice rippers of that period, does not say that erotic romance readers make love twice as frequently as non-readers because they read romances, it does establish a correlation between frequency of intercourse and reading erotic romances, and between reading erotic romances and use of sexual fantasy. (158)

It should be noted that when Coles and Shamp refer to "erotic romances" they are referring to novels which are rather different from those in the sub-genre known by that label today, and they are also different from the novels focussed on by Thurston.

Thurston (1987) - Thurston also refers to "erotic romances" but in her book, The Romance Revolution, she was using the term to refer to both "The erotic contemporary series romances which began appearing in 1981" (Thurston 92) and the "erotic historical romance [which] as an identifiable entity is widely considered to have appeared on the American scene with the 1972 publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower. Two years later Avon again struck gold with Rosemary Rogers's Sweet Savage Love [...], setting off an avalanche of feisty heroines, high adventure, and sex that sounded the death knell for the suddenly tame gothic and regency romances" (Thurston 67). Thurston, whose The Romance Revolution was published in 1987, states that "the popular romance genre since 1972 has been divided into two basic types - the sweet romance and the erotic romance - with the fundamental difference between them being the presence or absence of specific sexual behavioral norms and explicit sexual activities" (7).

In Thurston's view, "Other story characteristics (contemporary or historical settings, for instance) create secondary divisions in the two subgenres, but it was a specific kind of sexual activity, more and more explicitly described as the 1970s progressed, that created the first and most significant division within the genre" (8). Thurston states, however, that "Sexual content is the most important classifying characteristic [...] because of the kind of sex-role portrayal that came to be associated with it" (7) and that

More and more explicitly articulated after 1972, female sexuality became increasingly complex in the most evolved erotic romances (heterosexual in the genre examined here), and by 1982 it was generally being portrayed as inextricably intertwined with both economic and personal autonomy, and ultimately with a joyously feminine sense of self. (141)

In other words, Thurston seems to be suggesting that in the romances under discussion, sexual freedom and freedom from particular gender ("sex-role") norms have become inseparable.¹ Thurston also notes that there are many reasons why people would choose to read romances:

For almost all of the readers surveyed [...] reading romance novels is primarily entertainment-seeking behavior that provides pleasure, escape, relaxation, and renewal because it stimulates and challenges the imagination. Thus the romance as a form of entertainment and escape encompasses a web of complex motivations and gratifications, serving as a means of exploring new ideas about the changing role and status of women in society - a kind of test run or sounding board for a variety of ideas, attitudes, and behavior - at the same time that it provides the security of the familiar. It is the formulaic nature of genre fiction that opens the door to the unfamiliar, and through time and repeated exposure converts unusual or new elements into the ordinary and familiar. (131-32)

Thurston also has something to say about the sex lives of romance readers. She found that "about half of the readers surveyed in 1985 said they use erotic romance novels as sexual fantasy" (134) and that

Seventy-seven percent of the romance readers surveyed in 1985 agreed with the statement "Many of the love scenes depicted in romance novels are sexually stimulating," attesting to the fact that erotic romances contain fantasies that many women can and do relate to sexually. Furthermore, most readers consciously perceived these novels as erotica and said they use them for sexual information and ideas, to create a receptive-to-sex frame of mind, and even to achieve arousal. (10)

Thurston believed that in romances sex "was generally being portrayed as inextricably intertwined with both economic and personal autonomy" (141), perhaps at least in part because at the time she was writing, during the 1980s, many of the novels contained

The New Heroine [who] generally is experienced, confident, self-sufficient, assertive, and even daring - all traits traditionally assigned to men - which means she no longer needs the male guardian, the rake, or the sugar daddy. What does she require in a man? Still a strong-willed character (he must be if he is to be her equal), the New Hero also exhibits many traits traditionally assigned to females - openness, flexibility, sensitivity, softness, and vulnerability - transforming him from invincible superman into fallible human being. Thus androgyny has burst into full bloom. (Thurston 98)

