Searching for My Harlequin Past

As an early adolescent, I was a big reader of Harlequins. I remember hanging out in the local department store, in front of the serial romance bookshelves, poring over which titles sounded interesting enough to be worth the $1.25 I would have to shell out in order to take it home and read more than just the blurb. I remember shopping bag-fulls of the slim volumes cluttering up my closet, and later, after I became embarrassed by my early teen reading, being hauled out the door to be donated to a charity book sale or local Goodwill. Few of these books remained very long in my memory, far too similar in plot, characterization, and tone to stand out from any other.

There were two, though, that I still remember to this day, one with some fondness, the other with definite feelings of "yuck." I couldn't remember the titles or authors of either one, though, and so had a difficult time tracking either down when I rediscovered romance a few years ago (after leaving it far behind soon after graduating high school). But I was inspired by blogger Willaful's recent posts about rereading the romances of her own adolescence to try again to search.

You can easily find lists of all the books published by Harlequin in a certain year (on the romance wiki, and on Wikipedia), and I scanned both lists for the year 1979, thinking that year, the year I turned 14, the most likely one in which I'd find my titles. Could it be Victoria Wolf's Sweet Compulsion? Jane Donnolly's A Savage Sanctuary? Betty Neels' Sun and Candlelight? Some of the author's names sounded vaguely familiar, but since these lists do not contain book descriptions, it was pretty difficult to discover if any of these books were the one I remembered.

Then I hit upon the idea of doing an image search, rather than a straight web search. Maybe a picture would jog my memory more easily than a title alone?

And then, voila! There it was. The woman on the cover caught my eye first, even though she didn't seem the least familiar, with her brunette hair and brown eyes, a rose held lightly between her fingers, an engagement ring winking on her left hand. But when my eyes moved to the right, I knew I had hit pay dirt. Even though the blond man's suit, with its lime green shirt and blue striped tie, hinted at warmth, his downturned eyes and strong facial bone structure suggested just the opposite—a Harlequin hero worthy of his hard name: Stone Harland. Yes, I had finally found it: Harlequin Romance #2289, Jessica Steele's Spring Girl, published in paperback in October of 1979.

I ordered a used copy online, eager to reread and discover, if I could, just what about this particular Harlequin had found me turning back to it and rereading it, over and over, during my 14th and 15th years. I remembered the basic plot—a young woman, annoyed by the persistent sexual attentions of a man she's been dating, sends him a letter implying that she wants to marry him, a letter she hopes will scare the cad away. A few days later, she finds on her doorstep the brother of the cad's fiancée, insisting that she pretend to be his betrothed, to persuade his sister, distraught and hospitalized after a car accident, that her own fiancé has not played her false. Thinking back on this now, such an act seems pretty gutsy for a Harlequin heroine—using wit and guile to get the better of a man, rather than simply accepting unwanted attentions. Might this have been part of the book's appeal?

I also have strong memories of two particular scenes from the book, scenes that reflect less well on the novel's sexual politics. The first is a kissing scene: the hero and heroine kiss, an embrace that the heroine brings to a stop when the hero touches her breast. A pretty stock scene for the tamer Harlequin line. Boy did I ever learn the Harlequin lesson that it's the woman who's responsible for stopping the sexy times before they go too far!  The second scene I remember is one in which the heroine is sitting on the couch, the ankle she's recently sprained hidden under a blanket she's crocheting. The hero is in the midst of berating the heroine for not living up to her promise to visit his sister in the hospital, and, when she seems not to be paying any attention to his tirade, he angrily grabs the blanket and hurls it across the room. Revealing, of course, her horribly swollen ankle. As uppity womanhood is replaced by wounded femininity, our hero is transformed from verbal abuser to tender caring guy. Again, this seems similar to many a Harlequin, with male anger merely a screen behind which hides the vulnerable loving man. I don't think at the time I realized the underlying dynamic here—that "uppity womanhood is replaced by wounded femininity." I liked the fact that male anger could be changed, somehow, made less threatening, even though I did not understand the cost the heroine here paid in order to achieve this transformation.

When the book arrived (complete with a sweet "thank you" note from the reseller!), it migrated to the top of my TBR pile, and I breezed through it in a quick evening. To my surprise, the heroine, Carrie, seemed far more annoying, far less kind, than I had remembered her. A child of privilege, Carrie is supported not by a job, but by a stipend by her wealthy parents. A stipend she spends on clothes and travel; she's just returned from a shopping jaunt to Paris, where she met the aforementioned cad and dumped him via letter. I can hardly imagine identifying with such a girl, growing up as I did with parents who had been raised in the working class and who had, through education, raised themselves into the middle class.

Carrie is also a bit condescending to her less intelligent friend, Dee (although admittedly the rather wet Dee is so annoying in her constant harping about whether Carrie did the right thing by sending the letter to Lance Stevens). Dee is eager to find her future mate, while Carrie, whose parents constantly bicker and place her in the midst of every argument, has little desire to marry, a desire the text is obviously at pains to correct. As a teen, did I read against the text's intentions, admiring Carrie for her unusual stand in regards to marriage? Or did her family situation appeal to me, given the fact that my own parents were undergoing marital difficulties at the time? I can't say that I remember for certain.

Stone Harland is not as overbearing an alpha male as I had expected, although he certainly embodies many of the alpha male's characteristics. He's a rich guy (though we never see him at work); he's compellingly handsome; and he demands far more often than he asks, especially when it comes to Carrie. Carrie likes to be in control of her own life, though, and constantly finds ways to tweak or disrupt Stone's plans, even though ultimately she doesn't challenge them (for example, telling him she'll drive her own car to the hospital, rather than assenting to his "I'll pick you up at two" directive). He stops their first sexual embrace when she asks him to, and only kisses her out of anger (a familiar impulse in Harlequin heroes, as I recall) once, after she returns his "fake" engagement ring. Was I drawn to this book because its hero was a tad less overtly sexist than many of his counterparts? I'd have to reread some other books from the period to see if this theory holds any water.

