Romance and Sex Education

Having brought up the topic of sex in romances, and because the recent discussions of the controversy that homosexual romances have caused within the RWA reminded me of last year’s controversy surrounding graphical standards and the continuing sense that many writers of erotic romance have that they’re not entirely accepted within the RWA I thought I’d take quick look at some of the ways in which sex in romance can be educational. In the interests of full disclosure, I should make it clear that I’ve not read any inspirationals or any erotic romances, though I have read some romances with strong Christian elements, such as Cheryl St. John’s Saint or Sinner (Mills & Boon Historical Romance 2004) and I’ve read plenty of romances with fairly explicit sex scenes. I should also add that I don’t think sex scenes are essential in a romance: Austen and Heyer, to name just two authors, managed very successfully without them, and in fact, I have a feeling that sex scenes in Austen would be incongruous given the formality that her heroes and heroines maintain (though we know they take place ‘offstage’ between unruly characters, such as Lydia and Wickham, and Maria Rushworth and Henry Crawford).

The fact that sex can and does take place ‘offstage’ in romances leads Monica Jackson to argue that:

Romance has sex. The most staid inspirational romance is about establishing a relationship that is going to lead to luscious, hot monkey sex, even if the sex happens to take place outside the covers of the book. There’s sex in romance, whether it’s an implied promise or frequent and graphically described variations. That’s why the controversy over romance sex is sort of silly. It’s as if folks were arguing over sweetener in chocolate. You can eschew sugar in favor of artificial sweetener or honey or use less–but if you’re eating palatable chocolate, it’s going have some sweetness, even if only a hint. If you read romance, it’s going to be about sex. If your characters don’t care about establishing a relationship that will eventually lead to some sort of sex, then you don’t have romance.

Clearly she has a point, since marriage has traditionally been, at least according to the Book of Common Prayer, ‘ordained for the procreation of children’ and ‘to avoid fornication’. Quite whether the activities involved in this would always aptly be described as ‘hot monkey sex’, though, is another matter. Can you really imagine Fanny and Edmund Bertram engaging in ‘hot monkey sex’? I can’t (though it could be that this is because my imagination is lacking).

The crux of the matter is not whether or not people have sex, but whether sex should be depicted in romances, and whether, if implied/depicted, it should only take place between two married people. It’s clearly a highly controversial issue, and rather than get embroiled in an argument about the morality or otherwise of depictions of sexual activity (and the Bible itself can get pretty explicit, with lines such as ‘A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts’ (Song of Solomon 1:13), I’d like to take a look at a few ways in which romance novels can play a role in educating people about their bodies and in shaping attitudes towards sexuality.

In Lucy Monroe’s Blackmailed into Marriage the heroine is the not uncommon widow-who-has-never-had-an-orgasm, and the hero, of course, manages to awaken the heroine’s sexuality, but the twist is that this heroine’s got vaginismus. The treatment for this condition is described in some detail, and forms an integral part of the love-scenes and the author added a note to readers:

I wrote this book for the tens of thousands of women who suffer in silence believing there is something wrong with them. Only one in ten will seek treatment and of those, less than thirty percent will be willing to undergo physiological treatment such as the dilation procedure for vaginismus. I hope that if you are one of the women suffering in silence, you will be silent no longer, but most of all that you will realize that it’s not your fault. (2005: 187)

This is perhaps an unusual example of very specific information on a gynaecological problem being presented in a romance, but it seems to me that it’s an indication of the possibilities offered by romance. In general, romances may give some basic information about the mechanics of reproduction, and though the incidence of contraceptive failure seems extremely high if one looks at romances as a group, as do the numbers of secret babies produced as a result, the depiction of the use of contraceptives during sex scenes, particularly of condoms, suggests to readers that condom-use is not incompatible with passion and enjoyment. Romances also challenge attitudes towards women’s sexuality. As Crusie says, according to ‘conventional wisdom’:

Women shouldn't experience a lot of sexual encounters [...] because that would soil them, and it's not in their nature anyway. Men who had a lot of sex and enjoyed it were studs; women who did the same were unnatural sluts. [...] God forbid a woman should know more about sex than a man. Romance fiction not only says women want that knowledge and have a right to it, it often gives it to them explicitly on the page, telling them it's not wrong to want a full sexual life and showing them how to get one.

Whereas novels such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles tell a woman that, if she’s raped, she’s degraded, the modern romance genre, even with its rather high number of virgin heroines, does, on the whole, assert that a woman who has been raped or otherwise had sex outside marriage is still attractive, is still valuable as a person. Rather than condemning her, it celebrates her as a person. Some romances feature heroines who are/have been prostitutes, such as Mary Balogh’s A Precious Jewel, and Diane Gaston’s The Mysterious Miss M. Balogh writes that:

Priscilla Wentworth in A Precious Jewel [...] is a working girl at a brothel and a regular of the hero's until he takes her away to be his mistress. [...] Why do this? Just to give myself an excuse to write more sex scenes? Purely for titillation purposes? Emphatically no! Sex is surely not very joyful--and probably not very skilled or erotic either - between prostitutes and their clients. I did it to show that strong women can prevail over even the most dire and degrading of circumstances. [...]
There are sex scenes, of course, involving these women and their clients, but generally speaking they are either ugly or bland and emotionless. Those scenes provided me with a marvelous opportunity to write the contrasting scenes of love and joyfully erotic sex later in each book. I am firmly of the belief that sex can only be truly beautiful when it is combined with love. And so my books are love stories, not just sex romps or even just romances.

It’s also worth remembering that when it comes to sex, ignorance is not always bliss. In Polly Forrester’s Changing Fortunes, set not long after the end of the First World War, the widowed heroine, Flora, having been assaulted by her employer’s son, believes that she may be pregnant. William, the hero, asks her to marry him, because he himself is an illegitimate child, whose mother, ‘an ordinary country girl who made one mistake too many’ (1997: 166) was sent to a ‘home for fallen women’ (1997: 158). The stigma of such a status was immense, and William says that ‘I wouldn’t wish my fate on any child’ (1997: 166). Still unsure of their feelings for each other, having known each other for a short time, marriage seems like the only solution: ‘Marriage would be her only chance of escaping lifelong shame’ (1997: 166). On their wedding night, Flora experiences sexual pleasure for the first time, but this happiness soon turns to alarm when William spots some blood. He calls for the doctor:

‘Am I going to lose the baby?’
‘What baby?’ the doctor countered smartly. ‘There is no baby. As far as I can see, Mrs Pritchard, you are not now, nor have you ever been, pregnant. In fact, in my view you were still a virgin when your husband rather comprehensively made a wife of you just a short while ago.’
[...] Flora remembered [...] ‘My first husband-’
‘How long were you married the first time?’ [...]
‘Only two days – it was in the war. He was killed...’ (1997: 187)

Earlier in the novel, when William and Flora had visited a bookshop William had shown Flora his purchase: ‘Have a look. I shouldn’t like a respectable widowed lady to imagine I’d picked up the latest by Mrs Stopes.’ (102) Marie Stopes’ experience of her first marriage was not completely dissimilar to Flora’s:

Marie Stopes [...] had a disastrous marriage to fellow scientist Reginald Ruggles Gates. They had a whirlwind romance, but the relationship was close to breakdown within a year. Although she was highly intelligent, it only gradually became apparent to Marie that her sex life was not quite right.

