A Dark Heroine for Dark Times: Victoria Helen Stone's JANE DOE

What's the next word that pops into your head after someone says the word "sociopath"? I'm betting that "romance" or "heroine" are not likely to make your short list.

And perhaps it's not quite fair to term Victoria Helen Stone's latest novel, Jane Doe, a romance. A work of suspense, definitely. A novel of romantic suspense, yes—but only if you welcome a work in that sub-genre that doesn't depend on putting a female body in danger for its major thrills. Jane Doe starts, in fact, after violence has already been visited upon a female body, the body of the narrator's best friend, Meg. Meg has been subject to both verbal and physical abuse: the former at the hands of her manipulative former boyfriend, Steven Hepsworth; the latter at her own hands, through the one act of control Meg can take: killing herself.

Bringing Meg back isn't possible. But avenging her death certainly is, especially for a person like Jane. When Jane was a kid, she knew she was different from most people. Especially her emotional, melodramatic family. As Jane explains, she didn't feel sorry for her older brother when he was sent to jail for selling stolen goods out of the back of her car, like her parents and grandmother did; it only seemed logical. Being white, Jane reasoned, her brother's sentence was far more lenient than those given out to many men of color in the same situation, so why complain? Besides, she knew what a lazy, shiftless guy he was. Hadn't he only gotten what he deserved? "Nasty, cold-blooded, selfish, grasping, uppity, ungrateful goddamn little bitch," her family replies (37).

And Jane can't disagree. She doesn't feel emotions, unlike most other people do, or rather, she has some emotions, but she "can usually choose when to feel them. And more important, I choose when not to" (5). A situation stemming in part from her own childhood, raised by careless, selfish, at times abusive parents who allowed her to be abused by others as well.

Jane didn't understand what she terms her "disability" until she took a Psychology elective her senior year of high school, and came across the concept of sociopathy, or what the current DSM Manual labels "Antisocial Personality Disorder." Reading about all the serial killers and other criminals labeled as sociopaths, Jane was at first upset by her discovery. But further research reassured her: "Most people like me don't grow up to be killers. We lie and manipulate and take advantage, but usually that just makes us great at business. Yay for capitalism" (37).

One feeling Jane does allow herself is loyalty to Meg, the single person who stood as her friend despite her oddball lack of social graces. And so after Meg takes her own life after years of being alternately praised and then denigrated by Steven, Jane decides to take revenge into her own hands. Who better than a sociopath to bring down a sexist, manipulative, self-righteous man?

To that end, Jane takes a leave of absence from her high-powered financial job in Malaysia and scores a job working in data entry in Minneapolis—at an office whose supervisor just happens to be Steven. Knowing just what kind of woman Stephen goes for from all her long phone conversations with an emotionally upset Meg, Jane dons the mask of shy, uncertain, easily controlled girl and performs it for Stephen's benefit.

And Steven is instantly smitten.

Steven, of course, us completely unaware that all the while Jane is narrating a running commentary about Steven's own manipulations, selfishness, and lack of empathy. Is Jane the real sociopath, here? Or is Steven?

Jane's plan is to worm her way into Steven's life, even to the extent of becoming his girlfriend, so that she can get close enough to find out his "weakest point" and then exploit it, so that he will "live in misery for years" (39). As Jane explains it:

This relationship will be tedious and nearly unbearable, but the end will justify the means. Maybe I'll destroy his family. Maybe I'll set him up for embezzlement. Maybe I'll kill him. I'll find what's most important to him and then I'll take it away. However that plays out is fine with me.  (29)

By acting as if she has a Meg-like personality, Jane shows the reader rather than just tells what it is that a man like Stephen needs from a woman—and worse, what a woman has to hide and suppress of her own thoughts, needs, and desires in order to prove herself "worthy" of a man like Stephen. Jane's acerbic commentary only adds to the biting gender critique:

I nod but let him see that I'm shaken by the very idea of putting out. A woman shouldn't have her own sexual needs. My role is to resist. That makes me a nice girl. (17)

After all, everyone knows that women are responsible for how men behave. If we're not careful, they might decide to take what they want. They can't help it. But somehow I'm the one with the psychological impairment. (61)

In the first years of our friendship, I was fascinated by the way Meg interacted with me. She always made herself smaller, and they always loved it. At first I admired it as manipulation, but I later realized that once she'd established herself as small, she couldn't make herself bigger again.... She would shrug and say she felt shy with men she liked, but that wasn't it. It wasn't shyness. It was fading. She dimmed her light to make a certain kind of man feel vibrant. And it worked. (71-72)

But during the early days of her campaign against Stephen, Jane runs into someone she knows from college—an old boyfriend, Luke, who seems eager to take up with her again. As Jane and Luke begin to become reacquainted, the reader is again show the difference between a man who uses a woman for his own benefit, and a man who wants to engage with a romantic partner for their mutual pleasure and joy.

