Clouds of Glory

Eric Selinger

 
I'm teaching Eloisa James's The Duke is Mine this afternoon, so I've spent much of this glorious May Day indoors, re-reading the book and taking notes.

One of them concerns a little phrase that the second male lead, Rupert, says early in the book, when he promises to marry our heroine after he's returned from battle, "Trailing glory, you understand" (41).  Near the end of the book, the phrase returns with a slight variation:  "Rupert was buried with honors:  not in the family tomb, but in Westminster Abbey, as befitted an English hero who trailed clouds of glory" (362).

The novel is set in 1812, and Rupert is a poet, so perhaps he knows the source of his own allusion, Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."  It was first printed, I gather, in 1807, but not published in its final form until 1815, and I'm not sure which version features the lines, but in any case, here's the passage in question, with the key lines underlined.

O evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,	45
And the children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm:—	50
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there's a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look'd upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The pansy at my feet	55
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,	60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come	65
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,	70
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;	75
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Why this passage?  How does it connect to the novel?  Is this a "working allusion," so to speak--one that has some actual bearing on the book--or just a tag that the author has in her head, and so put in the novel, as appropriate for a poet in 1812?

I'm teaching the book in conjunction with Laura's chapter on Metafiction, so my thoughts tend that way, but we'll see what my class decides, or I come up with, as the afternoon goes on!

PCA/ACA 2012 - (1)

Laura Vivanco

Close-Reading the Romance: Nora Roberts, Lyric, Eloisa James, and the Male Rape Victim

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - 3:00pm - 4:30pm

“Darkness Piles Up in the Trees”:  Love and Lyric in Eloisa James
Eric Selinger -  DePaul University

In 1993, Allan Bloom announced the “death of eros.”  It was not by natural causes.  Feminists, sexologists, and the ghost of Jean-Jaques Rousseau conspired in this “de-eroticization of the world” and consequent “disastrous decline in the rhetoric of love.” “There have been hardly any great novelists of love for almost a century,” Bloom sighed, although “cheap romantic novels, the kind that are sometimes stuck into boxes of household detergent, apparently flourish among housewives who haven’t heard that Eros is dead.”  Bloom’s fears about the “end of the novel of love” (as Vivian Gornick described it four years later) find a curious echo in period concerns about the “death of poetry,” which was announced and contested by Joseph Epstein (1988) Vernon Shetley (After the Death of Poetry, 1993), Donald Hall (Death to the Death of Poetry, 1994), among others.  What, one wonders, do these “deaths” have in common—and what are we to make of the evident survival, even flourishing, of both poetry and eros in “cheap romantic novels” from the 1990s and after?   The romance novels of Eloisa James provide an ideal oeuvre in which to explore these questions.  Professor of Renaissance drama, daughter of the poet Robert Bly and short-story author Carol Bly, James quotes and alludes to poetry throughout her work, not least in her latest novel, The Duke is Mine.  Renegotiating the cultural status of both poetry and romance fiction, she explores the afterlives of love and lyric in a (post-?) skeptical age.

Picturing the Self in Nora Robert's Sanctuary
Zohar Korn - Independent Scholar

My paper explores Nora Roberts' use of photography as the central metaphor for the self in her 1997 romantic suspense novel, Sanctuary. My claim is that through her treatment of photography, which she uses to develop characters as well as further the action, Roberts proposes two models of the self: the autonomous subject and the self-in-relation, advocating the latter. Both heroine and villain are photographers; the model of photography each chooses not only shows what each of them privileges as the principle around which to construct his or her sense of selfhood, but also implicitly provides Roberts’ commentary on those principles.

In the romantic plot, Roberts uses the heroine's roles as practitioner, object and observer of photography to positively construct a selfhood that promotes affective wellbeing. The heroine’s gradual transition from taking pictures of unpopulated scenery to including portraiture shows a growing emphasis on care and relationship rather than self-sufficiency and independence, an emphasis that is portrayed as strength rather than sacrifice. Thus, framed within its narrative through the theme of photography, Sanctuary proposes a theory of selfhood that can, despite its different genre, be put in conversation with psychoanalytical theories.

Furthermore, the mystery plot juxtaposes the two photographers, determining that one is good and the other evil. By associating autonomy with the murderous villain who takes pictures as part of his killing ritual Roberts suggests that this notion of selfhood is morally problematic because it leads to objectification and violence. By showing that autonomy leads to objectification of others and violence while self-in-relation gives strength through care without negating selfhood, Roberts makes an ethical and affective claim in favor of the latter, which complicates criticism of the romance genre by showing that the self-in-relation is not a limiting construct used by heteronormative society to subject women but rather a positive way of life that might actually subvert some principles of heteronormativity.

Recovering the Hero: The Male Rape Victim in Romance Novels
Sarah Maitland - University of Rhode Island

Rape is a common trope in romance novels, typically perpetrated on the heroine. Often, although not always, the rape serves the purpose of positioning the heroine to be saved by the hero. We can identify the hero by the way he reflects multiple cultural norms of masculinity, including the ability and willingness to physically defend both himself and his woman from harm, or to seek revenge when harm is done. In this paper I will discuss a number of novels that deviate from these typical roles. The novels I examine also include rape, however instead of the heroine, these novels cast the hero as the victim. When the hero of a romance novel is raped the cultural norms of masculinity are violated. Typically the penetrating body, rape changes the landscape of the male body to be the penetrated. Romance novels that compromise the inviolability of the male body destabilize the gender roles that define the genre. In my paper I will examine the process the hero must undergo to reestablish his masculinity and reinstate the gender roles. In conversation with feminist theory, I will consider what the presence of the rape victim-hero and the process he must undergo means for the genre and what it may provide for readers.

Bindel and the Beast

First off, thanks Laura for the lovely picture accompanying your post this morning! And the exclamation points!!! Not much action over at my Romancing the Blog post, but I console myself that everyone's probably out doing Christmas shopping, and I'll get scads of comments as the week goes by.

Last week we talked a lot about Ms. Bindel's brief against romance, and the comments we received were long and thoughtful as well. Robin posted more at length here at Access Romance, with comments back already from Laura and Sarah and me.

There were a few comments here, though, that I wanted to pull out and respond to here "above the fold" because they seemed to me to touch on important issues for romance criticism, as well as for the genre itself. I'll do that over the next few days, so that no single post gets too long--as much to plant the ideas deeper in my own memory as anything else.

Lazaraspaste got some excellent points in right away, I thought, about critical condescension:

What Bindel fails to acknowledge is that what one likes to read is just that, what one likes to read. It is a matter of taste. If we must analyze literature and art from a (sigh) sociological and anthropological perspective, endlessly debating whether these books may or may not harm women's psyche, progress, personal quest for self-actualization, etc. then we must acknowledge that different women need different things at different times in their lives. [...]

What I found particularly obnoxious about Bindel's statements wasn't that she thought romance was trash but the implication that she knows what is best for women. That if women want to be free from patriarchal oppression not only must they not want men to behave this way (P.1) in real life but they must not read about it in a book.

And it isn't Bindel alone. Most opponents of the romance genre take a similar tack. Most of these critics write their arguments from this moral high ground, shaking their collective heads at those poor, benighted souls who have failed to see the light (whether it be ideologically left or right) and realize that the only literature worth reading is literature that ennobles us. And if people are resistant to being ennobled then we enlightened few must continue to educate them through a process of shame and condescension.