I think the one thing I can say for certain is that the level of sexuality in this book seemed just right for my never-had-a-boyfriend 14-year-old self. Hot kisses, a tiny bit of groping quickly put to a stop—enough sex to be titillating, but not enough to be too frightening, too overwhelming. There was tension, excitement, but safety, too, in these sex scenes—something similar to nursing a crush on a compelling pop star, someone with whom you'd never (except in your wildest dreams) have the chance to actually having sex.

I did not remember the book's ending at all. Stone puts an engagement announcement in the newspaper, despite Carrie having given him back his ring. This sends an irate Carrie speeding down the motorway to his country house, where Stone, of course, reveals his love for her. And of course, Carrie has recognizes that she's fallen in love with him, as well, and her fears about marital discord fall by the wayside ("How could she tell him, after all she had said against marriage, that to have him as her husband was all she would ever want?" [182]). This time, it's Stone, not Carrie, who brings the sexy times to a halt ("one of us had to be sensible" [185])—did I find this appealing? Or condescending? I'm guessing that Stone's highhanded behavior in both instigating this confrontation or in stopping it before its sexual climax would have been the appeal, so I'm not surprised that the ending was not one of the things about the book that easily came to mind before rereading.

I had fun rereading this book from my youth, although I can't imagine finding my nearly fifty-year-old self compelled to reread it over and over as I did then. I am curious to find that other book that stands out from my adolescent reading—anyone remember a revenge plot about an (Italian?) guy wanting to hurt a man by marrying his daughter, forcing her to have sex with him a lot, and then (of course) falling in love with her, despite his own wishes?


Have you ever gone back and reread a category romance you first encountered as a teenager? Did you find yourself responding similarly to it as you did when you first read it? Or differently? Did you notice different things? I'd love to hear about your experiences...

Where Are All the Women of Color, RNFF?

Last week, an RNFF reader sent me an email that made me smile, both with appreciation and chagrin. Said reader wrote that she'd found much to admire about the blog, but found it "depressing" that through its choice of titles to review, RNFF relegated women of color to "invisible status." Rather than castigate the blog or its creator for talking the talk of diversity and intersectionality, but not walking the walk, this reader decided to share her reservations, and encouraged RNFF to do something about them: "Romances featuring WoC have very strong feminist leanings. I do hope your site will reach out to diverse authors and feature more diversity in books."

The lack of romances about PoC I've reviewed on RNFF (as well as the near absence of lesbian romance) had been on my mind a lot lately, for two reasons. First, the scholarly one: I recently picked up a copy of Susan Ostrov Weisser's fascinating The Glass Slipper: Women and Love Stories (Rutgers UP 2013), a book that asks the question, "Why is the story of romance in books, magazines, and films still aimed at women rather than men?" (back cover copy). Weisser's book discusses both high and low literature, historical and current narratives, and I've been delving into individual chapters as my fancy takes me, planning to write a review of the entire book in the not too distant future. But one of Weisser's chapters, Chapter 8 "A Genre of One's Own: African American Imprints and the 'Universality' of Love," has been a bit of a burr under my saddle, urging me to explore in more depth romances written by African Americans.

In this chapter, Weisser compares ten category romances from black genre imprints to ten "Anglo Harlequin" romances, and concludes that while the two groups contain many similarities, black genre romances differ in several noticeable ways:

• African or African communal values and traditions are often referenced and celebrated, "thus countering black invisibility in mainstream novels" (161)

• Feminism more often plays a role in "break[ing] down chauvinism if it  is present in the hero" (162)

• These books display an "unusual and refreshing recognition of other kinds of beauty than that found in most Anglo romances" (163)

•  They include more "sexual conservatism and focus on marriage, including in some cases virginity before marriage" (165)

Despite the positive aspects of the first three differences, the similarities Weisser finds between both groups—the dominant alpha hero; the focus on professional, wealthy characters; the emphasis on the physical beauty of the characters—make her wonder how progressive these novels truly are. The erasure of more painful aspects of African American history and identity from these narratives also gives her pause.

Weisser asks a vital question: "Does a line of romance devoted singularly to African American authors and characters (and most probably readers) represent a long-overdue entrance into a world of human pleasure previously denied? And if so, is it therefore a mark of progressive equality, or is this publishing phenomenon a representation of white privilege in blackface, a false promise of happiness that masks and distorts the problems that surround race relations?" (165-66). I have a hunch that the answer to all three questions is "yes," but I'd feel far more comfortable arguing such a position if I had read more romances by African American writers.

Second, the personal one: This fall, I enrolled in a writing class focused on "smart" genre fiction. Unfortunately, the experience proved a frustrating one; my vision of what the class would be about was far different from that of the instructor's, and his teaching style was not one that worked for me as a learner. Most upsetting to me, though, was the lack of women writers amongst the stories and novel excerpts we were assigned to read. Each week, I'd wait for the teacher to hand out the photocopies of readings for the next class, hoping that the imbalance would correct itself over the course of the semester, that the readings' focus on male writers and male experience would gradually shift in the other direction. But by midway through the course, though, it became clear that such a hope would remain unfulfilled.

After one particularly frustrating class, during which the instructor and I ended up in several verbal tiffs (I admit that I was letting my frustrations out by challenging him as a teacher), I asked if we could talk after the session, so our differences wouldn't steal class time from other students. When I brought up my concerns, the instructor had difficulty hearing me. He viewed himself as a progressive, liberal, even a rebel—we were analyzing both high and low culture, John Cheever and the Muppets, Raymond Carver and superhero comics, weren't we? He'd edited romances once upon a time, hadn't he? And praised soap operas during class for their ability to keep narratives rolling? But when I asked him what he thought the percentage of male to female writers in the course readings was, he said "I'm not sure —about 60-40?" In fact, the proportion was closer to 85-15 at the time we spoke.