Not everyone saw this as a positive move, however. Jayne Ann Krentz, in her essay in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women (1992) discussed the

pressure exerted to make romance writers and romance fiction more politically correct. During the past few years, even as romance novels have commanded a spectacular share of the publishing market there has been an unrelenting effort to change them.
Much of this effort was exerted by a wave of young editors fresh out of East Coast colleges who arrived in New York to take up their first positions in publishing [...]. The first target of these reforming editors was what has come to be known in the trade as the alpha male. These males are the tough, hard-edged, tormented heroes that are at the heart of the vast majority of bestselling romance novels. (107)

It is not difficult to see the "New Hero," so pleasing to Thurston, under attack in this scathing comment by Krentz:

you don't get much of a challenge for a heroine from a sensitive, understanding, right-thinking "modern" man who is part therapist, part best friend, and thoroughly tamed from the start. You don't get much of a challenge for her from a neurotic wimp or a good-natured gentleman-saint who never reveals a core of steel. (109)

According to Krentz "The second target of those who attempted to change romance novels was another familiar convention in the books: the aggressive seduction of the heroine by the hero" (109) and she concludes that

The effort to make romance novels respectable has been a resounding failure. The books that exemplify the "new breed" of politically correct romances, the ones featuring sensitive, unaggressive heroes and sexually experienced, right-thinking heroines in "modern" stories dealing with trendy issues, have never become the most popular books in the genre. (113)

Wu (2006) - Perhaps it is at least in part because of this "resounding failure" that some, including Wu, believe that "Most romance novels promote deeply constraining patriarchal values" (131). Wu's

results reveal that female readers self-reported greater sex addiction, greater sex drive and greater number of orgasms required for sexual satisfaction than female non-readers. [...] Contrary to expectations, readers of romance novels had fewer sex partners, a lower level of self-assessed femininity than non-readers, and were older when they had their first thoughts about sex and had their first sexual intercourse. [...] The overall results of this study suggest that the general attitude-behavior pattern of readers of romance novels fits the Harlequin stereotype of nourishing a satisfying sex life in the context of romantic monogamous fidelity, while at the same time vicariously fulfilling sexual desires through fictitious characters in romance novels. (131)

Wu's essay is available online in full and for free.

Anderton (2009) - Widener University's Center for Education announced that Gretchen E. Anderton had successfully defended her Ed.D. dissertation on "Excitement, Adventure, Indifference: Romance Readers' Perceptions of How Romance Reading Impacts their Sex Lives." Some details about it are now available from ProQuest. Unfortunately you need to have a subscription to the database in order to read them, and a copy of the whole dissertation can only be ordered from ProQuest for a fee.

The dissertation is based on information provided by "Fifty-three women romance readers over the age of 18 [who] completed an online survey composed of multiple choice and open-ended essay questions." That's really not a lot of romance readers, so it's possible the results are unrepresentative of the genre's readers as a whole. In addition, if the online survey is the same one discussed on the romance scholar listserv in August of 2008, and which was titled "Opium or Viagra: The effects of reading romance novels on women's sex lives," then it should be noted that various members of the list who attempted to answer the questionnaire had their responses automatically rejected, and at least one of these rejections was due to the person living outside the US. It's perhaps no coincidence, then, that the introduction of Anderton's dissertation opens with statement that "Since the first modem romance novel was published in 1972, romance novels have contained sex" (1). Since this seems to be a reference to Kathleen E. Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower it perhaps indicates that Anderton is following Thurston in taking an American-centred view of the genre's readers.

Since I haven't been able to read the whole dissertation, many of my questions about it remain unanswered but its main findings seem to be included in the abstract and are as follows:

• In this study, it was found that participants use romance novels primarily to relax and escape the pressures of everyday life and only secondarily to produce sexual arousal.


• Most of the study participants (75.5%) reported that reading romance novels has had an impact on their sex lives. This occurred in several ways, including making participants more likely to engage in sexual activity and by making them more likely to try new sexual activities.