It's worth revisiting, in this context, Plato's arguments on behalf of throwing "poets" (which is to say "fiction makers," broadly speaking) out of the Republic, precisely because they will tempt the citizenry into liking what they, ruled by reason, should abhor. The discussion is in Book 10, which you'll find here; I'm partial to the commentary by Harvard professor Stephen Owen in his wonderful book Mi-Lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire. I'm going to quote a few passages and silently change the word "poetry"--which, again, to Plato meant imaginative literature more generally, or so I'm told--to "romance." Watch what happens:

Romance may indeed lead the citizenry astray. It may speak sweet seductive words, catch us up, work changes upon us. We would legitimately call such an event a straying, dimly recognizing in it the joys of swerving from weary and commonplace values of the community, values to which, when asked, we must always loudly reaffirm our adherence. Do not misunderstand: we affirm these values because they are our own. They seem to appear spontaneously whenever there are two or three of us together. They are precisely the words on which we concur and by which we survive as a community. Yet each of us possesses a liberty of desire that renounces nothing and wants all. We tire of our virtuous restraints, and we hunger. There may be something in great romance fiction, even and most perilously in its soothing disguises, that betrays those values we believe we ought to hold; here may be something that subverts the common good and pays honor to the beast.

[...]

By words the community binds us, and romance fights back with words: perfect words, double-edged words, weighted words, words made to rebel against the drudgery to which the community commonly puts them. With these words romance addresses us and quietly tries to compromise all who are so incautious as to listen. Perilous conditions may be taken for granted, and unreasonable enthusiasms may become, for a moment, our own; words can cast a glow of desire around some things and expose others to anger and disgust. Most of all, romance may seduce us with a freedom of opposition that can hold all contradictory and unrealized possibilities together in one fierce countermotion.

The experiments of spirit that we pass through in romance pose no immediate or pragmatic danger to the community, but they may work secret changes in the heart; they give sustenance to the beast so that it does not die of our public habits. We live in limitations, imposed by ruthless Nature and by a human society that desperately aspires to equal Nature’s inevitability. But there is in each of us a beast that does not love its chains. Romance would feed the beast with words, calling it back to resistance and desire.

This may be a little campy sometimes--that bit about paying "honor to the beast" makes me want to play an LP backwards, or at least cue up Spinal Tap--but I'm a sucker for it, every time.

"Secret changes in the heart": yes, romance does work those, and it does so by refusing to be embarrassed about self-contradiction, wanting it all--freedom and commitment, feminist politics and nostalgia for traditional sex roles, resistance and surrender--even if its desires don't stick to the moral or political high ground. (There's a moment in Crusie's Manhunting where Jake, "a nineties kind of guy" asks Kate why he always has to row their boat. "'Cause I'm a fifties kind of gal," she replies. She's not, but the two of them seem to enjoy pretending that she is, however lightly, in this particular interaction. That sort of messiness and playfulness is typical of romance, but too self-contradictory for a critic like Bindel to appreciate, perhaps.)

So as Lazaraspaste points out, we don't always read to be ennobled, and sometimes what we really, really want to read (or think, or feel) isn't at all the way we want a whole community, or even ourselves, to behave. At that level, the scandal of romance is the scandal of poetry, despite their very different audiences. That's fun to know.

A later comment from Xandra Gregory also leaped out at me, again because of the broader issue it raises. "Her attitude," Gregory notes, "seems to suggest that I as a reader should stop reading what Daddy (the patriarchy) tells me to read and start obeying Mommy (Bindel) instead. Neither option actually taking into account the possibility that I know my own mind."

I wonder whether part of the objection to Bindel--the vehemence of some reactions, if not the substance of them--stems from this sense that she's striking an unwanted note of maternal concern. Says linguist Deborah Tannen, who has written at length about Mother / Daughter communication:

Mothers subject their daughters to a level of scrutiny people usually reserve for themselves. A mother's gaze is like a magnifying glass held between the sun's rays and kindling. It concentrates the rays of imperfection on her daughter's yearning for approval. The result can be a conflagration -- whoosh. This I knew: Because a mother's opinion matters so much, she has enormous power. Her smallest comment -- or no comment at all, just a look -- can fill a daughter with hurt and consequently anger. But this I learned: Mothers, who have spent decades watching out for their children, often persist in commenting because they can't get their adult children to do what is (they believe) obviously right. Where the daughter sees power, the mother feels powerless.

Obviously we're dealing in metaphors here, and the source I need may not be Tannen (or not this book by her), but there's a dynamic in this fracas that strikes me as distinctively intramural: female readers reacting to a female critic. Tannen's latest book is called You're Wearing THAT? Mothers and Daughters in Conversation. Bindel's article might as well have boasted the headline You're Reading THAT? As a man, I'm certainly part of the conversation--but I'm slightly distanced from it, or at least caught up in it in a different way, with different flashpoints and hot button issues. Someone needs to think this through--although precisely because of that distance, I'm not sure I'm the one to do it.

Besides--to be honest, I'm a bit worn out from all this sober, even angsty dwelling on the politics of romance. It's time for me to sign off on that topic for a while, and kick back with my dear Stephen Owen instead.

"Each of us possesses a liberty of desire that renounces nothing and wants all.
We tire of our virtuous restraints, and we hunger. "

Laura? Sarah? Toss me that Les Paul. I just remembered a particularly catchy bit of patriarchal propaganda from my youth. (Surgeon General's warning: the following video makes smoking look cool, along with pouting, tossing your hair, and and truly unimaginative lyrics. But you know, these guys were kind of cute...)

Gwyneth Bolton - Sweet Sensation

Laura Vivanco

As usual, this isn't a review, and there will be spoilers. There's an excerpt from the novel here and very positive reviews from the Romance Junkies and RAWSISTAZ. The novel is the second in Gwyneth Bolton's “Hip-Hop Debutante” trilogy of novels which "all take common romance plots and give them a hip-hop remix. I’m Gonna Make You Love Me remixed the arranged marriage plot. And Sweet Sensation will add some flavor to the secret child plot" (from here). In the spirit of full disclosure I feel I should add that Gwyneth Bolton is the pen-name of Gwendolyn D. Pough, one of the Teach Me Tonight team and "an Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Writing at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on black feminist theory and the public sphere with an emphasis on Black popular culture" (from her bio). Gwendolyn is also a poet, like her heroine Deidre James who's "a former female rapper turned spoken-word artist", and you can read some of Gwendolyn's poems here and here. Sweet Sensation includes poetry and also draws on song lyrics:

the title Sweet Sensation comes from a old Stephanie Mills song. “Sweet Sensation… so sweet… a fantasy… love vibration… And I just want to let you know… That I'll never let you go…" [...] Anyway, the novel has a soundtrack of hip-hop love songs that I kept in mind as I wrote it.

You can find more details about all those hip-hop love songs here, at Gwyneth's blog.

Poetry and song lyrics all use words, and exploring the use of language and the impact of words is both a part of Bolton's own writing technique and a central theme of the novel. For example, here are the heroine's thoughts on the second page of the novel:

It's for the best. You can't change the past. Everything happens for a reason. You made your bed, now lie in it. The series of clichés ran through her mind, and not one of them made her feel any better.(2)

There may be some truth in clichés, but as noted in Wikipedia, a cliché is "a phrase, expression, or idea that has been overused to the point of losing its intended force or novelty". Repetition, then, can affect the power of words. The tone in which they are spoken is also significant, as when Deidre addresses her daughter: "'Kayla, what are you still doing up?' Deidre hugged Kayla and tried to put a sternness that she didn't feel into her voice" (3). When things are going well in a relationship, the exchange of words can be what brings a couple closest: "She'd missed the late-night conversations they had after making love when they were in college [...]. She'd missed the way he listened to her, really listened to her, in ways that no one ever had before or after" (122). Perhaps because this is so, the withholding of words can sometimes be an even more powerful statement than using them: Flex interprets Deidre's failure to tell him about his daughter as a betrayal (15) and Deidre "didn't think things could get much worse than her daughter not speaking to her" (19). Deidre herself doesn't "talk to her father. She had dodged having to say more than two words to Dr. Howard James for years" (20).

The importance of public words provides a frame for the text, as the prologue opens with the words of one of Deidre "Sweet Dee" James's songs. Deidre has just returned from "Miami where she'd performed for the first time in eleven years. The performance had gone well. After years away from hip-hop, it amazed her that she was still able to grab a microphone and rock a crowd with such ease" (1). The performance pulls Deidre out of her "life of relative obscurity", and into the eye of both the media and the reader. The novel concludes with the a media report on a very much more personal performance/use of words: "last week super producer and former record label mogul, Flex Towns, married Deidre 'Sweet Dee' James in a small wedding ceremony" (214) and, just a page after Flex "grabbed the remote and turned off the television" (214), the remote is also turned off, metaphorically speaking, on the reader, as the novel ends.