I did use the words "male privilege" but at least I didn't sic
feminist superheroine Gyno-Star on him...

And the proportion did not markedly improve over the final weeks of the class. He'd all but told me it wouldn't—"I can't up and change the entire syllabus at this point"—so as far as my own class experience went, the discussion was not all that productive. But I felt better, usually shy me, for having said my piece.

If he teaches this class again, will this instructor revise his syllabus because of our conversation? I'm not sure. But I know the experience has made me even more aware of the need to listen when others, especially those from traditionally marginalized groups, express discontent over the way their voices are (or aren't) being heard.

So thank you, RNFF reader, for emailing me about your problems with RNFF's lack of coverage of romances with and/or by PoC. I plan to heed your advice, to take more active steps to seek out romances by PoC and feature their work on RNFF far more frequently than I have in the past.

What are your favorite feminist romances featuring characters of color? Or written by authors of color? Are there places besides the Romance in Color web site that you go to to find new books by writers of color?



Illustration credits:
Gyno-Star comic strip: The Adventures of Gyno-Star, by Rebecca Cohen

Romancing Northrup Frye: Laura Vivanco's FOR LOVE AND MONEY

In the literary world, Mills and Boon has long been the black sheep. Its books—to call them novels would be to raise them far above their station—are lightweight, the plots recycled and the endings predictable and to read them is a waste of precious life. — Sarah Freeman, "100 Years of Romancing the Readers." Yorkshire Post, 2008

Having spent a great deal of time reading [Harlequin/Mills & Boon] romances, I would argue that many are well-written, skilfully crafted works which can and do engage the minds as well as the emotions of their readers, and a few are small masterpieces—as I shall show. —Laura Vivanco, For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance, 2011

For an academic scholar, admitting that one reads and studies romance novels is a particularly risky move. Though literature scholars pride themselves on uncovering the hidden oppressions in the texts they analyze, they rarely talk about the strict hierarchies within their own field, hierarchies often based upon the cultural capital of the texts one analyzes, more than the skill with which one analyzes them. When I met Mary Bly, a scholar of Renaissance literature, at a romance writers conference and asked how her colleagues at Fordham University felt about her other identity, award-winning historical romance writer Eloisa James, her answer was disappointing if unsurprising: she'd kept her alter ego a secret until one of her books made the New York Times bestseller list.

To proclaim that the mass-produced romances of Harlequin (or of Mills & Boon, the company's name in the UK) are not only worthy of analysis in a cultural studies context, but that they embody "literary art," then, is to open oneself up for knee-jerk ridicule from academe. Which is why I so admire Laura Vivanco's courage in writing and publishing her monograph, For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance. Bucking the cultural studies trend of previous literature, sociology, and psychology scholars who have written about category romance, Vivanco instead meets literary scholars on the field of literary value.

What evidence does Vivanco muster to support what to most readers might seem a dubious claim? Rather than argue for her claim directly, she justifies it by disproving specific criticisms previous writers have aimed at the genre. In her opening chapter, to counter the claim that romances are unrealistic works of wish-fulfillment fantasy, she calls upon an unlikely ally: mid-twentieth century literary scholar Northrop Frye. Frye's 1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays argued that literary scholarship should move beyond value judgments of individual texts, and instead take a more scientific approach to the field as a whole. Frye seems an odd choice to help make a case for a value-based argument, but applying his ideas to category romance does lead to some helpful insights.

Like Carolus Linneaus's taxonomic system of classifying life forms based on their shared physical characteristics, Frye sorted the fictions he studied into different groups, or what he termed "modes." Frye's modes—Mythic, Romantic, High Mimetic, Low Mimetic, and Ironic—are differentiated by whether their heroes (the term used by Frye) are superior or inferior in kind or degree to your average human being, and to their environments. Vivanco argues that HM&B books can fall into any mode but the Mythic, although most tend to be either in the High Mimetic (with heroes who are superior to other humans, but not to their environments) or Low Mimetic (with heroes who are equal to other humans). Placing the category romance within the context of these modes helped me to understand why so many of its protagonists are larger than life figures; many of the HM&B guidelines call for stories written in the High Mimetic mode. Vivanco's discussion of two romances written in the ironic mode, a mode very few romance writers choose for their novels, proves especially interesting, allowing me to see why I enjoyed Jennifer Crusie's Strange Bedpersons (1994) and Kristin Higgins' Catch of the Day (1996) even while feeling that neither was really quite a romance in the conventional sense.

The second part of the chapter rebuts other, more specific criticisms aimed at the unrealistic nature of category romance—that they all must have happy endings and that they never include social problems or issues—before taking an abrupt turn back to Frye's modes to counter the argument that HM&B books are all the same. Not only are there HM&B books written in different modes, but even books within the same mode can vary, as there are gradients within each mode. Also, as Frye argues that while one mode "constitutes the underlying tonality of a work of fiction...any or all of the other four may be present," HM&B authors may include hints of myth or romance within their primarily high or low mimetic works. Frye suggests that "much of our sense of the subtlety of great literature comes from this modal counterpoint" (50-51), a suggestion that Vivanco quotes but does not directly apply to the books she analyzes. Instead, she explores how such modal counterpoint can be used to increase reader identification (with the "average" heroine in counterpoint to the larger-than-life hero), or to convey the impact of love (its ability to make a heroine feel as if she is in a completely different, and higher, mode). Analysis such as this, when Vivanco uses Frye as a jumping-off point for her own theoretical work, are the spots in the text that I found the most valuable.

