Masculinity in RITA and YALSA-award winning YA romance

My apologies for the lack of a post this past Friday. I was attending the Children's Literature Association's (ChLA) 40th annual conference, held this year in Biloxi, Mississippi, and got too caught up in conference-doings to put together my planned post on masculinity in YA romance. So this week, I'll switch things up, with a general post on Tuesday and a review on Friday.

Back in February, I posted about the topic I planned to speak on at the conference: comparing YA romances nominated by the Romance Writers of America (RWA) for their annual RITA award to YA romances (or YA books with strong romantic elements) named by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) as Michael L. Printz Award winners or Printz Honor Books. Now that I've completed and given my talk, I thought I would share some of my findings here.

At the time I proposed this paper to the conference committee, neither YALSA nor RWA had announced their nominees/winners. And after mid-January's American Library Association meeting, where the Printz winner and Honor books were announced, I found myself in a bit of a bind. Only one of the five books lauded by this year's Printz award committee focused on a developing romantic relationship between two teens: Benjamin Alire Sáenz's Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. If I were to make this topic viable, I would have to look a bit further afield: to YALSA's "Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults" list, compiled by a separate committee of YA librarians. I wanted to use the same number of books for each of the two groups I studied, and so anxiously waited for the end of March, when the RITA nominees were announced. Surprisingly, there were only four books nominated for RITAs in the YA category (most of the other RITA categories had seven or eight nominees). Finalists must score in the top ten percent of all books submitted, suggesting the pool of YA romances was far smaller that of other RITA categories.

The RITA nominees for best YA romance include Robin LeFevers' Grave Mercy, Katie McGarry's Pushing the Limits, Emily McKay's The Farm,  and Erica O'Rourke's Bound.

Turning back to the YALSA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults list, then, I selected three additional titles: Alethea Kontis's Enchanted, David Levithan's Every Day, and Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Boys. None of these books focused exclusively on an adolescent romance, but each contains a strong romance storyline.

Some interesting things to note about these two groups of books:

• All of the YALSA titles were published by traditional New York children's book publishers (Harcourt/Houghton; Knopf; Scholastic; and Simon & Schuster), while only one of the RITA-nominated titles was (Houghton Mifflin); three of the four RITA nominees were issued by traditional romance publishers (Berkley; Harlequin Teen; and Kensington).

• All of the YALSA titles were published in hardcover, or simultaneously in hardcover and paperback, while only one of the RITA-nominated titles appeared in hardcover (the one published by Houghton Mifflin). The three RITA romances published by romance houses were issued in paperback.

• Fantasy, not realism, predominated on both lists: each list features three works of fantasy, and only one example of contemporary realistic fiction.

• While the YALSA books and the RITA-nominees both achieved high scores on reader review sites such as Goodreads and amazon.com, only one RITA nominee received strong praise from professional reviewers (again, the title published by Houghton Mifflin). The other three received lackluster reviews, if they were reviewed at all.

In addition to these general observations, I noticed several important differences between each group of books' depiction of ideal masculinity:

• The four RITA-nominated titles all featured heterosexual masculinity, while the YALSA books portrayed a broader range of masculine sexuality. Two of the YALSA books focused on heterosexual romance; one on a gay male relationship; and one, Levithan's Every Day, attempts to disrupt our current assumptions about sexuality and gender by having its narrator wake up in a different body each day, some days a male body, some days a female one, some days a body that desires the same sex, some days a body that desires the opposite sex.

• The male protagonists in the four RITA-nominees are all white. Or at least, readers can assume that they are white, though race is never discussed as a salient category of identity in the books. In contrast, the characters in the YALSA books are more diverse: two Latino boys, and a narrator who wakes up in differently-raced bodies each day, in addition to white characters.

• Three of the four RITA boys appeal to their books' female protagonists in large part because they are "bad boys": leather-jacket-wearing authority spurning rule-breakers. The one exception, Grave Mercy's Gavriel Duval, is cast more in the heroic than the bad boy mode. But all five (we have one love triangle, in Bound) are highly competent, a key component of normative American masculinity. The YALSA boys, in contrast, are more "outsiders" or "outcasts" than "bad boys." They, too, refuse to play by the rules, but the rules of normative society rather than the rules of institutional authority.