Roughly at the centre of the novel, both literally and in terms of emphasising the main theme of the work, is Deidre's poem, "Word", about the power of language:

When I first heard
brothers on the block saying word
I got excited
I sensed we would be getting our power back again
There is power in the word
the strength of NOMMO¹
was going to take us home
But when I tell you of this new coming strength
all you can say is
Word! [...]

In the '70s the word was spoken and black was beautiful again
We'd lost the knowledge
of our beauty for so long
And all it needed was to be spoken into existence
We spoke it and there was power [...] (115-116)

I imagine Deidre performing her poetry in a manner similar to Zora Howard, age 14, with her poem "Bi-Racial Hair", at the New York Knicks Poetry Slam.² Zora's only a couple of years older than Kayla, Deidre's daughter, who is already able to demonstrate her own skill with words.

Some months ago an item appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution which caused some anger among romance readers. Leaving aside some of the most controversial statements, at the centre of the arguments on either side, both for and against romance, was the question of what effect the novels have on the reader. Shaunti Feldhahn stated that she

was concerned to learn that many romance novels are not as harmless as they look. In fact, some marriage therapists caution that women can become as dangerously unbalanced by these books’ entrancing but distorted messages.

In her rebuttal Diane Glass responded that

Romance novels are about entertainment, not the dissemination of seriously dangerous notions. I don’t think Harlequin readers believe they’re doing in-depth gender research or that Fabio is going to ride up on his white horse.

Deidre herself has decided that song lyrics are not "harmless":

It was hard trying to raise a girl who clearly loved hip-hop culture and rap music as much as she had when she was growing up. Deidre had never thought she would turn into the moral police and criticize the culture and the music, but some of the things she heard on the radio made her cringe. She did her best to filter and control what Kayla was allowed to listen to. (4)

So are words dangerous, or are they safe if they're just "entertainment"? The might of words is asserted in statements as diverse as: "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (1 John: 1). Standing against them is the old saying "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Of course words can and do hurt, yet Meaghan Morris suggests that

the lesson of the chant is not itself a lie, but a magical theory of language: 'saying makes it so'. The chant is an incantation, a spell that we cast at aggressors to keep the power of their words at bay. When someone pelts words at us to try to hurt our feelings, we block them with a ritual formula that vows they will never succeed. So, like all good spells, this formula 'means' something different from what it seems to say: 'names can never hurt me' means 'you can't hurt me; who cares what you think? your insults are powerless; you don't matter, and I am stronger than you are'.

We learn that language is powerful, and we can do things to each other with words; that language is a social bond, as flexible as it as forceful; and that meaning depends on how we use language in all the varying situations of life. From its singsong cadence, we also learn something obvious that language moralists forget when they call some words good and others irredeemably bad: there's a lot more to language than names. The powers of language, written or spoken, include rhythm, tone, accent, pitch, and rhyme as well as reason. Much more than a way of describing things and trading information, language is a relationship between people. However routine or perfunctory most everyday contact may be, we touch each other with words.

Deidre is a skilled user of words who is extremely aware of the ways in which the "powers of language, written or spoken, include rhythm, tone, accent, pitch, and rhyme": "She spoke her words with such rhythm and flavor that he could have sworn he heard music, but there was no music playing" (117).

The novel raises questions concerning how much words can hurt and how much they can heal. Words may take the place of physical violence, as is the case with a "battle rap" (37) or "free-style battle" (115, 160-164):

Battle rap is a style of hip-hop that stems from the quest to be competitive within the culture. Although, battle rap is sometimes directed to anonymous rivals or used as a forum to sharpen one’s lyrical swords, it could be utilized in calling out detractors when made specifically for an individual.

Braggadocio is the crux of battle rap. Battle emcees focus on boastful lines and self-glorifying rhymes about one's proficiency or level of success, accompanied by verbal insults hurled at the other party directly or subliminally. Battle rappers often go as far as researching the dirty past of an opponent in order to dig up some self-injuring facts. These are then incorporated into the rhymes to downgrade the opposing party. (Adaso)

Sometimes, however, words can lead to, or accompany, violence, as when Deidre, as a child, "lived in a constant state of fear. I remember all the arguments. For years you simply yelled and made her cry. [...] Then I guess yelling wasn't enough. I remember the two times you hit her" (177). Or, outside the family, when "disrespect" is followed by a shooting. Stacks, Flex's enemy is released from prison and, after an angry conversation with Divine, a close colleague of Flex's, thinks: "All the exchange showed him was the level of disrespect that had been allowed to grow and fester since he'd been out of the game. Flex was going to have to be hit and hit hard" (106). It's not long before an old friend of Flex and Divine's, "Rapper Louie 'Loose Eye' Jones was gunned down" (110) and Flex "knew that Stacks was behind it somehow" (111).

This close relationship between verbal and physical conflict finds a parallel in the France inhabited by Cyrano de Bergerac, in the play by Edmond Rostand, in which Cyrano, who quite literally has a rapier-sharp wit, can, as demonstrated in this performance, duel and compose poetry simultaneously: "While we fence, presto! all extempore/ I will compose a ballade." (36, Project Gutenberg English translation).³

Cyrano's aggressive poetry in that scene is a means by which he can reject the judgements of others and impose on them his own assessment of his importance. Rap can be used in much the same way: "As a former rapper known for being good at free-styling, she knew it was a powerful weapon" (42) and Deidre's "battle rap" at the time she first began her career similarly challenged those who sought to define her by labelling her a "trick":

So, all y'all punks can just
Kiss what I twist
I'm Sweet Dee, niggas
Not your average trick! (36)

Yet, Cyrano will always be defined, at least partly, by the size of his nose and Deidre "would tire of bitch and ho being substitutes for woman" (38).

As that would be a somewhat negative note on which to end this post, I can't resist including a link to this love poem performed by Benjamin Zephaniah. He's got a beautiful voice and it includes the line "It's the truth I'm telling you, poets don't lie."

• Bolton, Gwyneth. Sweet Sensation. Columbus: Genesis, 2007.
• Morris, Meaghan. "Sticks & Stones & Stereotypes." Australian Humanities Review 6 (1997).
  

1 "The Kiswahili word, NOMMO, is difficult to translate, but the concept is that of a seed. The Word (play, song, dance, etc.) is a seed planted through the senses into the mind of the observer." (NOMMO Performing Arts Company)

2 In case that link breaks, here's a link to Howard performing the same poem at the 2006 Urban Word NYC Annual Teen Poetry Slam (link from Angela).

3 The original French text of the ballade accompanying the duel can be found here.

Eric's at Romancing the Blog

Laura Vivanco

Eric's posted on the topic of poetry, poets and the romance genre. And, as he mentioned Byron, I'm taking this as a good excuse to post a picture of Romantic man-titty. Unfortunately Byron is on his death-bed in this portrait, but as Candy says 'It’s a miracle more of these cover models don’t come down with some sort of catarrh from standing around with their shirts unbuttoned in the cold, damp air'.

Painting of Lord Byron on his Death-bed by Joseph-Denis Odevaere, from Wikipedia.

Romance, Pleasure, and Poetics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie Cohen – Being a Bad Girl (1)

No, this isn't a review. It's going to be like the analyses I've done of the metaromances, except that this time I'm going to look at imagery as well as at themes. It got rather long, which is why I'm splitting this up into two posts. I'll put up the second in a day or two.

Before I begin, I should mention that this book is a Mills & Boon’s Modern Romance Extra-Sensual (in the line formerly known as ‘Harlequin Temptation’). Julie Cohen has given seminars on writing sex scenes and you can read an excerpt which demonstrates her skill at this, but it's not something I'm going to discuss here. If you haven’t read the book and want to see a review, there’s one here.