Will Jane kill Stephen? Will she dig up some good dirt on him, and share it with friends, family, and members of his father's church? Or will Luke find out about her vengeance plot and insist she stop or he'll leave her? Or might Luke convince her that turning the other cheek is better than demanding an eye for an eye?

With so many commentators today suggesting that the #metoo movement has unleashed indiscriminate female anger, anger uncaring of the innocence or guilt of the men it targets, it seems a stroke of genius to create an female figure of vengeance who is not driven at all by emotions.

A fascinating, on-point inversion of the woman-as-crazy-stalker trope familiar from the film Fatal Attraction and its many followers, replacing the misogyny of the male infidelity morality tale with a razor-sharp critique of the misogyny inherent in patriarchy.

Victoria Helen Stone

Jane Doe

Lake Union Publishing, 2018

Lesbian Romantic Suspense: Mason Dixon's DATE WITH DESTINY and Andrea Bramhall's CLEAN SLATE

During my summer vacation, as part of my ongoing project to read and review all of the books nominated for this past year's Lambda Award for best Lesbian Romance, I took on two books that can also be considered works of romantic suspense. Both Mason Dixon's Date with Destiny and Andrea Bramhall's Clean Slate feature heroines whose lives, and loves, are under threat. Would that threat stem from the fact that both protagonists are out lesbians, I wondered? Or would the danger result from something completely unrelated to the heroines' sexual identities?

The answer is slightly different for each book. In Date with Destiny, Rashida Ivey has been off the dating market for the past two years, throwing herself into her work as district operations manager for Savannah, Georgia's Low Country Savings Bank after her break-up with her partner of six years. But when Rashida accidentally dumps her coffee on another patron at her local GLBTQ coffee-shop, she finds herself immediately drawn to the attractive butch with the unusual name of Destiny. Destiny, out of work and looking for a job in the want ads, isn't someone professional Rashida, who has worked hard to pull herself up from her working-class roots, would be drawn to in the normal course of events. But when their paths cross again, and Destiny's background as a security guard comes up, Rashida suggests she apply for a job at one of her bank's branches. The fact that it's against company policy to fraternize with a fellow employee makes Rashida more than reluctant to pursue a relationship with Destiny, but the heat that sizzles between them has the usually rule-abiding Rashida tossing the rules to the wind. Rashida's referral of Destiny stands the bank in good stead, though: she discovers an embezzler, and helps rescue bank patrons during an elevator fire. But when Rashida is threatened with incriminating photos of her trysting with Destiny (accompanied by the kindly note "Is this any way for a reputable business woman to behave? Obviously, you can take the girl out of the 'hood, but you can't take the 'hood out of the girl"), and discovers the threat of a robbery plot, she finds herself questioning the wisdom of placing her romantic life ahead of her job.

It was exciting to read a romance with not just one, but two African-American heroines, as well as one that touches upon class as well as race as a category of identity. Rashida's competence and devotion to her job is made abundantly clear (too much so, perhaps, as the details of bank mergers and security procedures slows down the story's pace), a welcome change from the plethora of stereotypical negative depictions of the black woman in much American popular culture. The narrative structure itself is also interesting, with the first half of the book told from Rashida's point of view, the second relating the same events from Destiny's. For me, the surprise revelation that occurs mid-book wasn't very surprising, alas; I'd guessed it pretty early on, which made the novel's plot feel quite predictable. On the surface, Rashida's lesbian identity seems to play little to no role in the threat which she finds herself facing, but once the villain of the piece is unmasked, sexual identity certainly plays a role, and not a feminist one. Definitely a mixed bag for this reader.

Andrea Bramhall's Clean Slate (the ultimate winner of the 2014 Lambda Award for Lesbian Romance) takes one of the most popular, and most often laughed-at, tropes of category romance—the hero or heroine who's lost his/her memory—and gives it a lesbian spin. After being attacked and viciously beaten, art teacher Morgan Masters wakes up in the hospital thinking it's 1992, not 2014. She doesn't remember her kids (13-year-old Tristan and his younger sister, Maddie); she doesn't remember her mother's death; she doesn't even remember Erin, the woman with whom she's been in love for the past fifteen years. And she certainly doesn't remember that three weeks ago, she asked Erin for a divorce.

Given that Morgan moved out without ever explaining what went wrong, and hasn't seen her family since, Erin feels caught between anger, fear, and guilt, especially when she finds herself even more attracted to the "younger," more carefree version of amnesiac Morgan than she was to her more melancholy wife. Is it really wise to respond to the attraction that Morgan inspires. Can she really take Morgan back, when even Morgan herself can't explain why she left in the first place?

