Offstage Heroine-ism and Gendered Cornering

If you're not a fiction writer, you may not be familiar with this piece of advice: be cruel to your characters. But it's something that experienced authors often tell writer wanna-bes.

Why? Because conventional writing wisdom says that authors often feel protective of their creations, and so do not put them into difficult enough situations, either plot-wise or emotion-wise. Which leads to a story without conflict, without the tension that pushes readers to turn the page, and the next, and the next. As a writer, don't coddle your characters; corner them, then toss them, kicking and screaming, into the hottest water you can boil.

I was thinking about this bit of writing advice while I was reading Cate Cameron's forthcoming contemporary, Hometown Hero. Hero's hero is actually a heroine: Mixed Martial Arts fighter Zara Hale. Daughter of an absent mother and a perpetually drunk father, Zara grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, depending on her older brother Zane to keep her fed and safe. Zara did not so much escape her small Vermont hometown as get pushed out of it after Zane suffered a mental breakdown and went on a drug-induced crime spree, a spree that landed him in prison. Sent off to live with an aunt in New York, tough-girl Zara found solace, and then a career, in the local gym and in MMA.

small town Vermont:
all rainbows & kittens?

Now, ten years later, Zara's at the top of her game, the reigning female MMA champion. But author Cameron has clearly heeded the conventional writing wisdom, and is not afraid to heap the bad times on her protagonist. As the novel opens, two concussions in a row have temporarily sidelined Zara. And thus she has no excuse for not going back to her Vermont hometown to keep tabs on Zane, just released from prison. And to take a temporary job at a community center, helping disadvantaged kids. No matter how little love she has for quaint Lake Sullivan and its inhabitants. Why should she put herself out for them? What did anyone there do to help her or Zane when their family was falling apart? And why should she be grateful to Cal Montgomery, town rich boy and Zane's purported best friend, for offering both her and Zane jobs at the community center? Isn't he just trying to make up for the fact that it was he who called the cops on Zane?

Zara's not into publicity, but her agent, Andre, insists that going home is perfect move, one that will both improve her own image as well as that of the MMA: "But seriously, making you into some sort of Ripley character, like from Aliens? You're a fierce warrior woman with a soft spot for kids. It's brilliant." Zara tries to argue with him—"I'm so tired of that crap. The men are allowed to just fight. They don't have to look pretty and flirt with reporters and work with damn kids!" But her sexist agent immediately shoots her feminist argument down:

Fighter or sex object?

"Simple question, Zara. Because, I don't know, maybe I missed something. So let me just check . . . Are you a man?" Andre paused, just long enough to pretend he was waiting for an answer. "Oh, no, you're not? Okay, next question. Do you live in a fantasy world of total equality, or do you live in this world?" Another pause for effect. "Oh, you live in this world? Then stop wasting my time with your whining and help me manage your career as a female fighter in the current universe. Okay?" (Kindle Loc 141)

With such a set-up, was it any wonder that I feared the take-home message of the story would be something along the lines of: 1, Zara needs to learn to like kids (because all good women like kids!); 2, Zara needs to learn to like small-town Vermont (because yeah, small-town America!); and, of course, 3, Zara needs to fall for the right guy (yeah, romance!). All of which, of course, will lead to 4, Zara needs to give up her MMA career for 1, 2, & 3.

Unsurprisingly, numbers 1, 2, and 3 all happen. But, (minor spoiler alert, here) to my utter pleasure, number 4 did not.

I began to wonder, then, why I had anticipated, no, actually predicted, that the book would end with Zara giving up her career. Was it because the older conventions of the genre so often demanded such a message? Because I tend toward glass-half-empty rather than glass-half-full kind of thinking? Or did it have something to do with this particular novel,  and the gendered ways in which Cameron "cornered" Zara?

I think it the answer is "yes, yes, and yes, but..." One and two are self-explanatory, but I wanted to think a bit more about #3. Because I don't think gendered cornering is something that happens just in Cameron's novel. It happens in many other romance novels, too.

Some examples to show what I mean by the phrase "gendered cornering":

• While Zara is a kick-ass heroine, we as readers never get to witness her in MMA action. How many romances have you read where the heroine is heroic offstage? Where you have to take her gutsiness for granted, at secondhand, at someone else's word? Does this diminish/undercut her impact, her power?

• The tension that exists between Zara and her love interest, Cal, lies primarily in Zara's refusal to not fight. Both Zara and Cal know that Zara is still having symptoms that might be due to her injury, symptoms that she hasn't reported to the doctors who have cleared her to fight. And with a challenger to her title already lined up, Zara isn't willing to come clean. Is it more common in romances for female characters to be told not to do something, to be put in a position where their professional goals are set up in opposition to their safety and/or health, than it is for male characters?

Might want to reconsider this one, ladies...

• I loved that Cameron, unlike many writers, calls attention to the gender constrictions that lie behind the masculine urge to protect we so often meet in romance novels:

"She won't let me take care of her, of course. But that just makes me want it even more. Because she's so strong, but she shouldn't have to be." [says Cal]
     Zane seemed amused. "There's nothing wrong with being strong. It's not what you have to be, it's what you get to be." (3010)

and

"If she was for sure going to die, you'd be right.... But this? She's taking more of a risk than you want. That's all. It's not as black and white as you're making it out to be. So you have to ask yourself: How much of this is about loving her, and how much is about controlling her?... It's not about it being the right decision or the wrong decision. It's about it being her decision." (3413)

Unlike Zara's male agent, who did not listen to her gender critique, Cal listens to fellow guy Zane. Cal's mother second's Zane's insights, but is it significant that it is Zane, not Zara, who calls Cal on the underlying motivations behind his "protective instincts"?  How often does a woman say something and is not listened to, but when a man says something similar, he is?

