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.

Important Themes

Brenda Coulter's made some interesting comments about this blog which I'd like to comment on (I know, it begins to sound incestuous, with me commenting on her comments on our comments). She writes that:

the unwritten assumption [on Teach Me Tonight] appears to be that the best romance novels contain “important” themes; most often about gender roles.

I chafe at the idea that every romance novel should mean something. Sometimes a good story is simply that. Sure, there must be a point to it, something my publisher calls the “take-away value.” But in general, I don’t expect every romance I read to contain Big Thoughts. In fact, I believe I prefer that they do not.

Obviously I can't speak for any other contributors to the blog, but it seems to me that one of the things that academics do is look for themes, and because we're looking for them, we find them. I don't think we're just forcing books to yield up something they don't contain (though I've seen academics do this on occasion, when they have a particular theory that they're committed to, and the text is shoe-horned into fitting the theory - rather like the Ugly Sisters' feet). All romances deal with love. And that's a Big Theme. Then there's the hero and heroine, who have a relationship. As soon as you start comparing them to other heroes and heroines, and wondering if their relationship bears any relationship to real life, or to the relationships in other romances, you begin to explore Big Themes. As soon as a reader gloms an author's backlist and starts saying things like 'I prefer author X's earlier work, she or he is beginning a process which could lead to Big Thoughts. I can't think of any story that's simply a good story. Zipes says of the fairy-tale, for example, that

any definition of this genre must begin with the premise that the individual tale was indeed a symbolic act intended to transform a specific oral folk tale (and sometimes a well-known literary tale) and designed to rearrange the motifs, characters, themes, functions and configurations in such a way that they would address the concerns of the educated and ruling classes of late feudal and early capitalist societies. (1991: 6)

I wouldn't argue that all romance authors 'intend' to address Big Issues, but the issues will be there nonetheless. Romances deal with sexual mores (virgin widows anyone? disputes about erotic romances?). Does the heroine have/not have a job? Does she want/not want children? Does the hero carry a gun/fight a duel? Do they own property (and if so, how much)? If so, the story can be seen as telling us something - about women's sexuality, about working women, about family life, about the use of violence, about capitalism.

So, if academics can find Big Themes and think Big Thoughts about almost any text, surely this means that we're not making the 'assumption [...] that the best romance novels contain “important” themes; most often about gender roles'? I think, and I'm speaking for myself here, that the 'best romance' novels speak to our emotions. They also have rich characterisation and a skilled use of language. In fact, when lists of 'great literature' are drawn up, I'm sure the 'speaking to the emotions' aspect of the text plays an important factor in that selection too, whether or not this is always admitted.

I've heard it said that authors of fiction can get inspiration for story ideas from all sorts of places including objects and news items. Did the creators of those objects mean them to spark an author's imagination? I doubt it. But they do nonetheless inspire the author. Academics are similar - we read texts and are inspired, and by making comparisons with other texts, the cultural context etc, we end up discussing Big Thoughts.

We can read for fun too, though, sometimes.

---
Zipes, Jack, 1991. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization (New York: Routledge). First published in 1983 by Heinemann Educational Books Ltd.

More Musings on the Alpha

Radway writes that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Comfort, Challenge, and "Importance"

J has posted a variety of thought-provoking comments on Jennifer Crusie, and more generally on the enterprise of treating romance fiction from an academic perspective. I've replied to some of these already (the exchange is over here); the most recent ones, though, deserve to be addressed "above the fold," I think. I'm not sure I can do them justice under current circumstances (I'm blogging in the basement, with my daughter foraging for entertainment not three feet away), but let me throw out a couple of ideas.

J began by quirking an eyebrow at what seems to her (to him? I don't want to presume) to be a recycling of formulaic elements in Crusie's novels, devices that have been around so long they have grown, in J's word, "trite":

I am not criticizing her use of pets and children. Of course the pets are cute and need rescuing, and naturally the children are loveable and need rescuing. That's what the heroine is for -- to rescue the weak and helpless. And then to be rescued herself by the hero with his sweet kiss.

The other day I was reading an Amazon review of one of her books, and found the comment "First off, where were the dogs?!" Okay, it's every reader's right to expect love and romance from Crusie, but must our author also deliver canine companionship, as well?

The first thing that strikes me about these comments is their witty, debunking tone: the tone of a reader who is not, by gum, about to let an author pull a fast one on her. I actually rather like that tone, since it reminds me of Min in Bet Me, but as a professor, it also puts me on my guard. Whenever my students strike it--heck, whenever I strike it myself in my own reviewing--I'm generally about to say something funny, but reductive: something that breaks whatever spell a book has tried to cast over me. I'm not a sucker, it says. And, indeed, a moment later, J offers this observation:

I suppose if I had to write a paper on Crusie, it would be on the topic of women's tendency to seek comfort in familiarity. Time and time again I read women's comments that they read a certain author because "they know what to expect." It's the key to Nora Roberts' empire, I think.

Now, maybe it's just because I've been properly humbled one or two times in my day, but I'm awfully wary of generalizations about "women's tendency" to do anything. Are women more likely to seek comfort in familiarity than men? Two days ago I was at a Cubs game with my son: we ate familiar ballpark food, wore familiar sports fan clothing, watched an utterly familiar, indeed utterly rule-bound activity for, what, 3 1/2 hours or so, and drove home listening to extra innings of yet another baseball game. Was there anything unpredictable in what transpired? Well, the Cubbies won, which is certainly an unfamiliar experience this season. But that's a little condiment of unfamiliarity spicing up an utterly comforting-because-familiar, even ritualized activity.

