PCA Romance Panel 11: Happily Ever After: Romance Conventions In and Through Film and Fiction

Jessica "was not able to attend this final romance area panel" so she does not have notes on all the papers "but Phil kindly provided me with a copy of his paper from which to derive a summary." Phil Mathews's paper asked "Is Happily Ever After a Romance Imperative?" and Jessica has put up her summary of it. I don't want to copy and paste all of Jessica's post, so in what follows I'm taking it for granted that everyone who carries on reading this has already looked at her notes on Phil's paper.

Phil asks some interesting questions about the possible consequences of knowing that a novel is going to finish with a "happily ever after" but what I found slightly curious about his paper is that although it was written by an academic from the UK, it doesn't seem to reflect the complexity of the UK situation with regards to the "romance" genre. By that, I mean that in the UK what we have is not so much "romance" as "romantic fiction" which may, or may not, include a "happily ever after" (HEA). The RNA has recently updated its website but a previous version (cached here) contained the following description of "romantic fiction":

What is romantic fiction?

Romantic fiction is the cross-genre genre. In the UK it appears under a variety of publishers’ labels including general fiction, women’s fiction, historical, romantic comedy, chick lit, sagas – even spooky – as well as romance. These are among the UK’s most commercially successful book categories.

It embraces Jilly Cooper’s 900 pages as well as the 187 of Harlequin Mills & Boon’s category romances which are published every month; multi-generational sagas and Regency romps; deeply serious meditations on life and flippant twenty–somethings’ metropolitan shenanigans.

The engine of romantic fiction is love and relationships. The bodywork is infinitely variable.

Romantic fiction’s heritage

The first modern novel in English (‘Pamela’ by Samuel Richardson, published 1740) was essentially a romance, a highly coloured tussle between love and virtue. (Both won.) First Fanny Burney, then Jane Austen honed the genre, leading their heroines through agonising mistakes to emotional understanding and a happy ending. The Brontë sisters added social isolation, madness and tragedy; Thackeray gave us the truly amoral heroine in Becky Sharpe. The modern genre was born.

Phil would "like to argue that the Romance genre is stigmatised undeservedly because of the imperative for a happy ending" but the UK's Romantic Novelists' Association was founded "in 1960 by a roll call of notables in women’s commercial fiction" because

They wanted respect for their genre. In her inaugural address, Miss Robins said that although romantic novels, according to the libraries, gave the most pleasure to the most people, the writers almost had to apologise for what they did.

And yet,

even in the sixties, not all RNA novels ended Happy Ever After. RNA Committee member Maynah Lewis ascribed this to women’s widening horizons. Winner of the Romantic Novel of the Year in 1968 and 1972, she said, “In my first novel the heroine didn’t get her man, in my second the heroine was 64 years old, my third was a romantic suspense set behind the Iron Curtain, my fourth had no wedding bells, not even in the far distance.”

So while I think Phil raises some very interesting questions about the effects of the "imperative for a happy ending" in the romance genre, I'm not sure it's necessarily that imperative which is the cause of all of the stigma (though it may well be the cause of some of it). After all, romantic fiction is, and long has been, to quote Phil, "able to embrace the love plot, tragic or otherwise" and yet many authors of romantic fiction still felt so stigmatised that they founded the RNA.

PCA Romance Panel 10: The Construction of Gender: (Killer) Heroes and Heroines

Jessica's notes on this panel are available here and describe papers by Darcy Martin, Jim and Margaret Haefner, Jacob Lusk and Marnie Jones.

PCA Romance Panel 9: So Classy!: High/Low/Middle Class/Culture

Jessica's notes for Panel 9 are now available. The papers were presented by Conseula Francis, Tamara Whyte, and Angela Toscano.

PCA Romance Panel 8: Exploring History, Genre, Media

The panelists were Maryan Wherry, Jill Astley, Toni Johnson-Woods, and Kimberley Baldus. Jessica's notes are available here.

Just so that we're absolutely clear about their status, Jessica introduces this set by stating that

Following are some of my fallible, incomplete, impressionistic notes from a Romance Area panel session at the PCA conference in St. Louis. These are notes on works in progress,and do not purport to be complete records of the papers presented. Please follow up with individual presenters for full copies of their papers or to have specific questions about their work addressed.