• Finally, despite Zane's criticism of Cal's refusing to accept Zara's decision, and Cal's acknowledgement of its accuracy, Zara does not get to make the decision whether or not to fight herself. A handy villain shows up to derail Zara's title bid, conveniently taking Zara's choice away from her. How often do romances purport to be about women's choices, but then pull the female protagonist's ability to chose out from underneath her?


Cameron's novel ends with both Zara and Cal compromising, each giving up something for the other. But I wonder, which is more powerful? The end message of equity and equality? Or the ambivalently mixed messages that lie behind the conflicts with which many romance novelists choose to corner their female protagonists?




Photo credits:
Small town VT: Strolling of the Heifers
Ronda Rousee ESPN cover: Breitbart
Under my protection: Slayashell Tumblr

When the Form Works Against Feminism

In the two years since the debut of this blog, I've read and followed many an online debate about whether or not romance as a genre is, by its very nature, feminist. My own position on the matter has been that no genre, including the genre of romance, is inherently feminist, but any book, in any genre, has the potential to be feminist. While a woman-authored genre may be more likely, in general, to be sympathetic to feminist ideas and discourses, the mere fact that the majority of its authors are female is not a an iron-clad guarantee that all, or even most, individual texts within it will be feminist. A woman may write an anti-feminist romance, just as a man may write a pro-feminist one. Whether any individual romance is feminist or not, I thought, depends entirely on how its author uses or subverts its genre conventions to convey sympathy with, or antipathy to, feminist beliefs and concerns.

Yet a recent book made me rethink somewhat my "it all depends on what the author does with it" stance. Because in this book, it seemed to me that the dictates of the genre itself did constrain an individual novel's feminist impulses, even when those feminist impulses are stated explicitly within the text.

The book that made me think harder about my own assumptions was recommended by Sarah, an RNFF reader, as one of the best feminist YA romances of 2014. Sarah wrote:

I'd include Jennifer Echols' Biggest Flirts on my 2014 YA list (and the others in that series, which are out this year)—she does such a great job at portraying girls' experiences and is very positive in her treatment of teen girls and sex. She also pushes the envelope in terms of the "likability" factor, which I especially appreciate in YA.

I'd never read any of Echols' books, so off to the library I went, and discovered a real treat. Biggest Flirts, like the majority of YA, is told in the first person, in this case from the point of view of rising senior high schooler Tia Cruz. Floridian Tia's all about the fun: a classic extrovert ("People always tell me I could have a conversation with a rock" [186]), Tia would much rather spend time hanging out drinking beer with her friends, or hooking up with a sexy guy, than taking on anything that has the least hint of responsibility about it. She doesn't want to work hard in school (despite her high PSAT scores); she doesn't want to be promoted to be assistant manager of antiques store where she works part time; and she definitely doesn't want to be named captain of the drum corps, responsible for keeping all her fellow marching band percussionists in line, both figuratively and literally.

Tia's seen first-hand what too much responsibility too early can do to a girl. Her mom, who got pregnant with Tia's oldest sister at 17 and had three more daughters in quick succession, later got hooked on painkillers and started stepping out with other men—"She told my dad she was trying to get back something she'd missed out on when they were younger" (230). And all three of Tia's older sisters followed in their mother's early footsteps, dropping out of high school to be with boys who "became the most important people in their lives" (32). Two of them aren't even with the boys anymore, and the other one's relationship isn't very stable. Tia doesn't ever explicitly state that she wants to avoid the stereotypes inflicted on Latina girls (she's half Puerto-Rican), but a passing worry about the appeal (or lack thereof) of her "gangly puertorriqueña" looks suggests that she's aware of the racialized assumptions many in the United States hold. No way does Tia want to end up like her mom or any of her sisters.

With such examples before her, it's hardly surprising, then, that the idea of dating turns Tia completely off. What's different here, though, from the typical YA is that while Tia doesn't want to date, she does want to have sex, and isn't ashamed to acknowledge it. She'll sleep with a guy, but she definitely won't date him, something she's careful to make perfectly clear to any guy with whom she hooks up. Including the hot new guy in school, midwesterner Will Matthews:

   "I think we're sending each other mixed messages," he said.
     "I think I've sent you a very clear message," I corrected him, "and you're choosing not to receive it."
     His hands paused on the bottom button. "You mean you do like what I'm doing right now, but you don't want to date me."
     "Date anybody," I fine-tuned that statement. "See? You do get it." (66)

Tia does not view her behavior as slutty or aberrant, and we don't hear others in the novel denigrating her for it, either. When Tia's overprotective friend Kaye, who has a long-term boyfriend, scolds Tia for taking Will home the same night she first met him—"Girls are supposed to say yes to a date, then no to manhandling. You're not supposed to say yes to manhandling, then no to a date" (73), Tia is quick to point of the hypocrisy of Kaye's statement: "First of all, you are not saying no to the manhandling.... And second, I want the manhandling. I don't want the dating. That stuff is fake anyway. The guy is taking you on dates just so he can manhandle you later. You're not being honest with each other" (73-74). Later, when Tia hears she's been named her senior class's "Biggest Flirt," Tia immediately recognizes the anti-feminist undertones of such an "honor": "I'm not sure I like this. It has a slut-shaming flavor, like they really wanted to give me Biggest Ho" (119). And when Will, who, despite their decidedly non-dating status, is granted the male half of the "Biggest Flirt" title right along with Tia and starts to blame her for the unwanted moniker,  Tia calls him on his sexism: "Cheap shot, but you have taken on an accusatory tone. You're standing here blaming me when we both got elected Biggest Flirt. We achieved that honor together. It's like a guy blaming a girl for getting pregnant" (122). Tia knows her feminist principles, and will not allow others to get away with making sexism comments or assumptions about her or her behavior.