After studying medical books in various languages in the British Library she realised her husband was impotent and that she was still a virgin. She did not believe in divorce, but took the extraordinary step of turning to the law and having her marriage annulled on the grounds of non-consummation.

The humiliating experience drove her to write her first book, Married Love. It was a sex manual - the first of its kind in the UK. It opened with these words: "In my first marriage I paid such a terrible price for sex-ignorance that I feel that knowledge gained at such a cost should be placed at the service of humanity… I hope (this book) will save some others years of heartache and blind questioning in the dark."

[...] The book was labelled immoral and obscene by the church, the medical establishment and the press, with its claims that women should enjoy sex as much as men. But it was an extraordinary hit with the general public. It sold 2000 copies within a fortnight, and Marie Stopes achieved fame and notoriety overnight.

A similar book in the US had falled foul of the Comstock Law which

forbade distribution of birth control information. In 1915, Margaret Sanger's husband was jailed for distributing her Family Limitation, which described and advocated various methods of contraception. Sanger herself had fled the country to avoid prosecution, but would return in 1916 to start the American Birth Control League, which eventually merged with other groups to form Planned Parenthood.

Anti-obscenity legislation has also led to the banning of extremely important works of literature:

In 1930, U.S. Customs seized Harvard-bound copies of Candide, Voltaire's critically hailed satire, claiming obscenity. Two Harvard professors defended the work, and it was later admitted in a different edition. In 1944, the US Post Office demanded the omission of Candide from a mailed Concord Books catalog. [...] Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio's Decameron, Defoe's Moll Flanders, and various editions of The Arabian Nights were all banned for decades from the U.S. mails under the Comstock Law of 1873. Officially known as the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act, this law banned the mailing of "lewd", "indecent", "filthy", or "obscene" materials. The Comstock laws, while now unenforced, remain for the most part on the books today; the Telecommunications Reform Bill of 1996 even specifically applied some of them to computer networks.

Censors often seem unable to distinguish between literature and pornography, and between educational material and what is ‘lewd’ and ‘obscene’. Of course, not everyone believes that romance is the correct genre for educating people about sexuality, but most would admit nonetheless, that, given the genre’s emphasis on sex taking place in the context of a loving relationship, even the more explicit romances do not, in general, encourage promiscuity and, as the heroine of Amanda Quick’s Wait Until Midnight says of her own novels: ‘although my themes and plots are often mature in nature, my characters are suitably rewarded or punished depending upon the morality of their actions’ (2004: 86).

---
Forrester, Polly, 1997. Changing Fortunes (Richmond, Surrey: Mills & Boon).

Monroe, Lucy, 2005. Blackmailed into Marriage (Richmond, Surrey: Mills & Boon).

Quick, Amanda, 2004. Wait Until Midnight (London: Piatkus Books Ltd).

Feminism, Sex and Romance

This is going to be an extremely short post to cover such complex issues, and I'd like to come back to them later and look at them in a bit more detail, but I just came across Jane Jakeman's 1999 review of jay Dixon's The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1990s and couldn't let it pass without comment. Jakeman says that:

"No sex without love" has always been the cry of the Mills & Boon heroine, in the teeth of all the evidence that human beings will screw around for almost any reason which seems good at the time, this presumably being the fundamental drive that keeps the species going.

and she goes on to add that Dixon's

central argument that M&B stories enhance women's status rather than lessening it doesn't convince, because ultimately the fundamentals of the relationship between men and women have never changed in the novels: sex for women is still only acceptable in the context of "love", by which is meant sanctified romantic passion

jay Dixon herself mentions a related view, and one with which she does not agree:

At the Romance and Roses Conference held at Liverpool University in November 1995, most commentators asserted that because Mills & Boon books end with marriage they reflect a "conservative patriarchal status quo". (1999: 183)

There seem to be two questions being raised here. The first relates to whether the portrayal of sexuality in romance is unrealistic and sexist (in that female sexuality is depicted as being inherently different to male sexuality) and the second is about the relationship between sex and marriage. Both implicity raise a further question, about whether romance can be feminist.

Leaving aside the issue of whether monogamy is possible (I think it is), it seems to me that marriage is not necessarily incompatible with feminism (see, for example, Gornick). Certain forms of marriage, particularly ones where rigid gender roles are enforced, or where women lose property rights, are clearly not feminist in nature, but not all marriages are like this.

The other argument against romance being feminist is that it seeks to link sex with love, 'sex for women is still only acceptable in the context of "love" '. Clearly romances do link sex, love and marriage, although, as Dixon points out, there are plenty of exceptions:

From the beginning, Mills & Boon novels make explicit the link between love, marriage and sex. This does not mean, as some commentators have assumed, that the books condemn sex outside marriage. On the contrary, there exist many instances, from most decades, of the heroine having premarital or adulterous sex, which is not condemned in the novels. (1999: 134)

What seems to me a crucial point, and one which is perhaps overlooked when arguments are made that romance is unfeminist, is that romance almost always advocates monogamy for both sexes (I know there are a few polyamorous romances, but they're a rare exception, but they too, from the reviews I've read, make a link between love and sex), and suggests that while people (of either sex) may enjoy sex without love/outwith a committed relationship, both women and men find greater fulfilment sexually when love is also present:

The Mills & Boon view of sex is very specific. Sexual intercourse is always better, for both hero and heroine, when there is a mutual feeling of love and desire and both protagonists surrender to that feeling, with body and mind in harmony. (Dixon 1999: 143, my emphasis)

I wouldn't for a minute deny that there's a sexual double-standard operating in many romances, because the number of virgin heroines paired up with rakes/sexually-experienced heroes makes that fact undeniable, but the genre also goes a certain way to undermine that double standard, because however promiscuous the rake may have been, his promiscuity has not usually brought him the happiness that he finds with the heroine. Thus romance seems to argue that sex will only be at its most fulfilling for both sexes when there is love involved. For all that people like Jakeman may feel this is unrealistic, I don't think it's unfeminist.
---
Dixon, jay, 1999. The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1990s (London: UCL Press)

[Edited to add that the link to Jakeman's article is now broken and I cannot find it in the New Statesman's archive. However, I did find it in an academic database. The full details are as follows: Jakeman, Jane. “Hearts and Flowers.” Rev. of The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon, 1909-1990 by jay Dixon and Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade. New Statesman 128.4426 (5 Mar. 1999): 51-52.]