Morgan's lesbian identity certainly plays a role in her being subject to danger; the opening attack (which we as readers witness) appears to be motivated by her attacker's clear prejudice against lesbians. But is this the only reason? Even in this early scene, we are given hints that there's more behind Morgan's beating than a random hate crime. When the motivations behind Morgan's abrupt divorce request come to light, sexual identity once again looms large as a motivating force. The vanquishing of the villain, then, strikes a symbolic blow against all who discriminate and abuse women who choose to live their lives outside of normative heterosexual sexuality.

Clean Slate possesses both the strengths and the weaknesses of much category romance. Its quick pace, heightened emotion, and out-and-out evil villain will likely appeal to readers who don't read for deep characterization and who do not mind a few "why in the heck did she do that?" moments in their plots, as long as the story delivers excitement and angst in equal dollops.

Feminism in Romantic Suspense: Jill Sorenson's BACKWOODS

Jill Sorenson, you're making me eat my words. In a post last year about Robin Schone's The Lover, I asked, "Is there any such thing as a feminist romantic suspense novel?" and suggested the answer was "no." Because romantic suspense, like a related genre, the Gothic, relies so heavily on the threat of violence against women to propel its narrative and to create tension in its readers, I theorized that feminism and romantic suspense might be inherently at odds.

Several readers, including Sorenson, took exception to my overgeneralized and unsubstantiated claim. Sorenson wrote:

I've always thought of romantic suspense as being a little more progressive than other sub-genres. The characters are often evenly matched as far as power and socioeconomic status (vs. the duke and pauper, billionaire and secretary, Dom and sub, etc.). Most RS heroines have established careers. Many of the heroines work in law enforcement, in addition to or instead of the hero. Sure, there are damsels in distress, but not always. For me the appeal is in a protective hero and a strong heroine, who are both in danger and work together to get out.

One of my favs from Sorenson's
backlist

Sorenson herself is an author of romantic suspense, and in the wake of her responses to this post, I borrowed several of her backlist books from the library. I enjoyed all of them—Sorenson is a strong writer, well-versed in creating compelling characters and placing them in a story that keeps you eagerly turning the pages—but none of them quite hit my feminist sweet spot. This weekend, though, as  I raced through her latest, Backwoods, I couldn't stop folding down page corners and marking relevant quotations, eager to write more specifically about what bothers me about much romantic suspense, and how Backwoods refuses to engage with those more disempowering aspects of the sub-genre.

Sorenson argued in another comment to the above-mentioned post that the trope of the "damsel in distress" is "an inherent part of the subgenre," but that "I'm just not sure I agree that it undercuts the image of an empowered woman." She goes on to note, "When the hero is in danger, which is the case in all or most suspense, mystery, and thriller novels, do we see that as not empowered? Only if he can't rescue himself. Often he's challenged by another man or men, so there is no gender inequality to the question." Sorenson seems to be arguing that since we don't regard men as disempowered when they are being chased by a villain, it is sexist to see women being chased by a villain as disempowered. And also, that a heroine in romantic suspense should not be seen as disempowered if she acts to rescue herself, rather than simply being a passive victim waiting for her hero to do all the rescuing for her.

In Backwoods, neither Abby Hammond, nor her college-aged daughter, Brooke, are presented as passive. After Brooke disappears during a hiking trip, Abby is determined to track her kidnappers, refusing to listen to the hero, Nathan Strom, when he tells her she's "not thinking clearly" and threatens to tie her to a tree to keep her from what he considers a foolish pursuit. She attacks and distracts one of the kidnappers when she sees he's poised outside a cave, waiting with a shotgun for Nathan and his son Leo to emerge. And she is able to use her wits (and a surprising source of wire) to break free both from the plastic zip-tie with which the kidnapper restrained her and from the locked cage in which he'd imprisoned her. Brooke uses a different set of skills—her ability to connect with others—to win the sympathy of the second kidnapper. Neither woman plays the passive victim, but instead actively works by herself, and later with others, to rescue herself.

Yet is disempowered female characters the only anti-feminist thing about romantic suspense? I'd like to think a bit harder about the parallel that Sorenson posits between heroes and heroines, pointing out other areas besides self-rescuing that impact a romantic suspense's underlying ideology.

A lot of the romantic suspense that I've read relies on a particularly gendered, sexualized violence, a violence different from that facing a hero in suspense, mystery, and thriller novels. In much romantic suspense, a male villain is after a female victim, often intent on inflicting sexual violence upon her body. This sexual threat seems far less common when a hero is under threat.

Backwoods features just such a villain. Abby, a worried, vigilant sort, notes the disappearances of three different women in the past four years in the area in which they will be hiking. No one else has connected the three, but Abby cannot help but be suspicious. And it turns out her suspicions are correct; the kidnappers focus only on abducting women (even killing one man in order to capture his companion), and for reasons that turn out to have everything to do with sex and sexual violence.