Yet Biggest Flirts is a romance novel, and the genre demands that any book within its bounds has to end with a happily-ever-after, or at least, a happy-for-now. And in particular, one that celebrates the creation of a new romantic relationship. In order for this to happen in Biggest Flirts, Tia's objection to dating has to be reinterpreted. Tia's refusal to date, which might have been seen as a wise decision, to hold off on getting too involved with another person at such a young age, instead becomes a psychological problem: a refusal to trust in the goodness of love. As Tia explains to Will:

"It's not just a sex thing. You can have a boyfriend without having sex. You can have sex without getting pregs. It's not the sex that messes people up. It's love. You can have sex and protect yourself and still keep out of trouble. It's love that starts to tangle everything up, and makes you think that an army private who's been to juvie would  make a great dad, and that seventeen is the perfect age to start a family. When my sisters and I used to talk about sex, it wasn't embarrassing as long as we were being honest. It's love that confuses things and makes you unable to explain later why you didn't use a condom. Love and pressure and the feeling that you're everything when you're with this guy, and when he leaves you, you're less than you were before. If you fall in love, you attach yourself to somebody, and you can't do what you want ever again." (233)

But only a few pages later, Tia is declaring her love for Will, and is starting to believe that her "fear of having a boyfriend seemed immature" (283). Friend Kaye, whose advice earlier in the novel Tia rejected as sexist and hypocritical, now serves as the mouthpiece for compulsory heterosexuality:

     "You've watched your sisters make mistakes. You're younger, so you may have seen your mother leaving very differently from the way they saw it. You miss your mom, but instead of trying to fix your life by filling her shoes, you avoid further complications by sidestepping responsibility when you can. You have an allergic reaction when you do get put in charge. You stay out of any relationship at all."
     "But that's a good thing," I defended myself. "I'm a lot better off than my sisters."
     "But what if you don't change?" Kaye asked. "At some point when you're older, you're going to look around and see that everybody is in a relationship while you're alone. And pretty much everybody in your high school classes will have gone off to college." (286)

Tia's refusal of responsibility is conflated with her refusal to have a boyfriend, both cast as problems Tia must overcome. By book's end, then, not only has Tia begun to stop sabotaging her future, has taken a few steps toward greater responsibility at home, at school, and in the band; she has also agreed to try dating Will. The happy ending required of the romance genre—that Will and Tia be together by book's end—can't help but undercut to some extent the book's earlier assertion that casual hooking up is nothing to be ashamed of, may even be a wise life decision for a woman on the verge of adulthood.

Rejecting the Horror of Sex: Charlotte Stein's INTRUSION

Do you like scary stories? I enjoy a creepy tale every now and then, but I have to admit that I avoid true horror, especially horror films, like the plague. I have enough trouble coping with anxieties and fears of my own; the idea that anyone might enjoy watching or reading about other people who are stalked, attacked, and violently murdered strikes me as close to incomprehensible. Especially because in American horror films, the "other people" being stalked, attacked, and killed tend to be women. In particular, women who desire, or actually engage in, sexual behavior. I can't imagine that watching women being punished for being sexual would in any way, shape, or form be a pleasure.

Perhaps that's why I so enjoyed Charlotte Stein's latest novella, Intrusion. Stein's romance fiction often dances on the edge of the creepy, but Intrusion engages more directly with horror and its tropes than any other of her works I've read. Not to endorse horror's misogynistic agenda, but instead to challenge it.

Clarice Starling: defeating horror, gun in hand

Stein's story opens with female fear, in particular, fear of a man: "I know he has my dog." The initially unnamed first-person narrator is in search of her missing pet, and neighborhood rumors about the strange recluse living down the block have her half-convinced that the man must know something about the pet's whereabouts: "Psychopaths and maniacs steal animals. And if I am honest, his house looks like the home of someone who does that sort of thing. I'm certain I saw it once on True Serial Killer Stories" (Kindle Loc 34).  She'd like to believe herself a Clarice Starling (heroine of that classic horror film Silence of the Lambs), but unlike Clarice, she has nothing close to a gun. Despite her lack of firearm, and despite a past trauma that has her convinced that "Nothing will ever make me strong again in the way I was before," (Loc 57), our narrator finds herself in her reclusive neighbor's yard, wavering between imagining the impending confrontation as "some empowering exercise, winning one over on a guy who decided to take something from me" and fearing "something very bad indeed" will confront her if she ever knocks on the door (Loc 57).

But our narrator doesn't have to knock; the strange man opens the door, just a sliver, at her approach. She makes her accusation, and he doesn't reply; he simply closes the door without saying a word. Only after she marches back across the street does she understand the significance of the chain the man kept across his door: "People put chains on their doors when they are afraid of you. Not when they want you to be afraid of them" (Loc 89). Rather than a terror like those that haunt her nightmares, might her reclusive neighbor be just as afraid as she is? Could what drove her across the street be less fear for her dog (who of course is waiting for her when she returns home), and more curiosity about a person who is in many ways acting the way she worries she might, if she ever gives in to her fears?