Suppose, then, we change J's comment to read: "If I had to write a paper on Crusie, I'd write it on the topic of the human tendency to seek comfort in familiarity." Fair enough, say I--but to get anything more than a C on that paper, you'd have to address not only the familiar elements in Crusie's books (say, the motifs she comes back to over and over again, like the animal friends and pop culture references), but also the way these novels address familiarity thematically, and also how Crusie attacks the aesthetic problem of over-familiarity, too. What does she do to vary her material, if only just enough to avoid boredom? In which novels is she more successful at this, and in which is she less effective as an artist? Does she ever address the question of familiarity directly in narrative or dialogue, or otherwise show some literary self-consciousness about the issue? (She was, after all, an academic before she became a novelist, and her dissertation was on narrative structures in men's and women's fiction. Surely she's as aware of this issue as any of us are.)

Now we're not asking snarky questions, but serious ones: in fact, the same serious ones we can ask about Petrarch, or about the Jewish poets of the Golden Age in Spain, or about qasida writers in Islamic world, of haiku poets in Japan, or about virtually any other literary artist working within a highly conventionalized framework. (Such conventionalized frameworks are, I would hazard, the norm in literary culture, except in isolated periods that value individualism and originality. Those are the exceptions, not the rule.) We may call romance fiction "romantic," but it's a classical art, and needs to be read as such.

Bet Me, I would argue, is a profoundly self-conscious book: probably Jenny's most visibly structured, visibly "designed" novel, and one in which the appeal of the conventional, the familiar, and the predictably appealing is addressed in many ways. J could write about how the superfluity of fairy tale material in the novel--allusions, both subtle and obvious, discussions of fairy tales between characters, and so on--makes the text both familiar and playfully self-conscious about that appeal to narrative and explicatory comfort. (It's a literary game as old as Alexandria, but here it's one that many readers, not just the cultured elite, can play.)

Min's resistance to the fairy tales, and her need to give in and articulate her own HEA, would then seem to match the reader's need to give up his or her cynicism in order to savor the text. (I think here of J's later comment that "I don't believe in fairy tales. They have much to teach us, like don't eat houses made of candy and don't expect your birth parent to keep your wicked step-parent from tormenting you. But if you lie around waiting for your prince to come and rescue you, you'll end up sleeping for 100 years.") It is also congruent with her resistance to fats and sweets, which suggests that fairy tales are the literary equivalent of those culinary pleasures, all of which we are suckers for, simply due to biology. We slim ourselves down by refusing them, the novel suggests, but at what cost? Is that cost worse than throwing up if we eat too much of them, as Harry does? Certainly we can't cook [create] our own chicken marsala [HEA] while leaving out essential ingredients, although we may want to, since those ingredients are the ones that some Nanette voice inside us insists we refuse. (It took me longer than I'd care to admit before I caught that joke about "No, No, Nanette.")

J finished that particular post with this challenge:

That stated, I reiterate that I enjoy the books; I enjoy the cute little pets that never seem to make nasty puddles on the heroine's carpet or chew her favorite shoes; I enjoy the children who are never hideous, spoiled brats. The writing is funny. But is it more than an entertaining and comforting formula? Is it "important"? Does it challenge us in any way?

I don't have time to address each part of this at length. For now, suffice it to say that I do not admit that "importance" is equivalent to "challenge," nor do I buy the notion that entertainment and comfort are unimportant, unworthy of intellectual inquiry. These seem to me the cliches of modernism, beloved of English teachers everywhere who want to show their students that the texts they enjoy are not as worthy of attention as the ones they are now being forced to read and write about for credit. In many moods, I think that NO literature, no art at all, is "important" in the way this question assumes. Rather, there are works that let us flatter ourselves that we are doing something important when we read them, like thinking about, I don't know, war and famine and political corruption, as opposed to the pleasures of food and sex. Less cynically, let me just suggest that Crusie herself addresses this question in Bet Me, embodying it in the pair of restaurants her characters visit.

Other kinds of art may get more credit, more acclaim, than romance fiction, Bet Me suggests, because they "challenge" us. In the end, though, they are the Serafino's of literature--places where an author "makes a statement," but does not please. We may convince ourselves that food that tastes bad must be "important," especially if the restaurant critics all concur. But do we really want to, in the end? Emilio's may boast innumerable cliches both of menu and decor, like romance fiction itself, but it also satisfies: not least, it satisfies our most embarassing, because most conventional, cravings.

That's not a full-blown essay, J--just an hour on a Tuesday morning. Give me time and coffee and I can do the job better, but this will give you some idea of how I think about this novel, and about the very good questions you raise!

Alpha male syndrome

I just started watching the first season of Queer as Folk. A friend lent it to me, saying it was Hot! especially since I like gay male romances so much.

She wasn't kidding. QaF is about four gay men who are all friends and a hot little twink one of them picks up and deflowers. It's also got a couple of lesbians as primary supporting characters. It's lauded as the first show that has an entirely homosexual main cast, and let me tell you, the "breeders" aren't represented well, when they show up at all. And it's got lots of nudity, lots of sex, lots of m/m kissing. If you like that sort of thing, it's definitely hot.

The Wikipedia entry about the show says something that I find fascinating:

The network's initial marketing of the show was primarily targeted at gay male audiences, yet a sizeable segment of the viewership turned out to be straight women.

Whoa! Big shock here, people! A certain segment of the straight female population loves romances between gay men!