Yet I didn't have the negative response to this trope that I often do in works of romantic suspense. I think it is because Sorenson chooses not to give the reader access to the villain's point of view, as do so many other works of suspense. Such passages work to heighten reader tension, but they always strike me as icky and distinctly sexist, because as a reader, I am being forced to look at the imperiled woman through the eyes of man who sees her as an object, not as a person. Such passages are intended to make me more afraid for the heroine, which they certainly do. But at the same time, by forcing me to see the heroine through his eyes, they simultaneously ask me to objectify her, to both want her for her sexual appeal and to want to punish her for her for the same, just as the villain has/does. No matter how vigorously I reject such an invitation, unless I skip over said passages, I can't but feel complicit in the villain's objectifying, sexualizing, and ultimately punishing gaze. By refusing to include such passages from the villain's POV, Sorenson refuses to extend the sexist invitation.

Sorenson also weaves in several feminist issues in the non-suspense portions of the story, the parts focused on character growth and development. Nathan, the primary hero, forged a successful career in Major League Baseball by following his father's tough-it-out approach, and overcame a slide into alcohol abuse when a former coach kept on his case. His own son, college-aged Leo, though, has little interest in sports, and does not take at all well to Nathan's tough-love parenting style. Talking his difficulties through with Abby, as well as reflecting on his own upbringing and his differences from his son, allow Nathan to begin to realize that there is not just one way of being a real man, and that acting the same way but expecting a different outcome may not be the smartest move to win back his son's trust.

Leo's not only dealing with his anger at his father, but also at his frustration with his stepsister, Brooke (Brooke's father, Abby's ex, is currently married to Leo's mother, Nathan's ex). Brooke, affectionate but rather naive, is free with her hugs and kisses, especially when it comes Leo. Just out of a less-than-ideal first sexual relationship, Brooke wants love and affection, and tries to get it from her stepbrother, roughhousing with him in that way that young adults sometimes do, pushing past then withdrawing back across the boundary between childish wrangling and adult sexualized play. Given that they are step-siblings, and that Brooke's father has threatened Leo against engaging with Brooke in any sexual manner, Leo's feelings about Brooke's actions are more than a little mixed. I can't recall another adult romance novel that addresses the issue of adolescent female sexual aggression at all, never mind in a way that doesn't point the blame at one or other of the parties involved. Sorenson has a real gift for exploring teen sexuality in a nuanced, sympathetic, sex-positive, feminist way; I'm eager to see how Leo and Brooke's relationship (unresolved at the end of this book) plays out in a later work (although I'd appreciate it if Brooke were not placed in the victim's role—being in an earthquake AND being kidnapped seem quite enough for one girl to take...)

So, Jill Sorenson: thanks for proving me wrong. Romantic suspense can be feminist. Particularly when it is written by you.


Photo/illustration credits:
Stop violence: Trauma, Violence, and Human Rights

Jill Sorenson, Backwoods

Harlequin, 2014

ALL BEAUTIFUL THINGS by Nicki Salcedo

After even a quick glance at the publisher's sell copy for All Beautiful Things, a potential reader would be hard-pressed to imagine the book that awaits is anything but a work of romantic suspense. A woman brutally attacked? The brother of the man convicted for the attack convinced he's innocent, and intent on convincing the woman to help him prove it? The romance between them "hot, tender, and almost as dangerous as the hunter who waits in the shadows of the city's darkest streets"?

Not to take anything away from romantic suspense, but Nicki Salcedo's debut novel proves far different from the genre its cover blurb works so hard to evoke. Told primarily through the third-person point of view of Ava Camden, a wealthy Atlanta socialite who was beaten and knifed in the face just after graduating from law school, All Beautiful Things struck me as more of a work of women's fiction with romantic elements than a straight-up romantic suspense. In her depiction of Ava, Salcedo not only paints a compelling portrait of trauma, but also hints at the broader landscape of acceptance, as Ava slowly begins to realize that the "partially broken" person who emerges in trauma's wake is still deserving of, and can actively work toward, happiness. Even if that happiness takes a form unimaginably different from that she once assumed it would.

Even though Ava's father, a member of Atlanta's black business elite, made sure the man accused of assaulting his daughter was speedily tried and convicted, seven years after the attack Ava still has not come to terms with her seemingly inexplicable victimization. Cecil Camden "did things white people told him he could not do. Then later he did things that white people told him he should not do.... Cecil didn't want to be the richest black man. He wanted to be the richest and most successful man in the city. Period. No qualifiers" (12). But despite his success, Cecil had not been able to keep his daughter safe from a white attacker: "Her father had been wrong. Everyone had an equal. Everyone could be brought low" (12). Her father's death shortly after the attack has only exacerbated Ava's feeling that she's been "unborn," that the only thing keeping her alive, keeping her safe, is the anger she continues to nurture toward the man convicted for the attack, Joel Sapphire (42).