Sleepwalking, apologies, and thank-yous bring our narrator (whose name we find out is Beth) back in contact with her mysterious neighbor, who turns out to be just as strange, and just as wary, as Beth is herself. For Noah Gideon Grant, a former criminologist and forensic psychologist, has experienced trauma worthy of the most chilling horror flick. Unlike the audience of a horror film, though, Noah has no ability to distance himself from the terror, is able to gain no catharsis by telling himself "oh, this isn't real." Because Noah has in truth been traumatized by what horror films typically offer up as over-the-top, fake, performed entertainment: witnessing the sexual violation and murder of women.

Despite their growing friendship, and their obvious physical attraction, Noah and Beth's previous history with violent men makes any kind of romantic relationship difficult to navigate. Only when they begin to unlock each other's psychological truths, to understand what boundaries are important, what boundaries can be pushed, can they recoup the pleasure in being kind to another, in experiencing sexual desire.

Who would you rather be? Halloween's Laurie
Strode? Or Silence of the Lambs' Clarice?

I initially found myself annoyed when, at the end of Intrusion, Stein's story takes us right back to the horror film plot, with the inevitable confrontation scene with a villain from the past. But form mirrors ideology here; recovery from trauma is not a straightforward, linear process, Stein insists, but one that forces victims to confront and re-confront their trauma. Just like the villain in a horror film, the effects of trauma return, again and again. And Stein's invocation of what film scholar Donato Totaro calls "the final girl" scene, where the one (virginal) girl left standing vanquishes the serial killer, plays with gender in ways that do not simply echo, but re-imagine, the patriarchal assumptions of horror.

Charlotte Stein

Intrusion

Avon Impulse, 2014

Dukes: The 0.0001735%

I've been searching for the source of the conventional wisdom that any historical romance with the word "Duke" in the title will sell better than one without. One Goodreads commenter points to a romance author as the originator of this truism: "I remember Julia Quinn once posted on her FB an advice for one of her author-friends, books with 'Duke' in the title sell better." If Quinn were truly the source, though, one would think that more than just two of her many romances (2000's The Duke and I, and 2008's The Lost Duke of Wyndham) would follow this dictum.

Author Shana Galen writes that it was her editor who told her "dukes sell." Galen concurs:"Women want to read about dukes. I'm a woman, and I want to read about dukes, too." An amazon.com reader echoes the idea that the truism comes from publishers in her story about her conversation with an unnamed author: "I was just talking to a writer when I bought her book at a signing a few months ago and jokingly said, 'Another Duke?" She looked tired as soon as I said it. 'Dukes sell. He was an earl, but my editor made me change him.'"

Editors urge their popular romance writers to endow every historical hero with the highest non-royal rank of the realm in order to increase their sales. Do said editors back up their assertions with actual sales figures, comparing duke books to non-duke books? Or do they simply rely on the wisdom of their Marketing and Sales colleagues? I'd be interested to see hard data from individual publishers, or individual authors, to see whether this claim is at all based on fact. Any historical romance authors out there willing to share their own experiences about the relative sales of their duke and non-duke books?

Whether or not duke books actually outsell their less lofty peers, the truism that they do means that duke books far outnumber their rivals in the marketplace. A quick scan of amazon.com using the search terms "romance" in the subject line and "duke" or other noble epithet in the title line gives us:

550 books with "Duke" in the title
39 books with Marquess, 109 with Marquis = 148
278 Earl books
101 Viscount books
133 Baron books

Coronet of a non-royal duke, with its strawberry leaves

With a little over 31,000 books labeled "historical romance" at amazon, this means that about 1.7% of them use the word "duke" in their title. A small figure, perhaps, but one far larger than the actual number of dukes that existed during the Regency, the period during which many of these books are set.

Pardon me while I crunch a few numbers...

A check of Debrett's Peerage shows that only 25 non-royal dukedoms existed in 1818. Out of a population of 14.4 million people, only 0.0001735%, or one in every 576,000 English people, held the title of duke. Even if we narrow our population figures to the gentry only (about 2% of the total population, or 288,000), we're left with 0.00868%, or one in 1,152. Even if we narrow still further, and take only at those men who held titles (530), we're left with only 4.7%, or one in every 21 noblemen.

Obviously, then, the plethora of dukes in historical romance in no way reflects their actual numbers in real life. The more interesting question, then, perhaps, is not a mathematical one, but an ideological one. Just why do duke books sell better than other books? Or, even if in fact they don't, why do people think they do?

Shana Galen's blog post, "Why Duke's (sic) are so Sexy," argues that women want to read about the highly titled because they want to read about sexy heroes. Galen argues that dukes are sexy because:

• they have power and money
• they have a title, which "makes us think of royalty, which conjures images of country houses, jewels, horse-drawn carriages and the like. It's romantic. It's sigh-worthy."
• they're romantically selective, a selectiveness which grants value to the heroine, and by proxy, to the reader: "They are sought after, and they can choose any woman they want, for the most part. It's sexy to think that a man who can have anyone wants you."

Some questions pop into my mind after reading the above list. First, regarding power and money: Do all women find men who have power and/or money sexy? For those who do, is it watching a man exercise power that is sexy? Or is the power more symbolic? Doesn't the exercise of power involve working, which, in this period, would take a man way from his lady love? Is it a fantasy of not having to think about money (as aristocrats were purportedly not supposed to have to do) that appeals? Do women who find men with power and/or money sexy also believe that the best, or only, way to get either is through a man? Do they not believe they can achieve either on their own?