• A smaller number of participants (24.5%) stated that reading romance novels has not had any impact on their sex lives, sexual behavior or knowledge about sexuality. These participants emphasized the fictional nature of romance novels and stated that they read strictly for pleasure and do not learn anything or make any behavioral changes based on what they read.


• With regard to safer sex practices, participants said that romance novels present incorrect or misleading information about safer sex and that they regard them as unreliable in this area.


• Most participants (85%) reported that reading romance novels has not had an impact on their feelings about their sex partners or has had a positive impact on their feelings about their sex partners.


• Another major finding of this study was that women who read romance novels and who are satisfied with their sexual relationships feel that there is no basis for comparison between their sex partners and the male protagonist or hero in a romance novel, or that their sex partners compare favorably to the male protagonists or heroes in romance novels. In contrast, women who read romance novels and who are not satisfied with their sexual relationships feel that their sex partners compare unfavorably to the male protagonists or heroes in romance novels.

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• Anderton, Gretchen E. Excitement, adventure, indifference: Romance readers' perceptions of how romance reading impacts their sex lives, Ed.D., Widener University, 2009, 165 pages; AAT 338383
• Clawson, Laura. "Romance Reader, Unashamed." Daily Kos Sun Dec 27, 2009.
• Coles, Claire D., and M. Johnna Shamp. “Some Sexual, Personality, and Demographic Characteristics of Women Readers of Erotic Romances.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 13.3 (1984): 187-209.
• Krentz, Jayne Ann. "Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 107-114.
  
• Thurston, Carol. The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.
  
• Wu, Huei-Hsia. “Gender, Romance Novels and Plastic Sexuality in the United States: A Focus on Female College Students.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 8.1 (2006): 125-34.

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1 Specifically with regard to romances, Thurston acknowledges that "Traditional attitudes or viewpoints are still present in a number of stories" (104) and she found that "It is in the area of childbearing and how it functions in the context of sexual and social relationships that the contemporary romance most often is murky" (107). Thurston also notes that

Feminists early on rejected the simplistic assumption that sexual liberation equals women's liberation (a familiar cry being "the sexual revolution is not our revolution"), asserting that it increased the availability of pornography and in general made women more vulnerable to sexual exploitation. They also realized, as Edwin Shur (1983, 118) warned in his comprehensive work on the social control of women, that "when women's active sexuality is acknowledged, it may be misleading presented as the main path to full female liberation," ultimately distracting women from the pursuit of real social change. But while a fully developed sexuality does not predict a conscious sense of self, it is difficult to imagine that such a self could be achieved without it. (140)

The danger warned of by Shur has been explored more recently by Ariel Levy:

Only thirty years (my lifetime) ago, our mothers were "burning their bras" and picketing Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants and wearing the bunny logo as supposed symbols of our liberation. How had the culture shifted so drastically in such a short period of time?

What was almost more surprising than the change itself were the responses I got when I started interviewing the men and -- often -- women who edit magazines like Maxim and make programs like The Man Show and Girls Gone Wild. This new raunch culture didn't mark the death of feminism, they told me; it was evidence that the feminist project had already been achieved. We'd earned the right to look at Playboy; we were empowered enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes. Women had come so far, I learned, we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny. [...]

There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda. It doesn't work that way. "Raunchy" and "liberated" are not synonyms.

Janet/Robin, of Dear Author suggests that in the romance genre, however, traditional versions of female sexuality still predominate: "So-called Dukes of Slut can be heroic, but not Duchesses of Sexual Liberation." She does, however, note that there are more

heroines who have been damaged by sexual promiscuity. [...] In one sense I appreciate the willingness to investigate the darker connections between self-esteem and sexuality in Romance heroines. But I also think it’s interesting that the sexually promiscuous woman written within a construction of romantic love often endures a great deal of shame or punishment (inflicted by others or by herself) before she receives the gift of romantic happiness. Those heroines who are unashamed of their sexual polyamory may, more often than not, be pushed into erotica, where there is no expectation of a romantic happy ending.