Chapter 2 identifies HM&B books which retell or re-envision myths, fairy tales, or chivalric romances. Vivanco doesn't explain how identifying the stories that undergird HM&B romances supports her claim that some are "small masterpieces," or that others are "well-written" or "skilfully crafted," however, leaving the reader to assume that her exploration of how retellings can be cast in different modes, from high to low mimetic to ironic, was undertaken to disprove detractors' claims that category romances are all the same.

A HM&B "masterpiece"?

I found Chapter 3, "Metafiction," the most interesting. One section focuses on the self-reflexivity of romance (a topic about which I blogged about in this post), discussing books in which stereotypes about romance authors, and/or romance readers, are rebutted by featuring romance-writing or -reading heroines. Another discusses romances that make links between their genre and other popular culture genres typically denigrated by the "high brow," such as television, film and comics, or other low-status literary genres, such as the Gothic. The brief middle section touches upon books which reference classic works of literature (Austen; Shakespeare). Though Vivanco argues that some HM&B books can, like the best metafiction, lead readers to productively question the relationship between fiction and reality, the books she discusses seem to fall more in the category of books that simply use references to other fictions in order to participate in a "shared stock of common allusions, words, and metaphors" (149) than ones that actively work to disrupt the taken-for-grantedness of fiction's conventions.

The last chapter identifies common metaphors in HM&B romances, suggesting both that the use of extended metaphor demonstrates the talent of HM&B writers, and that particular metaphors can help the literary critic better understand individual texts. Vivanco describes books in which extended metaphors are used to symbolize love: buildings and interiors; bridges; gardens and flowers; hunting; and journeying.

Vivanco's chapters demonstrate both her skill in close reading individual texts and her wide knowledge of the HM&B field. They also provide clear evidence that many of the criticisms leveled against category romances are clearly overgeneralizations. It would have been interesting to hear more about why Vivanco chose these particular 147 books to discuss, though. Are these outliers that prove the rule that in general, HM&B books lack literary merit? Or do they provide a broad enough sample to suggest that most HM&B romances contain literary merit? What percentage of HM&B romances demonstrate "literary art," in Vivanco's view? If the percentage is small, are the books she discusses ultimately relevant, or simply mere curiosities, easily overlooked amidst a welter of far less accomplished writing?

Do these chapters ultimately support Vivanco's overall claim that some, if not all, HM&B romances, demonstrate "literary art"? In her conclusion, Vivanco suggests that genre constraints such as those placed on HM&B writers do not always have to be negative; like the formal constraints of a sonnet, or Jane Austen's "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work," such constraints can provide fertile ground for literary artistry. But as Vivanco never gives her readers a definition of just what constitutes "literary art," readers are ultimately left unable to judge whether or not any of the 147 books she discusses embody it, or which among those 147 are "small masterpieces." Literary merit has become a vastly contested concept in the sixty+ years since Northrop Frye wrote Anatomy of Criticism; my idea of what constitutes it may be quite different from yours, or from Vivanco's.

Whether or not HM&B books contain literary artistry or not, they are certainly worthy of study by both cultural studies and literature scholars, particularly those of a feminist bent. The metaphors they deploy, the literary and cultural references they evoke, have much to tell us not only about gender assumptions, but also about female readerly desire. I applaud critics such Vivanco, Eric Selinger, Sarah Frantz, Pamela Regis and others, scholars brave enough to study popular romance in spite of the often denigrating attitude of many of their colleagues.

Next time on RNFF:

The allure of the male harem

Romancing the $s and £s

To date, I've not reviewed any category romances on RNFF, having made the assumption that the most mass-produced of titles in a decidedly mass-market genre would hardly be likely to hold feminism in high regard. Literary scholar Laura Vivanco, however, suggests that such an out-of-hand dismissal on my part may be premature. In her article "Feminism and Early Twenty-First Century Harlequin Mills & Boon Romances,"* Vivanco reports on the results of her reading of 120 category romances published between 2000 and mid-2007. Sixty of Vivanco's books came from Harlequin/Mills & Boon's "Modern"/"Presents" line, sixty from the "Romance"/"Tender" line.

Heroine Natalie is "no women's libber"

Though she discovered a "small number" of books which "appeared to be antifeminist in that they either explicitly critiqued moves towards equality or they end with the hero exerting significant control over the heroine in some way," and an unspecified number in which "little evidence of either a positive or negative engagement with feminism" appeared, 26 of her 120 books either "explicitly express positive attitudes towards feminists and feminism" or directly engage with feminist issues or ideas (1062, 1063). If we extrapolate from Vivanco's sample, her findings suggest that a little over 20 percent of Harlequin/Mills & Boon category romances portray feminism in a positive light. A distressingly low percentage in our purportedly "post-feminist" age, yet a percentage greater than conventional wisdom has previously assumed.

Just how deeply do these romances embrace feminism? I sometimes find myself frustrated after picking up a children's or YA book that a reviewer or expert has touted as featuring positive female role models, only to discover after reading that its feminism is no more than surface-deep, or that my definition of feminism seems quite different from that of the recommender. Often I find such books explicitly declare their alliance with feminist principles but then proceed to undermine said principles on the level of implicit, rather than explicit, ideology. I'm eager to take a look at some of the books Vivanco discusses, to see whether they are wholehearted in their embrace of feminism, or whether they present conflicting attitudes toward feminism. (I know that Laura Vivanco is a frequent reader of RNFF, and hope she will chime in here on this issue).

Until I can round up and read a few of these books, though, I thought I'd share another issue Vivanco's article raised for me: the issue of women's relationship to money. Vivanco notes that many of the heroines in the Modern line "struggle not to be seen as 'gold-diggers,'" a struggle she suggests "may be read as attempting to redefine the institution of marriage so that it is no longer a sexual/financial transaction but a relationship built around emotional trust and intimacy" (1070). This struck me as an surprising argument, as I'm guessing few unmarried young people today regard marriage as a financial transaction at all, never mind feel a need to "redefine" it as something distinct from financial matters. Why then should "emotional trust and intimacy" be placed in opposition to money?