Cinderella's coach at Disneyland Paris

Second, regarding the "dukes make us think of royalty" argument: This one seems in many ways at odds with the first one. Royalty is about power, or at least it used to be, but this list of images evokes luxury, beauty, and comfort, not politics, war, or any of power's other manifestations. Does this suggest that women are not really that interested in power, but more in the trappings of it? Another thought: why are country houses, jewels, and carriages "romantic"? Are things associated with the past, and/or with money, inherently romantic? Or are we simply transferring a Disney version of royalty onto our historical romance?

Finally, regarding selectivity: When dukes cease to become a scarce commodity, as they have become in the current historical romance marketplace, does the appeal of the selectivity Galen posits come into question? Or are readers willing to suspend their disbelief, as long as any one author does not populate her particular version of the period with too many dukes to maintain the air of selectivity?

Like Sandy at All About Romance, I have to admit my partiality for more realistic portrayals of the life of a duke, such as Mary Balogh's in 2004's Slightly Dangerous. Her Duke of Bedwyn is not freed, but rather is weighted down by, the heavy responsibilities of managing his dukedom's extensive properties and serving as the head of his often trouble-prone family.

But I must be in the minority, if it's true that books with "duke" in the title really do sell better than other historical romances...


What do you make of the current plethora of duke books in the marketplace? As a reader, do you find dukes more sexy than other aristocrats? Does seeing the word "duke" on the cover make you more likely to open your wallet?



Photo credits:
Ducal Coronet: Stalking the Belle Epoque
Cinderella's Coach: Disneylicious

Individualist Feminism in Julie James

Julie James has made a name for herself writing contemporary romances featuring strong, successful, career-oriented professional heroines. Whether they are corporate lawyers, Assistant U. S. Attorneys, or owners of their own businesses, James' heroines get ahead through a heady combination of ambition and intelligence, and are drawn to men who share their competitive drive. Rarely do they have to worry about hiding their light under a bushel in order to find romance, as she crafts heroes who find smart, self-confident, successful women enticing, not emasculating.

Highly educated career women looking for reflections of themselves in romance will not be disappointed by James' latest offering. Love, Irresistibly details the budding romance between Brooke Parker, general counsel for Sterling Restaurants, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Cade Morgan, a former college football star who channeled his athletic drive into the law after suffering a career-ending injury. The two meet during a sting operation requiring the U.S. Attorney's office to bug a restaurant to capture a corrupt state senator; internet harassment of Sterling's CEO and a thieving general manager at one of the corporation's restaurants throw the warily attracted lawyers together often enough to convince them that a friendly hookup now and then might be worth making time for in their busy schedules. These lawyerly problems serve as realistic but not too intrusive background to the real story, the internal problems keeping Cade and Brooke from turning their casual relationship into something with a bit more of a commitment to it.

On Brooke's part, the sheer number of hours she works have made dating, never mind seeing a man on a regular basis, nearly impossible. Having lived in an upscale suburb of Chicago, but without the money to participate in the things most of her fellow schoolmates took for granted, Brooke has always worked especially hard—in college, at law school, and in all of the jobs she's taken on since. But at the start of the book, the third boyfriend she's had since starting work at Sterling has dumped her, and for the same reason the other two had: she works incessantly, and he's starting to think about "getting married, having kids, the big picture [and] I don't see a woman like you in that big picture" (10).

Cade is a hard worker, too, but his past relationship problems stem more from his inability to open up emotionally to anyone than to casework overload. He attempts to hide his failings by chalking them up to traditional masculinity when his latest girlfriend dumps him:

"Fine. You want me to elaborate, I will. Here's the deal. I'm a guy. Genrerally speaking, we're pretty simple folk. I know women always want to think we have these deep, romantic, and emotionally angsty thoughts going on in our heads, but in reality? Not so much. You women have layers and you're complicated and mysterious and you say one thing, but you really mean another, and it's this whole tricky package that intrigues us and scares us and challenges us all at the same time. But men aren't like that. You talk about me not letting you in, but maybe what you don't realize is this: there is no in... What you see is what you get." (33).

But even Cade can't buy his own bullshit, not after he catches glimpses of Brooke's "in," the vulnerability lurking under her "dry-humored, nothing-gets-to-me exterior" (128). Part of him wants more, but part of him thinks the post-sex afterglow is too damned dangerous: "Because to get in with a woman like Brooke, he would need to let her in, too. And that was something he... just didn't do, wasn't sure he knew how to do, even if he wanted to" (129). After being abandoned not just once, but twice, as a child by his father, Cade's not just the opening up type.

Well-written romances that not only address the problems of work/life balance and the need for both women and men to acknowledge and share their emotions, but also include smoking hot sex scenes, are rare enough to warrant a mention on RNFF. And the resolution of Cade's problems works wonderfully within the context of feminist values: not an easy, fairy-tale family reunion, but a slow recognition of his own self-defeating emotional patterns, and an acceptance of the same in the people who have let him down.

Yet the resolution of Brooke's inner conflict leaves me with an uncomfortable, distinctly unfeminist feeling. Or at least a feeling I'm encountering a feminism distinctly at odds with my own. [SPOILERS AHEAD—stop reading here if you'd prefer to find out the ending yourself...]

And it's not because Brooke gives up the opportunity to take on an even more high-powered corporate job, an opportunity with a much larger rival company that would require her not only to work even longer hours, but move halfway across the country. Despite the hefty increase in paycheck, stock options, and bonuses the rival company offers, it's clear that turning down a job that will make Brooke's work-life balance even more out of whack than it already is ("There was busy, and then there was crap-when's-the-last-time-I-called-my-parents busy" Brooke realizes [235]) is the right decision, whether Brooke's relationship with Cade prospers or fizzles. Giving in to the ever-increasing demands of anti-family corporate culture is not a feminist move, no matter how lucrative the rewards.