Hidden Treasure and Convenient Arrangements

Last night I read a couple of books and the contrast between them got me thinking about the relationship between the plot of a romance, and the type of love-story it is. In other words, it seems to me that often the plot becomes a metaphor for the protagonists' experience of love. For example, some romances are road-stories, with the two characters travelling somewhere. As they travel, they discover not only new places and new landscapes, but also new things about each other, and usually once they reach their destination (or soon after) they realise that they've reached a romantic destination too, and their love is mutual.

The first romance I read last night was June Drummond's The Meddlers, about a rake who's facing ruin, having been left with huge debts by his now-deceased father. It's proposed (by one of the meddlers of the title) that he marry his rich neighbour, Kate, a young woman whom he's known all his life, but he refuses since he doesn't want to be thought of as a fortune-hunter, and besides, he's known her since she was a little girl. She proposes instead that they should hunt for another fortune, an ancient treasure buried on his land, and she hopes that the reward the Crown will pay for its recovery will be sufficient to pay off the debt. As a result, there's a lot of travelling around, discovering historical clues, but what also becomes clear is that Dominic, the hero, has hidden layers just like the layers of Roman, Danish, medieval and subsequent history that lie beneath the fields of his estate. The treasure may be found by digging, but the depths of Dominic's character are only exposed by love:

Lady Letitia [Dominic's mother] gazed thoughtfully at his rigid back. Though he had always shown her love and tenderness, she was aware that he had the reputation of being cold-hearted and arrogant. The careless indifference he displayed to those outside his own intimate circle had caused her many a sleepless night.
Today she saw him in a different light, his hurt made plain, his self-blame and regret beyond doubt. She did not have to look far for the cause of this change. Her rakehellion son had a last fallen in love. (2004: 239)

Dominic himself comes to realise that the true treasure is Kate: 'I knew that you're more precious to me than any treasure' (2004: 294). He has to dig beneath the surface impression of Kate that his memories gave him, and look at her as she really is:

If he remembered Kate at all, it was as a thin little snip of a child with a tangle of beech-brown hair. [...] He imagined Miss Safford must have grown up meek-mannered, malleable, and dull.
Over the past few weeks [as they've been travelling together, trying to find clues to the location of the treasure] he had found this image to be very wide of the mark. Kate was possessed of a strong will, independent views, and a lively imagination. She was brave, honest, and loyal to her friends. [...] But that was not all. He was discovering in Kate a delightful companion, with a sense of humour that matched his own. (2004: 208: 209, my emphasis).

The plot, which involves the protagonists in detailed historical research, and travels to seek the advice of authorities in the field, is paralleled by their gradual 'research' into each other, with the developing relationship encouraged by the 'authorities' in this field, the 'meddlers', or adults who have known them all their lives and who think they are perfect for each other. This metaphor is of love as something which is gradually revealed, and which is based on evidence of compatibility and good character.

The second book I read had a very different plot. In Leigh Michaels' The Corporate Marriage Campaign, the hero, Trey, asks the heroine, Darcy, to pose as his fiancée as part of an advertising campaign for the department store he runs and part-owns. This reminded me of the many other 'fake fiancée' or 'fake wife' scenarios I've read, and also of many of the arranged marriage plots. What tends to happen is that, as here, the protagonists are wary of love. They maybe don't trust it because they've been hurt in the past, so they decide to have a business arrangement, but then, while they thought they were 'just playing the game. [...] Throwing yourself into the role, for the sake of the public image' (2005: 182), it becomes real. These plots, it seems to me, are acknowledging that many people are cynical about love. The characters are a bit like Scrooge, who doesn't believe in Christmas. The plot forces the characters to reverse their opinions so that they do believe in love. They have to have faith in something intangible, that other people are sure doesn't exist, rather like Scrooge, who comes to believe in the Christmas spirit(s), or the audience of a performance of Peter Pan, who have to shout out their belief in fairies when Tinkerbell is lying ill and dying:

she thought she could get well again if children believed in fairies.
Peter flung out his arms. There were no children there, and it was night time; but he addressed all who might be dreaming of the Neverland, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think: boys and girls in their nighties, and naked papooses in their baskets hung from trees.
"Do you believe?" he cried.
Tink sat up in bed almost briskly to listen to her fate.
She fancied she heard answers in the affirmative, and then again she wasn't sure.
"What do you think?" she asked Peter.
"If you believe," he shouted to them, "clap your hands; don't let Tink die."
Many clapped. (Peter Pan)

It reminds me of something Crusie wrote, about why she writes romance:

even though I have seen the relationships of famous people crash and burn, even though I have seen the relationships of my friends crash and burn, even though I have seen my own relationships crash and burn (oh, Lord, let me count the ways), I truly do still believe in the existence of unconditional love, I still believe that it’s what holds humanity together, and I absolutely believe it’s the best of all possible things to write about. (1999: 226)

The story of a fake relationship which becomes real, against all the odds, is saying that, despite high divorce rates, despite all the cynicism, real love does still exist.

---
Crusie, Jennifer, 1999. ‘Why I Occasionally Think About Not Writing Romance Any More/Why I Know I’ll Continue to Write Romance Until They Pry My Cold Dead Fingers from Around My Keyboard’ in North American Romance Writers, ed. Kay Mussell and Johanna Tuñón (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press), pp. 223-226.

Drummond, June, 2004. The Meddlers (Bath: Chivers/Thorndike).

Michaels, Leigh, 2005. The Corporate Marriage Campaign (Richmond, Surrey: Mills & Boon).

Why Do We Read Romance Novels?

There's a thread at All About Romance on this topic, and so far there's been quite a range of responses. Despite the fact that some readers like the comfort that comes from the happy endings, and the reassurance that despite all the horrors that take place in the world, love and happy endings are possible, not all readers seemed to care about the happy ending. Some even said they disliked the extremely 'sweet' endings to some romances, in which everything is resolved in what they see as an artificial and overly tidy way. Some readers just enjoy the way in which the genre asserts that relationships are vitally important, and they like reading about relationships and how they develop. And some enjoy the twists and turns of the story as the couple must overcome the various obstacles which stand in the way of the development of the relationship. This latter answer is the one given by a character in Amanda Quick’s Wait Until Midnight.

Adam, the hero, asks a reader of the ‘sensation novels’ written by the heroine

“Doesn’t the fact that you already know the identity of the villain and that he will meet with an unpleasant fate take all of the surprise and astonishment out of the story? What is the purpose of reading a novel if one knows the ending before one turns the first page?”
Harold regarded him with acute bewilderment. Then Adam saw the light of comprehension strike.
“I take it you are not a great reader of novels, sir,” Harold said, sympathy as thick as cream in every word.
“No.” Adam sat back in his chair and gripped the arms. “I do not count novel reading among my vices.”
“Allow me to explain, if I may. Of course one knows that in a sensation novel, the villain will pay for his villainy, just as one knows that the hero and heroine will be rewarded for their good hearts and noble actions. Those things are givens, as it were. They are not the point of the business.”
“Indeed? Well, what in blazes is the point?”
“Why, it is seeing how the characters arrive at their various fates that compels our attention.” [...] “It is the series of startling incidents in the various chapters that entertains and amazes, all the twists and turns and emotional sensations. That is why one reads a novel, sir. Not to discover how it ends, but to enjoy the strange and exotic scenery along the way.” (2004: 108-109)

That's not why I read romance. I'm one of those readers who still takes sneak peeks at the endings. Yes, I know I'm reading a romance, and yes, I know it'll all end happily, but I still double-check sometimes. I really do need the happy ending. Why? Because, as the RWA suggests, these endings are ones which are 'Emotionally Satisfying' to me. I read romance because I like happy stories, and I can't think of any emotion that's made me happier than feeling requited love. I'm an unashamed romantic, and in the world of romances, I read about other people finding that same happiness.