This is something that is NOT a shock to anyone who knows anything about Slash fiction, which originated from a reference to the "/" punctuation between "Kirk/Spock" fan fiction written by and for women that depicted Kirk and Spock in a sexual and romantic relationship. This is also not news to the producer of Brokeback Mountain who told Ang Lee, the director of the movie about a pair of gay cowboys, that their core audience was not gay men, but rather straight women (although five years of experience runs between the makers of QaF and the producer of BbM, so hindsight is indeed 20/20). And male/male erotica (or m/m/f) is certainly the growth industry in the online erotica publishing houses. In an interview with the Smart Bitches, two editors from Ellora's Cave said:

And an up-and-coming genre that we are eagerly acquiring is m/m erotic romance, as well as m/m/f ménage.

So, what's up with that? Why might women be attracted to gay male romance and/or gay male sex?

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

With Jack and Ennis, however, there's no woman to pick up the emotional slack, and they're forced to experience their feelings without the benefit of female translation or analysis. In other words, they are (at least for each other) as emotionally available as it gets.

That's not actually the point of my post, however. ::sigh:: My point--and I do have one, to rip off Ellen Degeneres shamelessly--is to speculate on why it's the complete jerk alpha male in QaF, Brian Kinney, who is most attractive to everyone, both in the show and in the audience.

If women are attracted to romances to watch the men realize that they can't survive without love, and if they're attracted to Slash (which, in its purest form, focuses on relationship rather than just sex) and m/m romance to watch TWO men have to deal with the vulnerability of falling in love, then why is the irresistible alpha male quite so irresistible?

Because it's much more impressive to make the rake, the asshole, the user, fall in love than to make the nice guy fall in love. If the one man who refuses to admit that love exists (Brian says in the pilot episode, "Love is something that straight people tell themselves they're in so they can get laid. And then they end up hurting each other because it was all based on lies to begin with") can be seen to be emotionally vulnerable, then causing or watching that vulnerability gives a female reader/viewer power over everything that user, that alpha male, represents. A friend of mine recently wrote on her blog:

I want to take a man who doesn't express love and inspire him to express it to *me*.

I think this says it perfectly.

This connects, I believe, to my point about m/m romances. Ennis Del Mar is the much more affecting character in Brokeback Mountain, precisely because he's the most emotionally stunted. Watching him deal with his emotions is so much more heart-breaking because he has no idea how to go about doing it. A romance with a HEA would show Jack and Ennis finally able to express their love. Their story is a tragedy, however, precisely because they were never able to verbalize their emotions to each other.

My husband, one of the good guys, was slightly put out over my tongue-dragging, panting interest in the character of Brian Kinney in QaF. He complained that all his life he was told to be considerate of other's feelings, kind, and unselfish, only to find that women are most attracted to the emotionless jerks who treat them like dirt and discard them without a thought, all for the hope that they'll be the one to affect him and make him change his ways. I told him there was a big difference between the fantasy of conquering the alpha male and the reality of having him in your life. After all, I ended up (very happily!) with the nice guy. I just enjoy watching the alpha male get his come-uppance.


*Frantz, Sarah S. G., 2002. "'Expressing' Herself: The Romance Novel and the Feminine Will to Power," in Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America. Eds. Lydia Cushman Schurman and Deidre Johnson. (Connecticut: Greenwood Press) pp. 17-36.

Once Upon a Time - Romance and Fairy Tales

(First of all I need to apologize for I said I would post this last week. But I got embroiled in another Ikea-adventure, which involved, among other things, a wooden bookshelf door dropping onto my foot and some major rearrangements of my library.)

Like fantasy, romance fiction employs various elements of fairy tales, a genre which has been analysed by Max Lüthi (THE EUROPEAN FOLKTALE, 1947), among others. The familiarity of romance with fairy tales becomes obvious in the structure: at the beginning, the order is disturbed; the heroine often has to leave her home (e.g. in Gaelen Foley's LORD OF FIRE) and has to master several adventures before the order is restored or a new order is established at the end of the book. Similiarly to fairy tales, this new order is usually represented by the marriage of the protagonists and/or by the birth of a child: the adventures are over, the villains punished, and hero and heroine can finally return home:

". . . they raced across the wild, windswept crags and green valleys of
Scotland.
Home. Their land.
And the land of their unborn babe ...
And all their sons and daughters yet to be.
(Shannnon Drake, COME THE
MORNING 420)

Contrarily to what Jeanne Dubino writes in "The Cinderella Complex: Romance Fiction, Patriarchy and Capitalism", "home" in these cases doesn't only stand for a building of a mortar and stone and most certainly does not stand for the suppression of woman and her exploitation as a houseworker in patriarchal society (compare Dubino 105-06). The term "home" in romance stands for the protagonists' love for each other and for a new harmony in their relationship.

Apart from using structural elements of fairy tales, several romance novels also refer to specific fairy tales, most importantly:

A) "Beauty and the Beast": in this case, the hero embodies the beast, which is emphasised by animal or demon similes, metaphors and nicknames. Paranormal romance even goes one step further: here the hero is not just described as a beast, he is a beast: a supernatural being, often a shapeshifter, as in Christine Feehan's Carpathian series. The heroine is often forced to stay in his home (e.g., in Foley's LORD OF FIRE) or he comes into possession of hers, either by conquering it (e.g., in Penelope Williamson's KEEPER OF THE DREAM) or by receiving it as a gift from his king (e.g., in Drake's COME THE MORNING). It falls to the heroine to conquer and tame the beast, "to change [the hero] from an emotionally frigid Neanderthal into a sensitive, caring, nurturing human being", yet with his warrior qualities still intact (Susan Elizabeth Phillips, "The Romance and the Empowerment of Women" 58).