I'm not going to discuss the sex, or the plot development, or the characterisation and I may give spoilers. So, now that I’ve bored or scared off almost all my potential readers, for those who’re still sitting comfortably, I’ll begin.

The hero of Being a Bad Girl, Dr Oz Strummer, is a psychologist and as the novel progresses he makes observations about his own and the heroine’s motivation. However, given that he’s a fictional character, who sprang from the brain of Julie Cohen, and she has an M.Phil. in English Literature (her thesis included ‘a whole chapter on the Cottingley fairy photographs’) and is an English teacher, it’s perhaps not surprising that his statements can also be understood to refer to the processes by which authors create themes and imagery in their writing.

So, what does Dr Oz Strummer have to tell us? Well, when Marianne turns up dressed as Dorothy, while Oz is dressed as the Scarecrow

they burst out laughing together.
“You’re a very sexy Dorothy,” he said, looking her up and down. She felt herself blush.
“It was just the first costume I came across. I didn’t -” Suddenly she realized why Oz had dressed up as the Scarecrow. His name. Her cheeks felt even hotter.
“I didn’t choose it because you’re called – I mean, I closed my eyes. It was a random choice.” She stopped, and looked up into his laughing, knowing hazel eyes.
“You’re going to say that nothing is random, aren’t you?”
“It’s a well-known theory that our subconscious expresses itself in our least deliberate actions,” he replied. (2006: 133)

Romance authors, whether subconsciously or deliberately, use imagery which complements the themes in the story they're writing. Julie Cohen is in the latter group, playfully using imagery and then making explicit its meaning; there are no accidental uses of clichés in this novel. For example, when Marianne, the heroine, muses that she wouldn’t ‘know what a bad boy was like unless one came up and bit her on the behind’ (2006: 11) she immediately pours herself a tequila and raises a toast ‘to an imaginary bad boy. “To bites on the behind”’ (2006: 12). When Oz is given a fake tattoo to wear of ‘a large sword with a snake twining around it’ (2006: 15) he knows that these are ‘Two blatant phallic symbols. Jack and Kitty weren’t being subtle in the least’ (2006: 15). And then Oz takes Marianne to the beach at night, where she can see the lighthouse: ‘ “A pillar of fire by night,” Oz said. “That’s what Longfellow called it.”’ (2006: 52). Julie quoted this passage of the novel and discussed it on her blog, so you can go there and see how the imagery adds to the emotional effect of the scene. What’s particularly interesting is that the same object, the lighthouse, can be interpreted/‘read’ differently by two different people. For Marianne the lighthouse makes her think ‘beautiful, perfect, and alone [...] she wasn’t like that perfect, lonely lighthouse anymore. She’d moved up here to change: to become happy and carefree’ (2006: 52). Oz, on the other hand, says that ‘I brought you to the biggest phallic symbol in the neighborhood [...] I think I mentioned Longfellow, too’ (2006: 55).

I won’t list all the imagery and innuendo in the novel, but I will give just one more example which is key to understanding Oz: his motorcycle, which is not, in fact, his. It’s part of the persona that’s being forced upon him by his friends who are dressing him up for a charity bacherlor auction and making him look like a 'bad boy' biker. Despite this, it does reflect an aspect of Oz’s personality. When he first sees the ‘flame-colored, chrome-girdled Harley Davidson’ (2006: 15) he imagines it ‘thrumming under his hands [...] the feeling of the road rushing under the wheels. Then real life and responsibility came back to him’ (2006: 15). But Oz’s ‘real life’ and his responsibilities are changing, which is perhaps why he buys the bike. Oz, it turns out, likes speed and sometimes wants to be free from ‘Responsibility. My job. My life. Who I am’ (2006: 78). The bike is ‘Freedom on two wheels’ (2006: 17). But speed, risk, and freedom are not enough to make Oz happy. When he goes on a night ride by himself ‘The fantasy wasn’t working. The Harley was a stunning machine. It responded to his every touch with perfect precision and awesome power. And it felt like a stupid, inanimate pile of metal and rubber when he was on it alone’ (2006: 70). He wants both excitement and stability, freedom and commitment, ‘I need something and somebody permanent’ (2006: 103). Stability on a motorbike with a passenger riding pillion can only be achieved through trust ‘I’ll trust you not to crash’ (2006: 39) and physical closeness, ‘hold on tight to me’ (2006: 39), with both driver and passenger having to ‘let our bodies work together with the bike’ (2006: 40). That applies not just to riding the bike, but also to sex, ‘Their bodies worked together, as they had on the motorcycle’ (2006: 171) and to the emotional side of the relationship between Oz and Marianne.

The lessons that Oz learns with Marianne and the motorbike also help explain why he changes his mind about his sister’s forthcoming wedding. He had thought that she was too young to get married (2006: 99-100), but, by the end of the novel he knows that, given the right riding partner, speed and excitement can be combined with safety. His sister, though she’s rushing to get married at an early age is not making a mistake, because she’s chosen her partner well.

I also thought the names of the hero and heroine were interesting. Julie Cohen says that ‘I named Oz after Joe Strummer in The Clash, because he died the same week I invented Oz’, but the surname sounds not dissimilar to the words ‘thrum’. Oz's surname, then, may echo the ‘thrumming [...] the satisfying roar’ (2006: 15) of the motorbike. His first name is Oscar, but he’s known as Oz, and Marianne thinks ‘Oz was a good name for a biker [...] A wizard on a motorcycle’ (2006: 20). Marianne’s surname is Webb, and her hometown is Webb, and that possibly reflects the fact that she’s been caught up in a web of rules, and is now trying to break free: ‘Make up the rules yourself, mused Marianne. After years of having the rules made up for her, that sounded exactly like what she was looking for’ (2006: 11). Marianne is the name of the ‘national emblem of France’, ‘a personification of Liberty and Reason’. These are qualities which are combined in the intelligent, freedom-seeking Marianne Webb. The French Marianne is often portrayed bearing her breast, and Marianne Webb’s bid for liberty involves exploring her sexuality. If we compare this heroine to other Mariannes in literature, we may note that she is much more fortunate than Marianne in Austen's Sense and Sensibility, who also falls in love with a bad boy, Willoughby, though of course Willoughby is a truly bad boy, not simply one who breaks a few rules. Oz combines the romantic and sexual appeal of the bad boy with the stability and wisdom of a Colonel Brandon. Or perhaps her name owes something to the song Marianne, about another Marianne who likes the seaside, sung by Terry Gilkyson & The Easy Riders (Oz's bike is a low rider (2006: 39)).

All of the above regarding Marianne’s name is pure speculation, and I suspect that I may be wrong. Nonetheless, since the reader doesn’t often know the author’s intentions, it can be interesting to analyse the possible associations that particular names have for the reader. Readers certainly have preferences regarding names for heroes, and, as mentioned previously, alpha heroes are not infrequently named after predatory birds and animals. Trying to work out the connotations and derivation of a name is something that Marianne does. Oz’s name makes her think both of the Wizard of Oz and ‘Ozzy Osbourne’ (2006: 47), but in fact he got the nickname for quite another, very innocent reason. So, if my analysis of Marianne’s name is wrong, I’m not in bad company.

• Cohen, Julie, 2006. Being a Bad Girl (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited).

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

This subject seemed appropriate given today’s date, and maybe it was inevitable that I’d eventually work my way round to a discussion of death, given my academic background, but I’d been reading romances and not thinking about it at all when suddenly I realised that I’d read quite a few romances recently where characters are recently bereaved and/or still dealing with the effects of bereavement, and where the consequences of bereavement are dealt with in much more depth than the ‘our heroine is an orphan because that narrows down the cast-list and makes her vulnerable’, the ‘our heroine is a virgin widow’ or the ‘our hero’s wife died but only after she’d made him cynical about all women’ plotlines. I’m not saying that these plots are bad, simply that they don’t dwell in any depth on what it’s like to deal with a bereavement. There are, however, plenty of romances in which the effect of the death of a loved one is dealt with in considerable detail.