Yet the ease with which Brooke is able to come up with a solution to her problem—negotiating with her current boss to create better work-life balance for herself, by proving that such a move will actually be in the company's financial interests—gives me pause. On the surface, it clearly looks like a feminist win. Brooke doesn't rely on anyone else, especially a man, to rescue her, to come up with a solution to her dilemma. She keeps her job with a company whose values she believes in. And she acts for her own benefit, not so she can keep her job in Chicago and thus be with boyfriend Cade. What's not to like about that?

Ironically, by making Brooke the author of the solution to her own problem, James' romance suggests that only women who first give in to the anti-family demands of the corporate world, as Brooke has for much of her career, will have the leverage to demand work-life balance later in their careers. And by making her solution a solution that speaks only to one individual's problem, rather than to the work-life balance that the majority of working women face, the novel perpetuates the common myth that our work-life decisions are shaped solely by our own individual choices, rather than by a combination of choice, corporate culture, and government policy. As Laura Liswood, the co-founder of The Council of Women World Leaders, recently argued on the Huffington Post blog, "Having it all isn't just determined by a person's or family's choices. Those choices are informed and even forced by policy, customs, structures that are way beyond the control of the individual. The outside forces shape a woman's choices (and more and more men's choices) whether she realizes it or not." The more we continue to view such decisions solely in terms of individual feminist choices, the more difficult it will be to muster the political will to advocate for corporate and government change.

I'd like to think that the limitations of the novel form itself—its focus on individual triumphs and achievements over group activism and change—are what determined James' choice of ending for her otherwise feminist novel, not any conservative political bent hiding beneath a feminist veneer. But Brooke's offhand comment about the high cost of responding to "ridiculously onerous IDHR charges" during her negotiations with her boss gives me pause. I'm not a legal eagle, but I'm guessing that IDHR refers to the Illinois Department of Human Rights, the government office that administers the Illinois Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in that state. Now that she's negotiated not only work-life balance for herself, but an equity stake in the Sterling Restaurants, will Brooke be promoting more family-friendly policies throughout the corporation? Or will she consider such policies as "ridiculously onerous" as responding to charges of discrimination seem to be?

Wouldn't it be interesting if James were to write a romance about a sex-discrimination lawsuit in which the opposing counsel fall for one another? And if the lawyer prosecuting the case were a man, and the woman defending the company against the charges were a woman?


Illustration credits:
World's Greatest Workaholic: zazzle.com
Emotionally Unavailable shirt: Look Human.com
Work Life Balance: Mariashriver.com

Julie James, Love Irresistibly

Berkley, 2013

Next time on RNFF

A review of Laura Vivanco's For Love and Money

Laughing with the Conventions: Eloisa James' YOUR WICKED WAYS

All genres have their own conventions, patterns of form, style, and content that differentiate one genre from another. A tragedy must end badly to be a tragedy; a metaphysical poem must include a metaphysical conceit or pun; a melodrama must include an out-an-out evil villain. Romance novels, of course, are no exception. Plots that focus on courtship, a tone of hope rather than despair, a story that concludes happily—all must be present in order for a romance to make sense as romance.

In addition to genre-defining conventions, many literary genres also develop historically-specific conventions, conventions that change over time. Such conventions flourish for a short while, then give way to new patterns, different types of events, characters, or settings as history moves on. For example, in the opening chapter of Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels, Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan describe the conventions of romances published in the 1970s, then note how books published since the late 1980s feature quite different patterns: romances that were once solely written from the heroine's point of view shifting to include both heroine's and hero's viewpoints; the gradual disappearance of the rapist hero; the rise of romances that mention birth control. Though more recent romances still feature courtship, a hopeful tone, and happy endings, they've left behind many other non-genre-defining patterns, conventions that would feel dated to today's readers.
 

Snoopy plays with genre conventions, not entirely successfully...

Conventions are often ripe for poking fun at, not only by writers who have little respect for a genre, but also by its most innovative practitioners. A romance writer tired of, or ideologically opposed to, a certain convention might call readers' attention to its more absurd aspects, not only making readers laugh at it, but pointing to the ideology behind said convention, an ideology readers might prefer to do without. And if other romance writers follow said innovator's lead, one convention may disappear, and be replaced by a new one.
 
One such romance convention that I've been thinking about lately is "sex will always be fantabulously out-of-this-world—once I find my True Love." I don't know about you, but my first experience of sexual intercourse was not all that great. Neither was my second, or my third. In fact, it took a good long while for me and my partner at the time to figure the whole sex thing out, inexperienced practitioners that we were. Scientists and sociologists who have studied first heterosexual intercourse confirm that such a pattern is far more common than the one depicted in most romances. These studies consistently find that women find less pleasure in first intercourse than do their male partners; one 2010 study found that 52% of women experienced pain, only 34% reported physical satisfaction, and a mere 11% reported experiencing orgasm during their first intercourse. I haven't seen studies that look at experiences beyond the loss of virginity, but I'd guess that the satisfaction rate doesn't shoot up overnight from 34% to 100%, but instead only gradually increases over time, as young women gain knowledge both of their own bodies and of the act of sex itself.

