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

Playing with the Crush-on-your-older-brother's-best-friend Trope: Karen Stivali's TONIGHT and Tamsen Parker's IN HER COURT

As a kid, I longed for an older brother, a kind but tough guy who could look out for a shy younger sister, magically convince the mean kids to stop teasing her standoff-ish, bookish self. As an adolescent, I continued to long for said brother, although for slightly different reasons—an older brother might tell me what boys said to each other behind closed doors, give me the inside scoop about which ones were as rude and obnoxious and girl-hating in private as so many of them seemed to be in public. Alas, my mom and dad, parents to three females, never saw the need to adopt a fourth, boy or girl.

Perhaps my old longing is why I'm often drawn to the romance trope of the younger woman who has a childhood crush on the unattainable best friend of her older brother. A "true" big brother is always looking out for his younger siblings' best interests, especially those of his younger sisters, right? And since big brother is a nice guy, you know that big brother's best friend must be equally worthy—otherwise they'd never be besties. Despite the Westermarck effect theory (that people who grow up together during the first few years of their lives aren't commonly sexually attracted to one another as teens or adults), teen girls longing for boys with whom their brothers have been long-time friends are a staple of YA, New Adult, and contemporary adult romances.

Yet in many such romances, the older brother can seem less like a friendly protector and more like a cockblocking tool of patriarchy. So many older brothers don't want to acknowledge younger sis's right to being a sexual being; they say they are only protecting sis from undesirable men, but their actions are all about keeping little sis pure (or at least being allowed to pretend that their sisters are not getting it on to the same degree that they are). So I've though I'm drawn to the trope, I often end up setting crush-on-older-brother's-best-friend books aside, dismayed by their implicit, or sometimes even overt, sexism.

That's why I was intrigued last week when I read two older-brother's-best-friend books back to back, romances that play with the trope by changing the gender and/or the sexuality in the younger sibling triad. The opening lines in Karen Stivali's short novella Tonight, the prequel to her Moments in Time series, tells us both that we're in trope-tastic land, but that here the trope is just a little different than the expected:

     "He's not gay, you know."
     If I had a dollar for every time my older brother Derek reminded me that his best friend, Wiley, wasn't gay, I'd be able to afford my own place instead of sharing an apartment with the two of them. (Kindle Loc 94).

David has been crushing on older brother Derek's best friend, James Wiley, since Derek first brought his rugby teammate home to hang out when David was sixteen. But Derek, well aware of his geeky arty younger brother's sexual preferences, doesn't want Davey to break his heart, and so breaks into his protective mantra whenever baby bro starts to get that certain look on his face. Once David left for college and started dating, Derek's warnings stopped. But now that Wiley's grad student roommate has kicked him out of his apartment for a reason Wiley is reluctant to explain, and the brothers/roommates have invited him to crash on their sofa until he can find another place, Derek's mantra is back in full force.

David doesn't have trouble getting a date, nor has his brother stood in his way of David's hooking up; he's not the cockblocking patriarchal big brother of more conventional, heterosexual older-best-friend crush romances. And though he's a jock, Derek has never disdained his "dorky, artsy little brother," a brother who had "never even been able to sustain the illusion of being straight." But Wiley's presence in their small apartment puts a definite damper on David's dating prospects, if not his libido, because though he's always wanted a boyfriend, he's still crushing pretty hard on Wiley.

But when the models for David's junior year portfolio keep not showing up, and Wiley offers his services in their stead, older brother's cautionary words go right out the window. Especially when David begins to suspect that said cautions may say more about the secrets Wiley has been hiding from Derek than about how well Derek knows his own best friend. A lovely wish-fulfillment fantasy romance from an author I'll definitely be looking to read more from.

Tamsen Parker's* latest, In Her Court, a novella in the group-authored Camp Firefly Falls series, features a most unusual best-friend pair: a heterosexual guy and a lesbian girl. Nate Carter and Evangeline "Van" Thompson have been friends since they were kids, both risk-takers with a flair for engineering. And since the third grade, Nate's younger sister Willa has been crushing onVan ("Maybe it was when Van had fixed the elevator in her Barbie Dream House or when she'd rescued Willa's favorite My Little Pony from being used as BB gun target practice" [91]). Nate and Van were supposed to be spending the summer working together at Camp Firefly Falls, a fun summer camp for adults, Nate as the resident tennis instructor, Van recuperating from her first year as a tenure track engineering professor serving as the camp's IT girl. But when Nate breaks his leg during a waterskiing accident mid-season, he calls on little sis Willa, who's been at loose ends since her own summertime grad student research project fell through at the last minute, to fill in for him.

Sharing a cabin with sexy, smart Van ("Van had a certain sense of style—half mad-scientist, half-Diane Keaton circa Annie Hall.... Add in her crazy-brilliant brain that worked in ways Willa would never understand and her quirky sense of humor, and Willa was a goner" [108]) will definitely not be a problem for Willa. But will it be for Van?

It certainly seems so, especially when a prickly Van spends their first week co-habitating avoiding Willa like the plague. Is it because Van thinks Willa is still just a kid, even though she's now twenty-three? Or that she's only a dumb jock? Doesn't she get that Willa's in grad school? That she's studying geology, and not just in a "rocks for jocks" kind of way, but because she's intellectually jazzed by it? Or is it because she's so caught up in her worries that the job she's worked for her entire life isn't making her as happy as she had imagined that she won't give Willa the time of day? Especially since Willa hopes to follow Van into academia, albeit in a different scientific field.

Van's heroine: Ghostbusters' Holtzmann

When the camp director asks the two young women to pair together to plan an '80's theme week at the camp, complete with Star Wars costume party, Dirty Dancing dances, and Ghostbusters laser tag (with laser tag packs engineered, of course, by intrepid Van), the two are forced into a proximity far closer than Van would like. She's not about to endanger her longest-lasting friendship by entertaining sexy thoughts about his little sister. Or is she?

Although Van knows that "Nate wasn't the kind of big brother who would lose his shit about his little sister being a sexual being," she isn't "sure if that would extend to his bestie being the person his sister was having the sexy times with." And she's more than a little worried about losing her best friend, one of the only friends she's managed to hold onto: "She'd always been Nate's friend, and she could see how her becoming. . . intimate with Willa would feel like she was betraying that" (1162). Maybe if this thing with Willa is just "going to be a casual sexing thing, Nate wouldn't even have to know. At all. Ever." (1162). I love that Parker addresses this underlying fear, one that often remains unspoken or unexplored in stories where the three points of the relationship triangle are older brother, older male best friend, and younger sister, perhaps in part because of fears of homosocial desire when male friendships are at risk.