So why do you read romance? Or, if you're not a romance reader, is there something about the happy endings and the focus on relationships which you find off-putting?

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Quick, Amanda, 2004. Wait Until Midnight (London: Piatkus Books Ltd).

Eric's Summer Reading

Well, everyone, I'm off for a little vacation--how nice to know that this blog will keep humming along without me, unlike my other two!

I have some new books stacked and ready to go, including jay Dixon's The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon: 1909-1990s, Juliet Flesch's From Australia with Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels, and Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction, by Lynn S. Neal. We'll see if they can compete with the stack of Georgette Heyers, Julia Quinns, and assorted other primary texts my wife and I have been hoarding for the getaway. (All of this premised, of course, on the kids giving us a minute's peace in which to read, but they're at their summer best right now, and I won't be entirely upset if I end up reading nothing but Treasure Island, their choice for a paternal read-aloud this year.)

See you in August!

Metaromance (2)

The metaromance for today is Hannah Bernard’s The Marriage Adventure. Unfortunately, according to a cached version of her website, she has now ‘retired from romance writing and turned to another career’. This was, as far as I know, her last published romance. The metaromance element both deepens the characterisation and gives the reader a little bit of insight into a novelist’s creative processes.

Maria, the heroine, ‘started out illustrating other people’s books, but now I’m working on writing them as well. It’s a challenge.’ (2005: 21). And she’s having a few problems:

“I have most of the story down in my head, except for the very ending, and some minor issues.” She sighed. “Well, a huge issue, actually.” [...] “The hero. I can’t get him to materialize properly on the paper.” She looked at Eddie and frowned, trying again to picture Marius. Eddie raised an eyebrow in question and his face was superimposed on her mental picture of Marius.
Yes! (2005: 22-23)

The heroine of Amanda Quick’s Wait Until Midnight has had both a similar problem and a similar sudden burst of inspiration when she spots the hero: ‘No doubt about it; he was a perfect model for the character of Edmund Drake’ (2004: 11) who ‘is very important to the story but I have been having difficulty getting him down properly on paper. There has been something rather vague about him, I’m afraid. He requires sharpening up’ (2004: 30).

Of course many novels come with the legal disclaimer that:

All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

But be that as it may, authors do seem to get plenty of inspiration from images of individuals ‘known or unknown’ to them, for example, Monica McCarty recently wrote about a couple of male actors who’ve been the inspiration for the descriptions of some of her characters. Another Monica, Monica Jackson, has photos on her website of the man whose face (and body) are those she’s given to Raziq, the djinn, hero of Love’s Potion. There are plenty of other examples, and authors who like to collage may well include photos of real people. But, from what I can tell, authors don’t just cut and paste real people into their writing without making any changes. Their process is like Maria’s drawing, taking elements of the person and then merging them with something else to create a composite which is rather different from the original:

She’d always preferred to use human models, even if her characters were anthropomorphic animals. She liked to catch a person’s personality and transform it to paper in a figure completely different from the model. [...] Usually it was impossible to see who the drawn figure was based on – but there was something she needed from her human models.
Perhaps a soul. (2005: 57)

Another aspect of Maria’s problems with her story also remind me of what I’ve read about some authors’ creative process:

“It’s Marius. He’s giving me endless problems. Not cooperating at all.” [...] For one thing - he changed the plot on me.”
Eddie blinked. “Wow. He can do that?”
Maria nodded [...]. “It’s so infuriating when a character does this.” (2005: 124-125)

Sometimes the characters seem to lead the author in a new direction from the one she’d expected. At other times authors can actually encourage their characters to speak to them and change the plot, for example, one technique used by some authors is to interview their characters.

So, back to Eddie/Marius. Maria had a crush on Eddie when she was a teenager, but he was a few years older and went off to explore the world, leaving her behind. Now he’s come home and, as Marius, has taken up a starring role in the picture-book she’s writing. Here Maria tells Eddie a bit more about Marius:

“Marius...” [...] “Well, Marius is a hero. Pretty standard hero material. Good guy. Very passionate about what he believes in.”
“Sounds good.”
“He’s a hard worker with a big heart.”
“My kind of guy.”
“He’s just starting out in the hero business. [...]
“And...” She took a deep breath. “He’s ... a penguin.” (2005: 93)

The description sets up parallels between Marius and Eddie. Eddie has come home to help his sister, who has an autistic son, and in taking that responsibility, and planning to run an adventure-holiday company, he’s just starting his life as a ‘hero’. And then we have his heroine:

“And his lady is another penguin, I presume?”
“No. Viola is a swan.” [...]
“Marius is a bit depressed because he’s having a hard time getting her to notice him. You know. She’s a swan after all. Her head is too high up on that long neck. [...]
“Poor Marius. Unrequited love. But he’s rescuing her from the evil dragon anyway?”
“Of course. Marius loves a challenge. He’s hoping she might notice him after he saves her from being broiled by the dragon’s fire” [...]
“Viola is on a quest of her own. She’s searching for the perfect feather (2005: 98-100)

Maria has always thought of herself as different from both her parents and Eddie, because they’re adventurous and she’s not. In a way, she’s the ugly duckling of the group, the one who never seemed to fit in. But, of course, the ugly duckling isn’t a duckling at all, and while she might not make a good duck, she makes a very fine swan indeed. As Eddie says, ‘You don’t have to measure yourself by their standards! You’re smart and talented and beautiful...’ (2005: 177). She, however, thinks that she and Eddie, just like a swan and a penguin, are too different for a relationship between them to work: ‘We’re total opposites’ (2005: 148). But, just as Viola and Marius are both water birds, so Maria and Eddie both have an ‘adventurer’s spirit’, it’s just that Maria ‘liked working on adventures inside her head’ (2005: 22).

Maria, like Viola, is apparently in need of rescuing. She’s planning to do a parachute jump, despite the fact that this terrifies her, because she doesn’t want to admit defeat and admit that she will never live up to what she thinks are her parents’ expectations. The jump is, for her, the equivalent of a dragon’s fire or a dangerous quest. And she would very much like Eddie to be in love with her. You do have to wonder if the choice of name (Marius, which is rather similar to Maria) is a reflection of how Maria feels about Marius. She wants them (or rather, her and Marius's real-life counterpart) to be a pair, just like Mozart's Papageno and Papagena, who, while not birds, are a bird-catcher and his beloved. And although Maria doesn’t make the connection between her behaviour and Viola’s, Eddie does:

“You’re playing hard to get. Just like Viola.”
She looked up, surprised enough to forget to protest. “Viola? She’s playing hard to get?”
Well, it’s obvious she really likes Marius, isn’t it? She’s just afraid he doesn’t like her.” (2005: 128-129).