When the deceased was the hero or heroine’s spouse, he or she sometimes appears as a ghost or vision, as in Linda Lael Miller’s Wild About Harry. Here the heroine’s dead husband suddenly makes his presence felt:

“If I’m not one can short of a six-pack, how come I’m seeing somebody who’s been dead for two years?”
Tyler winced. “Don’t use that word,” he said. “People don’t really die, they just change.” (2000: 12)

He urges her to remarry:

“Harry’s the man for you.”
“You were the man for me,” Amy argued, and this time a tear escaped and slipped down her cheek.
[...] “That was then, Spud,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion. “Harry’s now.” (2000: 13)

The approbation of the much-loved, but now deceased spouse doesn’t always occur in such a dramatic fashion. At the end of Karen Templeton’s Swept Away, just after Carly, the heroine has agreed to marry the widowed Sam, he winks at his daughter, Libby, and when Libby ‘looked over at her mother’s photo on her desk, she could have sworn she saw Mama wink, too.’ (2006: 249).

Not all romances dealing with this issue include a sign from beyond the grave which signifies the deceased’s approval for the match. In Elizabeth Bailey’s Seventh Heaven the heroine had an arranged first marriage, which though not unaffectionate, was never loving. There is, nonetheless, a short discussion of how the heroine’s first husband would have felt about her remarriage. She jokingly suggests that she must marry Septimus, the hero, because he, a poet, requires a patron:

“A poet needs a patron, does he not? And it is high time you ceased to waste your very considerable talent on – on gruesome tales or whatever it is.” [...]
“And do you suppose Mr Shittlehope [Louisa’s first husband] would have approved of your sponsoring the arts?”
“Well, he liked me to play the pianoforte,” Louisa offered.
“Then that is settled. You may marry me with a clear conscience!” (296-297).

Clearly this particular example of a discussion about the deceased and his/her wishes is lighthearted, but it nonetheless shows the characters’ need to consider the possible feelings of the deceased. Even in cases such as Louisa’s, the assumed approval of the deceased gives a certain extra legitimacy to the new relationship and demonstrates that the dead are not forgotten.

Given that romances not infrequently suggest that there is one Mr or Ms Right, with heroines often waiting, in a virginal state, for the one man who can ‘awaken’ them, the situation of a hero or heroine who has had one true love, and is now embarking on a second marriage, with a second true love, raises questions about fidelity. Perhaps some readers would feel that a remarriage is a form of disloyalty, infidelity, or an indication that the first marriage was not one of ‘true love’. The widowed father of the heroine in Templeton’s Swept Away says of bereavement after the death of a spouse that ‘I’ve never really bought into the idea that staying lonely somehow honored the person who’d gone on’ (2006: 113), but the idea itself is implied to be one which is prevalent in society and it’s one which seems to trouble a fair number of romance widows and widowers. The supernatural approbation of the deceased is, therefore, clear evidence of the rightness of the new marriage, removing all possibility of guilt or shame on the part of the new couple.

In Claire Thornton’s Raven’s Honour, the characters receive no supernatural sign, and for a time Major Cole Raven, the hero, is wracked by guilt because he’d loved Honor, the heroine, for years, despite the fact that she was married to one of the soldiers under his command. Although he never let her know his feelings, and despite the fact that he did all he could to keep Patrick O’Donnell alive, he nonetheless feels guilty about Patrick’s death. Honor, not knowing how Cole feels about her, mentions the story of Bathsheba and King David, and Cole's responds angrily:

‘You think I’m the kind of man who could order another man to his certain death – just so I could take his woman?’ Raven demanded, his voice low and throbbing with outrage. [...] The Old Testament story of the King’s sinful action had never been far from Cole’s mind over the past few weeks. So Honor’s accusation had cut like a whiplash across his already tormented conscience, laying bare his guilt. (2002: 63-65)

In this biblical story King David’s guilt derives from the fact that he was responsible for the death of Bathsheba’s husband, but guilt can also arise from the feeling that one is benefiting from another’s death, or from the bereaved spouse’s sense that they should remain faithful to the deceased’s memory. The presence in romances of the deceased, who appear as spiritual or supernatural presences, perhaps remind us of the words of Jesus when asked about the status in the afterlife of a woman who during her lifetime had had seven husbands:

Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? for they all had her.
Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.
For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. (Matthew 22: 28-30)

The dead cannot marry or be married, and therefore the living spouse is not committing adultery when he or she begins a new relationship. For those to whom no supernatural beings or signs appear, they must find other ways in which to come to terms with the past and assuage their guilt. In Raven’s Honour, for example, it becomes clear to Cole, and to the reader, that Patrick married Honor to protect her, and in his final words to Cole, ‘Take care of Honor, sir’ (2002: 34) he passed that responsibility on to Cole. In the novel it is demonstrated that Honor and Cole need feel no guilt, because neither betrayed Patrick. Rather, Cole is respecting Patrick’s final wishes by caring for Honor, and Honor, by returning home to ‘make peace with your mother’ (2002: 38), as Patrick had asked her to do, and laying out his corpse for burial does ‘ “Her last duty”, said Joe. [...] “No one could have asked more of her than that – not Patrick O’Donnell, at any rate”’ (2002: 40). Among Patrick’s final words to Honor were ‘You’re a good wife’ (2002: 38). By giving us these details about Patrick and Honor’s marriage, and showing Honor and Cole behaving honourably with regards to Patrick’s wishes, Thornton convinces the reader, and allows the hero and heroine to become convinced themselves, that they need not feel any guilt. It is also noticeable that Patrick continues to be mentioned throughout the book because he’s an integral part of Honor’s life, and Cole cannot understand Honor’s past without learning more about Patrick.

While the remembering of the dead is not emphasised in Raven’s Honour, it is an important theme in many of the books I’ve read recently. For example, in Karen Templeton’s Swept Away the hero, who’s been a widower for three years, explains his feelings about his dead wife:

“You still miss your wife too, don’t you?”
Sam took his time before answering. “One day, I realized I’d gotten through a whole hour without thinking about her. And at first I thought something was wrong with me, that somehow, it didn’t seem right not to hurt, not when you loved somebody as much as I’d loved her. Then, when the hour stretched to two, then sometimes even half a day, it finally began to sink in that missing somebody implies a vacuum of some kind, a hole in your life where this person used to be. And I thought, hell – after all those years we’d had together...’ He shook his head. “All these kids, each one of ‘em reminding me of her in some way. [....] It was Jeannie’s idea, painting the walls all those bright colors. The snowball bush out front, the lilac over there in front of the kitchen window, the row of cherry trees over there ... all her doing.”
With a gentle smile, he turned to Carly. “I suppose some people would find all those reminders painful. But I find ‘em a comfort. After all, it’s kinda hard to miss somebody who’s everywhere I look.” (2006: 69)

Unlike the dead characters in Sartre’s Huis Clos, condemned to Hell and to be forgotten by those who had once known and loved them, in romances the memories of the beloved dead are cherished and kept alive. In Miller’s Wild About Harry, Tyler’s mother says that ‘When you love someone, they leave a lasting imprint on your world’ (2000: 175). In Marion Lennox’s Princess of Convenience, the heroine’s son died of leukemia just three months before the beginning of the novel:

‘You don’t recuperate from a child’s death,’ she whispered, and she couldn’t stop the sudden flash of anger. ‘But that’s what they all said. You go overseas and forget, they told me. Start again. How can I start again? Why would I want to?
‘Like me,’ he said softly and her eyes flew to his. ‘Only harder.’
‘What ... what do you mean?
‘I believed them,’ he told her, his voice gentling. ‘Or maybe, like you, they just wore me down by repeating their mantra and I hoped like hell they were right.’ [...]
‘You’ve lost someone, too?’ she whispered, though she already knew the answer.
‘My twin. My sister. Lisle.’ (2005: 66)