• The boys in both groups, however, reveal emotional vulnerability to their romantic counterparts. Normative American masculinity may push boys not to reveal emotions, or emotional vulnerabilities, but in order for romances to appeal to the largely female reading market, male characters must demonstrate their ability to feel.

• In the RITA-nominees, male strength, another key characteristic of normative masculinity, most often takes the form of physical violence. Boys fight others to protect the girls they love, or to protect their more vulnerable younger siblings or friends. In the YALSA books, in contrast, physical violence is often viewed as a problem, something that stands in the way of developing relationships.

• Physical fighting isn't restricted to males, at least not in the RITA books. Two girls fight alongside of their boys, while a third works violence behind the scenes, as an assassin. This might make it appear as if the RITA books offer more positive models of empowered femininity. But this conclusion only works if you accept the equation of strength with physical violence. The YALSA books reject this, not only for their male, but also for their female protagonists.

• While the RITA books allow their female protagonists to act masculine (to fight), they do not extend the same gender flexibility to their male characters. Boys performing actions or feeling emotions traditionally coded as feminine are far more prevalent in the YALSA books than in the RITA titles.


The overall conclusion of my small study—that librarians who specialize in young adult literature tend to honor books that are far less normative in their depictions of masculinity than do romance writers—is perhaps not surprising. But it is interesting, especially given that the guidelines of the Printz Award specifically note that the judging is based "entirely on its [a book's] literary merit." Librarians are not supposed to allow a book's ideology to influence their decision, yet this comparison shows that questions of content and ideology are often part and parcel of judging a book's literary merit.

And it is disappointing that YA romance writers, for whom "literary merit" is not as much at issue as it is for librarians, prove far less willing to embrace masculinities that depart from the norm. During the past decade, a substantial body of romance fiction grounded in feminist principles has been written for adults. Yet if a teen girl wishes to read romances that offer alternatives to a normative masculinity, a masculinity heavily invested in proving the dominance of males by eroticizing the subjection of girls, she'll still do far better if she looks to the books nominated by YALSA than to the ones held up as exemplary by RWA.

Do you think these patterns will remain constant over the next few years' cycle of awards?

Next time on RNFF:

Feminism and Revenge in Lori Austin's

Beauty and the Bounty Hunter

Moving Beyond the Sex Talk: Tom Leveen's MANICPIXIEDREAMGIRL

In preparation for the talk I'll be giving on masculinity in romance novels for young adults at the Children's Literature Association conference this coming Friday, I've been reading C. J. Pascoe's fascinating study, Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. Pascoe, a sociologist, spent a year in a California high school, observing how teenage boys enact masculinity in an educational setting. Building upon the work of previous gender scholars such as Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, Pascoe argues that masculinity isn't something inherent in male bodies, but a set of practices and behaviors that people (mostly males, but sometimes females) perform. That is, gender is not just natural, or something one is, but rather something we all construct through our actions. By constantly repeating certain behaviors, and repudiating others, people create masculinity, then assert that this constructed masculinity is a timeless truth.

At "River High," Pascoe wanted to find out just what behaviors and practices students (and teachers) associated with "masculinity." Her two key findings are rather disheartening for feminists. The first is how often boys use the word "fag" to discipline each other, and themselves, into adopting behaviors considered traditionally "masculine." An epithet less about homophobia or sexuality than about power, calling another boy a "fag" is meant to signal a boy's weakness, his lack of mastery over others, his failure to display the competence that is the center of American teen masculinity. The second is the prevalence of heterosexual "sex talk." Boys constantly discuss their sexual knowledge, prowess, and conquest of girls. They do so not simply because their raging teenage hormones compel them to do so, Pascoe asserts. "Sex talk" is less about who boys desire, and more about showing other boys "their ability to exercise mastery and dominance literally and figuratively over girls' bodies," thereby proving their masculine credentials (85).

Pascoe sees a ray of hope amidst this grim news. "Sex talk" occurs far more often in group settings than when boys talk one-on-one. "When with other boys, they postured and bragged. In one-on-one situations with [Pascoe] (and possibly with each other), they often spoke touchingly about their feelings about and insecurities with girls. While the boys [Pascoe] interviewed, for the most part, asserted the centrality of sexual competence to a masculine self, several of them rejected this definition or at least talked different about girls and sexuality in their interviews. When alone some boys were more likely to talk about romance and emotions, as opposed to girls' bodies and sexual availability" (107).