Though Parker's novella is filled with nostalgia, it's nostalgia for a time period (the 80's) and its beloved popular narratives, rather than its more restrictive gender roles. Both Van and Willa's voices are engaging and laugh-out-loud funny ("And then their fling would end amicably and things could go back to the way they were, just with more orgasms than she'd previously had. She shook it off, because she was going to carpe the fuck out of this diem and out of Willa as well" [1544]). I only wish the book had been longer, so that Willa and Van's sexy times could have been balanced by more "growing closer emotionally" scenes. But it's so great to see a popular series finally welcome a lesbian story into its ranks that I can easily forgive this one small shortcoming.


What other romances have you read that rock the boat of the standard crushing-on-older-brother's-best-friend trope?


* Full disclosure: Parker is a fellow chapter-mate of mine in the New England Chapter of RWA, and we serve together on its board. She did offer me an ARC, but no favors or foodstuffs were exchanged during the writing of this review.

Photo credits:
Older brothers/baby sister: Pinterest
Holtzmann: Third-Bit

Tropes and Tone: Lorelie Brown's FAR FROM HOME

When you begin to read a romance that draws on a familiar plot trope, do you have expectations not only about what will happen in the book, but also about the tone in which those events will be conveyed? When I picked up Lorelie Brown's RITA nominated short contemporary romance Far From Home and saw that it drew on the "marry for a green card" trope, I was expecting a light, funny read, á la the film Green Card and other similar romantic comedies that update the marriage of convenience trope for modern times. So when I began to read, I was surprised to discover that Far From Home isn't a comedy at all. Rather than have her two protagonists marry for convenience and then gradually, comically fall in love when they are forced into far more intimacy than a typically dating couple would experience, Brown uses a realistic, even at times melancholy, tone to explore several rather weighty issues: sexual identity; immigration rules and regulations; interracial relationships; mental health and recovery from addiction.

"I would marry you," says Rachel Fizel, the white first person narrator of Brown's romance, in the book's opening line. Rachel makes her joking offer in response to Pari Sadashiv, a friend of a friend who has come to Los Angeles from India courtesy of a H-1B work visa but would far prefer to be an independent consultant than remain with her current employer. Rachel's friends all assume her offer must be a joke; though she doesn't date much now, Rachel spent her teen years seeking approval by sleeping with a long series of guys ("poor vaginal choices," is her wry description of this period in her life [Kindle Loc 289]). But later at the party they are both attending, Pari, a "gold-star lesbian," seeks Rachel out, asking if she's perchance bisexual, and if the "large bills and a job that doesn't keep up" might just be incentive enough for Rachel to change her joking offer into a real one (104).

Rachel suddenly senses that this could be a life-changing moment, just like the moment when she finally admitted to her best friend, Nikki, that she had an eating disorder. Her job at a small studio doesn't really pay enough for her to keep up with the loans she accrued while earning her MFA in film, and it would be nice really to share expenses with another person. Especially a person as self-assured as Pari; maybe some of that young woman's assuredness will rub off on her, Rachel wishes.

Though she's typically reluctant to take chances, Rachel decides that it might be worth her time to go on a date with the elegant, composed, and occasionally minx-ish Pari. A date which quickly leads to an engagement. Which in turn leads to the arrival of Pari's mother, Niharika, from India, intent on planning a large, traditional Tamil wedding. And taking up quarters in Pari's two-bedroom apartment, forcing Rachel and Pari into the same bedroom. And the same bed.

Despite the myriad comic (and painfully stereotypical) possibilities of the above situation, Brown doesn't play her story for laughs. Instead, she allows us deep inside Rachel's head, showing how her distant parents and own "craving to be noticed" and "abhorrence of feeling superfluous" have shaped her starkly judgmental view of herself ("I'm aware that I'm medically still too skinny at the same time that I feel fat as a cow" [791]). And how her admiration of Pari, which initially takes the form of wishing she were more like her confident roommate ("Maybe if I was her, I wouldn't have to be me"), gradually transforms into an appreciation of Pari's intelligence, drive, and love of her own body and the pleasures it offers her. And an appreciation of the ways in which Pari forces her/allows her to pull down her protective guard, showing her real self, rather than the self Rachel constantly constructs to win the approval of others. And, finally, an appreciation of her own budding sexual desire, desire which only burgeons when she can engage in sex with a partner with whom she is emotionally as well as physically intimate.

But falling in love, even when that falling is mutual, puts a lot of pressure on a person. Pressure that Rachel, still prone to the self-doubts and self-hatred common to those who suffer from anorexia, does not want to admit she's feeling. Pressure that only mounts as the day of her wedding to Pari grows closer and closer. Will Pari's family, as tight-knit and loving as her family is distant and cold, accept her if they see that her anorexia is not fully under her control? Will Pari still love her if she's still sick?

Despite (or perhaps because of) thwarting my comic expectations, Far From Home proved a deeply satisfying read, a romance that doesn't shy away from important issues, but which never allows them to subsume the heart of any good marriage-of-convenience romance: how two people who thought only to help one another unexpectedly find themselves falling in love.

Photo credits:

Mendhi: I Love India.com

Lorelie Brown

Far From Home

A Belladonna Ink Novel

Riptide, 2016

Laughing at the Tragic Lesbian Romance Ending: Siera Maley's DATING SARAH COOPER

The romance community tends to agree that a romance is not really a romance if it doesn't end happily, or at least end "happily for now." How, then, can a subgenre of romance have a trope that's all about the unhappy ending?

When that subgenre is lesbian romance films. And perhaps Young Adult lesbian romance novels, too?

As blogger Danielle on The Radical Notion blog argues in "The Curse of the Tragic Lesbian Ending," the majority of lesbian romance films conclude with decidedly un-HEA moments:

Victims of the "Dead Lesbians" TV trope

If you identify as queer, you're lucky if you've got a handful of decent films to choose from, and even luckier if one or two of those films don't end with the protagonist dying, going to jail, or ending up alone. I can't tell you how many lesbian romances I've watched that have ended with one of the female characters meeting some awful fate.

The situation in young adult books with lesbian characters isn't quite so bad, at least in the books I've read. But still, the HEA, or even a HFN ending, is far from the norm.

Something that #ownvoices author Siera Maley takes dead aim at in Dating Sarah Cooper.