In the course of the novel, however, they do both recuperate, and in part this is because they realise that recuperating does not have to involve either forgetting or starting again. In the final scene, the family gather together in the kitchen garden, while a priest says a blessing over the ashes of Dominic (the heroine’s son) and Lisle (the hero’s sister):

This kitchen garden was no formal garden. It was used every day, by everyone who lived in this castle. Edouard played here with his baby alpacas [....]. The servants gossiped here. Louise and Henri sat and held hands and watched Edouard play. Raoul and Jess sat here in the moonlight. And soon... In not so many months, maybe there’d be a crib out here, where a little one could have a daily dose of sun.
Home. Home is where the heart is, Jess thought dreamily. Home is here. [...]
They lifted their urns and they let the ash drift across the garden on the soft see breeze to land where it would.
The urns were empty. Jess turned and she held her husband tight, and once again she shed tears. But this time there was no desolation.
This was right.
Lisle and Dominic had come home.
With their families. (2005: 186-187)

Romance novels conclude with an ‘Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending’: often they demonstrate that love triumphs even over death. In the words of Cousin Geillis, a white witch, and relative of the heroine of Mary Stewart’s Thornyhold, writing in a message composed before her death, but delivered after it,‘‘Love is foreseen from the beginning, and outlasts the end’ (1989: 222), or, as Dylan Thomas said:

Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

----

• Bailey, Elizabeth, 2001. ‘Seventh Heaven’ in Elizabeth Bailey: Three Stories in One (Chatswood, New South Wales: Harlequin Mills & Boon), pp. 7-299.
• Lennox, Marion, 2005. Princess of Convenience (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd.).
• Miller, Linda Lael, 2000. Wild About Harry (Richmond, Surrey: MIRA Books).
• Stewart, Mary, 1989. Thornyhold (Sevenoaks, Kent: Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughton).
• Templeton, Karen, 2006. Swept Away (Richmond, Surrey: Silhouette Books).
• Thornton, Claire, 2002. Raven’s Honour (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd.).

"Freshness," Subjectivity, and What Is To Be Done

In a comment several days ago, I wrote that "A romance novel's aesthetic interest, at least to me, often lies in how wittily or inventively or simply freshly a novelist selects among and deploys the givens of the genre." Laura posed a couple if searching questions in reply:

Eric, this part of what you said's been intriguing me, because although I think I'd usually be able to detect when a romance was breaking a convention of the genre, I've always steered clear of analysing humour or satire. Humour seems so hard to pin down. Do you have any techniques which academics should bear in mind when studying this aspect of texts?

I also wonder about the 'freshness' aspect you mention, because again I think that could be subjective, and it's also quite dependent on what you (generic you) have read in the past. [...] In the past I've studied old texts, and 'freshness' wasn't something I was looking for. How you go about identifying it and demonstrating to a reader of an academic article that it's present in the text you're discussing?

These are hard topics to pursue without sounding like a US commercial for feminine hygiene products ("sometimes a novel doesn't feel so 'fresh'"), but let me see what I can do, especially since the key terms of your questions, Laura, open a whole new set of issues for us as academic readers of romance.

When I read poems, I feel confident--probably too confident--in proclaiming that this or that poem is "fresh" or "witty" (in the sense of "clever" or simply "intelligent," more than "humorous"or "satirical") in its deployment of conventions. These are subjective judgments, however objective my rhetoric may be, but I make the claims based on thirty years of reading poetry, and at least twenty, maybe twenty-five, of studying the history and criticism of the art. During those years, I have internalized a narrative about how the art of poetry has developed, at least in English; I have also seen how critics disagree with one another, so that one critic's major poet is another's minor figure, and one critic's innovation is another's period piece. I've watched literary historians recover largely-forgotten poets (Mina Loy, Edwin Rolfe), and watched critics then wrangle over their value and interest, and slowly but surely I've grown confident enough to pass judgment myself. If I'm wrong, what's the worst that can happen? Someone will disagree with me, maybe disprove me--either with evidence, if I'm making an empirical claim, or with more persuasive rhetoric, if I've made the case for some poem's value--and then the conversation will go on.

When it comes to romance, I'm at a double disadvantage. I haven't read the genre very long, and there isn't much criticism out there for me to draw on as a shortcut. When I tell the story of the genre to my students, I depend on claims I've found in the histories that I have read so far: for example, that The Sheik is a reasonably good place to start the story of modern popular romance fiction, or that The Flame and the Flower changed the shape of romance publishing and inaugurated the age of the "bodice-ripper" or "erotic historical romance." I haven't done the research to test either of these statements myself, nor am I likely to do so. There are huge gaps in my romance reading: gaps I sometimes work to fill, as when I doggedly read Sweet Savage Love this summer (not a book I'd have finished, except for its historical significance as the second of those erotic historicals); gaps I haven't started to address, and may never, as when I tack past the shoals of Nora Roberts books, unsure how to set my course and explore them.

Where does this leave me as a critic? As Laura asks, how do I go about identifying and demonstrating "freshness" to my academic readers?

My hunch is that I'll just make declarations, based on my best sense at the time--my subjective response, in Laura's terms--and make them as ardently and cleverly and confidently as I can, as if I knew exactly what I was talking about. Then I'll hold my breath and wait for someone, probably one of you reading right now, to tell me that I'm wrong--God willing, at the peer review stage rather than when the piece is already in print, but if I make a fool of myself in public, I can live with that.

We are, after all, in the lucky position of creating the field of romance criticism, folks! There's no canon to speak of, and precious little critical orthodoxy to rein us in or weigh us down. If we say that this or that novel is worth reading and teaching, we make it so, at least for a while. If we say that Lydia Joyce's Veil of Night invokes the conventions of Gothic romance and then falters, unable to sustain their haunting and mysterious tone, then so it does, by gum--and, conversely, if we say that it invokes those conventions only to shine a debunking, rationalist light on them to witty and fresh effect, entirely conscious of its every turn, then the novel does just that. We have to decide, and make the case, and see which position wins out. (For my money, by the way, Joyce's Whispers of the Night is a far better book--but what I mean by "better" in this case, I'd need to hash out at length, knowing all the while that there are no set criteria for such evaluations, but that any criteria I use might be the ones to be adopted as this field develops.)

We need so much in this field: terms of art for describing the genre (Pam Regis has given us some, but we need more); a good set of arguments over who are its major figures and which its major texts; some thoughtful, well-researched debunking of what "major" really means, anyway; essays on the pleasures of individual books; Barthesian reflections on "the pleasures of the text" in romance fiction; historicist readings of romance novels in relation to women's history and other contexts; philosophical meditations on love and desire that take works of romance fiction as their instigation, the way that Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness treats Hollywood comedies of the 1930s. And more, I'm sure!

My hunch is that we needn't worry about being "subjective." We need a lot of good, well-written, confidently subjective criticism in the field, criticism of insight and unabashed advocacy, just as we continue to need solid, "objective" research that keeps the rest of us honest. I wish I had specific "techniques" to suggest, but at the moment, I have only hunches and aspirations--and the sense that, in the words of Bram Stoker's Prof. Van Helsing, "There is work, wild work to be done!"

Reading the Emotion

Several days ago I was searching the internet for items to add to the Romance Scholarship pages when I came across this statement on Shirley Jump’s website:

Good fiction and non-fiction does two things [that] makes you keep turning long into the night and triggers your emotions. It's the books that make us laugh and makes us cry that we remember, which is why writing with emotion is so important.

Mills and Boon evidently agree, since their romances currently have the slogan ‘Live the emotion’ printed on them. But which emotion is it that the reader is supposed to ‘live’, and does the reader want to do this?

