Romance as a Bad Habit

We all develop bad habits. These are defined as repetitive behavior that harms us in some way but also delivers some reward to us. For most of my life, my favorite reading material has been defined by society as a bad habit. When I first started reading comic books, I was the age when most children stop reading them—eleven, and just leaving elementary school to go to junior high school. Just beginning to be an adolescent. Just having my whole life turn upside down because from then on socializing would be based on something more complicated than merely meeting girls my own age. It would involve forms of competitiveness with those girls. It would involve boys. I picked up the comic book habit just like a drug addict picks up that habit, except there was no pusher involved other than house ads in each issue telling me about upcoming stories in the next issues. I’d seen comics around and read them at other kid’s houses, but they had never been in our home. And then I bought some for myself and was hooked. But my parents did not approve of my new habit, and they talked me out of it. They considered comic books to be utter trash. (Does this remind you of what some people say about romances?) There I was, still a child but on the cusp of change, who had just found this source of great reading pleasure, and my parents told me it was a degraded form of literature. Useless, below our intellectual standards, ephemeral—take your pick. It was unworthy of me and I should stop. So I did. I even took my little stack of comics to the back yard and started to burn them in a bonfire. Whereupon my best friend begged to have them instead. So only a few comics actually were consumed on the pyre. No collector’s item classics. They were all DCs. A few months later, I was back reading them again. I simply could not give up the habit. But because I could not give it up, I had to ask myself why. Because I had to justify it to my parents. And to myself. And I realized that comic books spoke to me in a way that nothing else I had ever read spoke to me. I loved the color, and the adventure, and the passion. Comic books made a true connection to me. Over the years, I came to believe that any art that does that cannot be trash. You could argue that if I felt a true connection to porn, that would not make porn art or change it from being useless trash. I’m not here to debate that with you. Just to tell you why I read comics. And romances. And why I respect myself for reading them. But let me return to my story. I don’t remember how I talked my parents around, because at the time I did not fully understand how comics had such a firm grip on me. Still, my mother yielded to my pleas, and allowed me to buy comics again. But she put her foot down and said no romance comics, as they were the most worthless and shallow of the lot. (Romance are worthless and shallow? Where have we heard that before?) Then one day I decided that I wanted to read a romance, the very thing that everyone around me derided. Not a book with literary merit that might just have a romance in it. Not a piece of historical fiction that included the love life of a Tudor or Plantagenet. A romance: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. I had never read a romance. I found one at the public library, a place from which my parents allowed me to pick any book. And so I found Emilie Loring, who had been writing straight contemporary romances since the 1920s. And who was dead when I first read a book with her name on it. And who actually did not write that book. But there was love at first sight and a Romeo and Juliet kind of dilemma and a happy ending. It was a romance, and I was hooked. Again. And hooked I have remained to this day. I added to my comic book collection. I even went to work in the comic book business. But I also read all of Emilie Loring, and Mary Stewart, and Victoria Holt, and Dorothy Eden and paperback romances by Arlene Hale and Elsie Lee and lots of more obscure writers who did nurse romances and gothics and Regencies and historicals. And much older books by Jeffrey Farnol and Georgette Heyer and Rafael Sabatini, and Ethel M. Dell and the Baroness Orczy, too. And Roberta Leigh and Charlotte Lamb and Anne Mather and Margery Hilton and Betty Neels. But I have to stop listing these authors, because you know that reading romances involves a very long list of authors, because it’s a lifelong habit. Sure, I read plenty of other kinds of books. But the consistent emphasis on emotions keeps me coming back to romance. Eventually, I added opera to my other habits, and then I realized that the color, drama, and passion that opera delivers are similar to that of a comic book or a romance. Funny, though. Nobody tries to argue me out of opera as a bad habit.

