Teach Me Tonight

Re-reading Georgette Heyer: Summaries of a Colloquium

2009-11-09T14:06:00.000-06:00

The "Re-reading Georgette Heyer" colloquium was held on Saturday 7 November 2009 in Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. In a press release issued online before the event,

Professor Sarah Annes Brown said: [...] I've organised quite a few conferences now - but none have received quite so much enthusiastic attention as Re-reading Georgette Heyer. But perhaps that's because I've never organised a conference about a writer who generates so much pure pleasure and enthusiasm in her readers.'

As she wrote in her observations on (and summary of) the colloquium, this enthusiasm was much in evidence on the day itself: "I’ve attended quite a lot of academic conferences – but never one where there was anything like so much cheering and laughter!" No doubt Heyer herself can take much of the credit for the laughter, since her novels are so full of comic moments and characters.

Many of the cheers, however, were elicited by Jennifer Kloester, who had new discoveries and announcements to make.

Since my notes are rather detailed it's going to take me some time to write them all up, so I've decided to give each paper its own post, and as I finish each one I'll link to it via the list below:

Jennifer Kloester: ‘The Life of Georgette Heyer’

Jay Dixon: ‘Heyer and Place’

Laura Vivanco: ‘”So educational!”, she said. “And quite unexceptionable.” The Nonesuch as Didactic Love Fiction.’

Sam Rayner: ‘Publishing Heyer: Representing the Regency in Historical Romance’

Mary Joannou: ‘Heyer and Austen’

Kerstin Frank: ‘The Thermodynamics of Georgette Heyer: Variations on the Quest for Revitalisation’

Catherine Johns: ‘Class and Breeding’

Sarah Annes Brown: ‘Lady of Quality and Homosexual Panic’

K. Elizabeth Spillman: ‘Cross Dressing and Disguise in Heyer’s Historical Romances’

As already mentioned, Sarah Annes Brown has written a summary of the colloquium, as has Una McCormack.

Heyer 2009: Jennifer Kloester: 'The Life of Georgette Heyer'

2009-11-09T13:58:00.001-06:00

Laura Vivanco

In her presentation, ‘The Life of Georgette Heyer,’ Jennifer Kloester revealed that she has completed a new biography of Heyer and hopes it will be published next year by Random House. [LV comment: Random House, under its Arrow imprint, has reprinted Heyer's works and published both Jennifer Kloester's Georgette Heyer's Regency World and Jane Aiken Hodge's biography of Heyer.]

Jane Aiken Hodge, who died earlier this year, granted Kloester access to her own research archive on Heyer but the new biography will also draw on a great many other archives which were not available to Hodge. Kloester has had extensive access to many letters written by Heyer which were untapped by Hodge, as well to the archives of A. S. Frere, Heyer's friend and publisher. Richard Rougier, Heyer's son (now also deceased) gave Kloester copyright permission to quote from his mother's letters. Kloester has a number of photographs of Heyer, including some taken in front of the the Rougiers' "mud hut" in Tanganyika [LV comment: A. S. Byatt, in her very short "biographical portrait" published in 1975, reports that "The Rougiers were [...] living in a hut made of elephant grass, in a compound in the bush, prowled round by lions, leopards, and rhinos."] and one by E. O. Hoppé. She also showed us photos of Heyer's family: her mother, Sylvia Watkins (1876-1962), her father, George Heyer (1869-1925), who graduated from Cambridge with a degree in classics and introduced Heyer to Austen, Dickens and Shakespeare, her brothers Boris and Frank, her son, Richard Rougier, and her husband, Ronald Rougier. Ronald had a varied career: originally training as a naval cadet before his defective eyesight was discovered, he retrained to become a mining engineer, briefly ran a sports shop and finally retrained yet again, becoming a barrister. Kloester has also found seven published, but since forgotten, short stories by Heyer, one of which was published pseudonymously.

Kloester gave a brief outline of Heyer's early life and publishing career. Georgette Heyer began writing at a very young age, and was described as a "prodigy." The Black Moth was published when she was very young. Heyer later suppressed her early contemporary novels Instead of the Thorn (1923), Helen (1928), Pastel (1929), and Barren Corn (1930), in which she struggled with the issues of gender and male/female relationships. In Helen the heroine's beloved father dies suddenly, much as George Heyer did, but at the time reviewers criticised what they considered this contrived aspect of the plot. Regency Buck (1935) was Heyer's first Regency romance. An Infamous Army (1937) was the novel that Heyer herself considered to be her best, and for a time it was recommended reading at Sandhurst because of its detailed description of the Battle of Waterloo. Kloester concluded by describing Heyer as a "great, enduring, bestseller" whose books continue to sell extremely well in the twenty-first century.

Heyer and Austen: Historical vs. Contemporary Fiction

2009-11-06T08:00:00.000-06:00

Laura Vivanco

This weekend I'm travelling (but not in the stylish conveyance depicted on the left) to Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, where I'll be presenting a paper on didacticism and The Nonesuch at a colloquium titled "Re-reading Georgette Heyer." I'm planning to take notes of the other speakers' presentations so that I can write up a summary when I get back. In the meantime, I thought I'd leave those not able to attend with a post about Georgette Heyer.

Lillian S. Robinson, in her 1978 essay "On Reading Trash" states that "Most of this essay will be focused on a contrast between the works of Jane Austen and those of Georgette Heyer" (202). The comparison seems to have been prompted by the way in which Heyer's novels have been marketed:

Georgette Heyer is the acknowledged Queen of the Regency romance (later paperback editions make some such peculiar claim), and it is a clear selling point to say that the book you are touting is just like "a" Georgette Heyer [...]. But for Heyer herself there can be only one predecessor sufficiently glamorous and sufficiently connected in the public mind with the Regency period and that is Jane Austen. (208)

For Robinson "the comparison can only prove disappointing" (208) yet she suggests that "Once the absurd incongruity of any connection between the two writers is duly acknowledged and assigned its proper weight, it has much to tell us about female literary experience" (202). Robinson's sense of the "absurd incongruity of any connection" between Austen and Heyer is based on her assessment of their respective literary merit (or lack of it, in the case of Heyer). Having made the comparison at some length, however, she concludes that

I can imagine no greater waste of energy than an elaborate demonstration that Jane Austen is a better writer than Georgette Heyer. In drawing so extensive a comparison between the two, my intention has not been to belabor the obvious points about what makes a great writer great. (220)

Personally, I'm rather less sure of what "obvious points" there are that make "a great writer great." I'm fairly sure that some of the writers who've been acclaimed as "great" in one period have gone out of fashion in others, so I'd have been interested to know the criteria by which Robinson judged greatness.

In her essay, the "extensive [...] comparison" she makes focuses on the differing ways in which Heyer and Austen present details of customs, dress, etc. Heyer's novels, Robinson states, "concentrate on precisely those minutiae of dress and décor that Austen takes for granted" (208). Can the presence of such details be sufficient to determine a lack of "greatness"? Robinson describes this sort of material in Heyer's novels as "pseudoinformation not because it is untrue [...] but because, ultimately, it reveals nothing about the society that fostered an institution like Almacks as its elite marriage market" (212) whereas Austen "communicates a far more vivid sense than we can attain to of the daily reality" (216) of life in the Regency period. I think this perhaps underestimates the amount and variety of historical information that Heyer's novels do convey about the Regency period. The "pseudoinformation" collected and organised by Jennifer Kloester (who will also be at the Heyer colloquium this weekend) in Georgette Heyer's Regency World makes for quite a substantial book. Heyer's information may not be of the type that most interests Robinson, but I think she goes too far in labeling it "pseudoinformation."

In addition, that Austen can convey a "vivid sense [...] of the daily reality" of living in the Regency period must surely be ascribed, at least in part, to the fact that Austen was writing contemporary novels, for a contemporary audience. Heyer was writing historical fiction, for a modern audience, a fact of which Robinson is well aware. Sarah Bower (2004) has noted that

Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice are not historical novels; their authors were writing about their own contemporary society, though, thanks largely to Andrew Davies, we are inclined to categorise them as period or costume dramas. The difference is, I think, self-evident.

Bower, however, does not seem to have found it so entirely self-evident as to make her own work superfluous, and her essay explores some of the ways in which "historical setting can heighten the effect of the romance." One of the ways derives from

the physical attributes of this “other country” called the past [which] can have an important role in raising the temperature of a romance. [...] What could be more romantic than Ivanhoe, armed and visored, under the escutcheon of the Disinherited Knight, tilting for love and English honour in the lists at Ashby de la Zouche?

As for the "pseudoinformation" so scorned by Robinson, Helen Hughes's response, as summarised by Sallie McNamara, might be that it owes its presence to the different requirements of historical fiction: "She argues that the language used, details of clothing, and so on, relating to the period, create a sense of verisimilitude" (85). Robinson acknowledges that they do serve this purpose but phrases her recognition of this in pejorative language:

Heyer [...] tells us about colors, cut, fabric, and trimming, [...] not only because the acquisition and display of clothing are more central to the existence of Heyer's heroines than they are to Austen's, but in order to invest the novels with that meretricious quality Henry James would have called "the tone of time." (208)

If Robinson had wished to compare like with like, she could perhaps have compared Heyer's novels to texts such as Sir Walter Scott's historical novels (including Ivanhoe, the novel mentioned by Bower), some of which were published before Austen's death but were set in much more distant historical periods. Robinson does not do so, however, and her insistence on comparing works of contemporary fiction with works of historical fiction, and then denigrating the latter because they are less authentic in representing the period in question than the former, suggests an inherent preference for contemporary fiction which neither Heyer nor any other author of historical fiction could entirely overcome. Robinson believes that

since historical fiction almost invariably takes the position that progress is desirable and that which in character, taste, or judgment most resembles present Western civilization is best of all, the context is created for a melioristic approach to historical process. At the same time, human personality tends to be portrayed as static, in that the most admirable and heroic characters have a modern view of themselves and what happens to them. The general impression one comes away with is that things used to be different (harder) for women way back then (whenever), but that women themselves were precisely the same [...] in what they needed, asked, or found in life. (207)

I think Robinson is correct in believing that historical fiction may have much to tell a careful reader about the period in which it was written but she gives little evidence to support her assertion that "historical fiction almost invariably takes the position that progress is desirable and that which in character, taste, or judgment most resembles present Western civilization is best of all." Perhaps some, if not all, offer authors and readers space to make comparisons between the past and the present which are less conclusively in favour of modernity. Sallie McNamara suggests that

The historical romance offers distance from the period in which it is written. Anxieties or tensions in relation to the contemporary society (of gender and sexuality) can be reworked within a constructed historical setting. (84-85)

Jane Austen may have been "aware that new social forces do encroach on the way of life - prosperous, decorous, and cultivated - that is the common heritage of Mansfield, Pemberly, Hartfield, Kellynch, Norland, and Northanger" (Robinson 214) but Heyer was also aware of "new social forces" encroaching, as is evident from her statement that she was "made violently unwell by the reflection that I am being forced to contribute towards a Welfare State of which I utterly Disapprove" (Aiken Hodge 122). Heyer, it would seem, did not believe that "present Western civilization is best of all," at least not in all respects. Sir Walter Scott, too, may have expressed in his novels some of the "Anxieties or tensions" which existed in his period. Sandra Schwab believes that "Sir Walter Scott, whose historical novels filled with knights, adventure and romance (Ivanhoe anybody?), certainly has to shoulder a large part of the blame" for Victorian medievalism which sought to "revive the spirit of the Middle Ages, the great ideals of "the days of old when knights were bold" (or at least what were thought to be the ideals of the knights of old)--in one word: CHIVALRY." Historical fiction which seeks to revive the spirit of an earlier age can surely not be read as an unambiguously triumphant statement to the effect that "progress is desirable and that which in character, taste, or judgment most resembles present Western civilization is best of all" (Robinson 207).

Historical fiction, then, while it may seek to teach the reader something about the period in which it is set, or at least be full of "pseudoinformation" may also, obliquely, suggest much about its authors' views of their own historical period, and those views may be rather more varied than Robinson seems to have recognised.

Aiken Hodge, Jane. The Private World of Georgette Heyer. 1984. London: Arrow, 2006.
Bower, Sarah. "Proud Protestations." Solander: The Magazine of the Historical Novel Society 8.1 (May 2004): 24-26.
McNamara, Sallie. "Georgette Heyer: the Historical Romance and the Consumption of the Erotic, 1918-1939." All the World and Her Husband: Women in Twentieth-century Consumer Culture. London: Cassell, 2000. 82-96.
Robinson, Lillian S. "On Reading Trash." 1978. Sex, Class, and Culture. New York: Methuen, 1986. 200-222.
Schwab, Sandra. "Social Movements: Victorian Medievalism." Unusual Historicals, 23 April 2008.