B) "Cinderella": the heroine in romance is often poor and has a lesser social status than the hero. Their love story consequently bears a resemblance to the Cinderella tale, and while only few heroines become actual princesses, they do become countesses/duchesses (in historical romances) or the wives of a multi-millionaires (in contemporary romances, especially category romances).

Despite all these similarities to fairy tales, it is important to realize romance (and fantasy, for that matter) differs from fairy tales in one important point: in contrast to the latter romance is set in reality, albeit a fictional one. Thus, even though romance uses elements of the fairy tale genre, it does not share its most important characteristics as described by Max Lüthi: romances are in set in specific places not just in "a forest", in "a village"; the characters are three-dimensional and, thus, they age, learn from their experiences, bleed and hurt when cut, and experience a host of emotions. In romance characters are individuals with individual names (the only names that appear in fairy tales are either nicknames like Little Red Riding Hood or commonplace names like Jack/Hans, Gretel); they are usually neither completely good nor completely bad.

The vital difference between romance/fantasy fiction and fairy tales becomes especially pronounced when magical gifts like gems and flowers falling out of one's mouth while talking come into play: in the "real" life of fiction such a gift turns out to be immensely impractical: "'I can still say 'morning,' ' Rowena growled, 'but I'm deleting the other word [i.e. good] from my vocabulary. Rose thorns hurt when they scrape across your lips'" (Elisabeth Waters, "The Birthday Gift" 104).

A Celebration of Love

I was at a wedding today, and one of the readings was from 1Corinithians 13.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

It sounded to me like a defence of the romance genre. Obviously that isn't exactly what St Paul had in mind, and the translations of this passage vary, so it could be argued that he's talking about caritas and not eros, and that romances only deal with eros (I'd disagree that that's the only sort of love described in romances, even between the hero and heroine, but that's possibly a topic for another blog entry). I should perhaps also make it clear that I'm not intending to cast slurs on other genres, because there are different types of love; there can be a love of justice, of beauty etc, and different genres fulfill different functions in their readers' lives. But it is the case that romance is the genre that is most associated with love, and which has at its heart the depiction of love stories: 'romance fiction says that love is powerful and important. [...] Result: romance fiction is called "silly fluff." ' (Crusie 1998).

Crusie, of course, is not in agreement with the critics who claim that romance is just 'silly fluff', and neither am I. Romances may not all 'speak in the tongues of angels', and some people would argue that they don't even 'speak in the tongues of men', as they have so few male readers. They may not 'fathom all mysteries and all knowledge' (though some make a good try at exploring a variety of issues), but what they do attempt to do seems to me to very worthwhile: they remind us how essential love is. They state that if I 'have not love, I am nothing'. Now before I upset anyone who's single, I should say that romance isn't just about couples and the love between couples, nor is that the only love depicted or celebrated in romance. Certainly what the hero and heroine feel for each other is central to each romance, but their love, according to Pamela Regis, affects the whole community:

The scene or scenes defining the society establishes the status quo which the heroine and hero must confront in their attempt to court and marry and which, by their union, they symbolically remake. (2003: 31)*

As I mentioned in a previous post, we also see the love that families and friends have for each other, and, as mentioned by J in the comments section of a previous entry, one not infrequently finds children and animals who both give love to, and receive love from, the main adult protagonists.

In Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels, for example, it is only as Lord Dain can bring himself to love and accept his son, that he can at last believe that he too is loveable:

the only woman who'd ever cared for him before had abandoned him ... because he was a monster, impossible to love.
But Jessica said that wasn't true.
Dain left the table and walked to the fire. Dominick looked up at his approach. In his son's dark, warily upturned countenance, Dain saw his own: the black troubled eyes ... the hated beak ... the sullen mouth. No, the child was not handsome by any stretch of the imagination [...]
He did not have a sunny disposition, either. Nor did his filthy vocabulary enhance his appeal. He wasn't a pretty child and he certainly wasn't a charming one.
He was just like his father.
And just like his father, he needed someone - anyone - to accept him. Someone to look upon him and touch him with affection. (1995: 339-340)

At the wedding today, adults and children gathered together to celebrate, uphold and witness the love between two people who wanted to make a commitment to each other. I think this genre is one worth celebrating too.

* For the full reference, see the Romance Wiki bibliography.

Calling for Crusie

Call for Papers:

Nothing But Good Times Ahead: the Novels of Jennifer Crusie

Edited by Eric Murphy Selinger and Laura Vivanco

Contributions are invited for a collection of critical essays on the work of Jennifer Crusie. Nothing But Good Times Ahead: the Novels of Jennifer Crusie will mark a turning point in the critical study of romance fiction, even as it demonstrates the richness of Crusie’s work as both an innovator in, and theorist of, her chosen genre.

Crusie is widely loved and deeply respected in the world of romance fiction. Her series romance and single-title novels have won numerous awards from the Romance Writers of America, and in a genre where most books go out of print quite soon after publication, hers have been repeatedly reissued. Crusie’s essays in defense of the genre articulate a theoretically sophisticated, ardently feminist argument on its behalf, and her novels, too, engage in cultural critique, subtly challenging readers’ expectations about what romance heroines, heroes, plot structures, and love scenes can be, while affirming the deeply-rooted optimism of the romance novel as a form.

We invite critical essays on Crusie’s novels, whether read individually, comparatively, or in connection with the work of other authors.