The premise behind Maley's novel is both high-concept and potentially cringe-worthy. On her way home from school in small-town Georgia, Katie Hammontree interrupts a football player bullying a fellow classmate, Jake, for being gay. Jake ends up with a split lip as a result of the encounter, and Katie invites Jake into her house to help clean him up. And invites her bestie, Sarah Cooper, over to help, since Sarah intends to go to nursing school after graduation next year. Jake, mistaking Katie and Sarah for girlfriends because of their playful physical closeness, invites them to come to a meeting of an unnamed school club to which he belongs: "if you guys ever wanted more people to hang out with and talk to and stuff... or if you just wanted to hang out with me and talk, you could come. You know, if you felt like spending time with people who can relate to you" (21). The girls, friendly but oblivious, accept. But when they find out from Jake just before stepping into the meeting that the club is a support group for gay students, impulsive Sarah decides to go with it. Dragging a reluctant Katie behind her, Sarah announces to the other students "Katie and I have been dating for about two months now, and we're ready to tell the world" (43).

Sarah's justification for her impetuous declaration is that it's a great way to get the guy she's been crushing on to notice her. "Guys like lesbians, right? And they also like challenges" (46). And because she and Katie are far more popular than the rest of the queer kids at school, "we'll be majorly boosting the confidence of the kids in that LGBT club" (46). Katie, worried about humiliating Jake and about being accused of making fun of the rest of the club, reluctantly decides to go along with Sarah's deception.

After Sarah and Katie out themselves to the wider school community, they learn a lot about what the queer kids in their school have to face every day. Word was that lesbians have it easy, especially compared to queer boys; homosexual boys get physically bullied, but everyone likes a lesbian, right? In fact, the straight boys like a lesbian a little too much: "Hey, Katie. Heard about you and Sarah... so what's that like and where do I buy tickets?"

Colton was the first of many, many guys that day who felt the need to gawk at us, tell us we were hot, announce their approval, or all three. We got questions about threesomes, questions about what we did in bed—all of which were completely invasive and inappropriate and absolutely qualified as "rude"—and questions about which one of us was the man in our relationship. We were whistled at, catcalled at, stared at, and shouted after, and I got called a "dyke" twice in casual conversation.  (57)

And that doesn't even mention the sexually harassing text and email messages that start arriving on both girls' phones. And the difficult conversation Katie has to have with her ex-boyfriend, with whom she broke up a few months earlier, appeasing his fears that he "turned her" gay. And the need to prove to a doubting fellow LAMBDA member that she and Sarah really are dating by kissing Sarah in the middle of a meeting.

That latter one is really the kicker for Katie, because "kissing Sarah just once had felt better than all of the hundreds of times I'd kissed Austin combined" (98). Might she really be gay? "What if my perfect boyfriend was actually a girlfriend? And how on earth was I supposed to know if that was the case?" (137)

Even worse, if Katie is gay, is she destined to be like one of the heroines of the lesbian romances that Sarah has been reading and watching for "research," a loser who falls in love with her straight best friend only to be doomed to rejection? As Sarah describes the pattern,

"Book number 1: one of the girls realizes she's straight. Book number 2: one of the girls realizes she's bi and loves a guy, and the other girl ends up alone. Book number 3: they both get murdered by vampires.... No matter what I picked up, there was always someone who got screwed over. I didn't want to end up like that. (242)

Neither does Katie. But one of these best friends is going to have to start being honest with the other if this book is going to have the happy, rather than tragic, ending promised by its comic tone.


In  "From Problem to Pride," Blogger Daisy Porter suggests that there are three types of YA books with queer characters:

• The gay problem novel, in which a queer character comes to terms with their own sexuality, the sexuality of a relative, or deals with coming out of the closet
• The "gaytopia" novel, in which being queer is not a problem
• The "Big Gay Book," in which queerness is the focus, but in a celebratory, rather than problematic way

Porter's first category includes many lesbian protagonists. But the "gay" in the "gaytopia" and "Big Gay Book" categories is telling; girls who love girls still rarely feature in novels in which being a lesbian is not a problem, or in which lesbianism is celebrated.

While I can't say that I love the idea of holding up characters who, in Katie's words "manipulate and use a minority group for their own gain" (76) as heroines (Katie and Sarah get off pretty lightly when they finally admit their ruse), I can definitely get behind more lesbian YA romances with HEAs. Or even HFNs.


Photo/Illustration credits:
Dead Lesbians on TV: Autostraddle
"Hand Holding": Chaos Life

Siera Maley

Dating Sarah Cooper

indie published, 2014

To Love Me Is To Know Me?

I think back to our argument. No matter how many times I tried to brush aside my unease by telling myself we'd find a compromise on the issue, there was one stubborn nugget of hurt that wouldn't budge. "I realized the reason that the whole thing upset me so much was it—it made me feel like you didn't even know me." —Bethany Chase, The One That Got Away



In mid and late 20th century heroine-only POV category romances, hearing the hero speak the words "I love you" typically served as the climax of the story, the point at which the virginal, innocent heroine could be declared the winner in the romantic battle between the unemotional, detached masculinity and emotion-filled, connected femininity. Because heroines were typically flat characters, placeholders for the reader, discovering their individual uniqueness was not a requirement on the path to falling in love for any category hero. Oh, the heroines might be praised for being innocent, or kind, or smart, or embodying any similarly generic positive characteristic, but rarely for any distinctive, unique talent or personality trait. Emotion given voice, the hero's love declaration was a promise that he would care for, protect, and cherish the heroine. But rarely was such a promise built on a special knowledge of the beloved, a knowledge that others did not share.

Though the out-loud love declaration is still an essential element of the majority of romance novels today, I've been wondering if that declaration has lessened in importance. Or, perhaps that the declaration carries less weight, at least in the more realistic contemporary romance, if it is not preceded by a recognition of the individuality of the beloved, a knowledge of the beloved that others around her often are not able to see.

Though there were many clues before the above in Bethany Chase's The One That Got Away that narrator/protagonist Sarina had chosen the wrong man, as soon as I read that passage, I knew that Sarina's relationship with her fiancé was not long for the page. Though said fiancé takes issue with her claim—"So, you're breaking up with me because I can't read your mind"—Sarina, and many a romance reader before her, does believe, or at least hope, that the one she loves will know her well enough to know things about her that she has not previously explained or discussed with him (in Sarina's case, her desire to keep working after they have a child). You can't love me if you don't know me, Sarina's claim implicitly argues.

Though romances, rather than women's fictions, far more often celebrate that knowing than discuss its lack, the assumption that one's romantic partner will know one, often better than one's colleagues, friends, and even family members, seems to me to have become a staple in much of realistic post 20th century contemporary romance, in a way that it wasn't in older works of romance fiction. I could point to many, many lines in the novels I've read which express this sentiment. Loving someone is no longer enough; a romantic partner must know you, too.