This potential gap between public performances of masculinity and privately-held beliefs puts heterosexual teen girls in a difficult position, though. If girls have no idea that this split is happening, if they think that the boy they see during one-on-one interactions is the only identity a boy performs, they can often end up being blindsided, as was the high school girl who sent a photo of herself naked to her kind, caring boyfriend, only to discover that he'd shared his phone, with its picture, throughout the football locker room (a story told to me just this morning by the male college-aged trainer at my gym when I talked to him about my research). If girls are aware, consciously or unconsciously, of the pressures boys are under to compulsively "perform" masculinity in public, they are stuck having to judge (or simply guess) which persona a boy will adopt in any particular situation. Or, in traditional romance novel fashion, they may come to believe that it is their responsibility to cultivate the emotional side of a boy, lead him to drop the immature male posturing of high school masculinity. Or they may assume that that the "private" is the "real," the "public" only a false front, which may be the case for some boys, but not all, as the qualifications in Pascoe's own assertions above ("possibly," "for the most part," "or at least")  reveal. Believing that a boy's expression of dominance and mastery over her body is not really "real" has the potential to encourage girls to remain in abusive situations in the mistaken belief that "private" masculine identity will eventually win over the "public."

Romance novels, whose primary audience is girls and women, typically do not depict the way teenage masculinity is expressed through the objectification female bodies, or, even less encouragingly, take it as a given, something girls just have to put up with. That is why I so appreciate books like Tom Leveen's manicpixiedreamgirl, a book that shows how constructed, how performed, teen masculinity is, and how those performances have real-life implications for relationships between adolescent girls and boys.

Told in the first person by Tyler Darcy, a high school junior, Leeven's narrative unfolds simultaneously in real-time (the course of one evening), and, through flashbacks, over the past three years of Tyler's life. The three years since he first saw Rebecca Webb on the first day of freshman year, and she became "the sun that lit and warmed my world. If I could be any more melodramatic about how she made me feel, believe me, I would. It's the best I can do" (4). But Tyler, a straight-A student, a writer, and not the most assertive of boys, cannot bring himself even to approach the aloof girl with the iridescent blond hair and the nautical star tattoo, never mind tell her about the feelings that threaten to overwhelm him every time he catches sight of her. For Tyler, Becky is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a term coined by film critic Nathan Rabin to describe a female character who serves primarily to "teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." Becky becomes the the embodiment of all Tyler desires, the liberating spirit who haunts his dreams. An object, not a person.

Tyler may be "soulful," but he also performs a more normative masculinity when he's with his male friends. Robby and Justin and Tyler are hanging out in the park, drinking and talking, the night during which the real-time story takes place. Throughout the evening, the three repeatedly engage in the sex talk Pascoe suggests is so characteristic of teen boys:

"But I want to tell a true story, Robby says. "I want to be able to tell a story that ends with the sentence, 'And that's when the profound tsunami of blow jobs started." (2)

"Three years, and she has no idea how you want to give her a bit of the old—" Robby asks. Tyler interrupts, claiming "It's not about sex," but quickly qualifies, "If she showed up naked at my bedroom door and said, 'Let's go,' I wouldn't say no... I'm not that honorable" (7-8).

"You don't know why Syd digs you?" Robby says. "I'll tell you why. It's because you're swinging a poleax down there!"
     I stare at him. "Dude... what?"
     "Hell yeah," Robby goes. "I can tell just by looking at ya. There's no cork in that bat. That's a hundred percent American grade A steel, dude."
     "....What?"
     "I think he's saying you have a big dick," Justin reports. (78)

When Tyler tells Robby about the story he's written about Becky and says he's determined to read it to her, Robby replies, "I just got a complete and total stiffy. You romantic little thing, you." He starts laughing.... "She'll probably throw you down right then and there" (206-07).