A study of ‘heavy readers’, i.e. ‘people who read upward of a book a week’ (Sheldrick Ross & Chelton 2001: 52) found that:

The bedrock issue is the reader's mood [...]. Mood, of course, varies. When readers are busy or under stress, they often want safety, reassurance, and confirmation. They will reread old favorites or read new books by trusted authors. When life is less stressful, they can afford to take more risks. They may want to be amazed by something unpredictable and might pick books on sheer impulse, even through random selection of an author's name. (2001: 52)

The study also found that:

The interviewed readers were emphatic about what they don't like and used cues on the book itself-e.g., foul language or mass market fiction. Typically readers ruled out books with particular content (too much sex/violence/horror/profane language); books with an undesired emotional effect ("makes me depressed"); books with unappealing characters (drippy heroines, violent heroes, and alpha males); and books written in an unappealing style.
When readers reject a book as "poorly written", they often mean that the book was successfully written to achieve an effect that they personally dislike - too sexually arousing, too scary, too sentimental, too full of verbal effects, too descriptive, or too literary for them. A fan of the stripped-down Hemingway style might dislike the sensuous language of romance and declare that all romances are "poorly written." (2001: 53)

Thus while there are many readers who are happy to get caught up in the drama of a developing romantic relationship, this isn’t what all readers want to feel. If they don’t, they may reject even a well-written or relatively well-written romance as ‘bad’, because it doesn’t fulfill their emotional needs and expectations. In addition, if feeling the emotion is dependent on the author having built up a sense of emotional connection between the reader and the characters, this may explain why some passages (e.g. love scenes) which work well in context sound strange when they’re separated from that context and read aloud in a sarcastic tone of voice. I have the suspicion that it’s harder to ruin the mood of love poetry in this way, because poems are often written to be read aloud: and their construction (e.g. the use of iambic pentameter and line breaks) shapes the way they are read. Also, with the exception of very long narrative poems such as epics, poems are usually already fragments of thought or emotion, carefully pre-prepared excerpts from the poet’s emotions or thinking processes.

But if books can be rejected because they create a mood or emotions that the reader doesn’t want to feel, they can also be embraced precisely for this reason. I’m sure most of us have read a romance that somehow touched a chord, and despite the fact that this particular book may not have been the best-written romance ever, we love and cherish it, perhaps returning to it and using it as a ‘comfort read’. If the emotion is right for us, we may be willing to overlook technical problems such as the fact that an author ‘headhops’ or often ‘tells’ rather than ‘shows’ what’s happening. On the other hand, some techniques which tug on a reader’s heart-strings may work in the short-term but then leave the reader feeling manipulated if the emotions didn’t resonate deep within the story. As Shirley Jump says: 'I knew family, children and sacrifice worked as emotional triggers for me, so I used those elements in my novels'.
But, and this is a very important point, one which makes clear the distinction between the merely emotionally manipulative and the book in which the emotion resonates, she adds that:

It isn't enough to just throw in a baby or a sick dog and hope everyone gets tears in their eyes. You have to make those things matter to the character for deep, fundamental reasons we all can relate to. Find out WHY your character cares and what would happen if he lost what means most to him and you have an emotional trigger.

It’s also important to note that not all romances produce the same emotions, despite the fact that all of them contain a ‘central love story’ and should ‘end in a way that makes the reader feel good’.

Different sub-genres, for example, specialise in eliciting particular emotions. For example, romantic suspense should create tension related to the suspense, and an erotic romance is probably failing if it doesn’t leave the reader feeling at least a little hot under the collar. Some romances deal with particular issues, such as being overweight, dealing with addiction or coping with divorce. These scenarios can create different emotions in different readers, depending on their life-experience.

I wonder how the emotions in romance affect the atmosphere in the classroom where they're being taught. Maybe Eric will have time to come and comment on that, though he's rather busy teaching at the moment. I'd guess that the students are less likely to end up feeling miserable or cynical than if they'd been studying works such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. But that's assuming, of course, that they began the course feeling in the mood for reading romance.
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Catherine Sheldrick Ross & Mary K. Chelton, 2001. ‘Reader’s Advisory: Matching Mood and Material’, Library Journal (February 1): 52-55.

Aphrodite visits Parnassus

Academic critics of romance fiction have long been preoccupied with a single question: is the genre good for women readers? This worry may be patronizing, but it has a pedigree. Doesn't Don Quixote pose the same question about chivalric romance? Certainly Plato fears that a steady diet of poetry--by which they mean fiction, made-up things, and not just verse--will rot the minds of the populace as surely as Krispy Kreme doughnuts will rot their teeth. (I know, I know, but what's the classical equivalent? Some sort of baklava?) Sir Philip Sidney's defense of poesy might then serve as a defense of romance, too, with a little judicious editing:

The lawyer saith what men have determined, the historian what men have done. The grammarian speaketh only of the rules of speech, and the rhetorician and logician, considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter. The physician weigheth the nature of man’s body, and the nature of things helpful or hurtful unto it. And the metaphysic, though it be in the second and abstract notions, and therefore be counted supernatural, yet doth he, indeed, build upon the depth of nature.

Only the romance writer disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of her own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as she goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of nature's gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of her own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as romance writers have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; nature's world is brazen, romance writers only deliver a golden.

The debate J sparked a few days ago about why romance heroines have to be so good--not patient Griseldas, to be sure, but drawn to virtue even at their caustic best--makes new sense if we read the genre through Sidney's eyes. "Now, to that which is commonly attributed to the praise of history...as though therein a man should see virtue exalted and vice punished,—truly that commendation is peculiar to romance fiction and far off from history. For, indeed, romance ever setteth virtue so out in her best colors, making Fortune her well-waiting handmaid, that one must needs be enamored of her." Or, I suppose, we might cite Wilde: "The good end happily, and the bad end unhappily. That is what fiction means."

Recently I spent some time thinking about romance fiction and poetry in another, less high-flown context: an essay on novels with poet-protagonists for the wonderful journal Parnassus: Poetry in Review. I wasn't just being a naughty boy, smuggling a copy of Georgette Heyer up to the High Table, although I won't deny that it was fun. I also wanted to contribute, in however small a way, to the new front of academic writing about romance: that [insert preferred adjective] body of criticism which does not ask whether the books are good for their readers, but tries to read them otherwise.

Here are the opening sections, in which romance fiction appears. The piece is called "Foils and Fakers, Monsters and Makers," although I will always think of it by its original working title, "Buffy the Poetry Slayer":

Foils and Fakers, Monsters and Makers

In my twenties, newly married, eager to please my wife, I cozied up to her six best friends, the novels of Jane Austen. We didn’t get along. Maybe Elizabeth Bennett’s quip about “the efficacy of poetry in driving away love” hit a little too close to home. (Like Darcy, I preferred to consider poetry the food of love, especially on our honeymoon.) A hundred pages into Persuasion, I balked again, this time on behalf of poor Captain Benwick, “a young man of considerable taste in reading, though principally in poetry,” to whom Anne Elliot recommends “a larger allowance of prose.” What was Austen’s problem? Had I known that Charlotte Brontë once wondered, with Pride and Prejudice in mind, whether there could ever be “a great artist without poetry,” no doubt I would have quoted her in defense of my slandered art. Lucky in my ignorance, I held my tongue, and have lived to find myself, like all good husbands, properly humbled.

In the last year I have become an aficionado of the poetry-bashing or poetry-praising novel, and still more of the novel-with-a-poet-protagonist. (Der Dichtersroman, I guess this last would be.) As you might expect, such books are a disparate lot. Some authors merely lift a verse, like a champagne flute, to toast a character’s passion or aplomb:

“I like my afterglow with you in motion. I measure time by how your body sways.” He bit her earlobe and she rolled to look up at him. “Okay,” he said. “I just like my afterglow with you.”

His eyes were dark as ever, but now they were hot, too, intent on her, and he took her breath away. Good grief, she thought. Look at him. He’s beautiful.

“By how my body sways?” she said instead.

“It’s from a very hot poem,” he said. “It comes to mind whenever I watch you move.”

Poetry, she thought. He’ll be surprising me forever.

-(Jennifer Crusie, Fast Women)

Others, like Austen, use poetry to limn their own genre. Persuasion, for example, hints that the novel can offer not only the pathos of Captain Benwick’s beloved Scott and Byron and the sober moral precision that Anne Elliot prescribes in its place, but also a dose of forgiving, tender humor foreign to both.