Call for Papers: Romance Fiction and American Culture

2009-10-30T16:02:00.002-05:00

Romance Fiction and American Culture:

Love as the Practice of Freedom?

Edited by William Gleason and Eric Selinger

Call for Proposals and Essays

Last April, Princeton University hosted a groundbreaking two-day conference on popular romance fiction and American culture. Gathering scholars, authors, editors, and bloggers, this interdisciplinary gathering featured panels on romance and history (both political and literary), romance and religion, romance and sexuality, and romance and race. Each explored the ways that popular romance fiction has reflected, and also helped shape, American culture from the late 18^th century to the present.

Conference organizers William Gleason (Princeton) and Eric Selinger (DePaul University) now invite proposals for a collection of essays that will build on the work of the conference: Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom? We welcome proposals from academic scholars from any field—American literature, popular culture, religion, women's and gender studies, African American Studies, or any other relevant discipline—as well as from authors, editors, and other members of the romance community who wish to reflect on their practice in light of the volume’s concerns.

We are eager to consider proposals or abstracts on the relationships between popular romance fiction and

the history of reading in America, from Pamela to the present
American cultures of sexuality, masculinity, and femininity
American religious cultures, in Christian and other traditions
Race, ethnicity, and exogamous desire
“High” culture: literary fiction, poetry, visual art, etc.
Other popular genres: mystery / detective fiction, Science Fiction and Fantasy, non-romance bestsellers, chick-lit
Other popular media: film, comics, music, gaming
The culture of sport (football, baseball, NASCAR, etc.)
American political / military culture, from the early Republic to the present
American psychological / therapeutic / self-help culture

We also hope for papers on the romance industry in America and the diverse community of romance readers, authors, and reviewers, both as they are and as they are represented in the media:

Romance sub-genres—Western, Gothic, Regency, Medieval, Paranormal (vampire, were, empath, etc.), Futuristic/time travel, Multi-cultural, Erotic, Gay/lesbian, etc.—and their shifting appeal to readers
American romance and other traditions: comparative studies, texts in translation, transnational encounters
Romance publishing: major presses, series and lines, the rise in e-publishing
Representations of American romance writers, readers, bloggers, book groups, conventions, etc.

Detailed abstract or draft essay and a short CV are due by January 4, 2010. Final essays will be due in June, 2010. We are happy to answer any inquiries. Please feel free to post and / or forward this email to interested colleagues, students, or friends.

Prof. William Gleason, bgleason@princeton.edu

Prof. Eric Selinger, eselinge@depaul.edu

Studies Show ... That Eric's Got a New Post Up

2009-10-30T06:36:00.004-05:00

Eric's over at Romancing the Blog today, taking some studies with a pinch of salt and receiving encouragement from others:

it’s got me thinking–not at all scientifically–about one of the novels I taught for the first time this quarter, here at DePaul: Laura Kinsale’s Prince of Midnight.

As the novel ends, our hero and heroine, S.T. Maitland and Leigh Strachan, are trying to figure out what love means, or at least what their love means, and why S.T. should stay with Leigh, despite the flaws that he thinks forbid him to marry her.

“What can I give you in return?” he demands of her. “Give me your joy,” she responds. “Give me all your mad notions and your crazy heroics and your impossible romantical follies. And I’ll be your anchor. I’ll be your balance. I’ll be your family. I won’t let you fall.”

Studies have shown that this is one of the most moving betrothal scenes in all of romance. OK, maybe no one’s studied that. But the notion that one test of a couple is how they deal with differential happiness, spreading the wealth, rings deeply true to me.

A Land of Something Other than Milk and Cream

2009-10-28T06:55:00.007-05:00

Laura Vivanco

Yesterday Angela T was blogging at Romancing the Blog about how

Here we are in 2009 and the case of “separate, but equal” rules how AA romances are treated. [...] I for one feel that acknowledging the issues romance writers of color face is the first step to understanding, and ultimately, supporting the inclusion of romance writers–and characters–of all colors, creeds, and nationalities into the romance genre.

Also yesterday, over at Dear Author, Handy Hunter had up a guest post about "Cultural Appropriation in Romance." Sunita added a very detailed comment which gave examples of many different possible scenarios for historical romances set in India with Indian protagonists. The discussion is still ongoing and it broadened out from the initial topic of cultural appropriation to include examples of "issues romance writers of color face." Jade Lee wrote about her personal experience:

Harlequin recruited me into the Blaze line specifically to add a dimension of multi-culturalism to it. I’ve written 3 books for them, one historical, two contemporary, all with Asian characters. No paranormal elements. Harlequin promoted me well, especially The Concubine which was the second historical Blaze ever, not the first. I think I write good books, but The Concubine was especially good and fit perfectly with senior editor Brenda Chin’s vision for the Blaze line.

After 3 books, Harlequin considers the experiement over. The sales were extremely poor. It was not the fault of promotion or marketing. I got a TON of promotion. It was also (according to senior editor Brenda Chin and the few who read the books) not the fault of the writing.

Despite the failure of this experiment, many readers on the thread expressed their wish to read romances written by "romance writers of color" about protagonists "of color." I thought I'd add a few links to some online short stories which might fit the bill:

Shobhan Bantwal - Seeking a Six-Foot Bride about Rajesh Sanwal, who is "seeking a six-foot bride."

Barbara Caridad Ferrer - For You I Will and a sequel, about Adam Cardenas and Milagros Acevedo.

Roslyn Hardy Holcomb - Rock Star Wedding, a novella and sequel to Rock Star. If you haven't already read Rock Star, you might want to just focus on the protagonists of this novella, Naysa and Twist.

Going further back in time, I suppose one could think of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda as a romance by a white author about characters from a different racial background:

George Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda, was also her most controversial. Few had a problem, upon its publication in 1876, with its portrayal of yearning and repression in the English upper class. But as Eliot's lover, George Henry Lewes, had predicted: "The Jewish element seems to me likely to satisfy nobody." (Owen)

If you've got more recommendations or links, please do leave a comment.

----
Both illustrations come from Wikimedia Commons. The first is "Attributed to Manohar" and is from "India, Mughal dynasty, ca. 1597." The second "was painted by Chang We-Che'ng who lived in the 8th and 9th centuries."

Ray Browne: Pioneer of Popular Culture

2009-10-24T13:35:00.004-05:00

Laura Vivanco

Bowling Green State University announced yesterday that

Dr. Raymond B. Browne, who was instrumental in establishing the first full-fledged department of popular culture in the United States at Bowling Green State University in 1973, died Oct. 22 at home in Bowling Green, Ohio. He was 87.

Internationally recognized as a publisher and expert in popular culture, Browne is often credited with coining the term and as being among the first to propose its serious study.

The Browne Popular Culture Library, which bears his name, includes among its many collections

a wide range of romance materials from novels to valentines. The collection includes more than 10,000 volumes of category romance series from publishers such as Harlequin, Silhouette, Loveswept, Candlelight, Ecstasy, and others. The holdings also include a sizable collection of mass market novels, including Georgian, regency, gothic, contemporary, and historicals.

Additional "romantic" items can be found in the Library's various special collections, including large holdings of ephemeral items, such as movie advertisements, posters, and press kits. A unique collection of romance publishing-house book marks and a large selection of valentines from various eras may also be found in the Browne Popular Culture Library.

In addition, the Library has manuscript collections containing correspondence, fan mail, literary manuscripts, and galley sheets from many prominent romance writers, includings Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Cathie Linz, and April Kihlstrom.

The library also holds the "RWA’s organizational archives documenting its founding [...] and following its growth into the world’s largest non-profit genre organization."

According to a "biographical sketch" of Ray Browne provided by the Browne Popular Culture Library

He received his PhD in American literature, folklore and history from UCLA in 1956. He accepted a position in the English department at the University of Maryland. While at Maryland his interest in American Studies expanded after meeting Carl Bode, one of the founders of the American Studies Association. Bode was part of a growing number of scholars who believed that academia needed inter and multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of the humanities and of literature. Browne embraced this view.

After not receiving tenure at the University of Maryland, he assumed a post in the English department at Purdue in 1960. Between 1965 and 1966 he was instrumental in arranging two Purdue conferences intended to broaden the traditionally narrow approach to studying culture. Browne would remain at Purdue until Bowling Green State University offered him a folklore professorship in 1967. In 1968 research facilities began to emerge as the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and the Popular Culture Library. In 1970 the Popular Press was established. Gradually he introduced a popular culture curriculum into his folklore classes, creating much unpopularity within the English department. This in turn would lead to the establishment in 1971-1972 of a separate Department of Popular Culture at BGSU chaired by Ray Browne. After being away for a year at the University of Maryland, he returned to BGSU in 1976 and remained until his retirement in 1992.

An obituary at CBC News recounts that

"Culture is everything from the food we've always eaten to the clothes we've always worn," he said in a 2003 interview with The Associated Press.

While many in the field credit Browne with coming up the name "popular culture," no one could say for sure whether he originated it. He said he made a mistake in 1967 when he first used the phrase.

"If I had called it everyday culture or democratic culture, it would not have been so sharply criticized," he said.

Initially, as mentioned in another obituary, this time in the Telegraph,

Professors at universities nationwide thought Browne, an English professor, was trying to demean or trivialise what they were teaching when he founded the popular culture department.

But he insisted that interest was genuinely rooted in finding out how society affects culture, and how culture affects society. The concept of popular culture as an object of study has been embraced worldwide, and it is commonly taught as part of a range of university courses.

He was interviewed in 2002 by Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture and

provided us with our most thorough and lasting definition of popular culture:

Popular culture is the way of life in which and by which most people in any society live. [...] It is the everyday world around us: the mass media, entertainments, and diversions. It is our heroes, icons, rituals, everyday actions, psychology, and religion — our total life picture. It is the way of living we inherit, practice and modify as we please, and how we do it. It is the dreams we dream while asleep.

Robert Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love

2009-10-17T10:30:00.003-05:00

Laura Vivanco

I've mentioned another of Robert J. Sternberg's theories about love here already, but since I've been asking what the truth is about love, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at Sternberg's triangular theory of love, illustrated in graphic form above. He tried to answer a number of questions:

What does it mean "to love" someone? Does it always mean the same thing, and if not, in what ways do loves differ from each other? Why do certain loves seem to last, whereas others disappear almost as quickly as they are formed? (119)

His response was the triangular theory which

holds that love can be understood in terms of three components that together can be viewed as forming the vertices of a triangle. These three components are intimacy (the top vertex of the triangle), passion (the left-hand vertex of the triangle), and decision/commitment (the right-hand vertex of the triangle). (The assignment of components to vertices is arbitrary.) Each of these three terms can be used in many different ways so it is important at the outset to clarify their meanings in the context of the present theory.
The intimacy component refers to feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in loving relationships. [...]
The passion component refers to the drives that lead to romance, physical attraction, sexual consummation, and related phenomena in loving relationships. [...]
The decision/commitment component refers to, in the short term, the decision that one loves someone else, and in the long term, the commitment to maintain that love. The decision/commitment component thus includes within its purview the cognitive elements that are involved in decision making about the existence of and potential long-term commitment to a loving relationship. (119)

These three kinds of love can be appear in different combinations and quantities in any given relationship, so for example if only the passion component is present, Sternberg would classify this as "Infatuated love. Infatuated love is "love at first sight." Infatuated love, or simply, infatuation, results from the experiencing of passionate arousal in the absence of the intimacy and decision/commitment components of love" (124). On a different point of the triangle we find "Empty love [...] the kind of love one sometimes finds in stagnant relationships that [...] have lost both the mutual emotional involvement and physical attraction that once characterized them" (124) but "in societies where marriages are arranged, the marital partners may start with the commitment to love each other, or to try to love each other, and not much more. Such relationships point out how empty love [...] can be the beginning rather than the end" (124).