The quotes Vivanco includes to support her argument, and the language in which she couches them, made me wonder if these books weren't just attempting to redefine marriage as no longer a financial transaction, but also, simultaneously, setting up a binary opposition between money and love. In this binary, love in placed in the superior position, money in the inferior, the opposite message most Western men are socialized to believe. Such a binary construction unconsciously suggests to women that money is not, and should not, be important, at least not to them.

Vivanco argues that in order for Stasia, the heroine of Sarah Morgan's Public Wife, Private Mistress,"to prove her point that marriage is not an exchange of sex for financial security, when she left him [her husband]," Stasia says:

 "I left everything because there was nothing I needed." She met his gaze full on, the message clear in her eyes. I was never interested in your money and I can't believe you don't know that. (1070)

Vivanco later suggests that Stasia

thinks of her work as something which benefits others and gives her more than merely financial rewards: "Life isn't always about money.... There are other things that matter, like independence and self-belief. I like my work. I need to know that I'm good at something. Making a contribution that matters." (1072)

While a belief that money is the end-all and be-all of life is one most feminists would find troubling, the completely opposite view—that money is "merely" a "reward" given for acting in ways that "benefit others," rather than something women earn so they can support themselves —seems equally problematic. Life isn't always about money, but it is often about money, especially life in a marriage. As myriad studies, including this 2012 study from  the  American Institute of CPAs,  have shown, the most common reason married or co-habitating couples fight is over finances. If romances function to persuade women that money should not be of much concern to them, then how will they be able to function as equal partners in a relationship in which many, many decisions about money occur?

The lines from Morgan's novel made me begin to wonder—have I ever read a romance, either category or single-title, in which a woman is proud of the money she earns? In which earning money through work is seen as a positive, empowering act for a heroine? A romance in which a heroine earns more than her potential love interest? A romance in which a woman does not want to give up her job after finding her true love, not because giving it up with be a sacrifice of personal fulfillment, but because earning her own money makes it easier for her to feel like an equal partner in a relationship with a fellow wage-earner?

I could not think of a single one. Am I just being forgetful? Or do some come to your mind?




* Vivanco, Laura. "Feminism and Early Twenty-First Century Harlequin Mills & Boon Romances." The Journal of Popular Culture 45.5 (2012): 1060-1089.


Photo/Illustration credits:
Women Minimum wage: Center for American Progress

Next time on RNFF:

BDSM & feminist romance

Rape in Romance, part 2: Rape in 1980s Harlequin romances

In speaking recently to a friend who had had an abortion as a teen in the early 1980s, I heard for the first time that her pregnancy had been the result not of unprotected sex, but of rape by her boyfriend.  "Call the police? And tell them what?" my friend exclaimed when I asked her why she hadn't prosecuted her rapist-boyfriend. "No one had ever heard of date rape back then," she reminded me. "I didn't even think of it as rape myself."

With "Take Back the Night" vigils on college campuses, documentaries about date rape on cable and network news programs, and widespread media outrage whenever a (usually male) public figure makes a sexist remark about rape victims, it's sometimes hard to remember that until quite recently talk about rape could rarely be heard in public.  Reading the first Mills & Boon/Harlequin romances to feature rape not as "aggressive seduction" but as criminal violation gave me a much-needed reminder of just how new our culture's acknowledgement of date/acquaintance rape truly is.

Charlotte Lamb and Daphne Clair were both popular Mills & Boon/Harlequin authors in 1980—Clair had published ten novels, and Lamb more than thirty— when each chose to use the romance form to explore the then-seldom confronted topic of rape and its effect on a woman's subsequent sexual and romantic life. Lamb chose to open Stranger in the Night with a scene depicting the rape her heroine, Clare experiences as "a young eighteen, straight up from the country" (5). Taken by her flatmate to a New Year's party, Clare drinks a bit too much, leaving her susceptible to an attractive man who flatters her and kisses her. Believing herself in love, Clare allows the man to draw her away from the party, where he violently takes her virginity, despite her physical and verbal protests (an act the back cover copy euphemistically terms "sudden and rough lovemaking"). In the aftermath, Clare vows never to allow herself to be "trapped by her own heart" again (23).

Fast forward nine years, and Clare has become a sophisticated, famous actress, not by sleeping her way to the top but by sublimating her entire emotional life into her performances. Between shows, she's vacationing in Nice with her best friend, playwright Macey, reading through his latest script. Though Macey initially hoped for a romantic relationship with Clare, he accepted a platonic one as the price of remaining her friend. Yet as he tries to convince her to take a role in his new play, its clear he still carries a torch for her.

Macey becomes far less willing to restrain his sexual feelings after he witnesses Clare's unprecedented emotional reaction to the nephew of another actress Macey is courting for his play. Readers realize that Luke Murray is the man who raped her, but Clare has never told anyone else about her violation, including her best friend. "I'd care like hell. I don't want people knowing, staring, smiling," Clare thinks when the perceptive Macey asks her what's wrong (70). In particular, she doesn't want Macey to know: "He would look at her quite differently; she knew that. Macey had an image of her, and she didn't want that image shattered" (71).

Clare can't tell Macey of her rape because she, like society, doesn't know any better than to blame herself for it: "He was bound to despise her when he knew how she had let Luke Murry take her that night. Clare knew Macey well enough to know how he looked at the sort of girl who got drunk at parties and went to bed with strangers" (77-78). Later, when Macey asks her why she never told anyone about what had happened to her, she responds, "Rape? How many people would believe me? I went with him of my own accord. And to do him justice, I suppose he thought I was willing, too. He thought I knew what he wanted. How was he to guess I was as thick as a plank?" (112-13). Women are raped, the novel seems to suggest, because of their own stupid behavior, not because rape is wrong.