During sophomore year, Tyler demonstrates the connection between sex talk and domination of actual girls when expresses his frustration about a completely different situation by taking aim at two girls sitting at the lunch table: "I'm sorry, you matter because?" he says to one, and to the other, "Have you gained weight since [last year]?" (61-62). Leeven demonstrates how teen boys, even boys like Tyler and his friends, who also talk about their emotions and relationships, express their masculinity through sex talk.

Ironically, despite his unrequited crush on Becky, it is Tyler, not Robby or Justin, who ends up with a steady high school girlfriend: "Somehow, by the time the second half of freshman year started up again after Christmas, Sydney and I were a couple. I couldn't tell you how. I called her, and she texted me, and I texted her, and we hung out, and we friended each other, and she called me, and we hung out again, and I texted her and..." (47). Sydney, a smart, confident go-getter, knows of Tyler's crush on Becky, but the power of her own attraction to him, as well the fact that she knows the real Becky is far different from the girl Tyler imagines, makes her believe Tyler will get over his immature infatuation. Leeven plays with gender roles in interesting ways here, with Sydney taking on the more masculine role of pursuer, Tyler the feminine of pursued. But Tyler still benefits from male privilege, as his admission demonstrates: "I liked hooking up with [Sydney]. Not going to lie about that. As August rolled around, I was initiating our make-outs as often as she was, because, I mean... well, it was there. I was fifteen, a guy, and here's a cute chick who likes hooking up with me. Maybe a better man could have called it off, but I wasn't a better man" (49). Even the pursuer can end up being used, especially if the pursued is a boy.

The novel might have turned offensive here, with Sydney being punished for taking on the masculine role by geting dumped when Tyler finally overcomes his "utter lack of balls" to reveal his feelings to Becky (49). Or it might have developed into one of those coming of age stories in which an adolescent boy is disillusioned by the shocking revelation of the gap between his dream girl and the girl in reality, and is punished for not recognizing the value in the girl he's missed seeing through the haze of his own illusions. Leeven, though, takes neither path, but forges one that attempts to move beyond punishment, beyond the power dynamics of masculine sex talk. By joining the Drama Club, of which Becky is a part, Tyler gradually moves from simply observing Becky to becoming her friend, even though everyone else keeps their distance from her for a reason Tyler doesn't really understand. At the novel's climax, the decision Tyler really must confront is not whether to tell Becky about his feelings for her, but whether he can move beyond the limits set by normative masculinity. Will he continue to see her only as his Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the object of his desires? Or can he acknowledge her as a person with problems and desires of her own, completely separate from his?

I applaud Leeven, not only for pointing out the gendered oppression inherent in the figure of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (whom Bitch magazine writer Holly Welker argues serves to help a man, rather than pursue her own happiness or desire) but simultaneously showing how adolescents might come to move beyond it.

Illustration/Photo credits:
Secure poodle cartoon: Mike Twohy, Condé Nast Collection
Boys Silhouette: ClipArtOf
Manic Pixie Dream Girl cartoon: Moonfruit Comics

Tom Leveen, manicpixiedreamgirl. 

Random House, 2013.

Next time on RNFF:

Masculinity in Award-winning YA Romance

Sexism in the SF community

This past week, discussions of what and what does not constitute sexism have roiled the Science Fiction writing community. The controversy initially began as a response to a two-part column on women in SF by Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg, which appeared in the Winter and Spring 2013 editions of the Bulletin of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. Many SFWA members objected to the first column's condescending title, "Literary Ladies," as well as to the second column's discussion of a now-deceased female SF editor's looks. Even more objected to the art used on the cover of SFWA #200, in which the second column appeared. When Resnick and Malzberg wrote a follow-up column in their own defense (issue #202), said defense—that anonymous critics who deemed their writing, or the cover of #200, sexist were simply "liberal fascists" advocating censorship—sprayed lighter fluid on an already sky-high fire.

The offending Bulletin cover

Hundreds of SF writers, many of them women, blogged expressing their frustration and outrage (see a partial list here), including author Ann Aguirre, who detailed the many sexist attitudes and acts she's encountered in the SF community during her career as a female SF writer. A handful of hateful, obscene comments in response to Aguirre's post clearly demonstrate that a belittling, denigrating attitude toward women writers is still alive and squirming in small pockets of the SF world.