Of course, not all romances contain heroines, and the sexuality of the characters in romances featuring gay men has also come under scrutiny recently. Spark in Darkness has summarised some of the issues as he sees them:

M/m fiction as I see it, is literature centring around a male/male relationship. It is also primarily written by straight women.
And I know some gay men loathe it with a fiery passion. And I don’t blame them - because most of it is bloody awful.
No, really. It’s full of gross (and often insulting) stereotypes, focused entirely on the sexing [...] I have read good m/m. But the majority I’ve read doesn’t come close - in fact it goes a long damn way from coming close. In fact, let’s be frank, most of it is porn. The m/m characters have as much relation with actual gay men as the nigh obligatory “lesbian” sex scene in porn aimed at heterosexual men. And, naturally, that has strong implications of appropriation, exploitation and voyeurism to say the least and potential consequences for young gays looking for something about them come across a stereotypical, angst filled, sex obsessed one-hand-reading piece of m/m fiction.

Heyer 2009: K. Elizabeth Spillman: 'Cross Dressing and Disguise'

Laura Vivanco

K. Elizabeth Spillman is currently working on fairy tales at the University of Pennsylvania, having completed an MA Thesis in Literature at the University of Wales, Bangor in 2007. This thesis, titled "The Morphology of a Love Story: Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Structures in Romance Fiction," focused on Austen and Heyer. Spillman has also studied the ways in which

Fairy tales have provided a body of imagery adapted by the wedding complex and used to elevate a single day and its rituals to iconic status, at once universalizing the bridal experience by connecting it to familiar narratives, and individualizing it with the promise of the extraordinary. As the mainstream American wedding becomes ever-more extravagant and complex, these intertexts are called upon to provide accessible imagery in the project of constructing meaning for an increasingly commercialized ritual. (abstract of paper presented to the American Folklore Society in 2008)

Whereas modern brides may be choosing to dress themselves as fairytale princesses, a number of Heyer's early heroines choose, or are forced, to disguise themselves as men. In 'Cross Dressing and Disguise in Heyer’s Historical Romances' Spillman observed that disguises may in some ways reveal almost as much as they conceal. If gender is performative, then this is revealed by the act of wearing drag. Spillman raised the question of whether heroines who wear male drag expand or obscure their identities, and she also suggested that drag might be the impersonation of gender.

Disguise in Heyer's novels is certainly not limited to wearers of drag. Spillman noted that the hero of The Black Moth [1921] is an aristocrat in disguise and in Powder and Patch [1923] Philip in a sense disguises himself as a fop. Again this seems to raise issues concerning gender, since Philip believes that being a fop is "unmanly." Eventually, however, his costume becomes his identity, and in performing he has become transformed.

Spillman discussed three Heyer novels which include cross-dressing. These are

• These Old Shades [1926] - in which Léonie, the heroine, has lived as a boy for years. The Duke of Avon declares that he knew from the beginning that "Léon" was really a "Léonie." She rejects femininity to start with as she feels it is unnatural. For a long time after she is obliged to reassume her female identity she continues to keep a suit of masculine clothes for recreational purposes. She also learns to fence and attacks her kidnapper. Although she gradually learns to be a lady, she does not give up all aspects of her former masculine identity and she retains some of the agency she had as a boy.


• The Masqueraders [1928] - in which the reader is introduced to the heroine, Prudence, while she is disguised as a man, and the secondary hero, her brother Robin, is disguised as a woman. The Lacey siblings have not been forced into their masquerade to the same extent as Léonie was. Peter and Kate are truly accomplished drag artists. Prudence/Peter begins to feel more like a man than a woman, but she observes her own performance and assesses how good her disguise is. She is thus constantly aware that she is performing. Sir Anthony is perhaps alerted to her true gender by the "odd liking" he feels for her and he admires the courage of her performance. [LV comment: Some time after he has worked out that Peter is female, Sir Anthony reveals that "I've had suspicions of your secret since the first evening you dined with me."]
  
