Guilty of Not Reading Romance

Sixteen years ago, I acquired a romance by a favorite author, Linda Howard, and put it on my bookshelf. Yesterday, I finally read it. What the heck happened? I’ve got one American classic, Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson, that has been on my to-be-read shelf at five addresses in four states. But that’s a book that would educate me more than entertain me, so it’s understandable that I still haven’t gotten around to reading it. The mother of the chairman of the English department when I was in college read all of Balzac when she was 80 years old. I always figured that when I reached that age (and I have a long way to go), I would do the same. So Ramona is still waiting. I am not surprised that The Brothers Karamazov has languished on my shelf for the past year or two, along with A Town Like Alice. These are all books that would be good for me, that would improve my intellect because they are not popular entertainment of today and thus are written in an idiom that will make me work a little. Of course I am delaying reading them. I have always preferred trash to treasure when it comes to books, and the easy read instead of the difficult. Not surprisingly, I’m not a fan of William Faulkner, and I’ve never bothered to try to read James Joyce’s Ulysses. (Although I did read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.) Linda Howard writes hot, sexy books with tough guy heroes who fall madly in love with the feisty heroines. Nothing intellectual here. Why didn’t I read it when I got it? And not only that book, but five others by Linda Howard were sitting on my shelf. Three of them were sequels to Mackenzie’s Mountain, a romance I had just adored. The heroine of Mackenzie’s Mountain was a spirited problem-solver whose big heart salvaged the lives of the embittered hero and his unhappy son and turned a whole town around. So why wouldn’t I want to read the sequels to such an inspiring tale? I must have thought I wanted to, since I got these books. I just didn’t read them, any of them, until yesterday. Also on my to-be-read shelf are a couple dozen books by several other favorite romance authors, all of whom I would recommend without reservation: Justine Davis, Alexandra Sellers, and Anne Stuart. I admire the intelligence and writing ability of these authors. I enjoyed their previous books immensely. Why haven’t I read their later books yet? They’re guaranteed to be good. One answer is that these books are potentially so special to me that I have been saving them up for some moment when I can properly enjoy them. But it’s hard to believe that in sixteen years, that moment never arrived. Another possible answer is that these books are escapist fiction that I simply couldn’t see myself running to during that period in my life. But if I look at my list of fiction that I read then (yes, I am nerdy enough to keep a list. I’ve been keeping it since I was 12), I read plenty of romances during those 16 years. Not the 30 to 50 per month I used to read in previous years, but still, plenty. I must confess that I pretty much skimmed the books yesterday. I ignored background details and gorged on scenes between the heroes and heroines, and just pushed through to the end. Book after book. I did the same with a couple of books by another old favorite, Diana Palmer. Maybe what happened is that I had had enough of that particular kind of category romance and I didn’t really know it. (A category romance is usually a numbered release within a named series; these were from Silhouette Books, in their Intimate Moments series.) These Linda Howard romances were not in any way a departure from her previous style or subject matter, although later, she branched out into single title releases that included more realistic elements. I had already been aware of the disappointment of reading books by an author whose focus had changed. This happened to me when Dorothy Eden, writer of some excellent contemporary Gothic romances, decided to write historical fiction instead. I read some of them, but I did not admire them or enjoy them. Still, I respect an author’s right to grow and change, even if I can’t or won’t follow her. But in this instance, I suspect that I am the one who changed. One of the inevitable flaws of genre fiction, especially in action-packed fiction, is that there isn’t much room for ideas. Romances have to be fast-paced and focus on the heroine’s developing relationship with the hero. Everything else in a romance is just a version of window dressing. Heroines all tend to be similar, a sort of Everywoman. So are heroes. After a while, authors have rung about every possible change in the basic romance idea that is currently popular. That’s when the genre has to change or readers lose interest. Even though I wasn’t actively seeking other kinds of stories sixteen years ago, I was losing interest in the same old same old. And I never realized it until reading Linda Howard again yesterday crystallized it in my mind. I read romances completely of my own volition, so I ought to know what I want. But we all get into reading ruts, or just buying ruts. Long after the thrill is gone, we’re still slogging through books that don’t offer us anything new. Or in my case, not bothering to read the books at all. Is this a problem? Not exactly. But why did I have these books sitting on the shelf all these years, making me feel sad because I apparently had no time to read them, or guilty because I never made the time to read them? I could have allowed myself to feel free about reading some other kind of book, whether a romance or something else. Come to think of it, this is a good argument for getting all my books from the public library. At some point library books have to be returned whether they’ve been read or not. Which then relieves me of the misery of having a permanent pile of books sitting around for years and years making me feel guilty. After scanning in the covers of these books, I’ve come up with another, less intellectual reason why I didn’t read Mackenzie’s Mission when it came out: Lousy cover. Not only is it static, but the uniformed hero with his fancy airplane represent not one but two topics I don’t care to read about: The military, and airplanes. (In fact, as my family knows, I have taken a dread oath never to cross the threshold of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum again.) But then look at the cover of the original book in Linda Howard’s Mackenzie series, Mackenzie’s Mountain. Not only does the heroine have incredibly bad hair and a terrible blouse, but it looks like the hero has a mullet. I’ve presented several possible reasons for ignoring a book for 16 years. I wonder which one is correct?