What's encouraging, though, is that the silent majority of SF-writing men, those who do not agree with sexism but who, by not calling their sexist brethren on their egregious behavior, indirectly benefit from it, seem to finally realize that they need to speak out. Including SFWA President John Scalzi, who offered a letter of apology to the membership on June 2. And on June 5, SFWA Bulletin editor Jean Rabe (a woman, ironically) tendered her resignation.

At its best, Science Fiction celebrates the possibilities of the future, the wonders of technology, how we as human beings can create progress, both social and political. It doesn't seem too much to expect that some of that progress be in the realm of gender relations.

I've not reviewed very much SF romance on this blog. But this controversy has made me eager to read more, written by either women or men, to see what their visions of gender relations in the future might be like. Surely Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness isn't the only SF title to tackle this issue. Any recommendations of new (or classic) feminist SF romances are more than welcome.

Next time on RNFF

When adolescent male fantasy and

slut shaming collide:

Tom Leveen's manicpixiedreamgirl

Wanting what you're not supposed to want: Cecilia Grant's A LADY ENTANGLED

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.


Between high school, college, graduate school, and miscellaneous other intellectual venues, I've listened to more than my fair share of lectures on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The one I remember the most, in an undergraduate Victorian novel class for which I was serving as a Teaching Assistant, began with the professor reading aloud the above opening line of Austen's novel. Rather than pose the expected question—what does this line say—he asked the fifty undergraduates to consider what it didn't say. What is Austen deliberately leaving out, even as she calls our attention to it by its absence? The answer—that a single gentlewoman, at least in Jane Austen's day, must be in want of a husband in possession of a good fortune. Or at least a fortune sizable enough to support her in the manner to which she has been brought up.

Mrs. Bennet in raptures...

Austen's female characters openly gossip about potential suitors' yearly income ("Ten thousand a year! Oh, Lord! What will become of me. I shall go distracted") in a way rarely found in novels published during the Victorian period. Yet, like those later novels, Austen's romance simultaneously suggests that thinking too much about "worldly advantage," as does Charlotte Lucas, is to "disgrace" oneself to a humiliating degree. Women must care about how much their potential suitors earn, Austen indirectly suggests, but, just as she does in her opening line, they must do so only without openly acknowledging that this is what they are doing. Actively work to secure your financial future through marriage, and, like Charlotte, you're punished, wedded to a Mr. Collins. But scorn a man in spite of his fortune, and you're rewarded with the fortune anyway. This paradox—only when a woman rejects material gain does she prove herself worthy of it—serves as the central organizing structure not only of many a 19th century novel, but also in much 20th (and 21st) century historical romance, in the trope of the romance heroine choosing to throw over a wealthy fiancé in favor of the poorer man she has truly come to love. Rewarding women for denying desire—not the most feminist of messages.

So my heart sank just a bit when I turned to the latest offering from Cecilia Grant and discovered that its female protagonist, Kate Westbrook, intends to hunt down and snare a man of fortune, one who can open "the door to that glittering world of champagne and consequence—the world that ought to have been her birthright." Though her father is the son of an earl, he married not only a commoner, but an actress, an alliance which his family refused to acknowledge. Kate may have other, more altruistic reasons for wishing to slip through that aristocratic door—to "haul her family back into respectability," to save her sensitive youngest sister from constant teasing at school, to reunite her father with a brother for whom he obviously cares deeply—but Kate also wants, wants the beauty and the luxuries, the "courtesy, consideration, and etiquette" lacking in her current life as the daughter of a gainfully-employed barrister.

Of course, there's a young barrister just waiting in the wings, who once thought of winning her hand but who big-heartedly takes an interest in her assault on the ton, and offers his help in her mercenary endeavor (the brother of Martha and Will, the Blackshear siblings featured in Grant's previous two books). And, by the way, Kate's amazingly beautiful, and she knows it, too: "stupefaction was her stock-in-trade, and she would not stoop to the tedious false modesty of pretending not to know it." For readers conditioned by romance tropes with two hundred years of history behind them, Kate is a heroine made to hate on-sight. It seemed, disappointingly, I was in for a story of a "bad" girl's reformation, a schooling of a young woman in how not to want.