Though the fantasy of ideal sex with one's beloved might be appealing for sexually experienced readers, younger readers who have yet to cross the virginity barrier might find themselves unpleasantly surprised by their initial sexual intercourse if romance novels have served as their primary source of sexual information. Perhaps this is why I so enjoy romance novels that poke fun at the convention of a heroine's virginity giving immediate way to earthshattering, blind-blowing intercourse once she's found her One True Love. One of my favorites is Eloisa' James Regency-set comedy Your Wicked Ways (2004). Not only does James make us laugh at the romance convention that as long as you're in love, the sex will always great, she does it with wit, charm, and a warmhearted sympathy for both her less than rakishly-experienced hero and her sexually self-doubting heroine.

Helene, Countess Godwin, and her husband Rees Holland have been separated for nearly a decade, Rees having thrown his wife of only a few weeks out of the house after she dumped a chamber pot over him. Serving as supporting role characters in the previous three books in James' Duchess quartet (Duchess in Love, Fool for Love, and A Wild Pursuit), Helene and Rees provide the comic counterpoint of the amorously disillusioned as their friends fall in love around them. 

Yet Rees and Helene's relationship began as a love-match, Your Wicked Way reveals: the seventeen-year-old Helene and a not much older Rees fell in love over the piano. Both musicians, they would often steal away from a ball or party to discuss each others compositions, and to exchange a few heated kisses. Despite having the approval of Helene's parents, the two chose to elope to Gretna Green, high on the romance of their own newfound amour.

Yet when sex is introduced into the equation, la vie en rose of young love all too rapidly gives way to the snarkiness of wounded feelings. The insults that flew fast and furious during previous books, and continue in this one, have an added poignancy now, as readers gradually come to see how both Rees and Helene are attempting to protect their own vulnerabilities in the face of their own mistakes, particularly their laughably disastrous wedding night, and the increasingly hurtful sexual encounters that follow it.

After living a life of spotless respectability for nearly ten years,  Helene decides she wants a baby, even if Rees won't give her a divorce and allow her to remarry. As she begins her search for a potential lover/father, Rees, advised of Helene's plans by her friend, pragmatically offers his own services. After all, it wouldn't be fair to his brother for a child not of their blood to inherit Rees's earldom, would it? Besides, he doesn't want Helene's feelings to be hurt when no eligible man expresses an interest in his scrawny, belligerent wife.

Rees has only two conditions: Helen must  move back into Godwin House, and she must help him complete his current opera, a project that has come to a standstill in the wake of the marriage of Rees's best friend, Darby, and Rees's longing for the "same kind of fire that burned" between Darby and his bride. Add Rees's brother, a minister, as well as Rees's current (and quite bored) mistress, both of whom also currently reside at Godwin House, and the double entendres, sarcastic quips, and hilariously surprising conversations bubble forth like the frothiest of champagnes:

    "If it is quite all right with you, I would like to borrow him once a day.... From what I remember, I only need around five minutes of Rees's time," [Helene] told Miss McKenna.
     "Sometimes Rees is good for seven minutes," Miss McKenna said with just a hint of laughter in her voice. "I would give him the benefit of the doubt."
     "Seven minutes!" Helene exclaimed. "How nice to know that one's husband has matured a whole two minutes in the past nine years."
     "I like a man to have ambition, don't you?" Miss McKenna said, taking a sip of wine. (169-70).

As they work together on the opera, Rees and Helene gradually remember why it was they came to care for one another. And with the maturity of an additional ten years, and a little soul searching, they each find the courage to reveal their vulnerabilities to one another, rather than hiding them behind the protective armor of insult and slight.

And as they grow closer emotionally, Helene and Rees also grow more sexually compatible. Not simply because love must lead to great sex, but rather because each works to discover what it is that the other needs in order to take pleasure from each other's bodies, and from their own.

Many romance novels construct sex as an act that people in love must already know how to perform; in contrast, Helene and Rees show that in order to perform sex with any degree of success, one must diligently study one's role, paying careful attention to the cues of the person with whom one takes the the sexual stage.

What other romance novels can you think of that open with a bad sexual relationship between the hero and heroine, a relationship that gradually transforms over the course of the novel? Or that discuss the difficulties adding sex to a relationship can raise?

Eloisa James, Your Wicked Ways. Book for in the Duchesses quartet. Avon, 2004.











Photo/Illustration credits:
• Snoopy playing with conventions: Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life
• Romance novels: Shannon Simbulan, Flickr
• 1-star lover: Spreadshirt
• Doing it fast: Michael Crawford, Condenast store

Next time on RNFF:

Heterosexuality and feminism, strange and uncomfortable bedfellows?

 



 

It don't breakeven... Gayle Forman's WHERE SHE WENT

 RNFF Book Review





After spending six+ hours in a car with a fourteen-year-old this past weekend, I have first-hand evidence that the songs on just about every pop music station are almost always about falling in love. Running a close second, however, are songs about falling out of it. While Neil Sedaka famously crooned that breaking up is hard to do, apparently singing about the end of a relationship is not nearly so tough.

Unlike pop music, popular romance fiction rarely focuses on the breakup, at least a final, absolute breakup between two lovers who truly care for one another. Instead, romance offers the trope of the separated lovers, their relationship broken apart (usually through no fault of their own) sometime in the past, before the action of the novel begins. During the course of the typical separated lovers story, the hero and heroine recognize the signs they misread, or discover the evil figures who tricked them apart (cruel parents, jealous siblings, rival lovers), and mend the breaks that have kept them apart, making them miserable for months (or more often, years).