For Sternberg, the "kind of love toward which many of us strive, especially in romantic relationships" (124) is "Consummate love. Consummate, or complete, love results from the full combination of the three components" (124). Unfortunately, some romance novels may fail to convince readers that all three components are present in the central relationship. Although the couple may seem passionately attracted to each other and have made a commitment to marry by the end of the novel, this may not be sufficient to ensure that the reader believes in the happy ending. Or, to put it in Sternberg's terms, the reader may not be convinced that the couple are experiencing "consummate love." Rather, the reader may feel that the couple are in the throes of

Fatuous love. Fatuous love results from the combination of the passion and decision/commitment components in the absence of the intimacy component. It is the kind of love we sometimes associate with Hollywood, or with whirlwind courtships, in which a couple meets on Day X, gets engaged two weeks later, and marries the next month. It is fatuous in the sense that a commitment is made on the basis of passion without the stabilizing element of intimate involvement. (124)

Of course it is possible for "fatuous love" to develop into "consummate love" and some readers may be happy to assume that it will, but other readers may well want to be given evidence that "consummate love" exists before they will believe in the happy ending. Snitow, writing about romances in the late 1970s, wrote that

After one hundred and fifty pages of mystification, unreadable looks, "hints of cruelty" and wordless coldness, the thirty-page denouement is powerless to dispell the earlier impression of menace. Why should this heroine marry this man? And, one can ask with equal reason, why should this hero marry this woman? These endings do not ring true. (250-251)

I'd suggest that perhaps they did not "ring true" for Snitow because the "thirty-page denouement" rapidly converted "infatuated love" into "fatuous love" but left her entirely unconvinced that the couple had the necessary intimacy to achieve "consummate love."¹

Cohn, however, has suggested that often sexual responses are intended to be read as proof of a deeper, emotional connection:

The formulaic discovery that the heroine's sexual response to the hero proves her love for him is critical to the strategies of romance fiction. For one thing, it provokes an a posteriori moral alibi for her earlier eroticism; her response to the hero was, after all, a response out of love. More important, it enlists sexuality under the banner of love, subduing sex itself to the ends of love. Female sexuality, though it may have been elicited by male sexuality, has its own character as handmaiden to love. (Cohn 29)

More recent romances have, in general, become rather more explicit about the passionate aspects of romantic relationships. In fact, in a review at AAR of Julia James's Just the Sexiest Man Alive the reviewer commented that, "in a shocking twist, there’s no sex – and I really mean that – and I definitely felt the lack. For a book being marketed as a romance, it’s an odd choice." Other reviewers also felt the need to warn readers about this aspect of the novel: "I feel I should warn you that there isn't ANY sex in the book. I mean, it's mentioned but we get no details" (Rowena, at The Book Binge). Clearly a lot of modern romance readers want to have detailed proof that the characters are not merely experiencing "Companionate love. This kind of love evolves from a combination of the intimacy and decision/commitment components of love. It is essentially a long-term, committed friendship" (Sternberg 124).

But explicit or not, and whether a romance features a sexually experienced heroine or a virginal one who's awakened to her sexuality by a mere kiss, there can be a tendency for passion to be read as an indicator of True Love in a way which obliterates the distinction between emotional and sexual intimacy and reminds me of Betty Everett's Shoop Shoop song:

I'm not convinced that intimacy can be detected "in his kiss" or even in the most intense of multiple orgasms, and far from being easy to write, the equilateral triangle of "consummate love" poses a considerable challenge to authors.²

Cohn, Jan. Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women. Durham: Duke UP, 1988.
Snitow, Ann Barr. “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different.” Radical History Review 20 (1979): 141-61. Rpt. in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. Ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson. New York: Monthly Review P., 1983. 245-63.
Sternberg, Robert J. "A Triangular Theory of Love." Psychological Review 93.2 (1986): 119-135.

1 This suggestion is strengthened by Snitow's statement that "When women try to imagine companionship, the society offers them one vision, male, sexual companionship" (252). In other words, the intimacy required for consummate love is lacking in these representations of romantic relationships, but passion is not.

2 As Sternberg points out, there can be a lot of variations in the triangles produced:

The geometry of the love triangle depends upon two factors: amount of love and balance of love [...] differences in area represent differences in amounts of love experienced [...]: the larger the triangle, the greater the amount of experienced love. [...] Shape of the triangle. [...] The equilateral triangle [...] represents a balanced love in which all three components of love are roughly equally matched. [...] a scalene triangle pointing to the left side, represents a relationship in which the passion component of love is emphasized over the others [...] By varying both the area and the shape of the triangle of love, it becomes possible to represent a wide variety of different kinds of relationships. (128)

Graphic from Wikipedia.

O Tell Me the Truth About Love

2009-10-09T16:16:00.001-05:00

Laura Vivanco

I borrowed that line from W. H. Auden

but it's something I've been pondering recently, in part because I've recently come across quite a few comments about, and descriptions of, love, but also because "The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance is dedicated to fostering and promoting the scholarly exploration of all popular representations of romantic love." My research has tended to focus on some of the texts which make up a genre which is defined by the centrality of romantic love, and I only occasionally want to focus my analysis on the "representations of romantic love" in those texts. Today, although I would like to discuss "romantic love," but none of the texts which have made me think about the nature of romantic love recently were romance novels.

Lazaraspaste's blog, That Bitch Goddess, Love, takes its name "from a William James quote from a letter to H.G. Wells. Love is far more of a bitch than success ever could be" and she

postulate[s] three kinds of pairings off:

1. Looks Like It’s About Time I Got Married and Bred [...]
2. Companions in Mind Boggling Dysfunction [...]
3. The Companionate Marriage Which hardly ever happens and even when it does, it can look from the outside like either #1 or #2 depending on the day

I suppose the relationship between Harry Smith, a Brigade Major during the Peninsular war, and his wife Juana, might fall into the third category, and he certainly distinguishes it from other marriages (which I suppose one could place in the first category). Here he's describing his reaction on being told that Juana (from whom he'd been parted for a few months, while he was posted to fight in America, and she stayed in London) is well:

It is difficult to decide whether excess of joy or of grief is the most difficult to bear; but seven years' fields of blood had not seared my heart or blunted my naturally very acute feelings, and I burst into a flood of tears. "Oh, thank Almighty God." Soon I was in Panton Square, with my hand on the window of the coach, looking for the number, when I heard a shriek, "Oh Dios, la mano de mi Enrique!"¹ Never shall I forget that shriek; never shall I forget the effusion of our gratitude to God, as we held each other in an embrace of love few can ever have known, cemented by every peculiarity of our union and the eventful scenes of our lives. Oh! you who enter into holy wedlock for the sake of connexions–tame, cool, amiable, good, I admit–you cannot feel what we did. That moment of our lives was worth the whole of your apathetic ones for years. We were unbounded in love for each other, and in gratitude to God for all His mercies. (from Harry Smith's autobiography)

Harry certainly seemed to think that his love for Juana was of a special and rare kind, but I wonder how many people think that the romantic love they're experiencing is boring and commonplace? Is the perception of uniqueness something induced by the experience of romantic love itself, or is it an accurate and realistic perception? Is this kind of marriage rare?

Lazaraspaste also writes that

The truth is that because love requires an upheaval both of social norms and personal comfort, that to love anyone, whether beloved or friend, mother or child, neighbor or enemy, is an act so difficult that the cynical are justified in questioning if love is even possible.

I can see how sometimes love "requires an upheaval both of social norms and personal comfort" but I don't think this can be the case for everyone, every time they fall in love in a category 3 kind of way. Over at Racy Romance Reviews, though, a comment by Janine seemed to suggest that at the very least falling in love causes upheaval for the person doing the falling:

To me “Alpha and Omega” was all about the scary aspect of falling in love. I find falling in love frightening in real life, because one doesn’t know the other person well yet in the falling in love stage of relationships, and yet that person has become so important to me, so much the center of my world. Should I trust them? Should I trust my feelings for them? Where do these sudden, powerful feelings come from? Will they ever go away? Do I want them to go away? Do I want this other person to go away, or will I feel like dying if they ever leave me?
For me, that is what falling in love feels like

Does everyone find falling in love frightening? I have the impression that a lot of romance heroes do, because they fear commitment, but perhaps this may be because many of them fall in love deeply, all at once, and fear that once in it's too late to get out, because "Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds" (Shakespeare, Sonnet 116). Friends-to-lovers storylines, however, would tend to suggest the possibility that romantic love can develop gradually, between people who do know each other well, and so their love does change, from the love of friends to romantic love.

In addition to differing accounts of the process of falling in love, we can have very different protagonists. Harry Smith's autobiography was published posthumously in 1903 but Juana was only fourteen at the time of her marriage in 1812, which may shock and horrify many modern readers of her story, but at the time she would have been deemed old enough: "In the UK, the age of sexual consent for women has been set at 16 since 1885, when campaigners fought to raise it from 13 to prevent child prostitution" (BBC). Their story (which forms a very significant portion of Georgette Heyer's The Spanish Bride) might therefore seem unromantic to many modern readers, but Harry writes that when he first saw her she "inspired me with a maddening love which, from that period to this (now thirty-three years), has never abated under many and the most trying circumstances" (Chapter 8). His experience seems in stark contrast to comments I've seen on romance blogs which state that the happy endings for teenage heroines seem unrealistic. According to figures given at Dear Author (but I have no idea where they got them from), "The average age of heroine in U.S. romance novels is between 24-26 (and possibly younger in historical romance)." My impression is that heroes tend to be older than heroines. If there are certain age-ranges at which it is deemed most appropriate for heroes and heroines to find true love and which make their happy endings more believable, I wonder what the reasons are behind them. Is it possible that some readers feel that teenagers will alter too much for their love not to alter too?

And once a couple has discovered that their love is mutual and there are no impediments to them expressing that love, how should they behave towards, and feel about, each other? Again, there are differing opinions. Here's James Cobham in Steven Brust and Emma Bull's Freedom & Necessity, writing to his lover, Susan:

My companionship with you, my Goddess, seems to be as much a state of ethical house-cleaning as it is an exaltation of the spirit and a carnival of the body. Do you doubt the last two? Never doubt them. You are the fire in my nerves and blood; the heat and smoke of that burning tempers my courage and clears my vision, until I feel almost that I can see into this solid world to its theoretical bones, the shape theology calls its soul. This is the first experience of my life that makes me question what I have always believed: that death stops everything that we are, and uncreates us down to the last atom. This one thing, my feeling for you, seems too large and strong to be extinguished by the mere breaking of the box of flesh and bone that holds it. If anything is left of me after the end of my life, it will be this.
There is, I think, an assumption that romantic love is universal, and the entitlement of every human being. If what I feel for you is romantic love, I am inclined to doubt the assumption, or at least its definitions. Or is love properly defined as the urge to mate, marry, and procreate, and this staggering experience of mine something else, an uncommon frame for those things, bearing some other name? (513)

Again, there seems to be a comparison being made here between what the lover feels and Lazaraspaste's Type 1 relationship. And although I've not seen it phrased that way before, the idea of the beloved encouraging "ethical house-cleaning" isn't uncommon in romances, either, since so many heroic romance rakes are redeemed/reformed by love. James continues, however, by rejecting several popular ideas about romantic love

How can I explain this? You are not an extension of myself; a pen is an extension of myself, having life only because I've picked it up, passive, unmoving unless moved. You are not my mirror; are there people who want to look at their lovers and see nothing but themselves? You are not my conscience, my muse, or the sanctifying angel of my hearth - don't laugh, Susan, you've read that kind of nonsense in the penny-press, too. [...] No, I can't explain it, other than to say that I'm required to deal with you as I would like to deserve to be dealt with. (514-15)

James' final sentence seems to offer a remarkably gender-free and egalitarian ideal of their relationship, which is keeping with both his philosophical and political leanings, and Susan's objection to marriage: she has told him that she has "no intention of marrying [...] You've concerned yourself in the cause of freedom in this country. You hate slavery. Do you know the laws regarding marriage in England? [...] Some of them are not in the husband's power to ignore" (233).

Christopher Stasheff, in The Warlock Enraged, offers no critique of the institution of marriage, and traditional gender roles don't seem to be challenged to any great extent in the fictional universe he's created, where even the types of magic witches and warlocks can perform is governed by their biological sex,² but he does offer an even stronger rejection of the idea that the beloved should be a sort of "conscience." Rod Gallowglass and his wife Gwen have been married for a number of years, and have four children together, but Rod is still negotiating his relationship with her:

Rod said slowly, "[...] I've always felt Rod Gallowglass is an even better thing to be, when he's with his wife Gwen."
"Thy wife?" Simon frowned. "That hath a ring of great wrongness to it. Nay, Lord Warlock - an thou dost rely on another person for thy sense of worth, thou dost not truly believe that thou hast any. Thou shouldst enjoy her company because she is herself, and is pleasing to thee, is agreeable company - not because she is a part of thee, nor because the two of thee together make thy self a worthwhile thing to be." (232)

So, after all that I'm feeling a bit daunted, lest my feelings of love aren't exceptional, exalted, unselfish, frightening, independent, companionate etc enough. Is anyone else feeling brave enough to try to tell me the the truth about love?
----

Brust, Steven and Emma Bull. Freedom & Necessity. New York: Tor, 1997.
Smith, Harry. The Autobiography of Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Smith, Baronet of Aliwal on the Sutlej G. C. B.. Ed. G. C. Moore Smith. London: John Murray, 1903. Online edition published by the Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania.
Stasheff, Christopher. The Warlock In Spite of Himself. 1969. London: Granada, 1982.
Stasheff, Christopher. The Warlock Enraged. New York: Ace, 1985.