But Grant's first two novels (A Lady Awakened and A Gentleman Undone) openly rejected many of the traditional romance novel tropes, so I kept reading, counting on her to do something with this very traditional storyline other than make Kate give up her material dreams in order to achieve her romantic ones. And while the romantic outcome of the novel is never in doubt (the novel is told in alternating hero/heroine points of view), the reasons why Kate chooses her impassioned barrister rather than the newly-ennobled Baron are far from the expected. Kate discovers what to most women during the period must have been obvious, but that many romance writers seem to have forgotten—that not only marriage, but female friendship, can help advance a woman's standing in society. That helping another realize her own romantic prospects is almost as gratifying as realizing one's own. That marrying into a life of consequence and ease might just be "dreary beyond imagining. What did you do all day, once you'd married Mr. Darcy?" That the challenges and industry required to strive for a goal such as marrying well might be at least as much of a pleasure as achieving the goal itself. Though it might take a bit longer than she had first imagined, Kate doesn't have to give up her material desires altogether; she just has to have the patience, and the drive, to achieve them by working with a husband, rather than accepting a hand-out from a husband.

In a blog post back in March, Cecilia Grant questioned whether there is such a thing as feminist romance. Romance certainly does privilege relationship over all other aspects of a person's life, which may disqualify the genre as a whole from being inherently feminist. But I would argue that there are many books within the genre that certainly align with feminist sensibilities. Especially those written by Cecilia Grant.


ARC courtesy of Netgalley

Photo credits:
Mrs. Bennet: Fanpop
Marrying for Money: CollegeTimes TV

Cecilia Grant, A Woman Entangled. 

Bantam, 2013.

Next time on RNFF:

Sexism in the SF community

Romance after Childhood Sexual Trauma: Rebecca Rogers Maher's FAULT LINES

On Goodreads, amazon.com, and many other web sites where readers post book reviews, reviewers often justify giving a romance a low rating with the explanation, "I didn't like the heroine." Heroines who are too selfish, too tough, too distant, too unromantic, too (fill in the blank with your least favorite personal characteristic) make romance readers unhappy, often so much so that they reject the books in which they feature out of hand. When it comes to romance, most readers expect their female protagonists to be nice.

What, then, to do with a heroine whose life experiences have made her anything but? Wedding planner Sarah Murphy is very good at pretending—pretending that the color of the bridesmaids' dresses matter. Pretending that the order she creates out of the chaos of each wedding can extend to her own life. Pretending that the guarded face she shows the world—the nice girl face—is all there is to see.

But the real Sarah, the one behind the façade, knows the truth. Knows that the gleam in her eyes that brings men running, the one that "promised easy sex and plenty of it, the gleam that said she didn't give a fuck about anything," isn't natural, but forced. Knows that the ease with which her overripe body draw a man's eye is simultaneously a thrill and a source of self-disgust. Knows that no matter how much she's been turned on by any of the hundreds of guys she's slept with, at some point they all "trip the fuse that was always waiting to be tripped, and she would go cold inside, and wait for it to be over." Knows that she uses sex to gain a sense of control over her life, a control wrested away from her  childhood self by a man who was supposed to love her, supposed to keep her safe.

When a casual hook-up catches a glimpse of the real Sarah, the frightened Sarah, her nice-girl Sarah façade quickly gives way to angry, tough-girl Sarah, a woman who knows how to dish out cruelty with the best of them. Rudeness, insults, foul language followed by mind-blowing sex, then more rejection should put Joe in his place, show him who's in charge, keep him at a safe distance. But Joe, a photographer, doesn't just take pictures at weddings; documenting military men and women suffering from PTSD has become his passion, his attempt to understand and come to terms with his own distant soldier father. To Joe, who has served as witness to the damaging effects of trauma, Sarah's behavior isn't that of a cruel person, a crazy person, but simply that of one struggling to come to terms with the horrors she's endured, as best as she is able.

Because of its brevity, because it is told completely from Sarah's point of view, and because several other people, not only Joe, play a role in Sarah's gradual coming to terms with her victimization, Maher's novel works better as women's fiction than as a straight romance. As a romance reader, I wished Maher had given me more time with Joe, and with Joe and Sarah together, rather than just showing them during the intense turning-point moments that mark Sarah's emotional growth. But despite its shortcomings as romance, Fault Lines has taught me the valuable lesson of not writing off a heroine because she's too something to be immediately likable. And, in real life, to look for the bravery in those people who may not be living up to my ideals, but who are trying as hard as they can to struggle through the aftermaths of their own individual traumas.

