Romance XIII: The Romance of Work? Books, Sex, Magic, and the Academic Heroine
Heroines in Bookstores: The Romantic Economies of You’ve Got Mail and Three Sisters Island
(
Heather Schell, George Washington University)
Around the turn of the millennium, two Noras created popular love stories: Nora Ephron’s
You’ve Got Mail
and Nora Roberts’ Three Sisters Island trilogy. While the plots differ
strikingly, the heroines in both stories have strikingly similar work
experiences: Kathleen and Mia both own and manage independent
bookstores, stores which are extensions of the heroines themselves and
which serve as central meeting places in their communities. Yet in both
cases, Kathleen’s and Mia’s love interests appear to conflict directly
with their work interests. In fact, in both stories, the hero’s
economic pursuits threaten to destroy or at least undermine the
heroine’s bookstore. Both the film and the romance novels discussed
here pay careful attention to economic issues, and they have their
heroines do the same. However, the resolution of each love story
reveals a distinct economic model underlying the plot: a cynical
neoliberalism in Ephron’s story, in which the heroine’s only option is
to take a wage job provided by the hero; and, in Roberts’ series, an
insistence on regulated economic planning based on community needs,
which allows both the heroine and her hero to develop mutually
beneficial economic strategies that benefit their island. In fact, I
would argue, the ideal economy in Roberts’ series is modeled on the
ideal romantic relationship.
“She would take her fate into her own hands”: Sex work and Happily Ever After in popular romance
(
Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud, Universiti Brunei Darussalam)
Popular romance as a genre confronts sex work as an inevitable facet
of male-female relationships, particularly in historical romances,
tending to condemn the industry and humanize its workers (particularly
mistresses and prostitutes). This paper will examine the deployment of
romantic heroine as sex worker in four texts: Lisa Kleypas’ “Dreaming of
You”, Catherine Anderson’s “Comanche Magic,” Courtney Milan’s
“Unclaimed” and Joan Wolf’s “His Lordship’s Mistress”.
A comparison of the central conflicts or “barrier” and the Happily
Ever Afters of these four texts will query both the effectiveness of
female solidarity and authority within the industry, and whether/how men
can be allies to female sex workers. Additionally, this paper will
explore the extent to which the texts resist the resolution of the
tension between romance and the sex industry, by resisting the use of
romantic hero as "saviour", and how this works with popular romance’s
generic insistence on a holistic (physical and emotional) approach to
romantic love.
Contemporary Supernatural Romance and the Academic Woman
(Jennifer Mitchell, Independent Scholar)
Deborah Harkness’s
The All Souls trilogy (2011, 2012, 2014), Juliet Dark’s
Fairwick Chronicles trilogy (2011, 2013), and Elizabeth Hunter’s
Elemental Mysteries foursome
(2012, 2013), all chronicle the supernatural romantic entanglements of
young women in academia. Harkness’s Diana Bishop is an historian of
alchemy, splitting her time between two prestigious institutions: Yale
University and the University of Oxford. Dark’s Callie McFay is a
scholar of folklore, mythology, and the Gothic who takes a tenure-track
job at the aptly named Fairwick College. Hunter’s Beatrice de Novo is a
serious student pursuing degrees in literature and library science. All
three women, who are intimately tied to their respective fields of
study, become involved with non-human partners: Diana falls for Matthew
de Clermont and Beatrice falls for Giovanni Vecchio, both of whom are
centuries old vampires while Callie has a tumultuous relationship with
her own demon lover.
Each of these heroines is presented to readers as exceptionally
intelligent, fiercely loyal, and, most interestingly, deeply committed
to her own scholarly pursuits. Moving beyond the reductive eternal and
teenaged romance of the
Twilight novels and beyond the reconfigured Cinderella story of the
Fifty Shades of Grey
series, these works all speak to a particularly telling trend in the
relationship between a woman’s academic identity and her romantic
desires. As such, this paper analyzes the perhaps unexpected allure of
young, sexualized female academics as the ideal protagonists of these
erotic supernatural romances.
It's All Academic: Scholar, Scientist, Romance Heroine
(
Jayashree Kamble, CUNY LaGuardia Community College)
From time to time, one encounters a romance fiction heroine who is an
academic, be it as a field researcher or university professor. In some
novels, such as Kresley Cole's Dark Desires After Dusk or Laura
Kinsale's Midsummer Moon, the scholar heroine comes across as a familiar
stereotype--an absent-minded and unworldly scientist, focused on her
work to the extent of it being a near-fatal liability. In others, such
as Linda Howard's Son of the Morning, the heroine is intrepid and
clever, while in Nora Roberts's Jewels of the Sun, she is an Earth
Mother fleeing from the cut-throat nature of academic life. As the genre
has had a love-hate relationship with academia since the 70s, these
choices provide an intriguing glimpse into how academia may appear to
romance fiction writers.
No matter how these representation vary, however, the everyday
reality of the researcher--teach, grade, read, write--is seen as
problematic, co-terminus with backbiting, boredom, behavioral disorders,
or breakdowns. Cole's Holly Ashwin is one academic who uses the staid
routine of academic life to keep her anxieties--she has OCD--under
control, anxieties resulting from being a closeted Valkyrie. In other
words, Ashwin is a professor who has a hidden violent and homicidal
side, one she does not comprehend herself. Ashwin's mousy work persona
is a veneer that both protects her from her fear of her true self and
manages to keep her enemies at bay till she can come into her powers as a
warrior woman. In this take on the identity conflict that is central to
the journey of romance heroines, Cole rejuvenates the trope of the
workaday academic and turns it into an origin story of a superheroine.