1 This can be translated as "Oh God, my Harry's hand!"

2 As Rod discovered in the first book in the series, both witches and warlocks can

'[...] wish ourselves to places that we know. All the boys can fly; the girls cannot.'
Sex-linked gene, Rod thought. Aloud, he said, 'That's why they ride broomsticks?'
'Aye. Theirs is the power to make lifeless objects do their bidding. We males cannot.'
'Aha! Another linkage. Telekinesis went with the Y-chromosomes, levitation with the X.
But they could all teleport. And read minds. (93)

Realistic Happiness

2009-10-02T09:33:00.002-05:00

Laura Vivanco

In Mary Balogh's First Comes Marriage, the heroine, Vanessa, is not the most beautiful of the three Huxtable sisters. Her gift is her "ability to be happy and to spread happiness about you" (196). It is a gift she learned, or at least perfected, in the course of her short first marriage to Hedley Dew: "He taught me so much about living life one day at a time, about finding joy in small things and laughter in the face of tragedy" (376). Thus although she is far from unaware of the realities of disease, bereavement and sorrow, Vanessa always tries to find joy in life. As she says to Elliott Wallace, Viscount Lyngate,

Realism does not exclude love or joy. It is made up of those elements. [...] We should all be as realistic as I [...] Why is realism always seen as such a negative thing? Why do we find it so difficult to trust anything but disaster and violence and betrayal? Life is good. Even when good people die far too young and older people betray us, life is good. Life is what we make of it. We get to choose how we see it. (Balogh 359)

This is, I think, an argument which many romance authors have made in defence of the genre itself. Shannon McKelden, for example, relates that

While shopping with a coworker, a friend found herself being chastised for purchasing romance novels. “How can you let your children see you reading those things?” she was asked. “All those happy endings give kids such a distorted, unrealistic view of the world.” Huh? [...]

The media makes sure we all have a healthy dose of murder, mayhem and misery to start and end every day. Then, there’s the newspapers, pointing out every riot and act of religious hatred, supplemented with political scandals and racial attacks. [...] Honest, unbiased news would present the real facts — that every day, somewhere in the world, in this country, and, yes, even in our own backyards, someone saves a life, someone gives a needy child a home, and someone shares peace with their neighbor.

In rather more combative mode, Jennifer Crusie has written that

the world is full of cynical, sophisticated, seductive people who will tell you that only a romantic (and when did that word get to be a pejorative?) would believe in love and connection; that the world is a cold, cruel, heartless place; and that happy endings are unrealistic and ultimately harmful; and I think these people are snot-nosed jackasses, and it is my God-given duty to thwart and annoy them at every turn. (226)

Obviously there are a great many unrealistic elements in the romance genre, including vampires and shapeshifters, but what these romance authors are asserting is, I think, the realism of the emotionally optimistic outlook on life presented by the genre. Eric Selinger's "hunch [...] is that romance novels are often primers in positive psychology, in ways that measure up quite well against current research."

The positive psychology movement was born in 1998 when Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, was voted in as president of the American Psychological Association. In his inaugural speech, Seligman, who had worked on depression for 30 years, stunned his audience by saying psychologists had missed a trick. Rather than devoting attention to lives that had gone desperately wrong, psychologists should change tack, focusing instead on people for whom everything was going well. While psychologists knew virtually all there was to know about depression, he said, they knew almost nothing of the secrets of a happy life. Discover what they are and it might give you a recipe that people could learn to make themselves happier and more satisfied with their lives. (Sample)

Vanessa and the romance authors' view of realism and happiness back up Eric's hunch, and they do seem to be shared by a number of psychologists. Daniel Nettle, for example, has stated that

The things in modern life that cause us fear, shame, and sadness are really - by and large - not as threatening as a large carnivore. [...] our negative emotion programs, designed as they were to cope with real, ugly, Paleolithic emergencies, go off on a needless rumination of fear and worry. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, since our constant fear and worry makes us more hostile, more paranoid, less attractive, and less open to good things that might come along.
The approach known as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) works on this insight to reduce negative thoughts and feelings. (148)

Or as Vanessa puts it, in the context of Elliott's rather Darcy-like disapproval at a country ball

Viscount Lyngate, Vanessa strongly suspected, had not really enjoyed the evening at all. And it was entirely his own fault if he had not, for he had arrived expecting to be bored. That had been perfectly obvious to her. Sometimes one got exactly what one wished for. (Balogh 55)

"Nick Baylis, a psychologist at Cambridge University" (Sample) seems to agree with Vanessa on this last point. He believes that "If you're optimistic and you think life is going to get better, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy" (Sample). Elliott not only marries Vanessa, but he also eventually opens himself up to accepting her views on life and happiness and so

Their lives were to be brimful and overflowing, he suspected - and always would be.
What else could a man expect when he was married to Vanessa?
He grinned at her and set to work. (Balogh 388)

--------

Balogh, Mary. First Comes Marriage. New York: Dell, 2009.
Crusie Smith, Jennifer. "Why I Know I'll Continue to Write Romance Until They Pry My Cold Dead Fingers from Around My Keyboard." North American Romance Writers. Ed. Kay Mussell and Johanna Tuñón. Lanham, Maryland: Scarcrow, 1999. 225-26.
McKelden, Shannon. "Since When Are Happy Endings a Crime?" Romancing the Blog 1 August 2005.
Nettle, Daniel. Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Sample, Ian. "How to be happy: Why do some people enjoy life and others don't? Psychologists are spending $30m on trying to find out." The Guardian 19 November 2003.
Selinger, Eric. "Romance, Resilience, and “Authentic Happiness”." Romancing the Blog 19 December 2007.

The photo is from Wikimedia Commons. You can decide for yourself if the glass is half full, or half empty!

A Simple Proposal

2009-09-26T07:46:00.006-05:00

Laura Vivanco

She was beginning to feel horribly embarrassed. People were beginning to look. A number of the girls were beginning to nudge one another and titter. [...] Frances looked at him in mute appeal.
And then her daring, impulsive, annoying, wonderful Lucius did surely the most reckless thing he had ever done in his life. He risked everything.
"Frances," he said without even trying to lower his voice or make the moment in any way private, "my dearest love, will you do me the great honor of marrying me?"
There were gasps and squeals and shushing noises and sighs. [...]
It was the sort of marriage proposal, a distant part of Frances's brain thought, that no woman would ever dream of receiving. It was the sort of marriage proposal every woman deserved.
She bit her lip.
And then smiled radiantly.
"Oh, yes, Lucius," she said. "Yes, of course I will."
[...] everyone within hearing distance clapped. (Balogh 336-37)

That's an excerpt from Mary Balogh's Simply Unforgettable. It raised a few questions for me. In making a public proposal how has a man "risked everything"? And supposing you were a single women receiving this proposal, and you were in love with the person making it, would you

(a) feel this was "the sort of marriage proposal every woman deserved"?
(b) "feel horribly embarrassed"?
(c) feel some other emotion/have an alternative opinion?

Why?

Balogh, Mary. Simply Unforgettable. New York: Delacorte, 2005.

----
The very public proposal in the photo took place on "(March 10, 2007) - Lt. Ryan Hinz proposes to Nora Awad aboard the newly commissioned ship USS New Orleans (LPD 18). Awad said yes and both were congratulated by the Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV), the Honorable Dr. Donald C. Winter." The photo came from Wikimedia Commons.

History of Reading

2009-09-25T05:33:00.002-05:00

Laura Vivanco

Since we've been having discussions about the experience of reading, I thought it might be interesting to post a couple of quotes concerning some of the ideas about reading that existed in the ancient world. In Plato's Phaedrus,

Lysias is Phaedrus’ lover. In their homoerotic relationship, Lysias is the active partner (the lover), Phaedrus the passive partner (the beloved). But here the lover is also the writer: Lysias wrote the discourse. Phaedrus will read this discourse out loud: the beloved here is thus also the reader. Now, within the Greek context, such a doubling of roles (the lover who doubles as a writer, the beloved who doubles as a reader) cannot be innocent: one of the first Greek models of written communication, in fact, defines the writer as a metaphorical lover, leaving the role of the beloved to the reader. This “pederastic” metaphor stems in part from the fact that the Greeks of the first literate centuries read exclusively out loud: through his writing, the writer is supposed to use the reader, the indispensable instrument for the full realization of his written word. The writer uses the reader, just as the lover uses the beloved to satisfy his desire. (Scheid and Svenbro 124-25)

and

What then happened when in certain circles the practice of reading silently began to take hold at the end of the sixth century B. C.? […] in the silent reading of the Greeks, the voice of the reader is in some sense transferred into the graphic sphere, which in turn raises its voice: the Greek who reads silently hears the “voice” of the writing in front of him in his head, as if the letters had a voice, as if the book were a talking object. In Euripides’ Hippolytus, the writing is supposed to be capable of “speaking” to the reader who reads in silence, of “shouting” to him, even of “singing” him a melos. It is as if the voice were inside the writing, present inside.

In other words, from now on writing and the voice seem to be lodged in the same place, and the “text” - created by the reader each time his voice unites with the writing – therefore becomes quasi-obsolete, replaced by a text that is closer to our own, which tends to erase the interpretative, or at least vocal, contribution of the reader (to such an extent that a considerable theoretical effort became necessary in the twentieth century to accord the reader an active role in reading). An unsuspecting ventriloquist, the reader now listens, in his head, to a text that seems to be addressing him autonomously. (Scheid and Svenbro 127)

As for the history of reading romances, McDaniel College have a new article up on their website about Pamela Regis:

In the early years of Regis’ scholarly attention to romance fiction as a form worth studying, she was criticized and all but ostracized from the academic community when she presented a paper noting Jane Austen as a romance writer. [...] Although nearly 20 years have passed, Regis will always remember it as her Davy Crockett moment since the paper was delivered in San Antonio, home of The Alamo, where the famed frontiersman and statesman perished.

“Oh, it was ugly. I was under siege,” said Regis last week. “They attacked. They handed me my head.”

In those days, Regis stood essentially alone among academics in believing that romance fiction is indeed worthy of study and recognition as a legitimate, centuries-old form. The harsh criticism rattled the young professor, but she remained undaunted.

[...] the romance criticism that was around when I began my thinking about the form in the early ’80s was so negative, so condemnatory of the form, that I thought, ‘Really!? Can all these women really be choosing to read such toxic literature, and is it really harming them in the ways that these critics claim?’” Regis says.

Edited to add: I've only just seen another post that's relevant to this discussion, so I'm adding some quotes from it. Over at Romance: B(u)y the Book, Gwendolyn Pough is discussing her experiences as a reader, and this too has a historical aspect to it since

Fifteen years ago, Kensington published the first Arabesque novels. To be sure, there had been a few romance novels published prior to 1994 that featured black heroes and heroines. Before that time, we had Rosalind Welles’s "Entwined Destinies" (1980), Jackie Weger’s "A Strong and Tender Thread" (1983), Sandra Kitt’s "Adam and Eva" (1985) and Joyce McGill’s "Unforgivable" (1992). Traditional paperback romance novels that showcased black love had been sparse to say the least. However, from the time editor Monica Harris got Kensington to publish those first Arabesque novels all of that changed.

[...] Many black women romance readers, like myself, read romance novels long before the first African American imprints appeared in the early 90s. Many still read a wide variety of romance and don’t limit their reading based on the race of the author or the race of the characters in the book. Some only started reading romance novels when the black romances were published and never will read a romance with white leads. Some have read white authors in the past when they couldn’t find black authors and will never read another white romance again now that they can find black romances. However, most black readers will tell you that they read black romances because they want to be able to relate to the book. They want heroines that look like them.

At first glance, that desire may seem superficial. But imagine growing up never seeing popular images of healthy loving relationships. Imagine hearing nothing but distortions about your sexuality, having your desire demonized, and hearing nothing but myths about your so-called pathology. Could you hold on to the dream that you would one day find love? African American romance novels also offer readers and writers a way to rewrite images of black masculinity. For the most part the stereotyped images of black masculinity that populate the larger public sphere are missing for romance novels.

That's just an (admittedly fairly substantial) excerpt of the blog post [the embedded links were added by me], so if you want to read the rest, you'll need to head over to Romance: B(u)y the Book.
------

Anonymous. "Professor’s study of romance novel helps bring genre respect." McDaniel College. 22 September 2009.
Pough, Gwendolyn. "Gwen Pough ScholarBlog: African American Romance -- A Personal History Of Sorts." Romance: B(u)y the Book, 25 September 2009.
Scheid, John and Jesper Svenbro. The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric. Trans. Carol Volk. Revealing Antiquity 9. Gen. ed. G. W. Bowersock. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996.

Unfortunately I couldn't find a photo of a depiction of Phaedrus reading. Instead I've included a photo of a vase painting of a Muse "reading a volumen (scroll), at the left a klismos. Attic red-figure lekythos, ca. 435-425 BC. From Boeotia." This and other details about the work can be found at the same Wikimedia Commons page where I found the photo.