In his jealousy, Macey becomes almost as physically and verbally abusive to Clare as her rapist was. A reader might expect that telling Macey her secret will mitigate this problem. But Clare tells Macey in the middle of the novel, not at its end, and his obnoxious behavior only continues. The real difficulty comes when Clare's revelation reawakens her long-repressed sexuality, and she begins to reciprocate Macey's attraction. But even though he desires her, Macey doesn't want Clare to use him just to satisfy a passing sexual urge, and his sexual frustration only increases.

Unfortunately, he doesn't tell her this until after he's already in the midst of a sexual encounter he initiates (although he, like her rapist, attributes his loss of sexual control to her, not himself). He blames her for his own frustrations,  calling her "a stupid little bitch," and a "tease," the same words Luke Murry uttered when she resisted his sexual advances nine years earlier. At the novel's climax, when Macey threatens yet again to "do something we'll both regret," i.e., force her into sex, her reaction is not "stop acting like a rapist," but instead "I love you" (183). With the traditional Harlequin construct that insists the hero prove his love by losing sexual control, it becomes distressingly difficult to differentiate lover from rapist.

Structurally, Daphne Clair's The Loving Trap takes the opposite approach. The novel begins in the present, not the past; both the hero and the reader are kept in the dark about just what happened to heroine Kyla to make her so skittish about sex. The back cover copy makes no mention of rape, either, framing the problem between Kyla and new husband as the "reluctance to commit herself that she still felt, despite her love for Marc." Clair drops myriad hints about Kyla's past, hints that a 21st-century reader would surely pick up on: Kyla dislikes  "big, aggressive men" like Marc, who, like most Harlequin heroes, is a wealthy, self-assured professional (11); she dates Chris, whose "very lack of masculine attraction was the chief quality that had attracted her to him" (25); she feels "panic shot through with sudden pleasure" when Marc kisses her (65). Would it take the 1980 reader far longer? Perhaps when she grows angry at the way Marc takes his own power for granted: "It must be lovely for you to shift us all of us little pawns around the way you do. And it's all done with kindness, too. Everyone benefits, don't they? We're all much better off than before" (65)? Or when Kyla faints when Marc's kiss becomes blatantly sexual? When she refuses to have sex with him on their honeymoon? Or when she admits to herself that "quite simply, she resented him and his male power" (124)?

Though Marc, unlike Macey, doesn't get to hear Kyla's story until near the novel's end, he realizes early that he needs to be gentle, that any abrupt, aggressive move will send her flying away. Before their marriage, he approaches her "with infinite slowness, as though afraid of frightening her with a sudden lunge" (43).  In order to win Kyla, Marc must become the opposite of a traditional Harlequin hero; he must restrain his violence, and his passion.

As a result of Marc's go-slow approach, Kyla begins to feel sexual passion for the first time: "She hadn't thought she could ever feel like that about a man. In a way, she felt an odd, detached relief, that it was possible, after all, that her body was capable of reacting in that way, because the men she had been fond of in the past had never been able to touch any core of pleasure or passion" (70). She even startles herself by thinking "It was high time she stopped being afraid of life and began to reach for what it had to offer" (105). Reach she does, for when Marc offers marriage, she agrees.

Kyla, like Clare, fears telling the man she loves about what happened to her. Not, thankfully, because she thinks she's at fault for her rape; Clair's novel is remarkable for the lack of self-shame it inflicts on its heroine. Kyla was even brave enough to tell the authorities, and to testify against her attackers. Kyla is reluctant to tell Marc because in the past, she told two other men she dated, with disastrous results: one pulled away, the other took a prurient interest.

Yet despite her love for Marc, Kyla cannot control her body's rejection whenever their physical contact moves beyond kissing. Marc becomes increasingly impatient, veering between restraint and force, lover and rapist: "I'm not going to apologize.... You asked for what you got," he tells her after one such aborted encounter (137). After they return from their unconsummated honeymoon, the alpha Harlequin hero/rapist who must force sex upon the woman he loves comes to the fore. Kyla resists, stopping him only by angrily revealing that he won't be the first, that he won't be able to inflict the pain of deflowering on her.

Marc finally realizes what has happened to Kyla, and listens while she tells her story of being raped by a drunken acquaintance and his two friends. Though Marc is disgusted by his behavior toward Kyla, we still have a few more pages to fill out, and so Kyla misinterprets his self-disgust, mistaking it for disgust with her. The two must dance a bit more around their own insecurities before Marc can finally admit that "I should have guessed, of course. The signs were there, if I hadn't been such a blind, arrogant fool.... I'd just damned near raped you myself, and that made me about on a level with them" (184).

In Stranger in the Night, Macey, too, had been dismayed by his own near-rape of Clare after he discovered what had happened to her in the past. Yet he continued to insult her and impose himself sexually on her. In contrast, in The Loving Trap, Marc recognizes the distressing similarities between his actions and those of Kyla's rapists, and quickly changes his behavior.  Only then can Kyla accept Marc as a sexual partner, demonstrating her readiness for sexual intimacy with him by initiating it, rather than simply responding to his advances.

Both novels demonstrate the limited discourses about rape available to women in the early 1980s, even to novelists wishing to portray rape victims with sympathy and understanding. That The Loving Trap proves a far more satisfying read for the feminist reader than Stranger in the Night also shows that significant differences can and do exist between category romances, especially those depicting social issues in the midst of a paradigm shift.