Romances: Trash versus Treasure

Here we go again: The latest version of the usual debate has been raging on various web sites. You know, the one about whether romances are serious literature, or should be considered seriously, or even should be reviewed by serious literary reviewers in serious literary publications (see Smart Bitches: Litblogs vs. Print Reviews: FIGHT! 6/15/07.) A new wrinkle on this debate has been for print journalists to slam at blogging in general (see Adam Kirsch’s The Scorn of the Literary Blog). This even though it should be obvious that blogging enfranchises thousands of people to weigh in on what they themselves are interested in and not what the literary establishment thinks they ought to care about. Apparently, free speech by the readers themselves isn’t legitimate criticism. Only that of serious print journalists counts, and by the way, it just so happens that they don’t think romances are worth reviewing. Well! Time for some free speech here, y’all: • The people who read books have a perfect right to express their opinions of those books in any medium to which they have access. • The (chiefly) women who read romances have a perfect right to read them without some huffy literary establishment taking pots shots at them. (Just as, to be fair, do the readers of any other genre, be it manga or self-help.) • The people who read romances because they like romances are probably the best people quipped to review them. But not the only ones. • And nobody has any call to rag on and dismiss a particular literary genre because it is a genre. • Especially because it is a genre mainly written and read by women. That said, some books are better written than others. Some books fully articulate significant themes. Some do not. Out of all the millions of books ever published, there aren’t a whole lot—certainly not thousands and thousands—that uniquely say something unique. Some authors are not even trying to be unique. They’re just trying to get in their two cents’ worth, adding to the collection as it were. Inevitably, some romances are better written than others, and some are fashionable and then fall out of fashion, leaving later generations to wonder why anybody cared. To be honest, I feel that way about Dickens. Some of his themes still have some validity today, but I just hate his sentimental lies, his cutseyness, and his hypocrisy. Guess what? His huge reputation has been sinking for quite a while, and these days almost nobody reads him voluntarily. But then, few people outside of college bother with Pamela, the first English novel, which is a work of such lasciviousness, hypocrisy, melodrama, and outright balderdash that it’s a wonder anyone has ever taken it seriously as literature. It should more properly be called a singularity, or a breakthrough, because it started a fashion that continues to this day, of writing about people who are not tragic kings and queens or mythic heroes, but more or less ordinary mortals. For millennia, art was only supposed to be about people in high life, people of importance. When the opera “La Boheme” (popularized yet again recently as the Broadway hit “Rent”) opened in the late 19th century, it scandalized audiences because it was about ordinary people. Ordinary people as the subject of serious literary fiction have been in the ascendant ever since. Find me a popular drama today, in the 21st century, that is about a princess, or a Greek hero, or a god. (I am not counting anything about Princess Diana, because she firmly belongs in the pantheon of exalted tragic heroines. Somebody ought to write an opera about her. But instead, they’ve written an opera about Sweeny Todd, a guy who kills people and ...yuck.) But wait. Romances today sometimes do feature stories about fairy tale princesses! (Who live happily ever after, let it be noted, not who live unloved and who die and whose rival then gets the prince.) Romances seem to be the most utterly conventional of here-today-gone-tomorrow literature, and yet they explore all kinds of deep-seated, mythic themes. What is going on here? Could it be that, disguised as ephemeral claptrap, authors of romances have something serious to say? Possibly. And then again, maybe not. It is the proper place of serious critics to figure out what is going on in romances, to point out themes, and hypocrisy, and political subversiveness, and failure. It sure would be good if these same critics also told us readers which romances are the best, and warned us about the ones on which we need not waste our time. Movie critics do just that, and they do it for some of the most godawful tripe that Hollywood has mashed together and dared to call entertainment. We could use a sourpuss movie critic to take romances seriously and do some slash and burn through the large amounts of dreck that see print. This would be a deeply appreciated service, because not every romance is wonderful. The tenor of what little romance criticism so far exists sometimes is a little too nice-nice. Make that way too nice-nice. There is room for someone with a good critical eye to hold romances to the standard to which other novels are held. Because, really, writing humorous or best-selling romance (I will name no author names, but insert a couple of well-known ones here) does not make those romances works of great literary importance. Yet the huge numbers of people reading romances should make literary critics sit up and pay attention. And not just read one and think they’ve read them all. Who is paying attention? So far, readers of romances, writers and commenters on blogs, and home-grown forums of all sorts, that’s who. Who is not paying attention? Readers, writers, and critics who consider the romance genre to be unworthy of any serious interest. It bears repeating: Anything that so many people like so much is important in understanding our culture. These stories may even be important in understanding human existence, period. Of course there is plenty of trash out there in genre land. Even in romance genre land, much as I love romance. But there is treasure, too. I urge anyone with the chops to do serious literary criticism to take a serious look at romances.