Her powerhouse mother, a lawyer, wants Ava to take up the profession for which she was trained, to wear pretty clothes, to be respectable, to be normal once again. But Ava won't, or can't; instead, she spends her afternoons and evenings working in a shelter, where "the men didn't seem to notice or care about her scars, because they had seen so much worse in the world" (22), her nights prowling the city, following the sounds of ambulances and sirens to photograph of the victims of crimes other than her own: "She wasn't insane as long as she had something to photograph. There was too much movement in life. She had to create order and stillness" (34).

Ava tries hard, though, to at least appear somewhat normal; whenever someone asks about her scars, she tells them only what they want to hear: "I had an accident, but now I'm fine." A statement that simultaneously asserts Ava's sanity and prevents the inquirer from gaining any real access to Ava's inner pain. Why shouldn't she use such a distancing platitude, when she's been on the receiving end of so many herself? You are lucky you weren't raped. You are lucky you aren't dead (35). Aren't such platitudes all about denying her pain?

When Graham Sapphire intrudes into her life, Ava's initial reaction is to offer platitudes to him, too. Far better to lie than to have a beautiful white man taking pity on her, especially the brother of the man who attacked her. But Graham sees beyond the platitudes, to something even Ava isn't quite aware she possesses: "He appreciated all beautiful things. As she stood before him poised, scrutinizing every inch of his face, and liable to strike him, he thought she was the most incredible thing he had seen in his life. She didn't step away from fear, she walked up to it" (60). Only after an emotionally harrowing confrontation between the Ava and Graham, one in which Ava is forced to face not only her own anger and pain, but to really see and feel the anger and pain of another, can Ava begin to grab hold of her own courage, her own power. No longer able to keep her pain at a distance through the safety of a camera lens, Ava starts to realize that she's not alone, and that she still has the power to choose, even if the choices available to her are different than the ones she thought she'd have: "If everyone had scars, there are two choices. Bleed to death slowly or stitch yourself together" (161).

Plot-wise, the final confrontation between Ava and her attacker is both melodramatic and a bit anti-climactic, although it's symbolically potent: Ava remembering, Ava planning, Ava choosing to face the man by herself, all highlight her bravery, independence, determination, and courage, characteristics that Ava feared had been cut away the night of her attack.

SPOILER ALERT:

[When I first read the true motivation behind the attack on Ava, I thought Salcedo had returned us to more typical romantic suspense ground: the attack was not a race-based hate crime, but the gendered, sexist one far more common to the genre. But then I began to wonder if the two weren't entwined in a more subtle way than I had first thought. Ava's attacker was white, and assaulted her in order to teach his own [white] partner a lesson—leave me and I'll harm you just as I've harmed her. That this white man chose a black woman's body as the "canvas" for his violent lesson says something quite sickening, yet still far-too-often quite sickeningly true, about the value, or rather, the lack of value, in which white American culture holds black women.]


By the end of the novel, when someone asks, "Ava? How are you?,"  "I had an accident, but now I'm fine" is still the first thing that jumps into her head. But instead of speaking the platitude, Ava is finally able to give voice to the truth of her experience: "Terrible," she finally admits. But "If everyone could be brought low, then everyone could rise up," Ava realizes (144). Even in the face of bigotry, or sexism, or violence. Including Ava herself.


Photo credits:
woman with camera: Whatyonameis.com
camera charm: favim.com

Nicki Salcedo

All Beautiful Things

Belle Books, 2014

Suspenseful Equality: Carolyn Crane's OFF THE EDGE

I've read romantic suspense novels with police officers, detectives, and FBI agents as heroes. With army officers, Navy SEALS, and members of various military special ops groups. Even with spies, thieves, and the occasional assassin. But until last week, when I picked up the second book in Carolyn Crane's Undercover Associates series, I'd never come across a work of romantic suspense featuring an academic in the leading male role.

Or at least, a former academic. American Dr. Peter Maxwell was once happy to spend his days analyzing language, breaking words into smaller sound components, spending "entire months studying the way different people pronounced a dipthong like the ow in low, and draw all kinds of conclusions about what that meant" (20). But after his family and his fiancee are killed during an attack on a Mexican train, Peter turns his academic skills to tracking the terrorists responsible. So successful does his investigation via linguistics prove that he's recruited by a secret cabal, The Associates, a private group devoted to "keeping the balance of power intact," "keeping World War Three from happening," and "stopping the most despicable crimes" (124). After years of training, Peter Maxwell has transformed himself in Macmillan, one of the smartest, as well as the most dangerous, members of the Associates team.

If Henry Higgins had turned to spying...