Next time on RNFF: 

The girl as romantic stalker in Sharon G. Flake's Pinned

Power Games... RNFF Review of Ilona Andrews' Kate Daniels series

In a recent post on the Popular Romance Project web site, Jayashree Kamble discusses the rise of paranormal romances featuring heroes who are part human and part animal. As the construction of dominant masculinity popularized in 1950s-80's Harlequins and 70s-90s single-title romances has become less culturally acceptable (or, perhaps, simply less desirable) to many women raised in the wake of second-wave feminism, the alpha-hero who once dominated contemporary and historical romance has become, if not an endangered species, at least a far less commonly sighted beast. But he has found a safe haven in the subgenre of paranormal romance, a development that gives Kamble pause. "It is no grievous fault to desire a passionate hero," Kamble argues, "but when that translates into animality (and a dismissal of men who do not care to be animals), it is time to reassess the desire."

An early shape-shifter: Jupiter as bull abducts Europa

Just as I'm wary of critics who would dismiss the entire romance genre, I'm also suspicious of those who would reject a subgenre without looking at individual books within it. Do all paranormal romances that feature beast-men return readers to a male dominant/female submissive paradigm? Or are there differences between titles, and between authors? Do some books endorse female submission to the alpha male, while others espouse a more equitable relationship between hero and heroine?

Ilona Andrews' Magic series (Magic Bites, Magic Burns, Magic Strikes, Magic Bleeds, and Magic Slays) provides at least one example of a man-beast story which doesn't glorify the alpha male at the expense of any woman. Urban fantasy novels, the Magic books focus on action and suspense in an Atlanta transformed by repeated periodic incursions of magic. But romance, in the form of the developing relationship between the novels' narrator, mercenary Kate Daniels, and Curran, the shapeshifting leader of the "Pack," serves as an underlying leitmotif.

Curran's shapeshifters,  who include not only were-wolves, but also were-jackals, were-rats, were-bears, and, in alpha-male Curran's case, were-lion, are organized strictly along the biologically-based hierarchical lines common to pack animals: a dominant alpha rules over the entire group. Such is the appeal of many a man/beast tale: the alpha-male dynamic frowned upon in more realistic fiction gets validation from its occurence in the natural world of the beast half of the man/beast.

But Andrews' Pack also includes sub-alphas, who rule over each sub-group (for example, were-jackals have their own alpha, whom they obey, but who owes allegiance to Curran). Kate believes Curran "wasn't in charge because he was the smartest or the most popular; he ruled because of those three hundred and thirty-seven [shape-changers in Atlanta] he was unquestionably the strongest. He was in charge by right of might; that is, he had yet to meet anyone who could kick his ass" (Bites 52). Curran is called "alpha," "Your Majesty," or, most often, "The Beast Lord." Though Kate learns through the course of the series that there's a lot more to Curran than just physical strength, if you're looking for egalitarian political structures in your romance reading, you're not going to find them in Andrews' alternate Atlanta.

Leader of the Pack

But if political structures in the Pack are regressive, gender relations prove far more nuanced. The pack contains both male and female shape-shifters, and most sub-groups in the pack are lead by both a male and a female alpha. The alphas are generally mated (i.e., married or in a long-term-relationship) couples; the only exception to the male/female couples are a male-male alpha pairing, a welcome, unobtrusive nod to homosexual romance. Female as well as male shape-shifters fight and kill, and protecting the children of the pack seems a primary shape-shifter goal, no matter what gender one is (not surprisingly, given the action-based nature of the genre, little actual child-care is depicted in the novels).

Kate Daniels, the novels' heroine, is not a member of the Pack. But she proves herself the equal of any of its members, including its alpha leader. Readers are first introduced to Kate as she easily dispatches a vampire with a single toss of her knife. No damsel in need of rescuing, Kate is more than capable of saving not only herself, but also the denizens of Atlanta, whether they be human, shape-shifter, or even, when absolutely necessary, necromancer. She's also a rebel, a woman who hates authority with a capital H. Kate works as a freelance mercenary, unable or unwilling to be subject to the rules and regulations of any of the several institutions designed to do what she is best at: subduing magical threats and creatures. Looking for the embodiment of "kick-ass heroine"? Kate Daniels easily fits the bill.

As the series of Magic books unfurls, Kate and Curran engage in a cat and cat game, each trying to assert dominance over the other, each resisting the other's attempts to do the same. Curran assumes his usual tactics—intimidate via a mere show of his overpowering lion form—will lead to Kate's submission. Kate, in contrast, resists through wisecrack, using her anger (and fear) at being expected to be submissive to drive her ever-sarcastic mouth. For example, at their first meeting, she thinks:

     Where was he? I scanned the building, peering into the gloom. Moonlight filtered through the gaps in the walls, creating a mirage of twilight and complete darkness. I knew he was watching me. Enjoying himself.
      Diplomacy was never my strong suit and my patience had run dry. I crouched and called out, "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty." (Bites 54).

Though Curran initially tries to intimidate Kate through word and appearance, and even through physical force, over the course of the series he learns that mere displays of power won't impress or subdue her. For she has power of her own, power different than his, perhaps even stronger than his in many ways. And she will never agree to subject her power to his.

Myrna Loy and William Powell as Nick and Nora Charles

But Curran can verbally spar with the best of them, and the insulting back-and-forthing between hero and heroine as each asserts her or his will in the face of one equally as strong gradually shifts to bantering designed to signal knowledge of the other, and even affection. My favorite bickering motif occurs when Curran teases Kate whenever he has to "rescue" her, when in fact all that's usually necessary is to take her to the infirmary after each battle she fights and wins. In the grand tradition of verbally-duelling detective couples like Nick and Nora Charles, The Avengers' John Steed and Emma Peel, and Moonlighting's Maddie Hayes and David Addison, Kate and Curran trade verbal ripostes between bouts of fighting the bad guys (and girls, and disgusting demonic creatures), and over the course of four books, gradually learn to trust each other and open themselves to vulnerability.