Have you noticed this trend? And if so, what do you think is causing it?

Photo credit: A Quote a Day

The Protective Hero, or What Are Romance Readers So Afraid Of?

I've heard a lot of romance writers and critics account for the trend in romance for BDSM heroines, and romance heroines in general, taking sexual pleasure by giving up control by pointing to the burdens of the second shift. Having won a certain degree of equality in the workplace (we'll put aside the issue of the gendered wage gap for now), the majority of Western women now put in a full day of work outside the home. But since men have not rallied for equality on the home front, at least not to the same degree that women have on the work front, women end up pulling a second shift, still doing nearly the same amount of childcare and housework that they did when they worked only at home: cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, scheduling children's medical appointments, sending birthday cards to relatives, etc. etc. The apparently sexist romance trope of giving over power/control, then, is really a metaphoric cry of feminist frustration/outrage at continued gender inequalities in a purportedly post-feminist society.

I can buy this explanation to a certain extent (although the snarky, outspoken side of me just wants to stop and shout, "don't just wallow in a book that tries to distract you from the inequality in your life; demand that your boyfriend/spouse take on an equitable share of the home chores!"). What I'm thinking about today, though, is the fact that I haven't yet heard a comparable socio-historic explanation for the prevalence of another, perhaps even more common trope in romance: the trope of the protective hero. Mr. Protector is the star of the majority of today's paranormal books, especially those with shapeshifters. But he also appears almost as often in erotica, in romantic suspenses, in historicals, and even in contemporaries. In fact, I came across him twice just in the past three days, and not just in books from the same publisher, or by the same author, or even in the same genre: in Virna DePaul's rather un-feminist* erotic suspense romance Filthy Rich, as well as in Meredith Duran's far more progressive Victorian historical, Luck Be a Lady. To wit:

"Despite the fact that she was obviously capable of taking care of herself, she brought out his protective instincts" (Filthy Rich, Kindle Loc 525)

"I'm going to protect you on this, Cara. Trust me, okay?" (FR 1821)

"He'd fucking promised to protect Cara, and instead he'd allowed someone to get close while they'd ben dancing and endanger her again" (FR 3895)

"I told you once: violence is clumsy. But sometimes it's called for. And when me and mind are at stake, I'll do what I must. Show no weakness, accept no insult, allow no advantage: that's the law of the street. (Luck p. 216)

     "Your wife, whom you will overrule whenever you deem it fit. Your wife, whom you will lock away when her desires strike you as inconvenient."
     "To hell with that," he snarled. "If I think you in danger, yes. That's what a man does—for his wife, for his friends, for anyone he loves. You think I give a damn if you're angry now, so long as you're safe tonight?" (Luck 327)


The word "protect," or some form of it, appears forty times in the NetGalley ARC of Filthy Rich, most often in reference to the feelings that its rich businessman hero, Branden Duke, experiences towards the heroine Cara. In contrast, the word appears hardly at all in the novel by the more literarily-inclined Duran. Yet Duran's hero, a London crime boss, is just as invested in a conception of masculinity defined by its ability to protect a heterosexual beloved as is DePaul's Manhattanite financier.

Why, at this particular point in history, do so many romance readers find the fantasy of being loved by a protective man so appealing? Or, to ask the question another way, what are romance readers today so afraid of? In real life, few of us are in danger of having someone ruin our reputations with a false sex tape, or being abducted by a mad Russian general, or being attacked by a crazed colleague, or being incarcerated in a Victorian madhouse. What is is that many romance readers feel in danger of, then, that draws them/us like bees to pollen to heroes who promise to save us, even at the expense of our independence?



*See my Goodreads review of Filthy Rich if you want the particulars of why I consider this one unfeminist

Second Chance Romance, One Night Stand Style

I'm a big fan of second chance romance, especially those books in which the protagonists were just not ready/mature enough to make a relationship work during their initial time together. For me, what's appealing about the second-chance romance trope is the idea that mistakes aren't forever. You can and will screw up, in life and in love, but that doesn't mean you're a bad person, or that you're doomed only to regrets until the day you die. Familiarity, too, is part of the appeal—returning to someone whom you once knew really well, and rediscovering those things about that person that made you light up with smiles. And then finding out the things about that person that are different, some of which may even make that person more appealing. Familiarity and forgiveness—a formula almost as good as salted caramel gelato, at least to this romance reader.

I've come across several second-chance romances of late, though, in which the "first chance" is barely more than a one-night or one-weekend stand. J. Kenner's Say My Name (an RWA conference give-away), Laura Florand's A Wish Upon Jasmine, and Johanna Lemon's That Girl all feature heterosexual couples who meet and experience an intense, immediate sexual and emotional connection, but then who for various reasons end up parting. And then who end up back together again, trying to understand what drew them apart, and why it might be better for them, and for each other, if they try and stay together.

This variation on the second-chance romance obviously appeals for one of the same reasons that its more common cousin does: the idea that mistakes aren't forever, that forgiveness is not just a possibility, but a realizable promise. But it seems to be totally lacking when it comes to the second piece: familiarity. These pairs of lovers did not stay together long enough to really know much about the other, not in the same way that, say, Jane Austen's Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth (Persuasion)  or Lisa Kleypas's Win and Kev (Seduce Me at Sunrise), Kristan Higgins' Harper and Nick (My One and Only) or even Sherry Thomas's Briony and Leo (Not Quite a Husband) do.

What different desires, then, do you think the one-night stand second-chance romance appeals to? What fantasies does it satisfy, that romances with longer-term first-chance stages don't?

Cocky Self-Confidence

His hand twitched against his side. Emma licked her lips. "Touch yourself," she repeated, more a whisper than an order, but he finally obeyed. His fingers, dark against his belly, slide down and curved around the dusky skin of his shaft. — Victoria Dahl, A Rake's Guide to Pleasure




Many romance novels come and go without leaving a memorable trace in my mind. But I can still remember the shock with which I read the scene in Victoria Dahl's steamy Victorian historical romance, A Rake's Guide to Pleasure, from which the above quote is taken. Emma Jensen has wormed her way into ton society, masquerading as the Dowager Lady Denmore, in order to wager and win enough at the card tables to secure herself a competence large enough to retire from society on. But her attraction to the rakish Duke of Somerhart has proven a distraction from her gambling. At a high-stakes house party, she finds herself spending less time gambling and more time negotiating a sexual power game with Hart. After realizing how much Emma is aroused by being told what to do, sexually, Hart challenges her to try out the opposite role: "You take control, Emma.... Take control of me. Come to me" (100).