  Robin/Kate seems more confident in his disguise. Indeed,
  

  There could be no fault found [...] in his deportment. [...] Prudence watched him with a critical eye. He had several times before donned this woman's garb, but never for so long a stretch. She had coached him to the best of her ability, but well as she knew him could still fear some slip. She had to admit knowledge of him was deficient yet. Sure, he might have been born to it. [...] He seemed to know by instinct how to flirt his fan, and how to spread his wide skirts for the curtsy.

  Perhaps because of this he is also given the opportunity to spend more time performing his male role, rescuing Miss Grayson and, as a masked stranger, receiving her admiration. He masters both genders and moves fluidly between them. Unlike Prue, his disguise is not guessed at by his beloved.
  


• The Corinthian [1940]- in which the hero assists the heroine, Pen Creed, in perfecting her masculine disguise. Her disguise is not hidden from him and although the disguise is not very successful in helping the heroine to get the husband she initially wants, she does escape an unwanted husband. There is more comedy in the disguise/cross-dressing in this novel than in the previous two. For example, the novel ends thus:

  The coach lumbered on down the road; as it reached the next bend, the roof passengers, looking back curiously to see the last of a very odd couple, experienced a shock that made one of them nearly lose his balance. The golden-haired stripling was locked in the Corinthian's arms, being ruthlessly kissed.
  "Lawks a-mussy on us! whatever is the world a-coming to?" gasped the roof passenger, recovering his seat. "I never did in all my born days!"
  "Richard, Richard, they can see us from the coach!" expostulated Pen, between tears and laughter.
  "Let them see!" said the Corinthian.

  The breach of heteronormativity is the punchline. The Corinthian is Heyer's last cross-dressing novel and forms part of a move towards comedy in Heyer's later novels.
  

There is also a rather brief, comic cross-dressing attempt in The Talisman Ring [1936] when Ludovic disguises himself as a clumsy maid. [LV comment: Another brief instance of cross-dressing can be found in Simon the Coldheart [1925] when Lady Margaret disguises herself as a boy in a futile attempt to escape from Simon.]

In Faro's Daughter [1941] the heroine does not dress as a man, but she does long for male agency: "Oh, if I were a man, to be able to call him out, and run him through, and through, and through!" Her aunt sighs and responds that she "can't think where you get such unladylike notions!" Although she does not dress as a man, she does for a short while adopt a different identity [LV comment: that of a woman of a lower social class].

In Regency Buck [1935] Judith Taverner races her curricle in a way that is not appropriate for a lady. Heyer's later heroines thus show independence within a female gender identity rather than by contravening social norms and dressing as male. Spillman suggests that Heyer used cross-dressing to explore how women could appropriate power, but she later taught herself to empower her heroines without resorting to cross-dressing.

[LV comment: Spillman's paper, about heroines who dress as men and thus gain the ability to act and talk like men, reminded me of the discussions we've had in the romance community about how readers relate to the heroes and heroines of romances. As usual when it comes to my thoughts on how people read, what follows is mostly speculation on my part, as I (a) attempt to work through what other people have written about their process of reading and (b) attempt to draw parallels with Spillman's argument.

I wonder if there's a similarity between some of the cross-dressing heroines of romance and some romance readers who, as Laura Kinsale has suggested, imaginatively become the heroes of the novels they read:

I think that, as she identifies with a hero, a woman can become what she takes joy in, can realize the maleness in herself, can experience the sensation of living inside a body suffused with masculine power and grace [...], can explore anger and ruthlessness and passion and pride and honor and gentleness and vulnerability [...]. In short, she can be a man. (37)

These readers aren't physically cross-dressing but, Kinsale suggests, during the time they spend engrossed in the novel, they are able to dress themselves in a male body in order to appropriate male power. Perhaps, to parallel the development in Heyer's heroines, these readers are thus enabled to integrate into their daily lives as women some of the masculine behaviours and emotions they have learned from their time spent "cross-dressing" as heroes.]

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The photo is of a "Robe à la française or open gown with stomacher, 1740s, England," from Wikimedia Commons.