Sentimental Lies

To the degree that popular fiction is a lie, it doesn’t live beyond its original moment. It has to be revisited for this to be obvious, though. So go back to an old romance you read many years ago, and read it again. Do the circumstances of the heroine strike you as quaint? Does her conflict with the hero come off as artificial? Some situations and conflicts are extremely topical, which is not quite the same thing as a lie. An example of topicality would be a contemporary romance written in the 1970s or early 1980s, in which the heroine is trying to work in what previously was an all-male career slot instead of being just a secretary, and she gets a lot of flak from the hero or others about it. And she herself is defensive, prickly, and very determined to not compromise an inch because of how attacked and vulnerable she feels. This was a legitimate phenomenon in the 1970s and immediately thereafter, as the baby boom generation of women pushed its way into the working world. But despite the glass ceiling that was later discovered, the reality of women’s jobs is different now from what it was then. Women don’t have to fight to walk in the door anymore. That there still are battles is understood. But there’s already something antique about a romance in which the heroine is, say, a cop, and the hero acts like she’s a rare bird. Our world has moved on. We take it for granted that there are female cops. That’s topicality, and topicality dates a romance. No, what I’m talking about are what I call sentimental lies. These are elements of a story that are false to the characters and their situation (whether it’s a topical situation or not), but which are expected by the popular audience. An example of this setup would be any romance heroine of the 1950s or 1960s who has an artistic career and a boyfriend who doesn’t like it. In the popular trend of the day, every woman had to give up her career for a life of domesticity. Even when the heroine very clearly had unique artistic talent as, say, a ballerina. Harlequin published several romances about women whose beloved felt totally threatened by and angry at the demands of the woman’s career. So the woman would give it up. And they would then live happily ever after. Ha! Not so fast. Did they live happily ever after? Or did these women just try to make peace with being on the losing side of a battle? (Especially since it was a battle whose opponents consisted of the entire male establishment and most other women, too?) The problem with the sentimental lie is that in real life people do not get the result that the sentimental lie predicts. Oh, sure, plenty of women have given up careers for marriage. But then many of them were not happy at all, and they acted out their frustration and grief in various unpleasant ways. They lived through their children; they became alcoholics; they turned into the neighborhood gossips. Or harem schemers, or unfaithful wives, or whatever. Unhappy people who feel trapped and hard done by—and who have little reason to believe their lost cause is noble—do not rise to sainthood; they head the other way. If you read a romance written in the 1950s or the 1960s, the writer will trot out the party line about how the heroine must stop being a concert pianist or an opera singer or a ballerina (even though these are such feminine, artistic careers) and just stay home and polish the furniture and herself—and that she will be happy. But first, the writer will set up an adversarial situation between hero and heroine that cannot be resolved without someone totally giving in, or there being a deus ex machina like a node on the vocal chords, or a broken hand or foot. The writer organizes the story so that it has to end with the heroine losing. To our modern eyes, this is no victory for love, but rather the destruction of a woman’s hope. The men also come across as incredibly selfish and pigheaded, not attractive or caring at all. It isn’t a happy ending. It was only a sentimental trend for a fairly short period in our society, but these stories are virtually unreadable now. This kind of story’s ending was a sentimental lie. Such stories come across as very obviously false once the public has moved on to other lies. And so later audiences turn away. Incidentally, this is a major problem with older movies, TV shows, plays, operas, novels, and so on. The audience has moved on. It no longer pretends that the false feelings are real, and thus the story is not believable. Think of Shakespeare: “Othello” still works because insecurity can always fuel irrational doubt (helped of course by Iago’s villainous actions). “Romeo and Juliet” works because to very young teenagers, not to get what they want is still enough to make them want to die. They do not have the leavening of life experience that will allow them to compromise (or sell out). But “The Taming of the Shrew” is a problem because to modern eyes, even at the end Kate isn’t getting a particularly good deal. The power dynamics of the story were always evident. But public acceptance of the outcome has changed. Why does any of this matter? It’s the reasoning behind the way we tell stories on MyRomanceStory.com. On the one hand, we want to tell an interesting story that feels credibly modern. And since we know that modern lovers make love before marriage (they always have, but that’s another story) without significant social consequences, we include that in our stories. But we also know that no matter how tough modern people talk, or what their sex lives are popularly reported to be, they still have the same feelings human beings have always had. So we try very hard to get at the truth of their feelings, and to show why the heroine picks this man, and the hero picks this woman. It isn’t enough that they are a man and a woman of marriagable age. They have to make a connection that is believable and unique. And by the story’s end, whatever differences or doubts they have must be resolved in a way that strongly indicates that they are going to be happy together for a long time. Anything sentimentally conventional about their romance becomes a trap into which the story could fall and date itself. Even the sentimental convention that they make love. Still, human nature being what it is, men and women continue to be attracted to each other. How they get from those initial feelings to a lifelong commitment in which both people will be happy is what our romances are all about.