For his latest mission, Macmillan has come to Bangkok in the guise of a visiting professor, but really to keep a disturbingly advanced remote control drone, a weapon powerful enough to take out an entire airport, and precise enough to target a single man on a crowded street, from falling into criminal hands. If he could only get close enough to hear the conversations of arms dealers who have gathered in a famous Bangkok hotel, he'd be able to use his linguistic analysis skills to hone in on the man who stole the weapon, and shut him down before he can auction off the weapon to the highest bidder. When he realizes that the hotel's lounge singer, a woman whose sentimentally irritating songs have been pissing him off all night, has been recording her set, her equipment right next to the arms dealers, Macmillan knows that seduction and larceny are next on his agenda.

Laney Lancaster, like Macmillan, has come to Bangkok for motives other than what appear on the surface. Having played a vital role in sending her gangster husband to jail, Laney fled the States to avoid being captured by men loyal to her ex. Hiding in plain sight in Thailand, Laney seems a damsel custom-fitted for being rescued from distress.

But Laney, like Macmillan, is far from the typical romantic suspense heroine. Though the opening scene shows her fleeing and hiding after spotting a man she believes worked for her husband, Laney is determined to protect herself, determined never to allow the abusive Rolly to harm or control her ever again. To never allow another man to tell her want she wants, to make her feel small, to turn her into a victim. Her skills with language, as well as her newfound skills with a gun, will make sure of it.

Macmillan may think he's the one in control during their seduction, but Laney's way with language proves just as disarming as his own. For Laney, poetic language is "about connecting with people, not hurting them or isolating them [as her husband uses it]. The dusty old poets Laney so loved—Keats, Byron—they helped her feel less alone, as though she was linking with another soul across time. That was poetry" (9). Macmillan uses language against others, to hide and deceive, to hunt and track, to entice and seduce. But Laney uses language to forge connection, to delve beyond the commonplaces, to flush out the truth. To pull pieces of the old Peter out of Macmillan, pieces he'd long imagined dead: "Peter hadn't lost parts of himself in the train bombing. He'd gained parts of himself. He was all of these things. Lover. Fighter. Scholar. Hunter. Killer."

Peter, like most romantic suspense heroes, feels protective towards Laney, and takes his fair share of punches, insults, and bullets on her behalf (and on behalf of the mission). But it's her courage that he most admires, not her frailty: the courage to forge meaningful connections with others, even after the abuse she suffered from her former husband; the courage to fight with him, to tell him what he doesn't want to hear; the courage to keep hope alive. "That was Laney. A warrior for the people she cared about" (215).

Unlike in much romantic suspense, the emotional thrill of this book doesn't stem primarily from watching its heroine be placed in danger. Instead it's from the danger that both Peter and Laney face together. And from the emotional vulnerability each must risk for the other, if their mission is to succeed. For it will be their ability to work together, rather than Peter's ability to swoop in and rescue, that will bring these two "word nerds" to a fittingly happy, and feminist, ending.


Photo credits:
Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins: Wikimedia
Word Nerd: Melville House

Carolyn Crane

Off the Edge

(Associates #2)

self-published by Carolyn Crane

2013

In Search of Feminist Romantic Suspense: J. D. Robb's NAKED IN DEATH

I've had mixed feelings after reading many of the romances of Nora Roberts, the most popular writer in the genre. While I admire Roberts' clear, concise prose, as well as her ability to craft intriguing plots and sympathetic characters, I often find myself wishing for a touch more variety in the depiction of masculinity of in heroes. Though each have different backgrounds, even different personalities, the choices they make, and the emotional place in which they end up by each book's end, often feels remarkably similar, and homogenizing. What's more, in her more recent books (the Bride quartet, and the Inn at BoonsBoro series, for example), the line between male and female, between masculine and feminine, strikes me as sharply drawn, with characters often speaking of things that women like, or do, or are, vs. things that men prefer. In such books, there's little room for depictions of characters who veer from conventional gender identities, or even acknowledgement that such veering even exists in the real world outside the novels. And while Roberts grants her heroines far more flexibility in characterization than she does her heroes, several of her books seem to include a latent hostility toward women in their depiction of secondary characters (especially toward errant mothers: see for example Seth's mother in the Chesapeake Bay books) that gives me pause.

I've also had mixed feelings about the entire subgenre of romantic suspense, as I've written about in previous post (see here). Given these two sets of mixed feelings, then, it's probably not surprising that up until last week, I hadn't picked up any of the books in Roberts' (writing under the pseudonym J. D. Robb) futuristic police procedural In Death series. But I found myself pleasantly surprised by Naked In Death, even though it has some of the same weaknesses of the romances I note above. I'm sure many of you have already discovered the pleasures of this series, but as a newcomer, I find myself wanting to write about what it is that's making me look forward to picking up volume 2.