CFP IASPR 2010 - Belgium

2009-09-22T13:16:00.002-05:00

Please circulate this CFP far and wide!!

A Call For Proposals

for

The Second Annual International Conference on Popular Romance:

Popular Romance Studies: Theory, Text and Practice

Brussels, Belgium

5-7 August, 2010

The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) is seeking proposals for innovative panels, papers, roundtables, discussion groups, and multi-media presentations that contribute to a sustained conversation about romantic love and its representations in popular media throughout the world, from antiquity to the present. We welcome analyses of individual texts—books, films, websites, songs, performances—as well as broader inquiries into the creative industries that produce and market popular romance and into the emerging critical practice of popular romance studies.

This conference has three main goals:

To bring to bear contemporary critical theory on the texts and contexts of popular romance, in all forms and media, from all national and cultural traditions
To foster comparative and intercultural analyses of popular romance, by documenting and/or theorizing what happens to tropes and texts as they move across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries
To explore the relationships between popular romance tropes and texts as they circulate between elite and popular culture, between different media (e.g., from novel to film, or from song to music video), between cultural representations and the lived experience of readers, viewers, listeners, and lovers

After the conference, proceedings will be subjected to peer-review and published.

IASPR is pleased and proud to announce that the Keynote Speakers for the conference will be Celestino Deleyto, University of Zaragoza, Spain, Lynne Pearce, Lancaster University, UK, and Pamela Regis, McDaniel College, USA.

Please submit proposals by January 1, 2010 and direct questions to: conferences@iaspr.org.

We are currently pursuing funds to help defray the cost of travel to Belgium for the conference. If these funds become available, we will notify those accepted how to apply for support from IASPR.
IASPR Webpage: http://iaspr.org
Conference page: http://iaspr.org/conferences/belgium

Call for Papers: The Cultural Production of Disability (Manchester, UK, Jan 2010)

2009-09-18T07:43:00.001-05:00

Dr Ria Cheyne of Liverpool Hope University's

work examines the representation of disability in literature, particularly contemporary and popular fiction. She is working on a monograph on disability in genre fiction, including science fiction, romance, crime, and horror.

She has been asked by the organisers of Present Difference: The Cultural Production of Disability (Manchester, UK, Jan 2010)

to see if I can put together a panel on disability and genre fiction - I'm presenting on disability and trauma in Balogh. It looks like it's going to be a really interesting event (there are some great speakers), and I'd certainly be open to having an all-romance panel if we could get the papers!

Papers could examine:

Individual romance texts featuring disabled characters
The intersection of disability with race/gender/sexuality/class etc in romance
The relationship between disability representation and the conventions of romance subgenres (medical, historical, etc...)
and much more!

Those interested in presenting a paper should contact Ria informally "in the first instance; the next step would be an abstract (max 250 words) and bio (max 150 words). For access purposes, papers need to be submitted to the conference organisers by 30 November," so you would need to contact Ria well before then.

Present Difference: The Cultural Production of Disability is a conference being organised by Manchester Metropolitan University in conjunction with BBC North West and the Cultural Disability Studies Research Network and will take place from Wednesday 6th to Friday 8th January 2010.

This conference seeks to address the contemporary cultural production of disability within and across local and global contexts. Its focus is upon representation both in the sense of the production and circulation of particular narratives, ideas and images of disability and non-disability, and in the sense of the participation of disabled cultural practitioners in the production of culture.

We invite further proposals from all stakeholders in the mass mediated production of disability across a variety of themes and from a diversity of perspectives within this disparate field of enquiry.

Keynote speakers:

Lennard Davis (Illinois) author of Enforcing Normalcy: Disability Deafness and the Body (2001) and Bending Over Backwards: Essays on Disability and the Body (2002)

David T. Mitchell (Temple) and Sharon L. Snyder (Illinois) authors of Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2001) and Cultural Locations of Disability (2006)

Robert McRuer (George Washington) author of CripTheory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (2006)

Artists, performers and film-makers include: Shira Avni, Ali Briggs, Liz Crow, Paul Darke Outside Centre, Jim Ferris, Ju Gosling, Peter Street, and Tanya Raabe.

Confirmed Events:

Wednesday 6th January: Conference Dinner

Thursday 7th January: Justin Edgar director of Special People gives a director's talk followed by a screening of the film at Cornerhouse Manchester

Friday 8th January: Presentations, discussion and networking event at BBC North West, Manchester.

Readerly Desires and Aspirations

2009-09-16T06:50:00.002-05:00

Laura Vivanco

In the responses to my most recent post we've been exploring how different readers relate in different ways to their reading material. GrowlyCub, for example, commented that

I get intensely involved with the story lines and characters. And I've literally thrown books against the wall and been horribly upset, even though I know very well the story and characters are fictional

whereas AgTigress revealed that

I enjoy reading fiction, regarding it as a pleasant leisure activity, but it is clear that I simply do not become emotionally engaged with it to anything like the same degree as other readers. I actually find it quite hard to imagine being caught up in a fictional tale in the same way as the rest of you. I am always removed, standing back, from what I am reading, in the sense that I am an onlooker, never a would-be participant, and therefore never become deeply emotionally involved.

This has brought to mind a discussion Tumperkin and I had not so long ago about heroes, heroines, and how readers relate to them. First of all, Tumperkin pondered

whether [the] heroine represents for the reader what she wants to be while the hero represents what she desires. For both, it's aspirational but a different type of aspiration.

and she later observed that

one of the things that I love about romance [is] that the things readers like are so very often not the thing itself but what it represents

I think her second point may be very important in untangling the ways in which some readers respond to romances. If we accept that some things and people in romance may have meanings on more than one level, we need to provide more layers of explanations. Some readers may find that romances evoke responses on two or more levels simultaneously, while at other times, or for other readers, responses may only be evoked on only one of the possible levels.

Thus, in addition to recognising that some readers have much more profound emotional responses than others, we need to bear in mind different ways of relating to the characters and the situations in which they find themselves. Readers who relate to the characters and their situations in a more literal way, for example, may have very different responses to a scene of forced seduction than will readers who respond to the same scenario as though it was a sexual fantasy.

It may also be that different readers seek out different books, with different types of characters, in order to get the kind of experience they prefer. Tanya Gold suggested that

Mills & Boon heroines are like madams in brothels. They essentially have to facilitate a sexual encounter between two other people – the reader, and the hero. They are the third person in the romance.

Michelle Styles, who had been giving Tanya advice on how to write a Mills & Boon, later said on her blog that

the heroine as a conduit is something I learnt from the editors years ago. With Modern/MH [Harlequin Presents in the US], the heroine is the conduit. With Romance [the M&B and Harlequin Romance line], the reader walks in the heroine's shoes.

On the most obvious level of sexual attraction, a heterosexual female reader might be expected to want to be the heroine i.e. she wants to take the place of the heroine, and experience much of what the heroine experiences, but there's obviously a difference in the level of identification with a "conduit" and with someone in whose shoes one walks. In the guidelines to authors who wish to write for the Romance line, the editors ask

Do you want to walk in your heroine’s shoes?
We celebrate women: their lives, triumphs, families, hopes, dreams…and most importantly their journey to falling in love. These are heroines every woman can relate to, root for, a friend you can laugh with and cry with. There should be a sense that the story really could happen to you!

Readers of this line seem to be expected to identify with the heroine. In the guidelines for the Modern line, however, the editors state that

Modern Romance is the last word in sensual and emotional excitement. Readers are whisked away to exclusive jet-set locations to experience smouldering intensity and red-hot desire. [...] A Modern Romance is more than just a book; it’s an experience, an everyday luxury. Let the pleasure and passion envelop you as you take a ride in the fast lane of romance!

This is the heroine as conduit, as a "placeholder" who permits the reader herself to be "whisked away" to experience "desire", "pleasure and passion."

Whether the heroine is identified with, or is a purer form of placeholder/conduit, there seems to be some consensus that

the reader [...] does not identify with, admire, or internalize the characteristics of either a stupidly submissive or an irksomely independent heroine. The reader thinks about what she would have done in the heroine's place. The reader measures the heroine by a tough yardstick, asking the character to live up to the reader's standards, not vice versa. (Kinsale 32)

I'm not sure that placeholding and identification can be entirely separated out, because readers perhaps would prefer not to be put in the place of a heroine who acts in ways they dislike.

Lisa Kleypas [...] firmly believes, based on her own experience, that the heroine is indeed a placeholder for the reader:
I believe the heroine is the placeholder [...]. I've gotten so many comments throughout my career from readers who complain about the heroine's actions in terms of "I wouldn't have made the choice she did ... she didn't react like I think she should have ... why didn't she just ..." and all of these comments are evidence to me that the reader generally experiences the story from the heroine's POV even when the hero's POV is strongly represented.

And it's the trickiest part as an author to create a heroine that most readers will like, and it's not always possible. (Wendell and Tan 60-61)

It's tricky in part because some readers want to identify with the heroine, but at the same time the characterisation mustn't be too obtrusive, lest it prevent some readers from slipping easily into her place. These readers want the novel to read as though it were their own story, enabling them to fall in love with the object of the own (as well as the heroine's) desires: the hero. To quote Tanya Gold again,

I can have virtual sex with a non-existent man who is made of paper. So I retreat to my bed with The Venetian's Moonlight Mistress and live in a perfectly etched fantasy world where I get everything I want.

If, however, we look at the hero, not as himself (i.e. as a sexually attractive male) but in terms of what he represents, the relationship between the reader and the characters looks rather different. According to Cohn,

Romance fiction tells the story of the heroine and to that extent romance is about the heroine. But the dominant character in contemporary romance is always the hero. In the character of the hero inhere the excitement, the glamour, and the power of the desired. [...] The contemporary hero is a fantasy construct [...]. For romance readers he represents the satisfaction of all those desires that our culture both fosters and disappoints for women. Our culture values individualism, success, money, power, but has traditionally granted only to men the right to pursue them. (Cohn 41)

Readers, then, might still desire the hero but, as Laura Kinsale has suggested, they may also desire to be him in order to experience the "satisfaction of all those desire" that he, as a romance hero, can experience:

I think that, as she identifies with a hero, a woman can become what she takes joy in, can realize the maleness in herself, can experience the sensation of living inside a body suffused with masculine power and grace [...], can explore anger and ruthlessness and passion and pride and honor and gentleness and vulnerability [...]. In short, she can be a man. (37)

But if the hero represents all the power and emotions denied to women and which women readers desire to incorporate into their own lives, what does that mean for the heroine? What does she represent? Kleypas notes that "a heroine cannot be a bitch and be afforded the same forgiveness [as would be afforded a hero who was "a complete jerk"]. I still haven't decided why - it's possible that most readers like the heroine to be an idealized version of themselves?" (Wendell and Tan 61). Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie have written that

Women in day-to-day life face a lot of pressure to be the “right kind of women” (i.e., the ones men want). For celebrity women, the heat is turned up a lot … because, of course, celebrity women are the yardstick with which people measure the women they know, the yardstick by which the rules of sexiness, attractiveness, and appropriateness are determined.

Perhaps the romance heroine often resembles the "right kind" of celebrity women in that she may not be exactly who we as readers want to be (because at least some readers would like to have more freedom to experience the hero's "masculine" emotions), but she's who we as readers feel culturally pressured to be. She's the ideal to which we can never match up but against which we judge ourselves and other women. Sometimes she's a more accessible, relatable, ideal than others: some heroines are less than perfectly beautiful, for example, and some have minor character flaws (she's adorably clumsy! she's a little bit forgetful!) but taken as a whole, heroines aren't generally permitted to have the kind of serious flaws that heroes have.

So at this level, if the heroes represent what we want to be, and the heroines represent what we (the mostly female readers) feel we ought to be (in order to be "good", socially acceptable women), we're offered freedom during the course of reading the novels to experience "masculine" emotions, but we're also being reminded of those outside pressures to conform to feminine ideals.

I should perhaps conclude by admitting that, when I read, I'm neither the hero nor the heroine. I don't enter into the hero and heroine's sensual experiences, even though I may sympathise with them in their pain, or rejoice with them in their happiness. I'm an emotionally-involved fly on the wall, albeit one who (a) has the power to mind-read and (b) feels she might be more socially acceptable if she looked or behaved more like the heroine (people can have such negative responses to flies!). Looking back at a post I wrote several years ago, about voyeurism as part of romance reading, I wonder if my preference for romances in which the bedroom door is kept shut is due at least in part to being a fly who conforms to certain social norms; I feel as though I ought to give the protagonists some privacy. I was also intrigued by a possible conclusion that could be drawn from Laura Kinsale's statement that "When placeholder and reader identification merge, the experience of the story is utterly absorbing and vital; analytical distance recedes" (35). Could it be that flies find it easier to be literary critics?