You CAN Tell a Book By its Cover

My library reading group (it’s practically a law that women must join one) just read a classic tale of Norwegian pioneers of the late 19th century in the Dakota prairie, Giants in the Earth, by Ole Edvart Rolvaag. It was on a lifetime list of important books to read that I’d had knocking around in my files since high school. This book was published in America in 1927, after Rolvaag, a university professor in Minnesota, oversaw its translation from the Norwegian in which he originally wrote it. I talked the group into reading it. Since this book was so antique, the more squeamish members, the ones who won’t read any sex or violence, were willing. They knew there would be nothing in so old a book to offend their sensibilities. Eighty years old! But what beautiful prose. All our copies were old, too, because the book is seldom read anymore even though it is a classic. (Willa Cather’s similar classics get more reprinting, so it’s possible to find new printings of O Pioneers! and My Antonia.) Turns out having a new printing is a significant issue. One lady in our group refused to read the selection because she did not like the antique typeface (the font) and the overall old-fashioned look to the book. This lady wouldn’t read a book only because of how it looked. How weird is that? Yet she’s the most daring reader in our group, who thinks nothing of reading all kinds of tough modern nonfiction as well as fiction. She hasn’t suggested a sugarcoated book for us to read yet. But she said this book looked too much like something one is forced to read in high school, in that it had a library binding, the kind put on a book that is going to get a lot of wear over many years. What the heck does this have to do with romance, you wonder? Well, a while back I talked about buying books (or borrowing them from the library) because their covers appealed. I don’t think I had considered just how often we turn away from books because their covers repel us. Or the presentation of their insides. For instance, not being an historical romance fan, I pass right over any cover that purports to be one. Especially covers that feature a great sweep of cloth and flesh, but don’t pin down the historical era or the country precisely. These vague, swashbuckling covers strike me as mere eye candy for women. These covers signal bold, warlike heroes, and highly girly, self-willed heroines of olden days. A clash of egos reverberates through hundreds of pages of breathless adventure and passion. These books are catnip to many romance readers. Alas, they leave me totally cold. A cover art appearance of the famous Italian model, Fabio, never meant anything to me. So these covers repel me. I don’t even look at them closely. Sure, some have pirate ships in the background and others have medieval castles, and still others have the hero Not Wearing Any Clothes. But I just don’t care. When certain mainstream romance novels started having covers with just a flower or two on them, or a tasteful string of pearls, instead of a man and woman embracing, I also steered clear. Not my kind of book, and the covers, so similar in style to each other, were once again plainly telling me that the books inside were all of the same ilk. Meanwhile, covers with crude folk art drawings signal a different kind of read altogether, a more mainstream story. It’s often a small town setting with a plucky tale of a young girl with no education who finds herself a brand new family. A lot of what are called Oprah books have covers like that. I stay far from them, although the reading group has required me to at least give them a try. Life of Pi (by Yann Martel) had this kind of cover although it has nothing to do with a small town or a plucky young girl. But it’s definitely a mainstream read. (I found it to be more like a comic book story than anything else; I guess magic realism and comics are two sides of the same coin.) I’ve heard romance readers disparage the already classic chick lit style of retro cover art (those stick-figure women wearing stilettos), but it’s certainly recognizable. The pastel backgrounds are a tipoff, too. A number of humor books have come out lately with similarly styled covers, obviously aimed at the same demographic that buys chick