Robb's series is set in the New York City of the mid-21st century, futuristic enough to have lasers instead of guns, savvy computers that can calculate the odds of a suspect having committed a specific crime, and a political landscape similar enough to the world of 1995, the year in which its first two volumes were published, to ring familiar, but different enough to make readers think about the ideological assumptions underlying it. Prostitution has been legalized so it can be monitored and controlled; women have safe and easy access to birth control; guns are tightly controlled, so the murder rate is far lower than 1995's. Though a conservative movement is battling to roll back such reforms, it's clear that the book's protagonist, New York City Police and Security Department lieutenant Eve Dallas embraces what she views as progress, especially in regards to women's lives:

"In the year 2016... at the end of the Urban Revolt, before the gun ban, there were over ten thousand deaths and injuries from guns in the borough of Manhattan alone..... Before we legalized prostitution, there was a rape or attempted rape every three seconds. Of course, we still have rape, because it has much less to do with sex than with power, but the figures have dropped. Licensed prostitutes don't have pimps, so they aren't beaten, battered, killed. And they can't use drugs. There was a time when women went to butchers to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. When they had to risk their lives or ruin them. Babies were born blind, deaf, deformed before genetic engineering and the research it made possible to repair in vitro. It's not a perfect world, but you listen to him [a conservative Senator] and you realize it could be a lot worse" (278-79).

In the year 1995, in the midst of Democratic President Bill Clinton's first term of office after the conservativism of the Reagan/Bush years, hope that progressive political change would be the story of the future made Robb's depiction of a female-friendlier mid-21st century America seem likely, not improbable. That the targets of murder in this first book in Robb's series are prostitutes, however, hints at fears that such progress might not come without protest, or even violent backlash.

Robb chooses for a protagonist a woman who has confronted such violence on a personal level, as well as one who fights it on an institutional level. The girl that would grow up to become police officer Eve Dallas was abandoned at the age of eight by her father, a father who sexually abused the child so severely that she cannot even remember her own name, and refuses to remember her past. But Eve is good at compartmentalizing, allowing her to focus on the task at hand rather than allow the past to undermine her. Eve is good at her job, a ten-year veteran so skilled that she's assigned the case of a murdered prostitute, sensitive because of the identity of the victim: the granddaughter of a powerful conservative Senator. She has good instincts, hones in on the relevant evidence, and slowly but surely leads the investigation, and the reader, to the killer. And when she finds herself unexpectedly attacked by said woman-hating killer, her love interest/knight in shining armor arrives not in time to rescue her, but only in time to pull her off her attacker before she does him irreparable harm.

Eve Dallas's love interest, the billionaire-with-only-one-name, Rourke, reminds me both of his television predecessor, Remington Steele, as well as his literary descendants, the rich but emotionally tortured financial titans currently populating the world of romance in the wake of 50 Shades and Sylvia Day's Crossfire books. If Dallas' past is a mystery, so is Rourke's; I'm guessing that future books in the series traffic on that mysterious past to pull Eve and Rourke closer together, as well as push them apart. In this first book, their attraction is immediate, and Rourke is not loath to tell Eve directly what he wants from her:

     She lifted her gaze again. "That's what you want to do, Roarke? Seduce me?"
     "I will seduce you," he returned. "Unfortunately, not tonight. Beyond that, I want to find out what it is that makes you what you are. And I want to help you get what you need." (104)

Though the narrative is focalized primarily through Eve's eyes, short passages from Roarke's point of view demonstrate not only his attraction to Eve, but his insight into her personality, his curiosity about her, his willingness to allow her to set the pace of their encounters. I'm curious to see how his character emerges over the course of the series, whether the masculinity he embodies lines up with that in Roberts' romances, or is given freer (or tighter?) rein. And to seeing how gender plays out as the series progresses. In this book, the gender lines between Eve and Roarke seem far less sharply drawn than they do in Roberts' later romances; will this prove true in the later In Death books, as well, or have the more recent ones become more conservative in their depiction of gender?

My biggest turn-off in reading romantic suspense books are the scenes told from the point of view of the villain, scenes that ask the reader see through his eyes as he stalks/rapes/kills female victims. I'm guessing that such scenes are meant to show us evil, and heighten suspense. But far too often they veer into eroticization, casting violence against women as something not only to be appalled by, but also turned on at witnessing. That's not a readerly position in which I enjoy being placed.

Naked in Death gives us one brief murder scene, told primarily from the point of view of the victim. Like the scenes between Roarke and Eve, though, readers are given a few brief paragraphs from the killer's point of view, a decision which not only structurally contrasts Roarke and the killer, but also gives an important clue as to the killer's identity to the careful reader. Eroticization is there, no doubt, but for me, it weighed far less heavily than in the typical romantic suspense book.