In the light of that disclaimer, those of you who read Jessica's notes on An Goris's paper about Nora Roberts, in Session 3, but who haven't kept up with the comments thread here at TMT, might like to know that An felt the "summary might have (understandably) lacked some of the nuance I hope I put into the paper" and she has therefore provided some "some clarification and additions."

PCA Romance Panel 7: Romancing Vampires: Toothsome Heroes and Happy Endings

On this panel were Haley Stokes, Brent Gibson and Kat Schroeder. Jessica has "disabled comments on this post deliberately."

PCA Romance Panel 6: Romance Publishing: Canadian Romance, ePublishing, and Erotica, Oh My!

And Jessica's notes for this panel are also up. On the panel are Crystal Goldman, Jessica Taylor, and authors Amanda Berry, Jeannie Lin, and Sela Carsen.

PCA Romance Panel 5: The Safe Spaces of Romance: Smart Bitches, Dear Author and a New Romance Documentary

Jessica's put up notes for this panel now. Jane Litte refers to two blog posts. The first is this one by Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, and the second is this one, by Laura Clawson at Daily Kos. The other papers are by Pamela Regis and Laurie Kahn.

Edited to add: Jane Litte has also put up a detailed post about this panel.

PCA Romance Panel 3: Nora Roberts: Food, Community, and Voice

Jessica's notes about this session are now available. The presenters were Tessa Kostelc, Glinda Hall, and An Goris.

Jessica's notes about An's paper mention the

Connected book format –which had been new in early 1990s, shift in genre and its publication practices

Genre of romance seems at first resistant to connected series, since each novel has a definitive ending [...] Roberts’ first use of connected books format was in 1985, 4 books about MacGregor siblings for Silhouette.

In fact, Mills & Boon had already published Mary Burchell's Warrender series, which began in 1965 with A Song Begins. Connected romances can also be found in the oeuvre of Georgette Heyer who is, of course, a highly influential figure in the genre and one of whom Nora Roberts is very well aware: Roberts has written that "Georgette Heyer has given me such great pleasure over the years in my reading, and rereading, of her stories. [...] I have Georgette Heyer's books in every room of my house." (i). As mentioned at Georgette-Heyer.com

Although Heyer didn't really write 'series', there are a few books that are linked by common characters. These are These Old Shades [1926] with Léonie and Justin parenting Dominic in Devil's Cub [1932] and Dominic and Mary are the grand-parents of Barbara in An Infamous Army [1937]. [...] In addition, the characters from Regency Buck [1935] are also featured in An Infamous Army. [...] her first novel, The Black Moth [1921] was revisited in These Old Shades. As Hodge says in the bio, "Devil Andover from The Black Moth has suffered a sea change into the wicked Duke of Avon (known as Satanas to his friends)."

An Infamous Army thus creates a cross-over between the books about two separate families.

Jessica added that "Sarah Frantz asks the first question, noting that it was in fact Sam and Alyssa, Suzanne Brockman’s characters, who first began their courtship in a book in which they don’t have their HEA." This made me think of Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire and Palliser novels. They're not strictly romances, but they do contain plenty of romance elements because Trollope apparently believed that "a novel can hardly be made interesting or successful without love" (Polhemus 383). Trollope's two series do eventually cross over, and in Phineas Finn in the Palliser series we can find Phineas beginning a romantic relationship that eventually concludes in Phineas Redux.

Can anyone else think of more examples of

• early romance series
• cross-overs between series
• characters whose courtships begin in one book in a series and end in a later one?

---

• Polhemus, Robert M. "Being in Love in Phineas Finn/Phineas Redux: Desire, Devotion, Consolation." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37.3 (1982): 383-395.
• Roberts, Nora. Foreword. Frederica. By Georgette Heyer. Don Mills, Ontario: Harlequin, 2000. i-iv.
  

PCA Romance Panel 2: The Dark Side of Romance: Rape, Serial Killers, and Power Dynamics

Jessica continues with her summaries, this time of papers by Robin Harders, Sarah S. G. Frantz, Amber Botts, and James Buchanan.