In an intriguing exploration of power, Kate and Curran also learn the dangers of their alpha-ness. Though were-wolf Derek, who becomes Kate's friend, protests her budding romance with a human doctor by arguing that "You're harder than he is.... The man's supposed to be harder. So he can protect," his real objection is that "He will never tell you no" (149, 150). But the head of any social hierarchy needs to have someone to stand up to him or her; otherwise, power becomes absolute, sliding from alpha-ness to despotism. Kate seems to be the only one who will stand up to Curran, who will disobey his orders, who will fight him, both physically and intellectually. And if she wants any kind of romantic relationship with Curran, Kate needs to recognize the need to compromise, to listen when he protests her plans, agreeing with him when she can see the reasonableness of his objections, proceeding if those objections simply wish to keep her safe from harm.

In Andrews' world, an alpha male doesn't need a submissive mate. He needs a woman with as much alpha-ness as he has. In Kate Daniels, alpha Curran meets his alpha-match.

What other man/beast romances explore the dynamics between two strong protagonists without forcing a heroine to cede her power?

Ilona Andrews, Magic Bites. New York: Ace Books, 2007.
      Magic Burns (2008)
    Magic Strikes (2009)
    Magic Bleeds (2011)
    Magic Slays (2012)

 

 

Photo/Illustration credits
• Titian, Rape of Europa (1562). Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
• Wolves sparring for dominance. Courtesy of Marty Sloane.
• Alpha lion. Courtesy of Christian Sperka.
• Myrna Loy and William Powell. Courtesy of Megan Walsh Gerard.



Next time on RNFF: Cheers for meta-fictive romance

Romance as Pornography for Women: A History (part 1)

In my previous post on what a feminist can gain from reading from romance, I discussed the use of the phrase "pornography for women" to describe the genre. Several readers suggested that the phrase might refer to other things besides the idea that romance cloaks sex in narrative clothing. In the wake of such responses, I began to wonder about the history of the term. Who first used the phrase to describe romance? What did he or she mean by it? And how has the meaning of the phrase changed over the course of its history?

The earliest usage of the phrase that I could find in reference to romance fiction, as opposed to actual pornography, is from 1979, in an essay by Ann Snitow called "Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different."* Snitow was one of the earliest literary critics to look analytically at Harlequin romances, and one of the first to move beyond viewing genre romance as either a patriarchal opiate for the female masses or a rebellion against patriarchal restrictions. Instead, she was interested in exploring how the Harlequin novels accurately describe what she terms "certain regressive elements in the female experience" (308).

Viewing romance as "pornography for women" was not original to Snitow; she heard a fellow scholar, Peter Parisi, make the connection in an unpublished talk he gave at Rutgers in 1978. Parisi claimed that Harlequins are "essentially pornography for people ashamed to read pornography"; the romance and promised wedding serve only as a cover for readers raised to think sex outside of marriage is sinful or shameful, but who still read primarily for sex (314-15).

Snitow agrees with Parisi that Harlequins are pornographic, but takes pains to note that she is not using the word pejoratively. Rather than judging Harlequins because they sexualize all contact between hero and heroine, Snitow is more interested in thinking about whether the books "contain an affirmation of female sexuality" (315).

In considering this question, Snitow makes a fascinating argument, one that compares pornography to "infant desire and its furious gusto": "In pornography all things tend in one direction, a total immersion in one's own sense experience, for which one paradigm must certainly be infancy. For adults this totality, the total sexualization of everything, can only be a fantasy. But does the fact that it cannot be actually lived mean this fantasy must be discarded?" (316). While misogyny may be one aspect of contemporary pornography, another is its "universal infant desire for complete, immediate gratification, to rule the world out of the very core of passive helplessness," Snitow argues (316).

Because of the way it explodes the boundaries of the self, Snitow believes the "abandon" of pornography gives it the potential for subversion, even for social rebellion. Especially when it also depicts the power balances of society run to excess. But she sees this radical potential as still unrealized, both in pornography for men being published in the 1970s and in the Harlequin romance of the period.

Intriguingly, though, she does not read Harlequins as simply oppressive to women. Rather, she sees in them a strength: the insistence "that good sex for women requires an emotional and social context that can free them from constraint" (320), an insistence rare in any literature of her time. Unfortunately, Snitow notes, the road to good sex that Harlequins of her day map requires romance heroines to give up the very qualities—aggression and spontaneity—that are the hallmarks of rebellious infantile abandonment. In order to gain emotional intimacy, heroines must passively wait for it, for fear they will scare off their emotionally wary heroes.

In future posts, I'll be taking a look at how the phrase "pornography for women" has changed since Snitow (or more accurately, Parisi) coined the term. For now, I'd like to consider the conclusion of Snitow's essay, in which she imagines what a progressive pornography, one for both men and women, might look like. Her vision cals for both "personal feeling and abandoned physicality together in wonderful combinations undreamed of in either male or female pornography as we know it" (320-21). Such a progressive pornography will not be achieved, she posits, until equality between the sexes as both workers and child-rearers is far more commonplace than it is in America in 1979.

Today, U.S. society is far more egalitarian than it was in 1979. But many barriers to full equality between the sexes remain. How close do you think today's romance novel (Harlequin or otherwise) is to embodying Snitow's dream of a positive pornography?




* First published in the journal Radical History Review (20), and later reprinted  in Susan Ostrov Weisser's collection Women and Romance: A Reader. New York: NYU Press, 2001, 307-322. Quotations above have been taken from Weisser's reprint.


Photo/Illustration credits:
• Happy Baby   
• Two covers from Harlequins analyzed by Snitow courtesy of Goodreads  


Next time on RNFF: Book review of Ilona Andrews' Magic series