Eddie’s right about both Maria and Viola. And so, at last, both stories conclude happily:

“Marius discovers that Viola’s long journey, and all her perils were made for one purpose – finding the feather he’d admired so much so she could give it to him.”
“So she did it all for him?”
“Yes. [...] She was just too afraid of rejection. So she pretended never to notice him.” (2005: 184)

The Marriage Adventure is only a short romance, 184 pages, in the Mills & Boon Tender Romance line, but the use of the metafictional device, by providing a commentary on the feelings of the heroine in a way that shows, rather than tells, gives it a depth it might otherwise have lacked. Or maybe the truth is that I just have a soft spot for Marius the penguin.

----
Bernard, Hannah, 2005. The Marriage Adventure (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).

Quick, Amanda, 2004. Wait Until Midnight (London: Piatkus Books Limited).

The photo of Papagena and Papageno was taken from the website of Opera Japonica. I used to have just a link to the photo on their site, but they currently have a new site under construction, and so quite a lot of people came here looking for the photo (which I think is a particularly good one) and couldn't find it. Here's a link to the original location of the photo of Pagageno and Papagena. I hope they don't mind me putting it on this page temporarily, so that other people can admire it. Sometimes that link works, and sometimes it doesn't.

Rainbow Romances

Sarah’s already written a little about gay romance, and I can’t mention the topic without adding a reference to Scott and Scott’s description of their heroes, but what I want to focus on are the ways in which homophobia, as well as acceptance of homosexuality, can be expressed via the secondary characters in romance.

The controversy that was triggered last year about homosexuality in romance is still alive. It began, or at least garnered a special report at All About Romance, when

we learned that RWA sent out a questionnaire to its 9,000 members presenting them with possible new definitions of Romance. I have not seen the questionnaire, but have been told by those angered by it that it was part of a calculated plan to close off RWA membership to writers of Romantica and Gay/Lesbian-themed Romances.
Whether or not that is true, in fact, is almost besides the point. Because by now many of RWA's members believe it to be the case, and quite a few authors have resigned their memberships in protest.

Now Kate Rothwell has commented on
a letter published in the Romance Writer’s Report written by Jan Butler, in which Ms Butler argues that the Romance Writers of America’s definition of romance should be changed to exclude homosexual romances. She brings in morality, slippery slopes and paedophilia to justify her argument. This prompted a characteristically strong rebuttal from the Smart Bitches. As many on both these threads have pointed out, paedophilia is completely different from homosexuality, but the technique being employed here to smear homosexuals is one which is used worldwide. For example:

The “Australian Family Association” (AFA) represents itself as a guardian of the “traditional family” of mother, father and natural children. In its campaign against the Western Australian law reforms [‘affecting the status of homosexual men and lesbians to ensure equality in the eyes of the law’], it used newspaper adverts, leaflet drops and billboard posters inter alia, to represent its position and to try to influence public opinion and to persuade the government not to proceed with these changes. These public representations consistently focused on the "age of consent" issue and portrayed homosexual men as sexual predators against young boys - rapacious paedophiles.

In contemporary Australia conscious vilification of the “other” has been increasingly apparent as a significant tool in stirring group fears and mobilising paranoid-schizoid anxieties. (Shafer, 2002)

This technique is one which is identified as homophobic by PACE, a UK charity ‘promoting lesbian and gay health and wellbeing’:

Homophobic attitudes may consciously or unconsciously be expressed through:

• stereotyping
• pathologising (not normal/deviant - mad, bad or sick)
• hostile/aggressive (verbal & physical abuse)
• ridiculing (e.g. jokes, offensive slang)
• pitying (e.g. "what a shame")
• ignorance/confusion/embarrassment voyeuristic (e.g. prurient interest in what lesbians do in bed)
• sexist (e.g. "not a real man/woman", "all she needs is a good ****"
• marginalising/seeing as "other"
• rejecting
• indifferent to suffering caused
• confusion of homosexuality with paedophilia, leading belief that lesbians and gay men should not be around children
• discriminatory - aware or unaware, formal/institutionalised or informal
• over-compensating (e.g. insincerely "nice", "some of my best friends ...")

It seems to me that homophobic attitudes in the romance writing and reading community are expressed within romance novels as well as in the opposition to gay and lesbian romances.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I mainly read historicals, and in the medieval, Regency and Victorian periods when most historicals are set, homosexual activities were illegal, so a lack of gay and lesbian characters isn’t unrealistic. They’d mostly have been well-hidden inside their closets. But there are a few romances which do have gay characters. I’ve also read some contemporaries, and come across a few gay and lesbian secondary characters. I’ll also draw on All About Romance's (AAR’s) resources, since they’ve read far, far, more books than I ever could, so their conclusions draw on a much wider base of evidence.

Let’s begin with the first manifestation of homophobia mentioned by PACE, stereotyping. This can be both positive (to an extent) or negative. The positive stereotype is often mixed with ‘over-compensating (e.g. insincerely "nice", "some of my best friends ...")’, because this type of gay secondary character is often the ‘heroine’s best friend:

Usually braver, spunkier, more daring than the heroine, unless the heroine herself is super-spunky, in which case the friend will be the voice of caution and reason. She appears in all subgenres, although in contemporary romances, her role may be played by a gay male. She often gets a secondary romance of her own, or a starring role in the author's next book. (Note: the latter does not apply if the part is played by a gay male.) Colleen McMahon, AAR

A gay male ‘best friend’ is useful because, as in the case of Miranda Lee’s Marriage in Peril, he doesn’t pose any competition for the affections of either the straight hero or heroine:

‘You and Vince are going to make a great team. I can see my investment will be in safe hands. Besides’, he added, smiling ‘with Vince being gay, I have no worries on that little score.’
Brooke frowned at that remark. ‘Would you ever really worry about me on that score, Leo? What if Vince hadn’t been gay?’
‘Then I wouldn’t have let him within a million miles of you,’ he replied in all seriousness.
‘But why? Don’t you trust me?’
‘I trust you. I simply don’t trust men.’ (2000:153)

Vince is a fashion designer, and another of the gay best friends I’ve read about works with the heroine in the cosmetics department of a large store, in Kylie Adams’ Fly Me to the Moon (2001). Ricky, as the AAR reviewer says, is ‘gay and her best girlfriend’. His problems with a lack of acceptance by his father may be realistic, but not much else is. So why are gay men stereotyped as being honorary women, interested in clothes and perfumes? In addition, as noted in AAR they’re extremely unlikely to get their own romantic relationship, and they aren’t often even seen with a boyfriend. This portrayal makes gay men seem as unthreatening to straight men as eunuchs, and given their apparent celibacy, they don’t offend the sensibilities of those who believe that gay sex is immoral.