Edited to add: Had I not been so busy thinking about the implications of being a fly, I would have asked a few more questions, so here they are:

Do you read in the same way across different genres? Or does placeholding only work for you in romance?

The theories about readers' responses to romances tend to assume that most readers are heterosexual women but of course this excludes other possibilities. How do different variations in reader and protagonist gender and sexual orientation affect the reading experience? Tania Modleski, for example, has written that after an "encounter" (26) with a

woman from my past I found myself as I read the lovemaking scenes identifying with the lover of woman as well as the woman herself and found myself vicariously experiencing the touch, taste, and smell of a woman's body. (26-27)

There are also plenty of female readers and authors of romances about two male protagonists.

If you're male, how does that affect your reading of romances with regard to identification and placeholding? What if there are two male protagonists in a romance? And do you read romances differently from other genres?

Cohn, Jan. Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women. Durham: Duke UP, 1988.
Edison, Laurie Toby and Debbie. "Women Athletes: Choose Between Strong and Sexy." Feministe 23 August 2009.
Gold, Tanya. "Confessions of a secret Mills & Boon junkie." The Guardian 11 Sept. 2009.
Kinsale, Laura. "The Androgynous Reader: Point of View in the Romance." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 31-43.
Modleski, Tania. "My Life as a Romance Reader." Paradoxa 3.1-2 (1997): 15-28.
Wendell, Sarah, and Candy Tan. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels. New York: Fireside, 2009.

The image was created by Egon B and I downloaded it from Wikimedia Commons.

A Tale of Two (or more) Tanyas

2009-09-11T07:52:00.001-05:00

Laura Vivanco

The front cover and five pages of today's G2 section of the Guardian have been given over to Tanya Gold's "Confessions of a secret Mills & Boon junkie" and "The Magnate's Mistress – Tanya Gold's debut Mills & Boon novel: An exclusive extract."

The latter, which "swim[s] into pastiche," reminds me of Tumperkin et al's The Unfeasibly Tall Greek Billionaire’s Blackmailed Martyr-Complex Secretary Mistress Bride [Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6] and All About Romance's Purple Prose Parody contests, which were designed to "celebrate the excesses of our beloved genre. But whereas Tumperkin, her collaborators, and the PPP contestants revel in their parodies, Tanya Gold's seems a bit strained, perhaps reflecting her conflicted feelings about the genre. In an earlier essay, about the Glastonbury festival, Gold wrote that

my name is Happy Fairy Tanya. I used to be Bitter Journalist Tanya, but then I went to Glastonbury. If you do not address me by my new title, I will rip your eyeballs out with my shimmering fairy wings.

In The Magnate's Mistress Gold writes like someone who wants to believe in fairies, who perhaps even wants to be a fairy, but who can't suspend disbelief long enough to bring Tinkerbell back to life.

The pages in the Guardian reveal as much, if not more, about Tanya Gold than they do about M&Bs, and they do so in a way which reminded me of an article written by Tania Modleski.

It would be naive to assume that either of the Tany/ia's is exactly as she portrays herself in her articles. Both are skilled writers, who shape their material into a particular form, in Tania's case with a didactic, and in Tanya's a humorous, intent. Nonetheless, both seem to make themselves vulnerable to the reader by exposing both their desires and their ambivalence about them.

Gold confesses that

when I am loveless or annoyed, I think – yes, I can have a Mills & Boon. I can have virtual sex with a non-existent man who is made of paper. So I retreat to my bed with The Venetian's Moonlight Mistress and live in a perfectly etched fantasy world where I get everything I want.

She keeps "waiting to be told the secret Mills & Boon formula," "I still keep expecting to be given the formula. Where is it?" One begins to wonder, however, if the formula Gold is seeking is not the formula for writing the perfect Mills & Boon romance, but the formula for making herself loveable enough to resemble a M&B heroine. She admits that

I can't even begin to write a woman I like enough to give a lover to. Begin with myself, you say? How? There is nothing heroic about me. I am bilious and I smoke. I suddenly become convinced that I am too cynical to write this proposal properly and, in the pantheon of Mills & Boon readers, I am not quite sure where this leaves me. Ready to become a 60-book-a-month girl? Or does this self-loathing in itself make me a Mills & Boon heroine? A woman who does not believe herself loveable enough to write a hero for? Nah. Pass the axe.

Tanya attempts to write in the Mills & Boon style but her heroine "is partly the opposite of me and partly the woman I wish I were. Either way, I hate her."

Tania Modleski has a similarly love-hate relationship with the genre and her own desires. She too has found herself "trying to understand my [...] addition to romances" (15), to understand (in Gold's words) "Why do I feel shame?" about reading romances. In "My Life as a Romance Reader" Modleski focuses on the personal nature of her relationship to romances, a genre which has "been central to my fantasy life since I was a preteen" (15). Her intellect and her desires are in conflict:

all those years of higher education and all those years of dedicated feminism hadn't lessened the attraction of the romances for me. I became consumed with the desire to figure out why I, a fervent feminist, had not shed these fantasies with all the rest of the false consciousness I had let go. (21)

Gold is informed that the genre has changed, become more feminist:

Clare Somerville, the marketing director [...] says "[...] I get very cross when people say we denigrate women. I think we are one of the most feminist publishers in existence."

and

Somerville smashes my preconceptions. Preconception One – in a Mills & Boon novel you get an overpowering hero riding up on a white horse and saving the heroine. This, Somerville explains, is not true. They used to publish books like that, but no more. They've moved on. "The Mills & Boon heroine," she says, "has changed from a cipher that is in every way inferior to the man to being the dominant force in the relationship." Nowadays, she explains, the woman is in control. The heroines used to have terrible jobs but today you find them running companies. The woman doesn't leave her job to marry the man. She keeps her job and marries.

Modleski, coming back to the genre after some time away from it, had her preconceptions about the modern genre challenged in a similarly brisk fashion:

"Rape is out," a romance writer told me [...]. She said it as if she were announcing a style trend. Apparently in some of the "bodice rippers," as the longer racier historical romances were called then, the heroine was sometimes subjected to rape. (21)

It seems undeniable, however, and both Tany/ia's are aware of this, that "Some things in Mills & Boon land are eternal" (Gold), and despite changes in the genre, it is still possible to find heroes who

are appalling. They are always saying things like, "You are a stupid little fool!" And I end up thinking women who read these books – including me – are incredibly stupid. (Gold)¹

Certainly, readers like the Tany/ia's seem to be incredibly conflicted. In Modleski's case, "Eventually it dawned on me that the elements of the formula that most disturbed me were the very same ones I desired for my reading pleasure" (24). Tanya Gold (at least in the persona she reveals in her article) sometimes seems to want to know the formula to turn herself into a fairy, but most of the time she doesn't really believe they exist.

Gold, Tanya. "Confessions of a secret Mills & Boon junkie." The Guardian 11 Sept. 2009.
Gold, Tanya. "The Magnate's Mistress – Tanya Gold's debut Mills & Boon novel: An exclusive extract." The Guardian 11 Sept. 2009.
Modleski, Tania. "My Life as a Romance Reader." Paradoxa 3.1-2 (1997): 15-28.

1 Smart Bitch Sarah seems to have found a recent novel in this mould in Sharon Kendrick's The Playboy Sheikh's Virgin Stable Girl.

The photo is from the Guardian website, and was taken by Alicia Canter. I hope it's permissible to use it, but if either Canter or someone from the Guardian asks me to remove it I will.

Michele Hauf: The Highwayman

2009-09-09T19:47:00.002-05:00

Laura Vivanco

Paranormal romances often feature heroes who are bigger and more dangerous than mere mortals. The lovers can literally be soul-mates, and if they are (or become) immortal, their happy-ever-after may be precisely that. Jane has observed that "The paranormal allows for an amplification of loss and sorrow which makes the emotional conflict more compelling." Paranormals, by their very nature, seem to intensify or magnify many of the characteristic elements of the genre and Michele Hauf's The Highwayman contains many examples of this process.

An excerpt of the novel is available here and here and there are reviews here, here, and here (some of them contain spoilers). Carolyn Crane has made some observations about the way Hauf depicts the catlike aspects of the heroine's nature. There will be spoilers in what follows.

The heroine, Aby, is a "familiar." When "sexually sated" (22) familiars can "bridge a demon" (22) into the world in which the romance is set. For Aby,"Summoning demons was her job. Sex was a job" (23) and "her profession involved having sex - a lot of sex" (109). However, because sex is her job, "Aby wasn't sure what real sex was" (91) and it is Max, the demon-killing hero, who gives her her "first kiss" (96). This makes him feel "as if he'd done something wrong, like steal a neighbor's mail, or a woman's virginity?" (98). Nor has she ever had a "sexual daydream about a man" (117) or "had opportunity to really look at a man before" (218). As he realises, this heroine with the "wicked innocent sensuality" (219) who "come[s] off as very [...] Sensual and attractive and confident about yourself and your body" (108) but who is also so full of "bright-eyed innocence" (97), "so innocent" (110), is the incarnation of both sides of the "Madonna and the whore" (174) dichotomy.

She thus presents a solution to the problem of how to resolve the two directions in which the romance genre is tugged on the question of female sexuality. Candy Tan described them thus:

while I think romance novels are subversive and reinforce the whole notion that women CAN have premarital sex and NOT die horribly by the end of the book, in a lot of ways, the message isn’t subversive at all. In fact, the message is oftentimes quite distressingly sexist.

Look at the obsession with virgins, for example. In no other genre are there so many women over the age of 20 and widows running around with their hymens firmly intact. [...] The heroines who aren’t virgins generally aren’t allowed to have orgasms or fulfilling sex lives before the hero comes along [...] Women are also rarely allowed to be promiscuous the way men are in romance. [...] Erotica and erotic romance have done a better job of blasting through a lot of these walls, in my opinion, and portraying more sexually empowered women.

Thanks to the possibilities opened up by the opportunity to construct a paranormal world, Hauf's heroine can have have her sexual cake of innocence, but also have already eaten it very pleasurably.

Hauf also provides the reader with a very clear example of a Glittery HooHa (GHH). This special organ enables a heroine to "snare him [the hero] forever, for yea, no matter how many HooHas he might see, never will there be one as Glittery as hers…" (Lani Diane Rich qtd. by Jennifer Crusie). All romance heroines have a GHH, but the fact is made more explicit in some romances than others.

Max, as he explains, literally gets "distracted by sparkly things like a damned magpie. I think it's part of the demon curse" (164) but his supernatural attraction to sparkly, glittery objects, which he is compelled to steal and make his own, parallels his attraction to Aby and her extremely glittery HH: "she looked better than any sparkly gemstone Max had ever tucked into his pocket" (81). He wants "to possess her. To steal her. To tuck her away like those jewels you take" (113) and just before they have penetrative sex for the first time he imagines how she must look in the shower, "All those water droplets glistening on her skin like liquid diamonds. An easy nab for a thief who couldn't stop himself from stealing" (217). Inevitably, close contact with the heroine and her GHH starts "changing him. Making him tolerant. [...] Max was happy to please his sparkly thing" (200).

The specialness of the sexual relationship between heroes and heroines in romances is not only emphasised by the fact that it is often the heroine's very first sexual relationship. In some ways it is usually suggested that it is a "first" for the hero too. With a hero who has been very promiscuous there is often a moment when he learns sex with the heroine is special. In The Highwayman it is Aby who learns this lesson:

Max put his cheek to her belly and hugged her. "Is it good for you? I mean, better than ..."
He was wondering about Jeremy. But that had been business sex. Unfeeling, unemotional. "Twenty times better, Max. I love you." (240)

The paranormal element of the romance presents Hauf with the ability to create an ingenious method whereby sex with Aby is made extra-special for Max, who already believes that "Love is better than sex" (236). When he became immortal, around 250 years ago, "the third blow he'd been served by the demon shadow" was "inability to climax [...] Over the centuries he'd tried to climax with many women. If there was a trick to setting him off, he'd yet to find it" (101). In his shadow form "he could watch lovers and feel the moment of pleasure in the dream. But he could never recall that pleasure or retain the feeling after dropping the shadow [...] he couldn't climax. Hadn't since 1758" (144). However when he enters Aby's dream about the two of them having sex, it results in "a sticky wetness" (144) in his jeans. Clearly Aby's GHH works in the dream world, and there's a long-anticipated waking repetition of it towards the end of the novel, "And with his surrender, came salvation. He came hard" (272).

Interestingly, Aby's ability to make Max "surrender" and acknowledge her specialness with his "wetness" is paralleled by her ability to make him cry:

He'd watched Aby come close to being hurt today. [...] He turned his face and sniffed back the tears. [...] He hadn't cried after Rebecca's death. He hadn't cried after Emiline's death. He never shed a tear for any who had fallen at his whip. (234)

Aby recognises the significance of the moment: Max has "opened up to her" (234) and just as it is with Aby that he ends two and a half centuries of sexual frustration, it is with Aby that he is able "to trust and release" (235) all the "pain inside" (235) him.