Young Adult romance* rarely features the separated lovers trope; given the typical age of its protagonists and their relative lack of romantic experience compared to their adult romance brethren, such a finding is not that surprising. To discover a YA romance that dances on the edge between breakup and separated lovers is rare in itself, but to find one that also tells its story from the point of view of the male in the relationship seems well worth looking at from a feminist perspective. Especially when the writing in the book is as good as it is in Gayle Forman's Where She Went.


Back in high school, Adam Wilde and Mia Hall were known as "Groovy and the Geek." Adam wrote songs and played guitar in an emo-core punk band, while Mia devoted herself to classical cello. The story of how two such disparate teens came together, as well as the horrific accident that broke apart Mia's family, is told in Forman's previous novel, If I Stay. Where She Went begins three years later, long after Mia, who moved to New York City to study at Julliard, gradually stopped returning Adam's texts and phone calls. The action of the novel, told in the immediacy of the present tense, unfolds over a single night and day; Adam recounts the events that led up to this day via memories interpolated between the current action.

In the now, Adam's a troubled, alienated rock star, having risen to fame on the strength of the songs he wrote after Mia dumped him (lyrics from that album—Collateral Damage—serve as epigraphs for the book's even-numbered chapters). Both on the verge of leaving for a 3-month tour of Europe and on the verge of a personal breakdown, Adam attempts  to lessen the anxiety caused by the grind of the spotlight, unresolved grief, and an overly inquisitive reporter by walking the streets of the city alone. But instead of finding the solace he seeks, Adam comes across a poster advertising that evening's performance at Carnegie Hall: YOUNG CONCERT SERIES PRESENTS MIA HALL. Deciding to violate "the three-year restraining order she basically put out on me," Adam buys a rush ticket, telling himself he'll be content to hear Mia even if he can't see her (54).

Zankel Hall, at Carnegie Hall

But such is the fame of Shooting Star and its lead songwriter that even the crew at Carnegie Hall recognizes Adam. Instead of signing the expected autographs, though, he finds himself being invited backstage. To see Mia, the girl who told him she loved him more than life itself before she stepped on the plane to New York three years ago. To Mia, the girl who never came back.


Mia, on the verge of departing for her own concert tour to Japan, invites Adam to accompany her on a farewell tour of NYC. But will it also a final farewell to Adam, providing closure to their unofficial breakup, a closure Mia never gave him? During the night and day that follows, Adam and Mia dance painfully along the edge of revelation, the weight of what isn't said far more meaningful than the awkward commonplaces that are all either can initially bring themselves to offer. Later, as Mia gradually begins to tell Adam about her life since leaving him, and her feelings about the accident and her lost family, Adam cannot stop himself from reading each statement as a potential rejection. But finally he allows an unscripted emotion to escape, discovering the courage, or perhaps the anger, to ask Mia why she left.

Forman doesn't offer the typical romance excuses of a misunderstanding, or interfering friends or parents; instead, Mia's heartbreaking answers point to the pain even those we love, and who love us, can cause. Even when (perhaps especially when) they are trying their hardest to help:


     "All I wanted was for you to be okay. All I wanted was to help you. I would've done anything."
     She drops her chin to her chest. "Yes, I know. You wanted to rescue me."
     "Damn, Mia. You say that like it's a bad thing."
     She looks up at me. The sympathy is still in her eyes, but there's something else now, too: a fierceness; it slices up my anger and reconstitutes it as dread.
     "You were so busy trying to be my savior that you left me all alone," she says. "I know you were trying to help, but it just felt, at the time, like you were pushing me away, keeping things from me for my own good and making me more of a victim." (184)

Unwilling to continue to play the victim, Mia makes the (feminist) choice to reject self-sacrifice, even if it means sacrificing her relationship with the man she loves:

"You wrote, 'She says I have to pick: choose you, or choose me. She's the last one standing.' I don't know. When I heard 'Roulette' I just thought you did understand. That you were angry, but you knew. I had to choose me."
     "That's your excuse for dropping me without a word? There's cowardly, Mia. And then there's cruel! Is that who you've become?"
    "Maybe it was who I needed to be for a while." (186-87)

Forman's novel contains many other understated feminist moments. One of my favorites is Adam's dismay at the realization that he's allowed himself to degenerate from being a "Man" to being a mere "Guy": 

     One day she'd told me that they'd decided that my gender was divvied into two neat piles: Men and Guys. Basically, all the saints of the world: Men. The jerks, the players, the wet T-shirt contest aficionados? They were Guys. Back then I was a Man....
     She's right. I am a Guy now. And I can peg the precise night I turned into one. (144-45)

Others include his recognition of what playing music really means, and especially the decision he makes about the direction his career will take once's his finally made his peace with Mia. Needless to say, this is not a book that makes a heroine give up what she loves doing in order to be with her man.

On which side of the breakup/separated lovers divide does Adam and Mia's story ultimately end? That Forman manages to keep readers unsure even up until the final chapters is not only a testament to her skills as a writer, but also to her ability to re-create a unique, and feminist, romance by experimenting at the boundaries of existing genre tropes.
 

 Gayle Forman, Where She Went. New York: Dutton, 2011.







*Unlike the RWA, which, through its recent change in their RITA award qualifications, has narrowed its definition of "romance" for the YA audience, I take a broader view in this blog, considering literary YA fiction as well as that packaged specifically as "romance."
  

Photo/Illustration credits:
• Cello ribbons & bows: Luana Krause 
• Zankel Hall: Robert Silman Associates
• Les Paul Junior Guitar: Top Guitars

Next time on RNFF: The origins of the phrase "pornography for women"