So much for the 'positive' stereotype. The negative one manages to combine ‘pathologising’ attitudes with ‘marginalising/seeing as "other"’ and ‘confusion of homosexuality with paedophilia’. In AAR’s At The Back Fence, there was a segment on a stereotype they dubbed the ‘Gay Villain’. Candy Tan commented that

It seems that almost every time I pick up a romance, most of the really sicko bad guys turn out to be gay. I, personally, am fed up with the constant and pretty much consistent association of homosexuality, bisexuality and almost anything other than regular heterosexual sex with everything evil including (but not limited to) pedophilia, psychosis, misogyny, incest, sociopathy, bestiality, abusive tendencies and bad personal hygiene.

a fellow contributor to the column, Mary Novak, agreed:

I share Candy’s distaste for the Multi-Pervert Gay Villain cliché. I don’t have a problem with gay characters that are obnoxious or even evil - obnoxiousness and evil are traits available to all classes, creeds, and genders. I do object, however, to the wholesale bundling of every pathology under the sun, particularly misogyny and pedophilia, with homosexuality.

Candy cites Robin Schone’s The Lady’s Tutor as having this sort of gay character, and I came across one myself in Sally Mackenzie’s The Naked Duke, although possibly one should describe the villain as bisexual, since he enjoys raping and murdering female prostitutes.

Not all romances descend into cliché and prejudice when it comes to the depiction of homosexuality, though. Suzanne Brockmann states that:

gay characters in romance novels (along with TV shows and many contemporary movies) tend to be asexual. They come in, redecorate the heroine's house, say something witty and exit stage left.

Don't get me wrong -- I think it's great that gay characters are showing up in more and more books. This kind of diversity is a big step toward tolerance and acceptance.

But the truth is -- and I believe this completely -- that love is love is love.

So she gave a gay secondary character his own romantic subplot in Hot Target.

Jennifer Crusie has a number of gay, lesbian and bisexual characters: there’s a gay couple in Faking It who’ve been an item for years; the heroine’s mother in Crazy for You has a lesbian lover as well as a husband; in Bet Me Shanna, a lesbian character, has a relationship during the course of the novel and later ‘Shanna and Linda parted company after a year with no hard feelings’ and Shanna soon meets the love of her life with whom she ‘went to China and adopted a little girl. Shanna is a stay-at-home mom’ (2004: 390).

I’ve also just read Amanda Quick’s Wait Until Midnight, and I’m certain that the aunts who brought up the heroine are lesbian lovers, although, perhaps in deference to the sensibilities of the Victorian age in which the book is set, we are told this in a somewhat coded way:

Emma and Milly [...] were both women of a certain age. They had been something more than very good friends for years, sharing not only a home and the responsibility of raising a child, but a seemingly endless variety of enthusiasms and interests. (2004: 55)

I'll end there, but I hope I've given just a tiny flavour of the range of attitudes towards homosexuality in romance novels.

-----
Crusie, Jennifer, 2004. Bet Me (New York: St Martin’s Press).

Lee, Miranda, 2000. Marriage in Peril (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited).

Quick, Amanda, 2004. Wait Until Midnight (London: Piatkus Books Ltd).

Shafer, Allan, 2002. ‘ “Wanted, Your Teenage Son!”: Homosexuality, Paedophilia, And The Vilification Of The “Other”: A Socio-Analytic View Of Some Fundamentalist Organisational Dynamics’, paper presented at the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations, 2002 Symposium.

Metaromance (1)

In honour of the forthcoming Romance Writers of America conference in Atlanta, and the recently concluded Romantic Novelists' Association conference in Penrith, I thought I'd post about metaromances. We’ve mentioned them on the listserv a few times, but haven't really gone into a lot of detail about why metafiction intrigues so many of us. Metafiction is:

a type of fiction which self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction.
It is the term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.

and one of the most common forms of metafiction, and certainly of metafictional romances, is ‘A novel about a person writing a novel’ (both quotations from Wikipedia).

On the listserv we were using the term ‘metaromance’ to describe romances in which one of the characters (usually the heroine), is a writer, and usually the author of a romance. I thought I’d mention the author-characters of the metaromances, so they could take their place alongside the poet-characters discussed by Eric. In that post, Eric mentioned that questions were often asked about possible negative consequences resulting from reading chivalric romances, and he alluded to Cervantes’ Don Quijote, who went mad from reading too many of them, and as a result ended up tilting at windmills. Here’s a picture of Don Quijote in the world of his imagination, surrounded by all the strange creatures and exotic people who inhabit the world of the chivalric romances.

I thought I'd start with Amanda Quick's Reckless. Gabriel Banner, Earl of Wylde, is the anonymous author of The Quest, ‘the most popular book of the Season’ (1997: 24) and Phoebe, the heroine, is Wylde’s anonymous editor and ‘the mysterious backer who had rescued Josiah Lacey’s faltering bookshop and publishing business’ (1997: 24). Both Gabriel and Phoebe are collectors of manuscripts of chivalric tales. The owning, writing and editing of chivalric romances, as well as a shared love of the genre set the hero and heroine on a quest of their own. In the process, it raises the issue of whether Phoebe and other reader of romances and chivalric romances are mad, or at least, naive, to believe in chivalry, love and happy endings to quests. This being a romance novel, not a parody of the chivalric romances, the answer is that they’re not.

Other metafictional works by Quick, The Pirate, The Adventurer and The Cowboy (all from 1990) have been discussed by Pamela Regis (2003). She writes that:

As a romance novel with a heroine who is a romance novelist and a hero who reads one of her books (208), The Pirate is self-referential. This novel points explicitly to its own genre. Krentz uses the romance novels that her character has written to create a perspective - an echo, a mirror, a doubling, an ironic contrast - for the essential romance elements of the actual novel, The Pirate, that we, the readers, are holding in our hands. Through mirroring or echoing an element of the core romance novel, Krentz adds a set of meanings to the actual romance novel, intensifying them, commenting ironically on them, but never actually undercutting them. This generic self-referentiality becomes part of the courtship. (2003: 171)

This being the season of conferences for romance authors, though, it's interesting to explore not just how metafiction comments on fiction and the conventions of fiction, but also the ways in which the metaromance can explore issues such as the marketing of novels and what is involved in being a published author. The metaromance aspect of Reckless, for example, touches on issues related to the marketing of romance novels. Phoebe describes The Quest to a potential reader as a

novel [which] engages the most lofty of the sensibilities. Very inspiring treatment of the subject of love. You will be especially pleased with its hero. He is even more exciting than one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroes (1997: 110)

It’s the verbal equivalent of the modern back-cover blurb and I imagine Quick/Krentz would consider this a fairly appropriate description of Reckless itself. Reckless even concludes with a publicity event which will boost sales of the book, though Wylde is a somewhat shy author who has trouble coping with the adulation of his fans: ‘Wylde was very set against being identified as the author of such a successful book. I believe that when it comes to that sort of thing he is rather shy’ (1997: 368). Wylde comments that:

“I do not like this business of being a famous author.”
“Nonsense”, Phoebe said. “ [...] Surely you can handle a few admirers on the rare occasion such as tonight.”
“The occasions had better be extremely rare,” Gabriel warned. [...]
“They will be,” Phoebe promised. She gave him a gloating smile. “And just think of what it will do for your career. I’ll wager we shall have to go back to print for another five or six thousand copies after this lot returns to London. Everyone here cannot wait to inform his or her friends of the true identity of the author of The Quest. Lacey’s Bookshop will make another tidy little fortune.” (1997: 369-370)

Clearly this is an extremely close editor/author relationship, but the reclusive author’s reluctance to court publicity, and the editor’s desire to have the author meet his/her fans in order to boost sales remind me of comments I’ve read on the blogs and websites of modern romance authors. Here's one such description of writers, from Susan Holloway Scott/Miranda Jarrett on today's blog post at the Word Wenches:

Writers cherish anonymity. We’re not by nature a glamorous bunch. Books may be considered part of the entertainment industry, but writing is not a performing art. Which is why when we have to “go public” –– whether at a big conference like RWA, or a small book signing at a local store –– the results can be, well, challenging.

-----
Quick, Amanda, 1997. Reckless (London: Orion).

Regis, Pamela, 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

Sold!

There was an item on US public radio recently about romance which I heard about thanks to a member of the listserv. It started well enough, mentioning current bestsellers:

"Angels Fall," by Nora Roberts. It's billed as a novel of romantic suspense. Number two is "12 Sharp," by Janet Evanovich. About a sassy female bounty hunter. Chick lit rules the lists, you could say. But bookstore worker and commentator Moira Manion is a bit worried about what women are reading these days.

So why is Moira worried? Because she’s been reading the titles of books in the Harlequin Presents series:

I noticed a theme in the "Harlequin Presents" series. Titles like "Mistress Bought and Paid For," "Bought By a Billionaire," "Bought By Her Husband," and "Traded to the Sheik."

When and why did women start fantasizing about being bought and sold? Women have fought against being property. Some sacrificed their lives. I can't believe women would pay to read a story of a woman so desperate for money that she sells herself to a Greek billionaire or a Zanzibar sheik.

But it makes sense. We live in a time when everything is for sale. Why work yourself to death for little pay when you can become the property of a rich man?

First of all, lets have a look at the guidelines for the Harlequin Presents series:

these fast-paced stories are essentially escapist romantic fantasies that take the reader on an emotional roller-coaster ride. Written in the third person, they can be from the male or female point of view, or seen through the eyes of both protagonists. All are set in sophisticated, glamorous, international locations.
With its focus on strong, wealthy, breathtakingly charismatic alpha-heroes who are tamed by spirited, independent heroines, the central relationship in a Presents novel is a provocatively passionate, highly charged affair, driven by conflict, emotional intensity and overwhelming physical attraction

So yes, the hero is likely to be a ‘rich man’, and that’s part of the ‘escapist’ element. And he’s going to be ‘strong’. But the other side of the equation in this line are the ‘spirited, independent heroines’. These are not books about women who find a wealthy man and immediately latch onto him in order to get his money. They are, however, often about women who are mistaken for ‘gold-diggers’, but, and this is a point that Moira seems to have missed, because she doesn't appear to have read further than the titles, they are not mercenary or materialistic women. For example, one Harlequin Presents novel that I read recently is Kathryn Ross’s Mistress to a Rich Man. The title is exactly the sort that Marion’s talking about. And the hero early on decides that the heroine is ‘a cold-blooded gold-digger and a damn good actress’ (2005:23). Is the heroine a gold-digger? No, of course she’s not, she just wants to meet the father she hasn’t seen for twenty years, and he happens to be a rich and famous movie-star. She doesn’t even become the hero’s mistress, though they do start a sexual relationship before they declare their love for each other.

The misunderstandings about the heroine’s motivation, and/or the nature of the circumstances in which the heroine is forced into close proximity to a hero that she often initially dislikes (but is attracted to) are not, I think, written so that women can indulge in ‘fantasizing about being bought and sold’. It seems to me to have a lot more to do with ensuring that each story is ‘a provocatively passionate, highly charged affair, driven by conflict’. And clearly the readers enjoy both the conflict, which serves to raise the sexual tension, and what is often a Cinderella-like fantasy of a poor, virtuous woman becoming the wife of a rich, handsome hero.

Some of the stories I’ve read do involve the hero and heroine entering into an arranged marriage, perhaps because the heroine is being ‘sold’ by her father or other relative, or perhaps because she needs to marry in order to save her family, or pay for medical treatment for a sick child. But the heroine generally struggles against her fate and she certainly doesn’t marry a rich man just because she wants an easy life of luxury. Furthermore, the heroine is never a ‘mistress’ according to the dictionary definition of ‘a woman (other than a wife) having a sexual relationship with a married man’, though she may occasionally be a ‘kept’ woman if she’s living in accommodation he provides. Very often, as in Mistress to a Rich Man, the word ‘mistress’ just seems to mean that the heroine is the hero’s lover.

The moral of this particular story, it seems to me, is that it’s not wise to judge a book by its title, and it’s even less sensible to judge an entire series (or genre) on the basis of their titles.

Personally I prefer less ‘glamorous’ settings and non-alpha heroes, so maybe I’m misjudging the appeal of this line to other romance readers. But if there are any of you out there who love the Harlequin Presents/Mills & Boon Modern Romance line, what is it about these books that appeals to you? Is Marion right that you’re just ‘fantasizing about being bought and sold’?

----
Ross, Kathryn, 2005. Mistress to a Rich Man (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).

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.
-----
Catherine Sheldrick Ross & Mary K. Chelton, 2001. ‘Reader’s Advisory: Matching Mood and Material’, Library Journal (February 1): 52-55.

Summer Time

We’re in the middle of a heatwave here in the UK. The weather does affect our mood, as well as our bodies, but some authors manage to demonstrate this more successfully than others. In literature, of course, authors can reverse the relationship and alter the weather to suit the mood of the characters:

In literary criticism, the pathetic fallacy is the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human emotions, thoughts, sensations, and feelings. The term was coined by John Ruskin in his 1856 work Modern Painters, in which Ruskin wrote that the aim of pathetic fallacy was “to signify any description of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions."

There are other ways in which the weather can be used to enhance the mood or drive a plot and romance writers are well aware of them. For example, Maria V. Snyder, a meteorologist turned romance-writer says that:

I discovered, much to my chagrin, that forecasting the weather wasn’t one of my skills and in order to chase tornados you had to find them first. Creating fantasy worlds where I have complete control of the weather is definitely more fun.

The most obvious examples of the use of seasons in romance are those anthologies of short stories which appear around particular holidays, such as Christmas and Valentine’s Day. Then there are the dramatic weather events, such as hurricanes or snow-storms which put the couple at risk, forcing them to work together to survive, or simply trap them and keep them together long enough for them to find their HEA.