Another instance of the paranormal setting allowing for the intensification of themes or elements present in other romances can be found in the heroine's response to the hero's body odor. As Jessica has noted,

Apparently, every lover has a bouquet, and our h/hs are always — always – connoisseurs. Like a Master of Wine, they can pick out different aromas and notes, hints of this or that. Over time, I have come to bracket my disbelief, understanding the important role of a unique set of smells to the development of the sexual relationship, and indeed to the full sensory experience romance novels provide.

Aby is a familiar, which means that she shapeshifts into cat form from time to time, and even when she looks human, she retains her catlike sense of smell:

Her world was navigated by scent. She never made a move without first assessing the atmosphere. It usually took her but moments to acclimate to new smells, else she'd be dizzy from the melee of odors.
A new smell, beyond the alcohol-laced colognes and grooming products and cigarette smoke, tickled her nose. [...] Running her tongue along her lower lip, she took in the tall man who also scanned the room. [...] He smelled different. But what about him was unique?
Drawing a soft breath through her nose, Aby discerned the faint masculine odor wafting from his direction. That was it. One simple scent. He was clean. No tobacco, alcohol or chemicals that tainted every living being in the world. Not a definitive food odor that usually lingered even on the most fastidious. (16-17)

Another example of the kind of intensification which can occur in a paranormal romance is provided by the heroine's need for protection. According to the statements collected at Bookbug on the Web, various authors, when asked "what qualities should a hero always have" mentioned protectiveness:

Lori Foster: [...] They have to be protective toward all things smaller or weaker than themselves.

Barbara Dawson Smith: A romance hero [...] is willing to take risks to protect his property, his loved ones, and his beliefs

Linda Cajio: [...] protective

Geralyn Dawson: [...] protective

Leigh Greenwood: The most essential quality? I can't decide between "the ability to protect his wife and all that belongs to him" or "a willingness to risk all to protect his wife and all that belongs to him." Maybe this is a particularly male point of view; women may think some quality of sensitivity or understanding are most important. I agree that they're essential in a hero, but without the ability to protect, he won't get a chance to use the rest. That's a role men have had for a long time and I guess it's still necessary. I should add that I'm thinking about historical heroes. When you get into contemporary situations, then understanding and sensitivity would have to take first place.

In paranormal romances, as in historicals, there's often a lot of opportunity for a hero to be protective. Even if Hauf's characters weren't under frequent attack from demons, Aby's very nature requires that she be protected:

"[...] I have this great dream of being independent, but I'm fooling myself. Familiars do best when they have someone close to protect and care for them. I'm not like those wild cats that roam the plains. I've been domesticated."
That realization, always at the back of her mind, now blossomed, and she couldn't deny it. She'd never be truly independent, able to survive without the help of others. Could she accept it?
"Aby, I love you. And if you want it, I will protect and care for you."
She did want his protection. (237-38)

Finally, there's a dream-state paranormal version of forced seduction/rape. Rather than being an intensification like the previous two examples, it's more of a paranormal variation on a theme. Max enters Aby's dream without her consent and discovers that she's dreaming about having sex with him. Max isn't exactly himself at the time, because he is in the control of his demon shadow and

The pull to shadow always manifested as a dark desire he would not resist [...] he hovered in solid form at the end of Aby's bed. Adorned in darkness and raiments of night, the shadow devoured the peaceful quiet. [...]
Before it lay a sleeping being. It did not discern age or sex. The energy was strong. So strong, it drew the shadow forward." (141)

Once within Aby's sexual dream, "He, the shadow as human shape, entered the dreamer, hilting himself inside her" (142). When she wakes up, Aby knows she has had a dream, but doesn't realise the full extent of Max's participation in it. He delays telling her the truth because he "thought you'd feel ... violated" (196). Max thus recognises that the event was a kind of rape/forced seduction, but the paranormal circumstances in which it took place exonerate him and render it far from traumatising for the heroine. All that is left of the forced seduction/romance rape scenario is a mildly illicit frisson.

Hauf, Michele. The Highwayman. New York: Silhouette, 2009.

Reviewing the (Academic) Literature of Love

2009-09-07T15:09:00.005-05:00

Eric Selinger's opening up discussion about the works that people would like to review and see reviewed in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS):

In the current Call for Submissions to JPRS we say that "The Journal also solicits reviews (individual and combined) of relevant scholarly works."

To my mind, this doesn’t simply mean works on popular romance fiction, but rather on anything that might be "relevant" to our work as Romance Scholars, broadly construed. This would include books on love per se, as well as books on representations of love in various instances of popular culture (TV shows, movies, music, websites, etc.). Scholarly work on sexuality, gender, race, and other fields might be "relevant," depending on the book, and thus in need of our attention.

If you are interested in reviewing scholarly books for JPRS, please email me and let me know your areas of interest and something about your relevant background or work in progress. I’ll pass that on to Nicki Salcedo, our Book Review editor.

If you can think of recent or forthcoming books that would be relevant, and that ought to be reviewed, please let me know that as well! I’m painfully aware of the gaps in my own knowledge at the moment: What are the books out there on romance in film, on representations of love & romance in pop music or advertising? Are there new books on love or sex that romance scholars really ought to know?

I’ve opened a discussion about this over at the IASPR Forum, so you can post responses there. Please feel free to pass this message along to potential reviewers and to anyone you know at a publishing house who might have books that need attention!

As he says, there's a discussion thread at the IASPR Forum and over there he brings up

other question we might talk about in this topic: how new do the works have to be? JPRS is a brand new journal, and IASPR is a brand new association, but the study of love and its representation in culture goes back a very long way. Would it be useful to have reviews, or quasi-reviews, of books from several years ago? What about decades ago?

Writing as Therapy for the Author

2009-09-02T03:34:00.004-05:00

Laura Vivanco

While researching the MA thesis which eventually became "Healing Writes: Restorying the Authorial Self through Creative Practice," romance author Valerie Parv started

to question a disclaimer, routinely included in the front matter of every edition of my novels, which states:
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
Reflecting on my creative practice [...] caused me to consider whether, rather than being 'pure invention,' the ideas most likely to inspire me to develop them into stories were those resonating with my lived experience. (314)

I've had my doubts about the truthfulness of that kind of legal disclaimer for some time, because authors frequently blog about their sources of inspiration. Trish Wylie, for example, acknowledges that "Justin Hartley inspired me to create Alex from [...] His Mistress: His Terms" and "the man who inspired Gabe in my linked book Claimed By The Billionaire Bad Boy [...] is Tom Welling." Kate Hardy has also mentioned a few of her sources of inspiration, and although she states that "Most of the time the inspirations [...] don’t remotely resemble the originals by the time I’ve finished with them," the sources of inspiration are still "distantly inspired" by real people, places, events etc.

Parv, though, wants to explore a different sort of inspiration, and the need it fulfills:

[Edited to add - I should have started by giving Parv's definition of a central term in her work, "restorying," so here it is:

I began to consider how writers including myself might frequently revisit themes and ideas which resonate with our lived experiences. I call this restorying, an unconscious process whereby aspects of one's life history are rewritten through one's creative work to achieve a more satisfactory result.

That should make the following quotes from her thesis rather more easy to understand. I apologise for not having included the definition when I first put up the post.]

catharsis in the form of restorying takes place within the creator of the work [...]. The research adds to our understanding of the therapeutic benefits of writing to the writer, while analysing an area not previously explored: the nexus between the writer's work and narrative therapy. (317)

and,

Having accepted that writing is therapeutic, we can then look at how creative choices may be unconsciously cathartic, and how writers may be drawn to pursue themes and issues leading to this catharsis, rather than to themes which lack restorying potential. (322)

Parv's MA thesis contained a novel as well as this analysis, but only the analysis is included in the free pdf provided by the Queensland University of Technology. Since it's relatively short (around 40 pages) and readily available, it seems simpler just to direct potential readers to it. I'd rather not attempt to summarise it because it's not at all in my area of expertise and I wouldn't want to misrepresent the ideas it contains. That said, I think most of the ideas Parv explores are summarised in this quote from Christine Wells:

What we do when we write romance is bleed onto the page. A romance writer doesn’t open a vein, she opens her heart, and while our characters are not ourselves, never us, they do show truth as we know it. I never realize what truth I’m telling until I read the finished novel.

Parv's thesis perhaps also perhaps explains why many authors have what Jennifer Crusie termed a "core story":

look at everything you’ve written down and try to find the patterns. If all the stories are about small towns, your pattern is easy. But what if some of them are about small towns, but one is about a detective agency in a big city and another one is about making a movie set in the middle of nowhere? Then look closer for the pattern: They’re all about small communities, relationships defined by environments. One of your books is about stray cats, another about drug addicts, another about people lost at sea: You write about saving the lost. Find out not what you think you should write or what the market says you should write but what you actually do write when you sit down at the keyboard. That’s your core story, the thing you return to obsessively even though you write it differently each time. That’s who you are as a writer.

The illustration is of the birth of Athena (the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom) from the head of Zeus. I found it at Wikimedia Commons. You could say that she was born in this rather unusual manner as a result of Zeus's attempt to repress some rather traumatic news.

Popular Culture Association Romance Area Call for Papers!

2009-08-27T09:01:00.004-05:00

It's that time of year again! The Popular Culture Association is gearing up for its annual conference, this time in St. Louis, MO, March 31-April 3, 2010.

The Call For Papers for the Romance Area is changed this year. We're not just looking for Romance Fiction--we're looking for discussions of ANY representations of romance in popular culture, anywhere, anywhen, any media, any genre.

The official CFP:

PCA/ACA 2010 National Conference
St. Louis, Missouri, March 31 - April 3, 2010
Call For Papers: Romance Area

Conference info

Deadline for submission: November 30, 2009

We are interested in any and all topics about or related to popular romance: all genres, all media, all countries, all kinds, and all eras. All representations of romance in popular culture (fiction, stage, screen—large or small, commercial, advertising, music, song, dance, online, real life, etc.), from anywhere and anywhen, are welcome topics of discussion.

We are considering proposals for individual papers, sessions organized around a theme, and special panels. Sessions are scheduled in one-hour slots, ideally with four papers or speakers per standard session.

If you are involved in the creative industry of popular romance (romance author/editor, film director/producer, singer/songwriter, etc.) and are interested in speaking on your own work or on developments in the representations of popular romance, please contact us!

Some possible topics (although we are by no means limited to these):

Popular Romance on the World Stage (texts in translation, Western and non-Western media, local and comparative approaches)
Romance Across the Media: crossover texts and the relationships between romance fiction and romantic films, music, art, drama, etc.; also the paratexts and contexts of popular romance
Romance High and Low: texts that fall between “high” and “low” culture, or that complicate the distinctions between these critical categories
Romance Then and Now: representations of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Modern, Postmodern love
Romancing the Marketplace: romantic love in advertising, marketing, and consumer culture
Queering the Romance: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender romance, and representations of same-sex love within predominantly heterosexual texts
BDSM Romance and representations of romantic/erotic power exchange
Romance communities
New Critical Approaches, such as readings informed by critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, or empirical science (e.g., the neurobiology of love)
The Politics of Romance, and romantic love in political discourse (revolutionary, reactionary, colonial / anti-colonial, etc.)
Individual Creative Producers or Texts of Popular Romance (novels, authors, film, directors, writers, songwriters, actors, composers, dancers, etc.)
Gender-Bending and Gender-Crossing / Genre-Bending and Genre-Crossing / Media-Bending and Media-Crossing Popular Romance
African-American, Latina, Asian, and other Multicultural romance
Young Adult Romance
History of/in Popular Romance
Romance and Region: places, histories, mythologies, traditions
Definitions and Theoretical Models of Popular Romance: it’s not all just happily ever after

As we did for the past two years, the Romance area will meet in a special Open Forum to discuss upcoming conferences, work in progress, and the future of the field of Popular Romance Studies. Of particular interest this year: the new International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) with its affiliated annual conferences and scholarly publication, Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS).

Presenters are encouraged to make use of the new array of romance scholarship resources online, including the romance bibliography, the RomanceScholar listserv and the open Forums at the webpage of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.

Submit a one-page (200-300 words) proposal or abstract (via regular mail or e-mail) by November 30, 2009, to the Area Chairs in Romance:

Sarah S. G. Frantz
Department of English and Foreign Languages
Fayetteville State University
1200 Murchison Road
Fayetteville, NC 28301
(910) 672-1438
sarahfrantz@gmail.com

Darcy Martin
Women's Studies
East Tennessee State University
P.O. Box 70571
Johnson City, TN 37614
(423) 439-6311
martindj@etsu.edu

If you have any questions as all, please contact one or both of the area chairs. Please feel free to forward, cross-post, or link to this call for papers.