What romances have you read that made you feel for an initially unsympathetic heroine?


Illustration credits:
PTSD word map: Anxiety.org

Rebecca Rogers Maher, 

Fault Lines.

Carina Press, 2012.

Next time on RNFF:

Back to the usual Tuesday book review, 

Friday general topic rotation

Romance Novels for Memorial Day

A brief post today, after a long Memorial Day weekend here in the States. In keeping with this holiday commemorating those who lost their lives during war, a question: what are your favorite romance novels featuring protagonists who have served in the military, or lost a family member to war? Bonus points if the protagonist in the military is a woman....

Photo credits:
Military women with flags: policymic.com

Next time on RNFF:

Romance after childhood sexual abuse

Merida's Makeover and Violent Masculinity in Disney's BRAVE

Last week, the feminist blogosphere was alight with celebration at the apparent triumph of public activism against sexist marketing to young girls. In anticipation of her ascension into the pantheon of Disney Princesses, Merida, the star of Disney's animated film Brave, had been given a makeover by Disney Consumer Products, a makeover that replaced her bow and arrows with a sash, transformed her wildly springy hair into touch-me flowing locks, and endowed her with hips and a bust worthy of Barbie. Many Merida fans, who had embraced the unconventional princess as the first feminist Disney heroine, were outraged by Disney's marketing changes. A petition started on Change.org by "A Mighty Girl," a female empowerment website, asked others to join it in objecting to the makeover, arguing that because Merida "speaks to girls' capacity to be change agents in the world rather than just trophies to be admired," such a sexualized makeover was a "disservice to the millions of children for whom Merida is an empowering role model." Soon after, the glammed-up Merida disappear from Disney's web site, which led some news outlets and bloggers to praise Disney for acknowledging its misstep and listening to consumer opinion.

For its part, Disney claims that it had never intended the sexed-up version of Merida to replace the original; as reported on the pro-Disney web site Inside the Magic on May 15, Disney claims that this 2-D version had been created only on a "limited line of products" as a one-time "stylized version." Though the new-look Merida is gone from Disney's web site, she still graces Target's, as well as merchandise sold at Target stores (wouldn't you like to see the marketing information that drove that decision?).

I remember watching Brave with my early adolescent daughter and both appreciating how different Merida was from many of her passive princess forbearers and feeling uncomfortable with the widespread praise of Merida as a feminist role model. In the face of this most recent brouhaha, I decided to re-watch the film, looking more closely at its feminist (and anti-feminist?) themes and messages. 

On the plus side:

• Rather than waiting passively for her prince to come, as did many of the most popular Disney princesses before her, Merida actively resists the finding-a-prince = happily-ever-after trajectory of the majority of Disney films aimed at girls. 

• Merida, a la Atalanta in Betty Miles' retelling of the myth for the 1970s feminist Free to Be You and Me record and television show, responds to becoming the prize for which men compete by entering the competition herself, and winning it.

• The witch of the piece is far from the typical sexy-terrifying temptress common to most Disney films. But she's not a sweet goody-two-shoes, either. Instead, we're given a portrait of a witch of many dimensions—equal parts mysterious and silly, canny and conniving. 

• Merida doesn't end up married, or even in a romance, by the end of the film. When Merida's mother tells her the story of the other kingdom, the story of a prince who asked a witch for the strength of ten men in order to wrest the crown away from his three brothers, I thought for sure we were in for a Beauty and the Beast retelling. After the marauding bear Mor'du had been defeated, I was convinced we'd find ourselves with a chastened, but suitably appealing prince with whom Merida could fall in love. Instead, Mor'du's clearly older human spirit thanks mother and daughter for freeing his spirit from its animal entrapment, and wafts away.

• Merida's story focuses on a mother/daughter relationship, a rare theme in any film for young children, but especially in one created by Disney. The main quest of the film is not to win a princess or to defeat a villain, but to repair an estranged mother/daughter bond.