Edited to add: James Buchanan has made available the slides which accompanied her presentation. They're probably not safe for viewing at some people's work-places. I know that's an issue for some people, so I thought I'd better mention it.

PCA Romance Panel 1: Romancing Bollywood

Jessica's first summary from this year's PCA conference, of papers by Eric Selinger, Jayashree Kamble, and Pavitra Sundar, is now up.

Tweeting PCA 2010

If you'd like to follow Sarah Frantz's tweets about the conference, please go to http://twitter.com/academicromance. You don't have to have a Twitter account to read the tweets. You can subscribe via RSS to your feed reader or there's the option of doing things the "old-fashioned" way i.e. just keep checking the page to see Sarah's latest tweets. The conference starts today, Wednesday 31 March, but Sarah says she'll start "tweeting on Thursday from the first Romance Area panel." I posted a list of the romance panels here (scroll down the page a little till you reach them).

2010 RWA Academic Research Grant

Laura Vivanco

The Romance Writers of America have awarded this year's academic research grant to both Conseula Francis and Pamela Regis. I asked them if they could share a few details about the projects for which they'd been awarded the grants and they very kindly agreed. Conseula is

working on female pleasure and sexual agency in contemporary African American romance and erotica. In African American literary criticism there's a great deal of attention paid to the ways that black female sexuality has been historically pathologized and commodified. We lament the lack of counternarratives to that image of black womanhood. Lisa Gail Collins praises one contemporary poet for opening a "space for the public celebration of black girlhood and womanhood. By sharing with black girls and women our own beauty, desire, and style, Morris gives pleasure: the uncommon pleasure for black women of knowing that it's all about you." I would argue that this pleasure Collins speaks of is not, in fact, uncommon. Critics regularly bemoan the dearth of cultural spaces where black women are celebrated and lament the paucity of opportunity for black women to speak themselves. In truth, though, contemporary African American romance and erotica regularly and consistently provide such a space, even if it is a largely critically ignored one. Contemporary African American romance and erotica is always all about black women, about their pleasure and beauty and desire. I find that fact fascinating, powerful, and liberating.

I'm working on two specific articles, one on black female pleasure (in all its manifestations) as a means to and marker of freedom in Beverly Jenkins' historicals and the other on Zane's war on black respectability in her Dr. Marcella Spenser novels.

Pam is working on

The American Romance Novel, 1742 to the Present, a book-length history of romance novels written by American authors. In this volume I will approach the romance novel as a literary historian and genre critic, guided by the definition established in my Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003), namely, “A romance novel is a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines” (14). In my presentation at the Princeton conference, Romance as the Practice of Freedom?, I deleted the too-narrow “heroine” in this definition and inserted in its stead the gender-neutral “protagonist” in recognition of the deployment of the form by authors depicting m/m, f/f, and ménage courtships. This inclusive language does not change the fact that the majority of romance novels, past and present, do indeed have a heroine courted by and eventually betrothed to a hero, and that the relationship between them is the focus of most works in the genre since its beginnings in the eighteenth century.

My approach to the study of romance, which stems from this definition, looks beyond the much-discussed business of publishing and marketing romances and beyond ethnographic considerations of romance readers, to focus on the novels as literature. I deploy traditional tools of literary analysis not only to understand individual romance novels, but also to arrive at generalizations about the genre as a whole. . . .My career-long project, which began with A Natural History of the Romance Novel, is to define, analyze, and write the history of the genre based on as synoptic a knowledge of the entire history of the novel as I can muster. The romance is a world-wide phenomenon, but I would argue that American romance holds a place near the center of the genre’s concerns, and its history deserves a separate treatment. I wish to write that history.

The proposed project will involve first identifying the novels of American authors that contain the eight elements of the romance novel laid out in my earlier book. From this will emerge the first identification of America’s national canon of romance. Analysis of these novels with an eye to identifying the essential components of an American romance, which is to say, those characteristics that the author’s nationality and its attendant culture imbue it with, will define our romance tradition.

I'd like to congratulate Conseula and Pam, and I'm very much looking forward to reading the finished products of their research.