Emma, despite her better judgment, takes up Hart's challenge. But the scene doesn't quite play out the way Hart expected. Emma doesn't tell him to do anything sexual to her; instead, she commands him to perform for her. "Touch yourself," she orders him, but refuses to step any closer to the bed in which he lies. She wants to watch him, to actually witness the act with which he taunted during their first sexual encounter: "I thought about this last night. Dreamed of your taste, of you pressing yourself to my mouth. I pleasured myself to this fantasy" (83). His fantasy turned her into an object of desire; hers, not just in mind but in the flesh, turns the tables, turning Hart into the object of Emma's.

Dahl makes it clear that Hart objects to being so-objectified. When Emma first issues her command, he outright refuses. Only after he makes a move to leave his bed, and she threatens to leave his room altogether, does Hart "finally obey." And when he reaches his climax, he's not just sexually satisfied; he's shatteringly angry, snarling, "Get the hell out of my room. Now" (111).

The next morning, Hart finds himself embarrassed by having ceded control, worried that Emma will tattle to others about "his little show" (112). Hart "wanted to take back the night, or at least turn it into something else. Something he controlled, despite his challenge to Emma. Somehow this seemed so much worse than being caught ravishing a woman in the card room" (113). A man sexually self-pleasuring himself in the privacy of his own rooms is fine. A man caught tupping a woman in public is not so bad, either. But a man touching himself in front of a woman, performing not just for his own pleasure but for hers, is something for which Hart fears he'll be "snickered at" and "turned into a freak" for, if word gets around (113).

I can't remember reading another such scene, one in which a man touches his own penis, in a historical romance, or in any romance, published around the same time (Rake first came out in 2009). But now, only six years later, such scenes seem to be popping up with far more regularity. Perhaps it is only because I've been reading more erotic romance of late, but in my reading of late, I've been noticing more and more romance sex scenes in which men take their own cocks in hand. Not just to guide them into various female (or male) orifices, but as one of the many possible sexual touches that play a part in longer sexual encounters. And unlike Duke Somerhart, the men in such scenes rarely think of touching themselves in front of a woman as something shameful, something freakish. Instead, they do it with self-confidence. Such acts are presented as part and parcel of a man's acceptance of his own sexuality, his own body. And an acceptance of, even a delight in, a sexual partner's being turned on by such a "show."

Am I just imagining things, or have you noticed such a trend, too? If so, what do you make of it?

What I Learned from Romance Novels: Fact or Fiction? Falling Asleep in your Lover's Arms

When he put his arm around her tummy, the softness of her skin felt perfect. When he spooned her so that he felt her body against his chest, his thighs, he sighed with contentment. This was exactly what he'd wanted. And from her sigh, he knew she wasn't unhappy about it, either. He closed his eyes and drifted off. — Jo Leigh, Ms. Match

I've been thinking a lot about a conversation I had recently with my significant other, about our expectations about romance. Our real-life relationship qualifies as a friends-to-lovers story, a slow, steady liking leading to affection, connection, living together, and, finally (at least for my mother-in-law), years later, marriage. I told him that I sometimes regret not having experienced the "grand passion" type of love—Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, Tristan and Isolde, Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara—and asked if he ever felt the same. "No," he said, looking at me with some puzzlement. "That's not something I expected at all." It made me wonder where his expectations about love and romance had come from, and in what ways they differed from, and in what ways they overlapped with, my own.

In particular, I started to think about what expectations about love and relationships I had learned from reading romance novels. And I thought I'd write an occasional post here on RNFF about different things I've come to expect after my years of romance reading, whether they have in fact played out in my real life, and then ask you about whether these things have proven to be true or not in your real, day-to-day relationships.

An ad for the "Cuddle Mattress," which "let's you hug your
better half intimately without any arm or wrist problems"

This first one is something I've always been disappointed about not happening in my real life. Unlike Paul Bennet, hero of Jo Leigh's Harlequin Blaze novel Ms. Match quoted above, as well as thousands of other romance heroes and heroines, I've never been able to fall asleep in a lover's arms. Oh, I can take a quick catnap, especially after a lazy weekend daytime tryst, but fall truly, deeply asleep? No way. My legs start to twitch; my brain starts thinking about the chores of the day to come; my body gets uncomfortably warm, even sweaty, tucked up so close to another person's heat. My love may be snoring beside me, but though my eyes are shut, my body just will not allow itself to drop off into unconsciousness. I always find myself slowly pulling away, needing to turn onto my tummy and pull the covers up over my shoulders, safe in my own solitary bubble of space, before golden sleep can reign.

Am I just an oversensitive oddity? Or is the falling asleep in your lover's arms a comforting fiction of romance? Enquiring minds (at least this one) want to know: Can you fall asleep while spooned up close to another person?

The Politics of Baby-Marriage: Molly O'Keefe's INDECENT PROPOSAL

Apologies for skipping last Friday's post. Child throwing up in the middle of the night with food poisoning ("well, that apple did taste a little fizzy, but the caramel and chocolate were fine") = no brain space left for blogging. Luckily, the bout was short-lived, and everyone's stomachs and brains are back to normal. So, on with the book musings...

Genre romance is rife with familiar and oft-beloved tropes. The marriage of convenience. The secret baby. Lovers torn apart to later reunite, or potential lovers stranded together all by themselves. One of my least-favorite, from a feminist standpoint, is the "one-night-stand leads to pregnancy leads to 'we must marry'." Given the latest statistics on unmarried mothers (in the United States in 2012, 40.7% of all births were to unwed mothers, according to the Centers for Disease Control), few Americans still believe marriage should and must follow any pregnancy, whether planned or not. But its not the lack of historical accuracy that gets in the way of my taking pleasure in this trope, but rather the patriarchal assumptions that often accompany it when it makes its appearance in a romance novel.

No baby mamas here: an example of
the "we will get married" trope

My memories of the trope come from the category romance reading I did as a teen, as well as some more recent stand-alone romances, stories in which the male half of the relationship insists that, despite barely knowing the woman with whom he had sex, she and he must marry. His reputation/his family's reputation/the future of the child/his budding business deal/his run for political office demand that they avoid scandal, he insists, not willing to listen to any objection she may raise. But what it really all boiled down to was they must marry because the child is his. His rights as the father take precedence over hers, and since she is now the receptacle for his unborn child, he has the right to assert control not only over the body of the child, but also over the body of its mother. Typically, he is the one who has more power—financial, social, sometimes even political—and thus even if the heroine opposes the idea of marrying a relative stranger, even actively resists it, because of this power imbalance, she usually ends up throwing up her hands fairly early and succumbing to the hero's often less-than-romantic wooing. By romance's end, of course, the two relative strangers have bonded over pregnancy and childbirth, have fallen in love, and thus persuade both themselves and readers that their unplanned marriage was, of course, all for the best.