* Don’t Look Down, 2006 (with Bob Mayer; St. Martin’s Press)
* Bet Me, 2004. (St. Martin's Press)
* Faking It, 2002. (St. Martin's Press)
* Fast Women, 2001. (St. Martin's Press)
* Welcome to Temptation, 2000. (St. Martin's Press)
* Crazy for You, 1999. (St. Martin's Press)
* Tell Me Lies, 1998. (St. Martin's Press)
* Trust Me on This, 1997. (Bantam)
* The Cinderella Deal, 1996. ( Bantam)
* Anyone But You, 1996. (Harlequin)
* Charlie All Night, 1996. (Harlequin)
* What the Lady Wants, 1995. (Harlequin)
* Strange Bedpersons, 1994. (Harlequin)
* Getting Rid of Bradley, 1994. ( Harlequin)
* Sizzle, 1994. (Harlequin)
* Manhunting, 1993. (Harlequin)

All critical, theoretical, and methodological approaches are welcome; indeed, we encourage critics who do not ordinarily work on popular culture or romance fiction to submit abstracts for our consideration.

Here is a suggestive, but not exhaustive list of possible topics:

• Crusie’s engagement with popular culture (film, music, fashion, food, popular psychology)
• Crusie’s engagement with other texts, notably fairy tales and the Bible
• Crusie’s debates—both explicit and implicit—with the literary canon and with previous feminist accounts of romance fiction (for example, Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance)
• Crusie and the genres of romance and comedy, broadly and theoretically defined
• Crusie’s artistry, whether in particular novels or across her career
• Crusie as theorist of romance; or, theoretical approaches to Crusie
• Crusie and developments in romance fiction and feminist thought since the 1990s
• Crusie’s innovations within the conventions of romance fiction, and her explorations of the boundaries of the genre (e.g.., its intersections with non-romantic women’s fiction, with mystery and detective fiction, and most recently with men’s adventure fiction)

Nothing But Good Times Ahead has the potential to reach audiences both inside and outside the academy. Our intended audience includes not only professors of popular culture, women’s studies, American studies, and literature, but also the intelligent, well-educated, and enthusiastically literate community of romance readers.

We will consider abstracts (approximately 500 words), conference papers, and full-length essays. All submissions should be e-mailed to Eric Murphy Selinger (eselinge@depaul.edu) and Laura Vivanco (nothingbut@vivanco.me.uk). The deadline for consideration is September 30, 2006.

For more information, including a fuller description of the book, visit http://www.vivanco.me.uk/modern_romance_scholarship/nothing_but .

We Are Family

Ann Barr Snitow, in her 1979 essay 'Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different' wrote that:

The heroine is alone. Sometimes there is another woman, a competitor who is often more overtly aware of her sexuality than the heroine, but she is a shadow on the horizon. Sometimes there are potentially friendly females living in the next bungalow or working with the patient in the next bed, but they, too, are shadowy, not important to the real story, which consists entirely of an emotionally isolated woman trying to keep her virginity and her head when the only person she ever really talks to is the hero, whose motives and feelings are unclear. (1983: 249)*

Not having read many romances from this period, I'm not sure whether this ever was actually an accurate description of romances (I suspect there will always have been exceptions). Nonetheless, it does remind me of the gothics. Could it be that the heroine's isolation, which was important in creating the plot and atmosphere of the gothics, influenced the portrayal of female friendships in other forms of romance at the time?

Snitow's description certainly isn't true of modern romances. Nowadays, as has recently been pointed out by Sharon Long, there are plenty of romance series where

Everything is hunky dorey in romance land. The women of the group get along famously. Like sisters even. They all HEART one another on sight and know that the guy has done the best job ever in choosing his mate.

Could this be due in any way to the influence of feminism? Is it an expression of belief in female sisterhood? Certainly there would appear to have been some feminist influence on romance. Kay Mussell, for example, has described the more equal relationships between heroes and heroines as 'clear evidence of the influence of feminism on romances'. Female friendships, however, are not simply valued by feminists. Peter Darbyshire**, writing about certain inspirational romances, despite concluding that they 'vilified' (2002: 80) feminism, nonetheless also finds in them strong bonds between women:

Female characters frequently live at home or with members of their extended family in these books, and these characters are almost always all involved in nurturing, supportive relationships with one another. [...] it is often the grandmother or mother figures that instruct the heroines to be subservient in their relationships with men, thus locating the origins of the reaffirmation of traditional patriarchal values in female characters. (2002: 80-81).

Whether or not one agrees with his opinion of inspirationals, it does serve as a reminder that female relationships are valued (perhaps for very different reasons) by people with a wide range of ideologies.

Is it, as suggested by posters responding to Sharon Long's comments that female friendships are an extra part of the 'wish-fulfillment' that romance provides, another aspect of the Happy Ever After ending? Are such friendships among women really so uncommon that they're more fantasy than reality? Sharon Long certainly seems to think so:

Let’s face it. Women do not get along that well in real life. Women are bitchy. They are competitive. They do not tend to LOVE one another on sight. Sure it happens. Every once in a blue moon, but the cold hard facts are that women, especially when you group them into a pack, do not all love one another and get along famously.

Another response to her comments was that the women described in these series are going to be family members through marriage, and this does mean that they'll be predisposed to attempt to establish friendly relationships.