On the not so encouraging side:

• Would you want to marry any of Merida's suitors? Resisting marriage seems the only possible choice when you're presented with an inarticulate clod, a self-admiring whiner, and an awkward wimp, doesn't it?

• Why doesn't Merida want to marry? "I don't want my life to be over. I want my freedom," she cries, without ever saying why marriage would bring her life to an end, or restrict the little freedom she currently experiences. In fact, you might think Merida would look forward to marriage, if only to get away from the oppressive gender-role harping of her mother. None of the men in the film seem to care whether Merida rides a horse and carries a bow or not...

• And why is Mom, rather than patriarchy, the oppressive force insisting that Merida must conform to strict gender roles? "A princess doesn't...", "A princess never...", "A princess must...", we hear over and over from the queen, but are given no explanation for why she's so insistent on embracing a restrictive vision of femininity, particularly when there seems no pressure from anyone else for her to maintain it. Perhaps Disney is suggesting that for young viewers, a parent's rules appear to be completely arbitrary. And it is certainly true that women contribute to socializing younger girls into gender conformity. But with the only other adult female in the film used solely as comic relief, the impression viewers are left with is that gender policing only occurs because adult women enforce it, for no logical reason.

• The film constructs feminism in a very second-wave way. Merida's feminism consists primarily in her rejection of stereotypically feminine activities, and embrace of masculine ones.  Merida doesn't like to play music, or sew; she likes to shoot her bow, she likes to ride out on her horse and explore, she likes to climb mountains: "I will fly, chase the wind, and touch the sky" the background music declares during her solitary nature jaunt at the beginning of the film.

• Once she's inadvertently turned her mother into a bear, Merida can't get mom out of the castle herself; she needs the help of her annoying little brothers to do so.

• The film's messages about self-determination are muddy, to say the least. Both Merida and the Prince/Mordu actively work to change their fates. But because their reasons for doing so are selfish, the film suggests, their actions are wrong: "I know how one selfish act can turn the fate of a kingdom," and "I've been selfish," Merida proclaims during the first reconciliation scene between mother and daughter. "Mend the bond / torn by pride," the witch declares. Was Merida's resistance to marriage selfish? An act of unacceptable pride? If she had found a different way to object, would her attempt to change her fate have been acceptable? "Our fate lives within us. You only have to be brave enough to see it," Merida's voice-over says at the film's conclusion, a suitably uplifting but rather confusing statement; in what way has Merida "seen" her fate?

• Is the film's message, then, less about self-determination, and more about accepting personal responsibility? "It's not my fault," Merida continually cries after her mother is transformed into a bear. Even taking up the feminine task of "mending the bond" by sewing back together the family portrait tapestry Merida had ripped is not enough to undo the transformation. Only after she acknowledges responsibility for her act—"I'm sorry. This is all my fault. I did this to you. To us."—does the spell begin to unravel. But it does not disappear until Merida recants her earlier mother-bashing does it completely lose its hold: "You've always been there for me. You've never given up on me. I just want you back." Mother-bashing, rather than denying personal responsibility, is the ultimate sin, a rather invidious message for a film that actively sets its viewers up to regard the mother up as the villain of the piece.

Watching the film this time through, I was struck by this image, of Mor'du about to ravage (ravish?) Merida. If you dig past the usual Disney bromides and think about what is happening on a symbolic level, this picture gives you a much clearer sense of why a girl might not want to get married. Early in the film, the queen acknowledges, "even I had reservations when I faced betrothal," an admission that's a bit hard to understand, given the far from fearful (in fact, quite bumbling) vision of masculinity the film has presented to that point. and continues to present in its depiction of the other clan leaders, their sons, and Merida's own brothers. But in Mor'du, we have a darker, more violent vision of masculinity, a selfish, sexual masculinity that threatens not only to take away a woman's freedom, but her very life. That the queen rescues her daughter not once, but twice from such masculinity, and Merida in turn rescues her mother when her father turns that portion of his masculinity on his queen, suggests a quite feminist underlying subtext: that only by protecting one another, and working together, can women keep violent, aggressive masculinity from destroying their lives.

Girl power indeed.

Photo/Illustration credits:
Merida before and after: change.org
Brave photographs: Disney.com
Merida comic: Dork Tower

Next time on RNFF:

Romance and childhood sexual abuse