Escape into Sensation

2009-08-22T18:07:00.009-05:00

Laura Vivanco

The senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch are all represented in Giuseppe Recco's Still-life with the Five Senses. Mary Reed McCall suggests using all of them when writing romance:

One of the best ways to bring a scene to life is to employ the six senses. And yes, there are six! All too often, authors seem to focus on the two most common of these - sight and sound. Perhaps this happens because most of us tend to rely on our eyes and ears most in our own lives. But what about taste, touch, smell - and instinct? [...] The use of sense powerfully ties readers to your characters, because it is what allows them to empathize - to "remember" those same experiences through the perspective of your character.

Laura DeVries has written that she

heard a best-selling author admit she doesn’t consider a scene complete until she’s included at least a mention of all five senses. She has gone so far as to write the words see, touch, hear, taste and smell above her computer screen. I know another writer who found herself stuck on a particular scene until she decided to try to write it with her eyes closed. The technique worked. By closing off the most over-used and familiar sense - sight - she had opened her imagination to the other four. What she learned was that by restricting herself to the visual representation, she had been missing the other sensual aspects important to that scene. The richness those other sensations added to her writing astonished and delighted her.

Evidently many romance writers make a particular effort to engage their readers' senses. But how do readers respond?

Jessica's got a very interesting post up about "escape" in the context of the romance genre in which she describes the reading process:

reading a novel requires the exercise of imagination. Your mind has to take authors’ descriptions of smells and tastes and places and people, and work them up into something real. Together, readers and writers create a unique sensory journey with every book.

Given that Tumperkin, writing about Sherry Thomas's Delicious, said that

I know that I've read food descriptions and references galore in other novels - but unless it's woven into the emotional heart of the story, I don't think it makes more than a passing impact on me.

it seems that perhaps some readers respond more strongly and more frequently to descriptions involving the senses than others do. Some of us may not respond to them much at all. It wasn't until I got to secondary school that I realised that for some people the phrase "the mind's eye" actually had some meaning, and was a good way of describing the way in which they could visualise images which were not directly in front of them. Some people can hear music playing in their heads, even when there's no external source of music to listen to. Yet others can recreate the tastes of food they've sampled, long after the meal has been digested. I haven't yet met anyone who can imagine smells, but perhaps, given what she's written, Jessica can.

I don't escape, via books, into a world of colour, sights, smells, sounds or tastes. I wonder how this shapes my reading experiences. I'm sure it must do, at least to some extent. How do you feel (and see, smell, etc) about the reading process?

--------

Edited to add: At her own blog Jessica's written about the sense of smell in particular and she has some advice for romance authors:

When I started reading romance, I used to be very jarred by the keen senses of smell our heroes and heroines possess. Apparently, every lover has a bouquet, and our h/hs are always — always – connoisseurs. [...] Some smells are overused (sandalwood, I’m smelling at you), and some are just lazy (”man”, “woman”. I’m waiting for the truly liberated romance h/h who thinks, “Hmmm. Smells like person!” Or even more inclusively, “Smells like living organic matter!”).
But here’s where I draw the line: the trend of h/h’s being able to smell psychic states. I don’t care how in love or turned on you are. You can not smell states of mind.

Stranger than Fiction?

2009-08-20T17:19:00.007-05:00

Laura Vivanco

Sometimes a true story will make me wonder if it's stranger than fiction, and that was particularly so in this case, because I'd only just read a fictional version of a very similar situation, written by Jenna Bayley-Burke and posted online in 2007 at The Long and the Short of It.

[They've got a lot of short stories in their archives (from 2007, 2008 and 2009.) As I was reading through them, I came across a couple which reminded me of Sarah's tweets (you'll have to scroll down a bit to read them) about Sandra Barletta's paper at the 2009 IASPR conference, on “A First Kiss is Still A First Kiss: Ageism, Romance Heroines and the Mid-Life Romance Reader.”]

The picture of the one ring came from Wikimedia Commons.

International Romance: A Summary

2009-08-19T07:03:00.007-05:00

Laura Vivanco

Sarah's just got back from the IASPR conference and has made a few observations about it over at Romancing the Blog. I'll copy a few of them over here, too, though, because I think they're worth sharing:

The conference, with presenters from India, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Indonesia, Italy, China, the US, and of course, Australia, taught us that Popular Romance Studies is and should be a truly international pursuit. In learning the universality of popular romance, though, it teaches us to be very specific about the historical, social, and national culture of the text under consideration. (For example, the book I will be writing for the next few years is about the power, appeal, and history of the modern American romance hero, not the romance hero in general.)

The conference also taught us to be aware of cultural definitions of romance. The American middle-class definition requires a happy ending, but other cultural versions of romance might not. It is important to be conscious of our own historical, social, and national cultures, as well as aware of those in the texts we study.

The map of the world's time zones came from Wikimedia Commons.

Georgette Heyer Links

2009-08-18T06:47:00.008-05:00

This is a compilation of links about Georgette Heyer, sparked by the Smart Bitches' latest contest. As they observe,

This week marks the 107th anniversary of her birth (16 August), and to celebrate, we’re hosting a giveaway of rather epic proportions.

Even if you don't win the books they're giving away, there are a few works by Heyer available free online:

The Black Moth
"Pursuit" - a short story.
"A Proposal to Cicely" - another short story, currently being serialised via Twitter, with the tweets then being archived at the site I've linked to.

A short biography of Heyer can be found in The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English. And for anyone who might be able to be in the Cambridge area in November there's:

Rereading Georgette Heyer
Saturday, 7 November 2009
Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge

Jennifer Kloester: ‘The Life of Georgette Heyer’
Jay Dixon: ‘Heyer and Place’
Laura Vivanco: ‘”So educational!”, she said. “And quite unexceptionable.” The Nonesuch as Didactic Love Fiction.’
Mary Joannou: ‘Heyer and Austen’
Sam Rayner: ‘Publishing Heyer: Representing the Regency in Historical Romance’
Kerstin Frank: ‘The Thermodynamics of Georgette Heyer: Variations on the Quest for Revitalisation’
Catherine Johns: ‘Class and Breeding’
Sarah Annes Brown: ‘Lady of Quality and Homosexual Panic’
K. Elizabeth Spillman: ‘Cross Dressing and Disguise in Heyer’s Historical Romances’

Love is "Woman's Whole Existence"?

2009-08-16T05:59:00.007-05:00

Laura Vivanco

I recently came across some blog posts about polyamory at Feministe. In one of these Eleanor Sauvage stated that "The problem with many of our contemporary relationships is that we’re meant to be everything to another person: to fulfill all and every need" and in another linked post, Frau Sally Benz elaborated on this:

at the heart of nonmonogamy is we believe it’s impractical to assume that one person can be everything for another person. I personally think a lot of relationships have problems when you expect your partner to completely fulfill you mentally, emotionally, sexually, physically, and spiritually. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I think a lot of the time, people view love as their search for The One – the person who is 100% compatible with you, your perfect match.

Judging by what Julia writes in Byron's Don Juan, the idea that a romantic relationship should fill one's life to the exclusion of all else is hardly new, at least not for women:

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,: 'Tis woman's whole existence; man may range
The court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart;: Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange
Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart,: And few there are whom these cannot estrange;
Men have all these resources, we but one,
To love again, and be again undone. (Canto I, verse CXCIV)
I'd like to look very briefly at what the romance genre has to say about monogamy and the idea that a romantic relationship could or should form a "woman's whole existence."

According to the RWA's definition of romance one of the two basic elements which make up every romance is "A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around two individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work." This element, as defined by the RWA, can, I think, be broken down into various parts

"two individuals" - Admittedly there are some more recent romances which include more than two individuals in the central relationship, but those are relatively rare in the genre as a whole.
"falling in love" - It may sound like stating the obvious, but these novels deal with a particular kind of love, the kind one "falls" into. The central couple are not two people who fall into friendship with each other, nor is the "central love story" in a romance going to be about the love of a parent for a newborn baby. Romances deal with relationships that have a sexual component, even if the sexual attraction between the individuals is never expressed explicitly in physical terms during the course of the novel.
"struggling to" - The struggle may be the result of external factors which keep the central couple apart, but perhaps one may also get the impression from this wording that all relationships require some adjustment of the part of the individuals involved. The path of true love tends not to run smooth for both external and internal reasons.
"make the relationship work" - This is very closely related to the previous point, but the wording does, it seems to me, hint that relationships require something to make them "work."

So how many people can there be in the central relationship in a romance? What is it that distinguishes their love from other kinds of love? Does the love between the individuals in the central relationship exclude other kinds of love and relationships? Why do they need to struggle? Do relationships require work? And, finally, does the romance genre present monogamous relationships as completely fulfilling the protagonists, "mentally, emotionally, sexually, physically, and spiritually"?

Those are far too many questions for me to attempt to answer in just one blog post, so I'll just take a quick look at the last one. It has been argued that some secular romances presented readers with a heroine who

is set in a social limbo: her family is dead or invisible, her friends are few or none, her occupational milieu is only vaguely filled in. As a result, her meeting with the hero occurs in a private realm which excludes all concerns but their mutual attraction; the rest of the world drops away except as a backdrop. (Jones 198)

In a romance of this type, it probably would be fair to say that the hero meets almost all of the heroine's mental, emotional, sexual, physical and spiritual needs. He may care for her, feed her, understand her sexual needs better than she does herself and provide a focus for her intellectual life (since she spends much of her time trying to understand him). It should be noted, however, that Jones was writing only about a small number of Mills & Boon romances from the early 1980s, and that she herself found some which seemed to open up the heroine's world to give her horizons which stretched beyond the hero.

As far as sexual needs are concerned, however, it's probably uncontroversial to state that in most romances, past and present, the central couple would be expected to find fulfillment for all of their sexual needs within their monogamous relationship. The situation is rather different when one looks at other needs.

As far as spirituality is concerned, Barrett states that "in Christian romance novels [...] God enter[s] this union, making it, for Christian women, ideal. This triad—God, man, and woman—forms the Christian marriage." Inspirational romances, then, present marriage as a relationship involving three individuals, two of whom are in a sexual relationship, and the third of whom supports the other two mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Sexual monogamy does not preclude the creation of a "triad" to fulfill other needs.

Many modern romance heroines and heroes have family and friends who provide emotional and mental support, and although many romance heroines still seem to have a rather magical ability to heal the hero's emotional trauma, in some novels, including Janice Kay Johnson's Snowbound, someone else may help to meet these needs.

Heroines, as well as heroes, often have careers and hobbies which provide intellectual stimulation that the central relationship cannot provide. AAR's Jean Wan recently commented that

Art is possessive and artists are obsessive and for many of them, love and art are mutually exclusive. When I encounter artists, musicians, actors, and such in romance novels, I often wonder how likely it is that characters of such creative brilliance can find equilibrium between their soul mate and their artistic soul. Many books never address this issue because the characters are given talented proficiency rather than brilliance, which is fair enough; few people are brilliant in real life.

As she observes, in addition to depicting characters who derive emotional or intellectual pleasure and stimulation from pursuits outside the central relationship, there are some romances which deal with characters for whom their art can perhaps be thought of as a third party in any relationship they form, and those romances, although rare, suggest that this can be made to work.

I'd also argue that there's an extra-textual dimension to the romance genre which reaffirms that the reader has individual needs which can be met outside a monogamous relationship with a spouse or partner. Barrett observes that

Since Christian novels are resolved in the always-loving nature of God, the reader, too, finally experiences God’s love when she puts her book down, as woman after woman testified during our discussions of reading.

The testimony of readers who spoke to Janice Radway confirms that secular readers, too, find that reading can fulfil needs that are not met elsewhere: "romance reading was important to the Smithton women [...] because the simple event of picking up a book enabled them to deal with the particular pressures and tensions encountered in their daily round of activities" (86). Of course, different readers will read for different reasons, but reading clearly does offer something to readers which other activities, and other relationships, do not provide. Interestingly, Dot revealed to Radway that some husbands considered books a threat to their monogamous relationship with their wives: "I think men do feel threatened. They want their wife to be in the room with them. And I think my body is in the room but the rest of me is not (when I am reading)" (87).

Romance reading, then, both intra-texually and extra-textually, can undermine the idea that the ideal monogamous relationship should meet both partners' "mental[..] emotional[...], sexual[...], physical[...], and spiritual[...]" needs. Instead it seems to me that most romances, while insisting that monogamous relationships can meet all of an individual's sexual needs, affirm that it is healthy and desirable for individuals to also have other relationships and interests.

Barrett, Rebecca Kaye. "Higher Love: What Women Gain from Christian Romance Novels." Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 4 (2003).
Jones, Ann Rosalind. "Mills & Boon Meets Feminism." The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Culture. Ed. Jean Radford. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. 195-218.
Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. 1984. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina P., 1991.