Since we’re having a heatwave, I thought I'd discuss a seasonally appropriate romance, Barbara Delinsky’s 1987 Heat Wave. This was published in the ‘Temptation’ line, so the title was an indication not just of the weather, but also of the sexual ‘heat’ between the hero and heroine. The story begins with Caroline undressing, and from the context we deduce that she’s just got back home after a long, hot day at work:

Caroline Cooper untied the wilting bow at the neck of her blouse, released its top button and peeled the damp fabric from her sweaty neck. [...] Freeing the last of the buttons, Caroline carefully separated the blouse from her shoulders and arms. [...] Caroline breathed a sigh of relief when she stepped out of her skirt and an even greater one when she rolled the nylons from her legs. [...]
Clad in panties and bra, Caroline padded wearily to the bathroom. [...] she unsnapped her bra and let it fall to the commode before rewetting the cloth and dragging it slowly over those parts of her that hadn’t breathed all day – the insides of her elbows, the curve of her waistline, beneath and between her breasts. (1987: 5-6)

It isn’t till page 7 that we’re told that ‘The dog days of summer had arrived suddenly and with a vengeance, but it wasn’t even summer. It was the sixth of June. She shuddered to think what July and August would be like.’ The slow, detailed opening pages make us feel the heroine’s sticky hotness with her, and they may also make the reader feel just a little bit voyeuristic as we ‘watch’ her slowly peel of her clothes. If so, that’s no coincidence, since the hero has also been watching the heroine from his window, fifty feet away from hers, and their relationship (or courtship) begins with them watching and fantasising about each other across the courtyard. Hot, literally and metaphorically.

But even if we’re boiling in the summer heat, poetry and prose can conjure up the mood of different seasons. Here, for example, is autumn:

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
(From John Keats’ Ode to Autumn)

Just reading that makes me feel the lazy, gentle warmth of that season.

Lydia Joyce’s The Veil of Night is a particularly good example of how weather can be used to set mood, assist in characterisation and drive the plot. There are examples of this throughout the novel, but I'll just give one example, from the very beginning, when Lady Victoria Wakefield arrives at a lonely mansion, ‘its saw-toothed crenellations pierced by random, unbalanced spires stabbing the slate-gray sky’ (2005: 3) . As she and her maid walk up the hill

A fat drop of rain fell squarely on her nose as a gust of wind caught the cage of her crinoline [...] Another drop splatted against Victoria’s cheek, then another soaked through the fabric of her wrap and the gown beneath to wet her shoulder. She pressed her mouth in a thin line of displeasure, wishing fifty hells on the arrogant duke. [...] They reached the door just as a peal of thunder shook the ground and the sky let loose, releasing a torrent of water over them. Victoria didn’t pause to knock. She jerked the iron latch down and threw her shoulder against the battered door, half stumbling inside as it opened. (2005: 6)

Victoria’s reaction to the weather gives us a clue to her resilience and determination, as well as to her unconventional side which prompts her imaginative curse and which is then demonstrated by her decision to open the door herself rather than wait for a servant to do it for her. The scene also works to create atmosphere, since it is decidedly gothic: the heroine arrives in near-darkness, accompanied by the roll of thunder, at a remote and imposing building. This is no mere pastiche of the gothic, however, instead it is a work in which appearances are shown to be deceptive, and the author, having created expectations in the reader, leaves many of them unfulfilled, thus reinforcing one of the themes of the book, about the need to look beyond the surface appearance of a person (or a book, or a house), if one is to truly understand it. Later parts of the book, which is set in September 1864, create the same impression of ‘mellow fruitfulness’ as Keats’ poem, particularly in the creative application of peaches, which the Duke uses to give Victoria her ‘just desserts’ (2005: 131) while she lies back, her blonde hair loose, like Keat’s autumn,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies

Anyone got any favourite weather scenes? And do you prefer to match the weather in the books you read to the weather you're experiencing?

Writers Who Bare All

Not literally! But I was thinking about what's involved when authors write about themselves, their books and their genre. There are so many authors who have blogs and websites, and on many of these one can read the writer's thoughts about the romance genre. Similar essays can be found in Mussell and Tuñón's 1999 North American Romance Writers and in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women (1992).

It's an issue which is discussed by writers and readers alike, with some readers declaring that they've been put off buying books by certain authors because they don’t like their personalities.

As someone interested in studying romances from an academic perspective, I find all this extra information fascinating, and sometimes extremely useful. The essay collections in particular offer an important insight into how writers were thinking about the genre at a particular moment in romance history. Many author websites also include articles offering writing advice, some of it about writing craft and some of it about the business side of being an author (e.g. about how to write a query letter). These essays can give readers an insight into the business and into an individual author's technique. Blogs can help build up a picture of events which may have shaped the author and her writing and of the author's personality. It's not that we need or want to psychoanalyse the author but rather that blogs and essays can sometimes give us a few clues about whether we’re going in the right direction in our analysis of the novels. One of the points brought up in the recent discussion about academic analysis of romances both at Romancing the Blog and continued here is that we might ‘OVERanalyze, looking for deep meanings that may not be there’ or that ‘maybe people do tend to over-analyze and see hidden meanings that really aren’t there for the sake of academics’.

Knowing a bit more about the author can help keep us on track. It’s not essential, of course, and there are plenty of authors from the past about whom we know extremely little and whose works have been studied in huge detail. It could be argued that knowing next to nothing (or even nothing) about the author just adds to the mystique of the work and opens up more possible interpretations. That’s particularly helpful if one’s interpretation is more focussed on the reader’s responses, and on the reader’s interpretations. But a bit of background knowledge about the author really does come in handy if

(a) one doesn’t want to look like an idiot. Getting details wrong about an author, details that any real fan knows, is not going to make an academic look either knowledgeable or serious about their subject.

(b) one perhaps wants to find out a bit more about their background. No-one writes or lives in a vacuum and it may well make a difference whether a writer is from Australia, or New Zealand, Canada or the US, England or Scotland. There's already a book just about Australian romance, for example.

(c) One might be interested to know which romance authors are really men writing under a female pseudonym (particularly if one were writing about male authors and male readers of romance). It could come as a big shock to discover that an author was actually two authors if one had been speculating about ‘her’ background, but it might also help explain certain differences in style or characterisation or plotting that might otherwise have been put down to uneavenness in a single author’s writing.

(d) Titles, like covers, are something that romance authors often lack control over, and academics need to be aware of that. For example, I happen to think that Jennifer Crusie’s Manhunting has a really appropriate title. But it turns out that it wasn’t Crusie who thought it up. So while the title may tell us a lot about the book, we have to be careful about drawing assumptions on the basis of the title alone.

And there are lots of other minor details about books and authors that could be helpful to know. Anyone want to add to the list? Or do you think the less we know about the author the better? And maybe there are some authors with items to add to the Romance Wiki list of resources?