The prevalence of both the the friendless, family-less heroine of the past, and the loving families who welcome new sisters with eagerness and instantaneous affection raise questions about what readers and authors want family and female friendships to be (just as the 'secret baby' stories seem to be exploring how important it is to know one's biological family, in particular one's biological father). Quite how one interprets such depictions will depend on a close reading on the individual texts. Some authors may simply be following a trend, others may be drawing on their own personal experiences of female friendships, yet others may be expressing their ideals (and those of their readers) regarding relationships between women.


*For full reference see RomanceWiki bibliography.
** For full reference see the first page of the Romance Wiki bibliography.

Reading Like an English Professor (1)

A week or so ago, to kick things off, I posted the syllabus for my first course on Popular Romance Fiction. I noted at the time that the course hadn't exactly gone as planned, and the ways that it variously succeeded and failed have a lot to do with the topics we have posted about here ever since.

Just to refresh your memory, that first course was organized by topics and genres. We had a week devoted the two-part question "What is Romance, and Why Do People Say Such Nasty Things About It?"; after that, we spent two weeks on "Alpha Males and Bodice Rippers," two weeks on Regencies, a week on romantic suspense, a week on historical romances, and a week on a contemporary romance. In each unit, I tried to pair an earlier and a later example of the genre, and in the weeks on Alpha Males, we actually worked on three novels: The Sheik, The Flame and the Flower, and Emma Holly's Hunting Midnight, whose hero Ulric, a shapeshifting upyr, is quite literally the alpha male of his wolf pack.

As the course went on, I had to cut a number of books. It took much longer than I'd thought to set out some of the conventions of each genre and then to discuss each romance. On the other hand, we made some wonderful discoveries as we read. For example, as our first romantic suspense novel I had assigned Mary Stewart's Madam, Will You Talk at the last minute, after giving it only a cursory reading. (The one I wanted to teach, Nine Coaches Waiting, turned out to be out of print.) When I walked in to class, the students were utterly baffled by it. Where, they asked, was the romance? After the sexually explicit texts they'd read for the past few weeks, Stewart's novel wasn't just tepid; it seemed positively repressed, and the relationship between our heroine, Charity, and the hero, Richard Byron, felt elusive at best and perfunctory at worst.

Now, I don't know about you, but I actually love reactions like this. They make me think on my feet, and they turn the class into a knowledge-producing, rather than a knowledge-transmitting, enterprise. I sent the class on a romance treasure-hunt, and within the hour, we had put together a delightful list of discoveries, spotting displaced romance in the setting (Troubadour country in the south of France), in the character's names (Charity, from caritas; and Byron from the poet, naturally, although they didn't know this coming in), in Charity's "mother-complex" toward Richard's son David, in Charity's visit to the Temple of Diana (where she meets Richard, rather violently--with this violence also a displacement of sexual interest), in the literary epigraphs to several chapters, in various code words and phrases (Richard, like Charity's late husband Johnny, tends to be, ahem, "dictatorial"), and, most of all, in the scenes of eating and drinking. Here's the turning point, midway through the novel, when Richard has finally caught up with Charity and forces her to have a meal with him, although she still suspects, in the best gothic fashion, that he is a murderer:

"All of it," urged Richard Byron. I obeyed him, and lay back against the deep cushions with my eyes closed, letting my body relax utterly to the creeping warmth of the drink and the smell of the food and wine and flowers. My bones seemed to have melted, and I was queerly content to lie back against the yielding velvet, with the soft lights against my eyelids, and do nothing, think of nothing. I was quiet and utterly passive, and the awful beginnings of hysteria were checked.

Still from that same dimensionless distance, I heard him speaking in French. I supposed he was ordering food. And presently at my elbow I I heard the chink of silver, and opened my eyes to see the big trolley of hors d'oeuvres with its hovering attendant.

Richard Byron said something to him, and without waiting for me to speak, the man served me from the tray. I remember still those exquisite fluted silver dishes, each with its load of dainty colours...there were anchovies and tiny gleaming silver fish in red sauce, and savoury buter in curled strips of fresh lettuce; there were caviare and tomato and olives green and black, and small golden-pink mushrooms and cresses and beans. The waiter heaped my plate, and filled another glass with white wine. I drank half a glassfull without a word, and began to eat. I was conscious of Richard Byron's eyes on me, but he did not speak. (173).

This description of the meal goes on for another page or two--it's as sensual as any love scene, but my students had overlooked it entirely, looking for something more literal.

The next time I taught my romance course, I made the first half of the quarter a chronological survey, from The Sheik (1919) to The Flame and the Flower (1972); only then did we break into contemporary authors and subgenres. This time, when we reached Mary Stewart, we could talk about it in terms of the sexual politics of the mid-1950s--what Charity, and Stewart, could and could not do openly in the text--and we had the chance to think more deeply about the novel's treatment of history, too. (Not to toss out spoilers, but the novel is set in post-war Europe, and there is an important plot thread involving the Holocaust.)

Now, is Madam, Will You Talk? of historical significance? Possibly--it's Stewart's first novel, and she has been credited with creating the modern genre of romantic suspense. Is it a teachable text? Absolutely; in fact, it taught my students not only about the history of romance fiction, but about a number of literary techniques, from allusion to symbolism. (Few were English majors; most needed this education, or at least these reminders of long ago high school coursework.) Would I put it in "the canon" of romance fiction, were there to be one? Well, it's not on my list of "transcendent romances," but I do find it awfully interesting. Is that good enough?

P.S. Here are two of the paper topics I used the first time I taught Madam, Will You Talk? Feel free to borrow and transform them, and let me know how it went!

Paper topics on Madam, Will You Talk?