So, I'm off to the library, eager to pick up book 2 in the series, Glory in Death. Readers familiar with the series—will I be pleasantly surprised once again? How feminist would you say the series overall is?



Photo credits:
Nora Roberts Bride quartet: Penguin
Kiss the Pimp Goodbye: The Canadian
Remington Steele: Persephone Magazine

Female Sexuality, the Gothic, and Romantic Suspense: Robin Schone's THE LOVER

Is there any such thing as a feminist romantic suspense novel? I've been pondering this question as I read more widely in this romance sub-genre. Like the Gothic novel of the 18th and early 19th century, which relies on the threat of violence against women for most of its dramatic oomph, the majority of romantic suspense books I've come across features a heroine who is threatened with grave physical danger, most often in the form of a powerful, menacing male. And most often, said heroine is saved from said physical danger by another scary, but at least on her side, human of the male persuasion. Not really a recipe for empowered womanhood, you say? I would have to concur.

...and afraid: the classic Gothic

Women in danger...

What happens, though, when an author bent on celebrating women's sexuality decides to take up the form? And pushes against the boundaries not only of romance fiction, but also of the Gothic? You get the creepy, compelling, yet deeply empowering book that served as one of the earliest examples of the erotic romance: Robin Schone's 1990's The Lover.

Thirty-six-year-old virgin spinster Anne Aimes has spent the majority of her adult life caring for the bodily needs of her elderly, ailing mother and father. Tired of fending off men who long for her parents' fortune, not her person, and no longer willing to be embarrassed by her own sexual needs after her parents are gone, Anne takes an unconventional, daring step: through her lawyer, she proposes a business arrangement with the most celebrated male prostitute in Europe, Michel des Anges. For ten thousand pounds, he will be her lover for a month, fulfilling her bodily needs and teaching her about the depths of sexual pleasure.

Michel agrees to Anne's proposal, but not for the money; his smoldering sexuality has already made him a fortune, not only in France, but now in England. No longer the beautiful young man Anne had once spied across a ballroom when she made her disastrous ton debut at eighteen, Michel (whose real name readers, but not Anne, are told right from novel's start, is really Michael) is now a scarred man; burned in a fire, his face and hands have sent women running in disgust, not moaning in passion, for the past five years. Yet his bodily scars do not even begin to hint at the emotional damage inflicted upon him by a sadistic figure in his past, a figure upon whom he plans revenge—by using Anne as bait.

Schone's narrative simultaneously depicts Anne's detailed, explicit, and deeply erotic introduction to sex while dropping more and more terrifying hints about the horrors of Michael's mysterious early life. Horrors so appalling that the thirteen-year-old runaway was only too glad to use the lessons of an enterprising madam to turn himself into a prostitute guaranteed to bring any woman to orgasm. For only by drowning himself in sex could Michael block out the sickening nightmares of his past.

In the typical romantic suspense, as in its predecessor the Gothic novel, as the plot grows ever closer to its end, so, too, does the threat to the female body. Yet despite the reader's growing awareness of the potential danger to Anne, we're not all that worried about her. Not only because fairly early in their relationship, Michael realizes he can no longer just use Anne as his tool, and vows to keep her from harm, but also because the passion that each draws out from the other is strikingly at odds with the subgenre's conventional conflation of physical danger with sexuality, particularly female sexuality.

In romantic suspense, threats to the heroine are often implicitly coded as sexual threats. In the earlier Gothic works, such threats were typically to the pure heroine's chastity (as in these covers from novels by the master of the Gothic, Ann Radcliffe, suggest); in more recent suspense, threats of rape or other sexual defilement. Schone, in contrast, works not only to identify this linkage between sexual passion and violation/death, but to break it.

But it is a terribly difficult linkage to break, given the society in which Anne and Michael live, a society that Schone claims in her introductory Author's Note is not all that different from our own. For in its casting of its villain, the novel suggests that this linkage lies at the very heart of patriarchy, and thus cannot be done in the typical romantic suspense way, with hero bravely protecting the heroine from all harm, or at least riding to her rescue before any real damage can be inflicted. It is only by understanding this that the reader can accept the ghastly turn that the novel takes in its final four chapters, a turn that leaves Anne at the mercy of Michael's tormentor, experiencing the same horrors that were once inflicted upon him, horrors intended to drive them into a disgust of every bodily desire.

Society punishes both men and women for their sexual desires, making them feel as if they are a horror, not a joy. But to reject passion because patriarchy would trick you into mistaking it for horror is the true tragedy, Schone's book asserts. Only by embracing her passion for Michael, in all its messy, bodily manifestations, can Anne learn to differentiate the screams of horror from the screams of passion, and break the damning linkage of desire and death.

Robin Schone, The Lover. Kensington, 2000.

Next time on RNFF

Be afraid, and carry a big pistol:

Romancing Gun Rights