It's a true delight, then, when an author can take a trope with such sexist underpinnings and recast it in feminist garb. That's just what Molly O'Keefe does in her latest contemporary, Indecent Proposal, the fourth title in her Boys of Bishop series. Our heroine, white working-class Ryan Kaminski, might be the evil villainess in a less thoughtful writer's book; a girl who for years allowed her striking good looks to be her identity, who, selfishly, believed her looks entitled her to more than other people, even her own sister. A girl who not only stole her sister's boyfriend, but married him. A girl who's been estranged from her family for years. But Ryan's done a lot of growing up in the years since her modeling career stalled, since her husband turned out to be far less a prize worth winning than she'd originally thought, since she realized how much her selfishness and entitlement had not only hurt others, but also made her a person she doesn't even like. At thirty-two, working as a part-time bartender and modeling when she gets a rare job, Ryan may not be on top of the world, but she finally knows who she is: someone secure enough to offer an ear and a kind word to the people who come to her bar.

And the man she and her fellow bartender christen "Sad Ken Doll," the man who has haunted her New York City bar for the past three nights, surely could use a kind word. His sister's in trouble (see book #2, Never Been Kissed), and he doesn't think he's going to be able to help her. Ryan knows that a bartender should never cross the invisible barrier down the middle of the bar, knows that the employee handbook says "no fraternizing with the drinkers." But still, Ken Doll, aka Harry, is so sad, so floundering, that Ryan consciously chooses to "shove her first right through that barrier and put her hand over his" (10). And she gifts him with of a night of human connection, of truth-telling and of sexual passion, taking him just as he is, and giving of herself the same. Though she finds herself, as she is all too wont to do, falling a little bit in love with Harry, and with the "rare illusion of care" their night together creates, she's not surprised to find him gone when she wakes up the next morning. She's not expecting to see him again; she doesn't even know his last name.

Even after Ryan discovers that the condom a friend gave her did not do its job, she has no plans to track down the mysterious Harry. But it turns out that it doesn't take much effort to find Sad Ken Doll/Harry; as the privileged son of a scandal-ridden white southern governor, the brother of a recently kidnapped sister, and a candidate himself for the U.S. House of Representatives, Harrison Montgomery is on the news almost as much as is Taylor Swift. Unluckily for Ryan, her volatile brother Wes happens to be in the room when Ryan catches the latest news report on Harry's run for Congress. And Wes takes it into his own hands to confront Harrison Montgomery, even though Ryan insists that she needs time to think about how to deal with the shocking revelation of the true identity of her baby's father.

Not surprisingly, given his own father's philandering past and the hard-ball politics he's grown up around, Harrison had real doubts about the truth of Wes's claims. And when he confronts Ryan, he's ruder than an arrogant Mr. Darcy proposing to Elizabeth Bennet. But "Ryan had been pushed into plenty of corners, so she knew when to come out swinging" (77). And swing she does, even after Harrison proposes to rescue his sure-to-be-floundering-in-the-wake-of-a-sex-scandal campaign by asking Ryan to marry him: "Listen, Harrison, you broke into my apartment. Called me stupid. All but accused me of being a gold-digging whore. I wouldn't marry you if you were the last man on earth" (84).

Harrison acts far differently than other "you're carrying my baby" heroes I've read. He takes little to no interest in the idea of the baby, or in the responsibility of impending fatherhood. All he wants is to not be like his scandal-ridden father, and to have the chance to do some political good in Washington. Thus his proposal is just that—a business proposal, not a claim on Ryan's body or on the baby. They'll marry, and, if he wins the election, they'll stay married, for at least two years. If she wants a divorce after those two years, he'll grant it, buy her a house, send alimony and child support, and step out of her life. In public, they'll pretend they're in love, but in private, they can be who they really are.

Harrison tells Wallace, his campaign manager, "she doesn't have a choice.... Neither of us do." And after her neighbors and her estranged family are besieged by the press, Ryan comes to the same conclusion: "There wasn't any other option but to agree to Harrison's proposal" (91, 98). This is the one point where the trope seems to fall back into its old patriarchal norms, taking away the woman's sense of being able to choose. To prevent the reader from thinking Ryan a gold-digger? Or simply to make the trope/plot possible?

Accepting may be presented as the the only option, but Ryan doesn't accept meekly; she hires her own lawyer and negotiates her "own terms for this indecent proposal," one which will benefit not only her child, but her family, as well (98). In a genre-referential moment, Ryan thinks to herself, "she was not going to show up at the Governor's Mansion like some impoverished historical romance heroine who'd been knocked up by the Duke" (110); instead, she does her homework, and is ready to hit back whenever anybody tries to demean or insult her. In particular, she refuses to accept the slut-shaming label of gold-digger. "Do you think your mother would have taken this deal?" she asks Wallace, Harrison's campaign manager, an African-American who grew up with a single mother in the housing projects of Chicago.  "When she found out she was pregnant with you. Do you think is some man had come out of the blue and promised to make sure your life was set up in a way she could never dream of making happen on her own, would she have done that?.... I think she would have. I think we both know your mother would have done anything for you. Including agreeing to this proposal" (114-15). After going a few more verbal rounds together, Wallace acknowledges her point.

Ryan may feel as small and alone as one of those historical romance heroines, but she refuses to act as if she is. And as long as she insists on her own value, insists that she's worthy of respect not because she's the mother of a future Montgomery child, but because she's intelligent, funny, a natural on the campaign trail, and a kind, caring human being, Ryan will be nobody's pawn. Not her mother-in-law's, not any reporter's, not any of the campaign's staffers'. And especially not Harrison's. For, as the balance of O'Keefe's novel delightfully and sexily demonstrates, Ryan has far more to offer Harrison than anything his contract could ever grant her.


Have you read other "one-night-stand leads to pregnancy leads to 'we must marry'" romances out there that move beyond the patriarchal trappings of the original trope?


Photo credits:
Condom failure: HIV-info.net
Gold Digger: Anti-Jokes

Molly O'Keefe

Indecent Proposal

Bantam, 2014

On the Ripping of Bodices, and other Sundry Garments

     Her nerves stretched taut with her toilette complete, and needing some task to occupy her thoughts, she began putting some order to the cabin, which was littered with clothing. His were thrown over the back of a chair, her beige gown in another. The torn chemise was still where he had dropped it after ripping it from her. She picked it up and found it irreparable.
     His hands destroy well, she mused.
                    