lit. Well, if it’s not your thing, it’s easy enough to recognize. And what about Nazi thrillers? Those swastikas on the cover are a specific promise about what’s inside. Likewise, very dark, usually black covers with spilled blood on them, or a partial face of a man with eerie, glaring eyes. No serial killer stories for me, thanks, and these covers tell potential readers quite clearly that there is violence and nastiness inside. Murder mysteries have a whole bag of tricks to signal to readers whether the story is a cozy, or a police procedural, or a gritty tale of urban anomie, or even a period piece taking place in the 1920s at some ritzy house party. It’s all there on the cover. Big houses, murder weapons, mean streets, and art deco jewelry are common representations. And what about the book itself? Aside from the reading club lady, I have a friend whose eyesight is very poor, so reading anything but a hardcover book with relatively large type is difficult. He doesn’t even look at the mass market paperback racks. I know other people who never glance at the hardcover books in a store, knowing that they cannot afford to spend three times the cost of one paperback just to get one book. So they aren’t even looking at the covers, just the book format. Similarly, classic children’s stories such as A Wrinkle in Time are often packaged in two formats, the chapter book style for younger readers (wide pages, thin spine), and as a mass market paperback for slightly older readers. It has been said that chick lit buyers don’t want to be seen with mass market paperbacks in their hands, hence the standard that chick lit is usually in trade paperback size. So format really does mean something to readers. Of course after eighty years, I have no clue how Giants in the Earth first was presented, other than knowing that in 1927, dust jackets on hardcover books were just that, paper jackets to keep the leather bound books from dust. Art on such covers was highly optional; some had it, and some did not. I do know that this book (and I read a first edition, but with a library binding) had no interior illustrations, and no frontispiece. But there was an endcover page with the outline of a man pushing a plow...

Fairy Tale Heroines

One reason that fairy tale heroines have been in style lately (actually, aren’t they always in style?) is that they embody old traditions of femininity, plus current ideas of female heroism. Appealing to old-fashioned value systems while acting on new ones is quite subversive. On the surface these fairy tale romances don’t rock the boat, but the currents are another thing. Much has changed. What’s traditional? Cinderella and Snow White, to use two very popular archetypes, are powerless victims menaced by the ceaseless jealousy of other women. Snow White isn’t even safe out of sight; her mere existence is obnoxious to the evil queen. And it isn’t enough that the wicked stepmother favors the other sisters; they collude in demoting Cinderella to a servant, one whose daily humiliation is to slave for them. Snow and Cindy are both young, beautiful, pure, and good. They are modest. They are not embittered by the cruelties of others. They are dutiful, even to betraying parents. And they also know how to be happy. The big irony in Snow White is that Snow is happy and cheery in a tiny, shared cottage, while the queen is miserable in the family castle. Cindy is happy with her mice-made gown (in the Disney movie, at least) and goes to the ball to have a good time, while her sisters are fretful and desperate to grab the prince’s attention. These two fairy tale heroines have passive virtues. They react admirably, but they do not act. Additionally, Snow and Cindy suffer without complaining, a classic passive female behavior that traditionally is rewarded in fairy tales (and supposedly in real life, too, but that’s doubtful). The fairy godmother helps Cindy. The mice make Cindy a gown. The woodsman refuses to kill Snow. The dwarves give her a home. Bad things happen, and these heroines just endure them and wait for something good. And then the prince comes to save the day What is so striking about these stories is their continued power. Little girls (and big ones, too) still dream of being rescued from all stress and strife by a handsome