1. In class, we explored some of the ways that this novel displaces its “romance”—at least as far as this means sexuality, desire, passion, and so on—into various other plot elements, activities, code phrases, epigraphs, settings, and so on. Write an essay that elaborates this idea into a full-blown argument. Demonstrate that, despite one’s initial impression, this is a pervasively “romantic” romance novel, albeit in a far more subtle way than we see in, say, The Flame and the Flower.

2. Romance novels are famous for delivering, by the end, the beloved “HEA”: happily ever after. How, though, can the novelist pull this off when her novel is filled with crime, death, and tragedy? Write an essay on the final chapters of Madam which shows how they pull off this remarkable challenge, allowing us to feel that the chaos and sadness that the novel begins with, in both private and public worlds, have been replaced by coherence and at least a promise of joy. (You may want to keep in mind an idea from romance author and critic Jennifer Crusie, who has said that the happy endings of romance novels best also be understood as endings that give us a sense of “emotional justice.")

Musings on Reviews and Establishing a Canon of Romances

I've just been looking at a couple of reviews of a book I wrote. It was a non-fiction, academic book, and the reviewers are academics. Nonetheless I was reminded of the questions Sarah raised in her blog entry about 'the ultimate romance novel' and the various controversies there have been about romance reviews, with some romance authors questioning the abilities and qualifications of readers who write reviews.

What the reviews of my book demonstrated to me was that even if a book is reviewed by the author's peers, all with a similar level of expertise and similar areas of interest, there will nonetheless be widely divergent views. As I read both the positive and the less positive reviews it became clear that each reviewer was looking for something different. Some mentioned critical frameworks I should have used or texts I should have discussed in more detail and each was obviously relating my book to their own particular, very specific areas of interest. For example, despite the fact that these reviewers are all Hispanomedievalists, some are historians while others are more interested in the literature of the period. Whatever their overall opinions, though, because my book was non-fiction, and included plenty of references to other works, and quotations from the relevant literature, even the reviewers who were least positive about it acknowledged that it would be a useful book.

So how does this relate to romance? Well, my experience suggests that everyone comes to a book (whether fiction or non-fiction) with certain expectations they want it to fulfill, or certain topics they would like it to touch on. Some readers and reviewers have a preference for particular sub-genres of romance, some have particular storylines which they love (or loathe). What one reader may find innovative and interesting, another may consider a disgusting breach of the conventions of romance. What one reader thinks is 'hot' or an interesting challenge to convention (e.g. the non-virginal heroine who doesn't need to be sexually 'awakened' by the hero), another may find morally reprehensible. A book considered exquisitely humorous by one reader may well appear mere slapstick to another, and what one person may consider delicious irony or sarcasm may come across as dry or irritating to another. When we pick up a book, we bring with us our own experiences and expectations, as well as our mood at the time of reading, and the mental comparisons we'll make with other romances (which will be dependent on how many other romances we've read, and which ones they are). Each of us, regardless of qualifications, will have a very individual response to each book. That's not to say that all readers and reviewers wouldn't be able to agree on something; they'd probably all be able to establish the basic outline of the story. Good reviews will provide both an objective description (of things such as the characters names, occupations, and how they meet) and a subjective opinion. The reviewer may even state why a particular work did or did not fit with her personal preferences . The reviewer who does this is acknowledging that not all readers of the review will agree with her opinion. She knows that once one goes beyond the basic facts of the story, interpretations and opinions will differ.

To take the example of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, it's fairly easy to establish the basic outline of the story but overall opinion on the book varied widely:

When it was published in Britain in 1960, the trial of the publishers, Penguin Books, under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 Act, introduced by Roy Jenkins, had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. [...] Various academic critics, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner and Raymond Williams, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on November 2, 1960, was not guilty. [...] The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it was the kind of book 'you would wish your wife or servants to read'.

This particular difference opinion concerned the sexual content and similar arguments continue in the romance reading and writing community about what constitutes 'obscenity'. While many authors and readers remain opposed to explict sexual content, there are others who consider the open depiction of sexuality and sexual acts to be a freeing, even a feminist act:

My sex scenes--and my romance novels--are about determined women who go after what they need and get it, which is why I think they're a feminist act. Naomi Wolf once said that men called women who liked sex “sluts,” but that was okay because “we need sluts for the revolution.” That's what I'm doing, that's my mission in life, I'm writing sluts for the revolution. I'm very proud. (Jennifer Crusie)

It's not just this sort of issue which causes controversy - 'literary merit' is also difficult to define. Some people automatically assume that a genre novel cannot have literary merit, but even among readers who do not make this assumption there may be differences of opinion because:

It has long been noted that the concept of "literary merit" is practically impossible to define, and it is hard to see how such an ideas can be used with any precision or consistency by policy makers, magistrates or judges. A common response to this criticism is that, while the process of establishing literary merit is difficult, fraught with dangers, and often subjective, it is the only method currently available to separate work that has significant cultural value from work that is ephemeral and essentially worthless. (Wikipedia)

By engaging with romance from an appreciative academic perspective, we are beginning the process of establishing the literary merit of some modern romances, which may ultimately lead to the creation of a romance canon.

History and “Wallpaper” History

In the past few months there has been a significant amount of discussion within the romance reading and writing community about historical romances, and much of the heat in these discussions was generated by the use of the term ‘wallpaper historicals’ .