         —Kathleen Woodiwiss, The Flame and The Flower (45)


"Bodice-ripper" has a long history of being used as a stand-in for the genre of popular romance in general. Witness, for example, headlines from many of the mainstream news outlets reporting on Rupert Murdoch's purchase of Harlequin earlier this month: "News Corp buys "bodice-ripper" publisher Harlequin." To the romance-literate, however, "bodice-ripper" has a more precise meaning: an epic historical romance, told from the point of view of a young heroine as she gradually wins the older, brutal man's love. Violence, evil villains, bad metaphors for sex, and myriad incidences of what today we would call rape perpetrated on the body of the heroine by the "hero" are the staples of the sub-genre, books written in the mold of Kathleen Woodiwiss's 1972 The Flame and the Flower and Rosemary Rogers' 1974 Sweet Savage Love.

Make sure you don't step on the hem
of that gown, Kristen!

Some suggest that the term "bodice-ripper" refers to the book's covers, in particular, to their penchant for depicting women whose bosoms seem poised to rip free of their bodices if they make one wrong move. But almost all bodice rippers include a scene or scenes of actual bodice-ripping, scenes in which the male protagonist violently tears a garment of the heroine's clothing off of her body prior to forcing himself sexually upon her. It's this trope I'd like to explore in today's post.

A search for "bodice" and "rip" in my e-text version of The Flame and the Flower reveals that it was not actually a bodice, but a chemise, that ended up on the scrap heap after being torn from our heroine Heather's body during her first sexual encounter with the book's eventual hero. Although when you read the actual passage, the violence of the act is rather underplayed: "She felt his hands go up her back and with an easy tug he separated the shift and snatched it from her" (28). Only later, when Heather is cleaning up the room after being assaulted (see above passage), is it made clear that it was not only Heather's virgin body, but also her garment, which was rent by ship's captain Brandon Birmingham.

What's going on with all that garment ripping? I think it's a dual signal to the reader, one that conveys opposing messages that are somehow made compatible through the symbolic power of the act. On the one hand, ripping a woman's clothing off of her body is a clear signal of the hero's lack of control. He is so driven by his passion for the heroine that he cannot stand to wait for any delay, even the minor delay of pushing a few buttons through their proper holes or untying a recalcitrant tie. His passion for the heroine has moved so far beyond social conventions that he must rip any symbol of said conventions from her body. His lack of control points both to the overwhelming nature of his feelings, and to the fact that someone else besides the hero is the one in charge, the one with the power. Perhaps it might be the heroine? If she and she alone can make him act so?

On the other hand, bodice ripping is all about the physical power of the male. The hero is strong enough to hold a woman still, and to tear apart some pretty strong fabrics (except in the case of those flimsy summer Regency gowns): linen, silk, flax, cotton, brocade. In the days before the sewing machine, clothing was made to last; even ripping a garment along its seams likely would have required more than average strength. A man strong enough to rip your bodice from you would likely be stalwart enough to prevent other men from attacking you, too. You might have to put up with his rapes, but at least you would gain protection from the rape of others...

One might think that with "rapetastic" Old Skool romances long out of fashion, few twenty-first century romance novels would include such scenes of bodices, or other pieces of women's clothing, being sacrificed on the altar of a romance hero's ardor. Yet the trope has a surprisingly persistent presence in both historical and contemporary romances.

Just this past week, I read two romances which featured scenes of male garment-rending. But they did so in a way that called into question the masculinist assumptions that underlie the original trope: the assumptions that a man has an unquestionable right to a woman's body, and that ripping off her clothes is a sexy articulation of his dominance, and the heroine's submission to it.

The male lead in Megan Mulry's comic romance If the Shoe Fits, the second book in her Unruly Royals series, is not much like the brutal alpha male of your typical bodice ripper. The second son of a duke, Devon Heyworth has spent most of his life being indulged by a doting mother and a long line of willing women, and rarely has to raise a finger, never mind a violent hand, to get what he wants in or out of bed (of course he's hiding his stellar mathematical brain and a kind heart behind his deceptive playboy exterior). When he falls, and falls hard, for American shoe-designer Sarah James, though, he's not at all prepared for the overwhelming strength of his feelings for her. Or how much like a possessive jerk they'll lead him to act.

Devon pops over to Chicago for a surprise weekend visit, and doesn't object when Sarah tells him that she already has dinner plans for Saturday night. But when spies a handsome young man helping her out of the car after she returns to her apartment, he's overcome with jealousy, jealousy that he knows is ridiculous:

     Why had he been looking out the window in the first place? Was he hovering like a child waiting for her return? What a jerk, he thought. And too late to trot upstairs and pretend he had been watching a movie in her boudoir. He felt  like a fool, a kept man all of a sudden. Not the carefree, fast-car-driving, mindless-pleasure-seeking persona he had spent years manufacturing, that she would be expecting.
     By the time Sarah opened the door to her home and came in a breathless rush toward him, her arms outstretched like a toddler, he had worked himself into a proper snit. Her skin against his face was cold from the biting night air, and the fur cape was monstrously sexy, and he knew he was about to fuck it all to hell.
     But some things couldn't be helped. (148)

When Sarah greets Devon's subsequent accusatory and jealous outburst not with apologetic deference or rational justification, but with the scorn it deserves ("Fuck you"), Devon displays all the characteristics of the bodice-ripping hero in mid-lust: "far too out of control," he "wanted her so keenly and with such an irrational, violent level of possession that he did not even recognize his feelings" (149). Unlike the early bodice rippers, Mulry's book allows the reader inside Devon's head, so we see that Devon is all too aware that his alpha male feelings and behavior are not the signs of a depth of passion that Sarah should and will find gratifying. Devon doesn't feel powerful, or privileged; his out-of-control possessiveness makes him feel "disgusted with himself" (149). Devon's self-awareness simultaneously allows the reader the emotional pleasure of knowing just how out of control his feelings have driven him (Sarah's power over him) and provides the comic kick of the scene—despite his awareness, Devon finds himself acting like a jerk nonetheless.

Sarah's Yves Saint Laurent vintage blouse?