prince. A lot of women know better than this, but still yearn for a world in which doing nothing on their own will actually get them what they want. Plenty of women still think that going along with this traditional program works. Sadly, as authors of fact-based economic texts such as The Feminine Mistake (by Leslie Bennetts) tell us, women pay a huge economic price for believing in this dream. It’s a lot safer to read about the rewards of being passive in a fairy tale than it is to try to practice a passive life. Issues of impoverishment in old age loom. A man is not a plan, even though in romances, it often seems as if he might be. Fairy tale endings can happen for modern romance heroines, but the heroine has to do something, not just be something. The conflict in the past often was between the women, and the judge/rescuer was the prince. The prince decided whose foot fit into the shoe. The prince woke Snow White from the death spell with his kiss. Now, the heroine of a fairy tale romance can have a career, have a stake in the prince’s political struggles, fight with him, intervene in a power play, and more. But because it is a fairy tale, he still has to save her at the end. Sometimes critics object to this classic ending as antifeminist. As a feminist myself, I don’t, because princes are supposed to be heroes. A modern heroine can be as aggressive, assertive, daring, opinionated, or downright aggravating as she wants. She does not have to display passive goodness. The prince simply has to be enough of a hero to do his part in saving the day. He doesn’t always have to do it physically. The heroine can avert an assassination attempt on the prince, for instance, and he can then be her hero by arranging for their marriage to be accepted by his weird little Ruritanian nation, or by solving some problem she has, or whatever. In the modern fairy tale, both the heroine and the prince live their best life, acting up to their potential. Neither is diminished by the other’s strength. But surprisingly, a lot of modern romances start with rather traditional-at-heart heroines. These often sadder-but-wiser women are the reluctant achievers. Even while fulfilling or even surpassing any youthful dreams of independence, these women keep their claim to modesty and passivity, i.e. to classic femininity, by having been “forced” into their current mode. These are women who did not intend to go it alone, but for whom circumstances have not been ideal by any reasonable standard. They aren’t fearless pioneers, daring secret agents, or the like. They are survivors toughing it out in situations they never planned. It’s great that the business is a success and the kid’s head is on right, but despite all her hard work, it’s all an accident. She isn’t brassy enough to have done it on purpose or even to like it. Accusations of workaholism are true for this heroine, who has given up on fairy tales. For her, the fairy tale romance is not a test of her virtue, but a test of the hero’s, with her as the judge. Is he pure enough to be worthy of her? Or is he just another selfish user in disguise? The heroine doesn’t trust her judgment, which makes it harder. Another version, a more passive one, is when the entrapment and cruelty of the evil stepmother has a modern substitute in the entrapment and cruelty of a man too cynical and bruised to recognize goodness when he sees it. First, he has to test it. Then maybe he can believe. That’s the basic premise of the classic modern romance that pits an inexperienced, powerless heroine against an embittered, powerful hero. Like all fairy tales, it has a happy ending. Once the prince realizes the goodness of the heroine, he ceases to be a menace to her. Regardless of the heroine’s seeming passivity, though, she draws a moral line in the sand that the hero eventually recognizes and submits to. That’s what makes even the most fairy-tale-ish of modern romances different from real fairy tales. In the old fairy tales, heroines merely had to be good. Now, they have to prove it. Still, there’s nothing like having a prince on bended knee before you, offering you the world. It’s not surprising that many an hour has been whiled away on stories of fairy tale romance, whether traditional, modern, or some version in between.