When it comes to poets as characters, the diversity continues. If many novelists treat them lightly, as foils or poseurs, still more trade on the ancient glamour of the Poet as archetypal maker, and pour out their prose as an offering to raise that noble ghost and question it on topics that more sophisticated critics now avoid. (Sappho, Ovid, and the British Romantics get this nekuia-treatment most often, thanks to their mysterious and ever-compelling lives, but the same rite summons the confected Victorian poets of A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance.) Neither indulgent nor spellbound, a few novelists patrol the graveyard of verse like Buffy the Poetry Slayer, poised to unmask a monstrous ego or put a stake through the heart of an undying, undead reputation. “Milton!” they cry—and it is Milton, often enough—“Thou should’st not be living at this hour!” And the battle is on.

Foils and Fakers

For an introduction to the pleasures of the poet- or poetry-novel, however, you’ll probably want to start with something less fraught than Paul West’s Sporting with Amaryllis or Peter Ackroyd’s Milton in America. The book that won me over was a classic Regency romance: The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer, inventor of the genre. The poet here is one Augustus Fawnhope, with whom Miss Cecilia Ombersley has, unfortunately, fallen in love, despite his slim prospects. A youngest son with no inheritance to speak of, Fawnhope lacks—because he’s a poet, naturally—any inclination to take up a “humdrum” position in government. Alas, he seems just as unlikely to win fame or fortune through his verse. As Cecilia’s mother observes in the opening chapter, “though his poems are very pretty, bound up in white vellum, they don’t seem to take very well, I mean, not at all like Lord Byron’s.” The billet-doux that arrives a few pages later bears this out: “Nymph, when thy cerulean gaze Upon my restless spirit casts its beam—” Cecilia’s older brother and financial guardian, Charles Rivenhall, is outraged:

“I thank you, I have no taste for verse!” interrupted Mr. Rivenhall harshly. “Put it on the fire, ma’am, and tell Cecilia she is not to be receiving letters without your sanction!”

“Yes, but do you think I should burn it, Charles? Only think if this were the only copy of the poem! Perhaps he wants to have it printed!”

“He is not going to print such stuff about any sister of mine!” said Mr. Rivenhall grimly, holding out an imperative hand.

Heyer nicely pokes fun here not only at Augustus, whose ill-timed and wispy effusions punctuate the novel, but also at Charles, our stuffy-but-goodhearted hero. Among the many things our heroine, the freewheeling Sophy, will teach him is a lesson about poetry familiar (like so much of Regency romance) from Pride and Prejudice. Fawnhope’s work isn’t “about’ much of anything, really, except its author’s need to churn out euphony. As for his love of Cecilia, one good sonnet—or, in this case, one good verse drama—will starve it away entirely.

Although The Grand Sophy aims to melt in your mouth like the best English trifle, Heyer takes her role as dessert chef quite seriously, and her sure hand with Fawnhope shows throughout . His poetic self-involvement, for example, may be a familiar caricature, but Heyer uses it deftly to underscore the novel’s concern with “fit conversation,” in Milton’s fine old phrase, as both the proof and the embodiment of love. The more Sophy and Charles square off, like the Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn of 1816, the better they suit each other, and that suitability plays out as a shared mastery of language. Unlike Charles’s erstwhile fiancée, Eugenia Wraxton, but quite like Charles himself, Sophy can turn on a shilling from the high-society pieties of the ton—from the French bon ton, don’t you know—to boxing slang to blunt negotiation. Fawnhope, by contrast, fawns and hopes, and the more he murmurs verses, the more he proves himself, in Sophy’s words, “the kind of man whom the waiters serve last,” too lost in thought to procure a covered chair for his female companions when it starts to rain. By the time Fawnhope has failed to help Cecilia’s younger sister through an illness—he dashes off a pretty pair of verses, wistful and grateful, respectively, as the girl first fails and recovers—we know the affair is over.

It feels just, then, not malicious, that Fawnhope should be the only major character who is not engaged to anyone, in the end. Like Austen in Persuasion, albeit more comically, Heyer makes poetry seem an art of the solitary self. It may be recited, even given to others, but it’s fundamentally about its own concerns, its own artistry, and Fawnhope admits as much. “Marriage is not for such as I am,” he shrugs to Cecilia when she breaks off their engagement, echoing the words of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Reginald Bunthorne, left single at the close of Patience:

BUNTHORNE. In that case unprecedented,
Single I must live and die –
I shall have to be contented
With a tulip or lily!

Takes a lily from button-hole and gazes affectionately at it.

ALL. He will have to be contented
With a tulip or lily!
Greatly pleased with one another,
To get married we/they decide.
Each of us/them will wed the other,
Nobody be Bunthorne's Bride!

Bunthorne, of course, famously parodies Oscar Wilde, and there’s a none-too-subtle jab at his sexuality in that rhyme about his love of a “li-lie.” Does Fawnhope, too, sketch the Poet as sexual introvert? My sense is no, given his closing work-in-progress, an ode to Sophy. “I have abandoned the notion of hailing you as Vestal virgin,” he declares, moments before Charles finally proposes to her. “My opening line now reads, Goddess, whose steady hands upheld—but I must have ink!” Exit Poet, pursuing a Muse. The story may now come to its properly comic, properly marital conclusion.

As you may have guessed, I’m rather fond of Fawnhope—and so, one suspects, is his author. Effusive, abstracted, entirely silly, entirely sincere, he stands at some distance from his more devious relative Bunthorne, a fake who lets us in on the game:

Am I alone,
And unobserved? I am!
Then let me own
I’m an æsthetic sham!
This air severe
Is but a mere
Veneer!
This cynic smile
Is but a wile
Of guile!
This costume chaste
Is but good taste
Misplaced!
Let me confess!
A languid love for Lilies does not blight me!
Lank limbs and haggard cheeks do not delight me!
I do not care for dirty greens
By any means.
I do not long for all one sees
That’s Japanese.
I am not fond of uttering platitudes
In stained-glass attitudes.
In short, my mediævalism’s affectation,
Born of a morbid love of admiration!

Gilbert, throughout Patience, stages a fencing match between poetry, whether of Archibald Grosvenor’s “Idyllic” or Bunthorne’s “Fleshly” school, and the exact, exuberant wit of his libretto. The former tend to the banal and the meaningless, respectively. (“The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind,” Bunthorne observes in his patter-song.) The librettist, by contrast, is a master craftsman. Like Wilde the master of epigram, and unlike Wilde the poet, he offers sprezzatura and not overwrought Rites and Impressions. When he’s funny, it’s deliberate.

The Grand Sophy stages a rivalry between the most admired, least popular of genres and the most despised but most read, with Heyer using Fawnhope to pin down what makes a novel novelistic, at least in the limited instance of romance fiction. Or rather, Heyer restages this little debate, which was carried out in earnest back when novels were an upstart form and poems still commanded a share of the literary marketplace. Neither Captain Benwick nor Anne Elliott, you’ll remember, is an intellectual, yet both agree on “the richness of the present age” where poetry is concerned, and their conversation assumes a reader familiar, at least by name, with Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, The Bride of Abydos, and The Giaour, although perhaps as puzzled as Austen’s characters as to “how the Giaour was to be pronounced.” There are, to be sure, recent popular novels that take poetry seriously, but they do so as boosters, to show that it, too, can be a popular art. A Wild Pursuit, by Eloisa James, boasts several scenes where poems are put to use for seduction or courtship, and James—the nom de plume of Fordham English professor Mary Bly—observed in The New York Times that readers contacted her eagerly, afterward, to ask where they could obtain more work by her featured sixteenth-century poet, Richard Barnfield. (Here, at least, a sonnet gets to be the food of love!)

What would a contemporary novel look like that considers poetry to be an actual rival, an equal, alternative art?

***
At which point I shift to the rest of the novels--the only other romance I discuss is A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance, and I'll save my thoughts on that for another day.