The comedy turns dark, though, when the combination of anger and sexual charge drives Devon to turn to the tried-and-true bodice-ripper method for beating back a man's emotional vulnerability: forcing the woman who has made him feel weak to feel weak herself, by seducing her into having sex with him. He's livid not with the man he saw her with, but with her: "Sarah was to blame for making him this way" (150). Though he struggles to be gentle in the midst of his seduction, the anger inspired by his own vulnerability pushes him into retaliatory violence: "He started to undo the loose fabric bow at the neck of her blouse, then unable to fully undo the knot, he lost control and tore the fragile fabric right down the front of her torso" (150). Only the sight of Sarah's own vulnerability (a single tear), finally shocks Devon out of his self-absorbed, dominating behavior and halts his forced seduction/rape.

The blouse, significantly, was not just an easily replaceable shift, but a piece of clothing that once belonged to Sarah's now dead mother. Devon's rending of the garment, then, is both a physical and emotional attack on Sarah's well-being. Not surprisingly, Devon's act of sexual violence does not win him Sarah's acceptance, but instead is what convinces her to end their relationship: "her anticipatory warmth at returning to a happy, lusty, carefree Devon was a prehistoric, fossilized memory. Regardless of whatever happened tonight, this... this... whatever it had been with Devon... was over as far as Sarah was concerned" (150-51).

This being a romance, Sarah and Devon do eventually get back together, but not until many, many months have passed. And they have to go through the cycle again, although in a less violent manner, before Devon comes to accept both the vulnerability that his love for Sarah opens him to and the mutual give-and-take that a romantic relationship requires if it is to be at all an equitable one. Mulry's exploration of the dark side of a woman's desire for a man to be "overcome" by passion for her argues that unless the violence is divorced from the want, being "love[d] in the most irrational, improbable way imaginable," as Devon proclaims he loves Sarah, will always come with a heavy price tag (307).

Laura Florand's short story, Sun-Kissed, takes a different approach to re-envisioning bodice-ripping, suggesting that's what's good for the gander can be equally good for the goose. Anne Winters, a fifty-three-year-old Martha-Stewart-like domestic/business goddess, and Mack Corey, middle-aged multi-billionaire captain of industry, both are used to being the ones in power. But even their combined power was not enough to keep Anne out of jail when she was charged with insider trading. Unable to make the actual charge stick, prosecutors instead convicted Anne of obstruction of justice, a conviction that the novel suggests is in large part an anti-feminist backlash against Anne's financial success and "fuck you" attitude. As the novel opens, Anne has just finished serving a six-months jail term, and is taking pleasure in reasserting her control, creating the most beautiful wedding for the daughter of her friend and neighbor, Mack.

Mack, a long-time widower, has fantasized about Anne for years; Anne, emotionally protective after a series of miscarriages and a painful divorce, keeps her own sexuality tightly under wraps. The two have long been friends and business confidantes, talking daily walks on the beach by their adjacent Long Island homes every morning whenever they are both in town. Spending six months apart, though, has led Mack to realize just how much the icy Anne has woven herself into his well-being: "I just—I can't—that prison. It still makes me want to rip everything. Rip up the whole world," Mack reveals to his bossy father. And then he thinks to himself, "And I hugged her. And God damn but does she feel good, nestled up against my damn dick like that. Now I can't separate the reality anymore from all those years of fantasy. I don't want to. I want to rip that damn sheet of plastic between us all away" (Loc 785).

But Mack is wary that going on the sexual offensive with Anne might endanger their friendship, something that he's not willing to put at risk. His father shakes up Mack's assumptions, though, when he offers him a different way of looking at the situation: "Well, you say she's your best friend. You've known each other twenty years. And you still don't realize that if you try to get Anne Winters and she doesn't want you to, she'll stop you?" (Loc 737). By not acting on his sexual feelings, the elder Corey points out, Mack is not protecting Anne or himself, but is disrespecting Anne's power and strength. His father's insight helps Mack decide to gradually, but aggressively, attack the icy exterior which Anne has erected in self-defense:

     He'd been eying that gorgeous, queen's castle a long time. Trying to make himself hold off, respect their treaties, keep his ally. But that fundamental greed pushed at him, that need to claim every territory he wanted. About high time he ripped those treaties up and laid siege.
     Well, siege. He was fifty-three years old and he'd been on the other side of that moat a hell of a long time already. Maybe it was time to bring in the cannons. (Loc 909)

For her part, Anne is equal parts wary and wonder-filled at Mack's sudden change in attitude. The two banter and circle, Mack openly declaring his intentions, Anne offering up her usual defenses. Anne's protests, though, are made not out of fear; she's always been disappointed that no other man has been able to match her power, to breach the strength of her emotional walls:

     But she wanted him to win. Behind those walls, she was terrified he would lose. Everyone else always had. Without her even getting a chance to flex her full strength in the battle. Like a wisp of clouds, those other men. They brought up their forces, they pretended to lay siege, and she took a deep breath in preparation for battle—and at its release, they just dissipated. (Loc 1470)

With Anne and Mack, sex is about power, about the pleasures of fighting and winning, of dominating and submitting, the physical tied directly to the emotional:

    Mack knocked her hands aside, grabbed the two panels of her tailored white shirt, and ripped them open.
     Buttons flew. She gasped, her heart pounding in shock and agonized delight as he tore that outermost wall apart and left her naked. (Loc 1479)

Anne is still wearing her bra here. Mack's action has stripped away not her dignity or her power of choice, but the defenses that have protected her from opening herself to vulnerability.

But Anne is not the only one who can choose to be vulnerable, or to take on the role of dominating tyrant. Turnabout, Anne and Mack discover, is more than fair play:

     She considered him for a long moment, enjoying the way she could torment him just by barely twisting her hips. Torment herself. Then, still astride him, she leaned over to her nightstand drawer and pulled out her tiny embroidery scissors. Mack's eyes widened at the sight of them, and he held very still, as if he might be genuinely afraid her instincts for torture were going to come out. As if he felt genuinely caught at the mercy of a dangerous queen.
     .....
     Very carefully, she cut through the hem of his T-shirt's neckline. Then she set the scissors back on the nightstand, grabbed either side of that cut, and ripped the panels in half. (Loc 1632)


Both Florand's and Mulry's stories conclude not with the ripping of garments, but the careful opening of gift-wrapped packages, packages that contain gifts made by hand. Bodices—or white tailored shirts, silk blouses, even t-shirts—may be rent during passionate interludes. But it's the weaving of garments back together, or the creation of new ones, that best symbolizes the equitable sharing of power both Mulry's and Florand's couples reach in their HEAs.


What other memorable bodice-ripping scenes do you recall from romance novels you've read? And how does the rending of garments in them reveal the power dynamics between the lovers depicted?


Photo credits:
Yves St. Laurent blouse: Decades Inc.
Windsor castle: KPBS
Embroidery Scissors: Rochelle Mendle Conwell