As a reader, my preference is for historicals which appear to me to be relatively accurate in their depiction of the past. I say ‘relatively accurate’ because I don’t think it is possible for any work to be entirely accurate. There is so much we don’t know about the past, and reproducing the language and speech patterns of historical characters might well render a book extremely difficult for the modern reader to understand. Despite my personal preferences, however, I think it is important to acknowledge that the level of historical accuracy in a romance cannot be used as an indicator of either literary merit or entertainment value.

Determining which historical romances are ‘wallpaper’ and which are more accurate may require a considerable degree of historical knowledge on the part of the reader. Once a relatively accurate historical romance has been identified, however, its use of history sets the characters and the issues raised by the romance in a historical context. This enables the reader to take the long view on questions such as the role of women in society etc, and thus see how much, or how little, has changed in the intervening years since the era in which the book is set. Nonetheless, each historical romance is a product of its own time: while attempting to remain true to the period depicted, it is likely to deal with issues such as sexuality and male/female relationships from a perspective which is shaped by 21st century attitudes. Issues may then be perceived to be universal in nature, but expressed differently at different times and in different cultures. This sort of historical romance also offers a historical commentary on the period in which it is set. In that respect it is the literary equivalent of the more accurate historical reenactment societies, which seek to explore what life was really like in the past. Finally, the more accurate type of historical romance invites the reader to read it both in the context of the literature in the period in which it is set, and in the context of contemporary works, since it engages with both the past and the present.

The historical romance whose author has striven for accuracy and succeeded in bringing history to life is, then, potentially an extremely challenging text. This does not mean, however, that one should therefore dismiss all ‘wallpaper’ historicals as ‘bad’ literature and mere entertainment. We need to fully recognise the possibility that a work may be full of historical inaccuracies and still be a great literary work. The following defence of Shakespeare’s work could be equally appropriate if used to describe ‘wallpaper’ historical romances since it argues that the author

should not be criticised too heavily for misrepresenting historical events. His plays were works of fiction and entertainment, intended for performance in a specific arena and written according to a rigid style and structure.

Shakespeare is a good example of a writer whose depiction of history is far from reliable. One website, created by some ‘third and fourth year English majors at the University of Michigan’ is designed to show how:

Shakespeare, like many playwrights of his time, changed history to fit his artistic purposes. This website highlights those changes and their significance in the major English History Plays.

While it’s possible that some of Shakespeare’s inaccuracies are due to a lack of knowledge, some must be deliberate, and this leads scholars to ask why he would have wished to change the facts. What ‘artistic purposes’ did it serve? Here’s an example:

Like most of the history plays, many years are compressed into a short sequence of events. The rebellions that are portrayed in this play [Henry IV ] actually had years between them and were not as much of a threat to the throne as portrayed. But [...] making the atmosphere seem more tumultuous adds suspense to the major pressing question of whether or not Hal is prepared to become a strong monarch.

Wallpaper historicals may use a particular setting because it gives credibility to particular types of plot (e.g. the arranged marriage, or one which turns on the importance of virginity and family honour, and it may give the hero particular opportunities for showing his strength, chivalrous nature etc.).

Sometimes Shakespeare’s motives in making changes appear to have been as much political as artistic. He must have wished to avoid displeasing Elizabeth I and several of the English history plays deal with the period leading up to the accession of the Tudor dynasty, of which Elizabeth was a member. Wallpaper historicals enable an author to avoid engaging with potentially inflammatory topics in contemporary society. For example, a Regency hero may be depicted as a Whig without incurring the wrath of contemporary Conservative voters, since the policies of the Tory party now bear little resemblance to those of the 1800s. Writing a wallpaper historical can also enable an author to avoid engaging with the less pleasant realities of history, such as slavery and racism, thus ensuring that the society and characters depicted remain appealing to a contemporary reader. Wallpaper history can also be used to promote particular ideas about national identity. A wallpaper historical set in Scotland will probably reveal far more about the author’s ideas about Scottishness, than it will about Scotland’s history. Similarly, wallpaper historical romances featuring a hero who is a sheik or a native American will express ideas about ‘the other’, the exotic.

While a few authors of ‘wallpaper’ historical romances may just lack the ability to do historical research, it seems likely that the majority deliberately use just enough historical details to create a particular atmosphere and setting. According to Northrop Frye

The romance is the nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfillment dream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical role. In every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains the threats to their ascendancy. […] Yet there is a genuinely ‘proletarian’ element in romance too which is never satisfied with its various incarnations and in fact the incarnations themselves indicate that no matter how great a change in society, romance will turn up again, as hungry as ever, looking for new hopes and desires to feed on. The perennially child-like quality of romance is marked by its extraordinarily persistent nostalgia, its search for some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space. (186)

It may be, then, that the historical inaccuracies of the ‘wallpaper’ historical romance are an indication of the particular ‘golden age’ or fantasy that the author and/or her readers prefers. A wallpaper Regency may suggest that both readers and authors have fantasies where they (and/or the hero) are rich, cultured and aristocratic. The wallpaper Western presents a fantasy of finding one’s ideal life partner in a very American setting where a man knows how to do ‘what a man has to do’. The wallpaper Scottish-set romance is often completely timeless, and while it may suggest that the author and/or her readers have, or would like to have, Scottish ancestry, it may simply be that they appreciate thinking about tall, rugged, warriors in kilts. Such fantasies are no less indicative of a lack of literary merit than is the use of a pastoral setting in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, nor do they prevent the author from exploring important themes such as personal autonomy, the nature of love etc. They may also reveal aspects of the type of life they would ideally like to lead and the qualities which the author and her readers feel are important in men and women. The historical setting is being used, then, as a convenient vehicle to convey ideals.