Ripping on Bodice Rippers

The other evening I was dining with a batch of old friends from the comic book business. As conversations do, the talk turned to what each of us was working on, and thus to my long stint in romances. An otherwise nice fellow made the mistake of asking me about “bodice rippers.” I almost leapt across the table to throttle him. He was taken aback by my impassioned annoyance. It’s a sore spot with most romance readers (and writers and editors) that most non-romance readers pick up an ignorant, pejorative term for our genre—a pejorative term foisted on us by the hostile and patronizing mass media—and continue to use it decades after that particular appellation could possibly apply. “Gothics” in fact kept being used until “bodice rippers” came into fashion even though the gothic trend was long over by then and it had been years since the last nightgown-clad governess ran away from a dark castle on the cover of a book. And anyway, not every romance was a gothic even when gothics were big. “Bodice rippers” was actually a correct description of a vogue in historical romances published in the 1970s. (My male friend obviously hasn’t noticed anything about romances since then.) The media made up that term for a specific trend in romances that was launched by Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower, along with Sweet Savage Love by Rosemary Rogers. Another term for it was the “rape saga, ” but that was not an accurate description of all these books. Woodiwiss’s acclaim probably reached its height with Shanna, the first original trade paperback historical romance, which received a major marketing push and became a big bestseller. These books were very popular because they had sex in them. Nothing like what readers are used to now, though. And these books had what we would now view as an antique attitude towards sex, because the sex was pretty much forced on the heroines. At first, anyway. Bodice rippers were historical novels in which the hero got the heroine in bed against her will initially, but things worked out well for them by the story’s end. At the same time as these stories of reluctant romance were being published, an ugly, double-pronged sub-genre of bodice rippers sprang up. In one version, the heroine was hot to trot; she had the morals and heart of a courtesan, and the story was just a series of cheap, crudely described erotic encounters as she lived the life of an adventuress. Presumably it was a way of dealing with the change in our society that said it was okay for women to have sex with men and like it. Few of these books are in print now and justifiably so. Not many people really want to read about a slut as a heroine. In the other version, the true “rape saga,” a complete stranger raped the previously innocent heroine. These stories clearly had an ogre figure representing ugly lust. At one time I remember joking to a friend of mine that the same fat, middle-aged merchant raped every heroine in every book. But it wasn’t funny. These heroines were living difficult lives and suffering realistically harrowing events. The heroines were thrown into a very unsafe, picaresque world of gypsies, whores, rogues, thieves, courtesans, and brigands of all descriptions. Often the heroine spent time as the kept woman of one nasty man, then more time as a kept woman of a different nasty man, plus chapters in bordellos as the helpless toy of an out-and-out villain. During all this, the heroine found her true love and lost him over and over. She usually bore a child or two, since the stories took place in historical times when birth control was not readily available. And she married once or twice, sometimes marrying while despairing that the first husband was dead but later discovering he was alive. This was a survivor story that no one today would consider a romance. A very negative world view dominated, but the heroine was still a good person throughout. Still, the events were naturalistic, not idealistic. People behaved badly. This kind of story found its core popularity with the audience for mainstream fiction, not for romances. The heroines of these novels were stubborn survivors, women who were used and abused by men, raised high by them and cast low, but who always held their heads high and fought for whatever a woman could realistically achieve in a society in which men could own women and degrade them for fun and profit, and think nothing less of themselves for so doing. Despite all the vicissitudes these heroines suffered, eventually they found or were reunited with their true loves. These women created strong social support systems of devoted servants or relatives. They had children. And they ended up with land and money. So these women became survivors. These survivor books had nothing romantic to the rapes. Nothing. But others in the bodice ripper genre conflated forced sex with love. It was a very curious mixture and reflected the confusion of the social times and the isolation both of romance readers and of romance writers. At the time, romance writers were writing in a lonely vacuum, not knowing or talking to each other and having no national or local organizations. And many men were writing these stories under female pseudonyms, so the honesty of the female point of view expressed within is in some doubt. But soon romance readers and romance writers started talking to each other through various forums, including fan magazines, writers’ organizations, and conferences. And when they did, a fierce debate over rape in romances began. Because, you see, during the bodice ripper vogue, nobody was asking readers if they were reading these books because of the rapes or in spite of them. The hot news was that there was sex in the books. The sexual truths certainly appealed to readers. Even the social truths. But most romance writers themselves expressed repugnance for stories in which rape is described as something acceptable. And most romance readers, when actually asked, said the same. On the other hand, all of them understood the appeal of an ardent, possibly dominating male who coaxes and convinces a heroine to give in to the desire she feels for him. Still, in the past 30 years, heroes have been more constrained not to use violence or the threat of violence against a heroine. And to honor her right to say no. Back then, not so. The bodice ripper vogue eventually tanked, as all fads do. What remains is the modern historical romance as we know it. Historical romance heroines often have to fight with their heroes to get what they want or need, but the basic relationship is or becomes mutually respectful. There sure aren’t a lot of ripped bodices in the modern historical. But ignorant people (mostly men, but also some women who never read romance and who do not like idealistic stories) still call romances bodice rippers. Given that the hottest trend currently is paranormal romance, we can safely assume that these patronizing-yet-ignorant people will soon start calling all romances by some bastard name for paranormal. I will try not to leap across tables to throttle them.

The Marriage of Convenience

Why is marriage of convenience such an enduringly popular romantic theme despite the fact that marriage as a life goal is losing popularity? Why like such a story? Maybe the simplest reason is that it’s a very efficient means of getting the hero and heroine into the same building, indeed, the same bedroom, for much of the tale. And their being constantly around each other leads to a very intimate relationship. Living with someone on any terms is intimate. The best romance is about the development of intimacy, both physical and emotional. In real life, a courtship is a series of meetings. The marriage of convenience compresses these meetings by establishing just one house (or mansion or castle or estate) as the basic physical setting. Another reason, for those of us raised in restrictive cultures, is that the sanction of marriage allows a woman to have sexual thoughts and desires and even needs without the reader thinking she’s bad or of low moral fiber. She might have these thoughts as an unmarried woman and either she or the reader could think less of her. But once she has gone through a form of marriage with the hero, no matter how businesslike and cold the marriage is, she is freed from the hypocritical sexual restraints of her upbringing. Or at least, from most of them. The sexual tension thus comes more from what the woman wants or does not want (sex in marriage) than from what the woman thinks she should not want or is not allowed to have (sex before marriage). Although many marriage of convenience stories are really about the deflowering of a virgin bride, reluctant or otherwise, others are about more mature sexual issues. The marriage situation opens the door to the bedroom and actually makes it the primary battlefield of the relationship. A third reason to like marriage of convenience stories is that they often show the struggle a new bride has to create her place in a family. In cultures in which newlywed couples live by themselves and lead lives far different from their parents, maybe this isn’t an obvious issue. But in cultures where the couple must live with or very close to parents, extended family such as aunts, cousins, sisters, brothers, or more, the bride’s necessity of fitting in with this new family and yet making her own place as a person is critical to her future happiness. Her husband can play a pivotal role in her family success, or he can sabotage it. Or, in the course of the story, he can change from one behavior to the next. Forging a good relationship with in-laws or stepchildren is a very important aspect of a woman’s life. (I remember an old Rock Hudson movie in which the heroine was separated from Rock behind the Iron Curtain for years. When she finally was reunited with him, she had to figure out how to create a relationship with her own daughter, and there was fighting with another female figure in the home as well. An appeal to Rock got the heroine nowhere; he told her that it was her business. A pre-feminism kind of division between a woman’s life and a man’s even though they lived in the same house.) A marriage of convenience can cover some very significant territory in a woman’s life beyond that of the core relationship with the husband. And a final reason to like marriage of convenience stories is that they are about power. Every transaction between a man and a woman is about power as much as it is about love or sex or money. In the typical marriage of convenience, the woman is constrained to offer up her physical self (let’s face it, she is prostituted) to a man because of monetary imperatives. Maybe she’s in dire poverty; maybe it’s her family that is selling her. Maybe an inheritance depends upon her marrying this man, even briefly. Maybe the marriage is to protect the honor and good reputation of the parties involved. (In modern times, protecting one’s honor by marrying seems an antique idea. But people still do marry when an unexpected pregnancy is involved. And I am sure that marriages made to protect the reputations of the man and woman involved are still important in some places in the world.) The marriage of convenience also constrains the man. He is no longer able to continue his bachelor ways. (If he does, he often faces censure.) He has to consult the wishes of this woman whom he hardly knows. His relatives and his social world also weigh in on their opinion of her, so even if at first he does not care about her, her social acceptance becomes an extension of his own and thus important to him. The meat of the story is the main characters’ struggles with themselves, with each other, and with their wider world. Whereas usually one party to the forced marriage is at a power disadvantage at the story’s beginning, by the end, they have reached equilibrium. A real marriage has been created The best writers can make marriage of convenience a fascinating dance of entwined personal and social and even sexual issues. Merely competent writers tend to focus just on sexual battles, often fueled by insecurity and social competition (i.e. the other woman who interferes with the marriage). But I confess I like them all. The marriage itself, no matter how hollow it starts out, gives the heroine a stake in what happens that no other romance situation has. And it also gives the situation a basic limitation, that this story is about this marriage, that appeals to me as creating the unity that the ancient Greek playwrights cited as key to good drama. So bring on that hoary old plot line!