The Sex and the City Movie: A Classic Romance

Allow me to gush. I finally finished watching the last season of “Sex and the City” on DVD, and then headed out for the cineplex to see the movie of the same name. Since I was there nearly two months after the well-hyped opening, I saw it in a theater that had two other women in it. I think the previous showing had only one person watching. SPOILERS AHEAD, but you must be kidding if you care by now. Most people who intend to see this movie in a theater are done. Even so, I had managed to carefully guard against encountering any spoilers. It was tough, considering the 63-page section about SATC in “Entertainment Weekly” that sat staring at me for over a month. But I had never seen the last TV season, and I wanted to catch up first. I’m always late to the party. And what a party it was! I just loved this movie. The classic romance themes were especially strong. I’ve read a lot of reactions to the movie now, and I find it interesting that most of the complaints are about elements that are standard in romances, in fact, that are beloved. The opportunity to wear fancy clothing, for instance. Going out to fabulous clubs and parties. Being around rich and glamorous people whose lives are more uninhibited than your own. And, of course, the delights and miseries of love. Carrie takes it in the heart in this movie. Big treats her about as badly as we all expected him to, considering how he has slighted and hurt her over the years. Their relationship has always, always been about him. Couldn’t the wedding have been about her for a change? But no, he had to chicken out. I must confess that I have never been a fan of Big. (That’s the reason I hadn’t watched Season Six four years ago. I just knew Carrie would pick him, and sight unseen, I wanted Baryshnikov to win. But I confess I was wrong about that.) Chris Noth’s looks do not appeal to me, and Big’s attitude has always been infuriating. But I have always understood why Carrie couldn’t say goodbye to Big and make it stick. Because she’s in love with him. It’s love that rules her. And it’s love, in this movie, that nearly destroys her. The devastation that Carrie suffers when she is jilted on her wedding day was absolutely familiar to me from many romances I have read. And I ate it up. I loved it. It was done perfectly. There wasn’t a false note. Though I am no fan of scatalogical humor, even I laughed at how Charlotte’s embarrassing case of Montezuma’s Revenge finally brought Carrie out of her morose mood and into laughter again. This was brilliant, especially because Charlotte is the one character who would find the situation truly humiliating. The movie shows the pain of being betrayed in love in more than one version, with Miranda’s and Samantha’s stories. Miranda and Steve have lost their way because their life has gotten so busy. She’s the perfect wife and has let the lover part go away. And he can’t handle it, and can’t get her to see what’s happened (we don’t see much of that, and as people have commented, that’s slighting Miranda so Carrie can have more of the spotlight). Steve takes some comfort elsewhere. But because Steve loves Miranda and admires her, he can’t help telling her and asking for forgiveness. But Miranda has always been tough on Steve because she’s tough on herself. She fights her softer feelings. As many people have said, she’s a control freak. Her need to control starts with herself. Her consequent anger and anti-marriage remarks perhaps shove Big in the direction of doubts on the eve of his wedding. And doom her and Steve to months of misery. Samantha has a trickier betrayal to live through. Smith remains the perfect man, but he’s busy, and she’s not busy enough. She spends too much time at home eyeing the sexual antics of the man next door. Finally she realizes that the life she’s living with Smith is not the life she wants to lead. She has betrayed herself. It’s a very interesting and rather subtle ending—or is it a hiatus?—to their love affair. Samantha turns 50 as the movie draws to its conclusion, and she’s just embarking on a new journey towards self-fulfillment. You go, girl. Several people have cited the lack of attention paid to Charlotte’s marriage to Harry. But as Leo Tolstoy famously said in the opening of Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike.” What makes Charlotte interesting is not her happiness, but her collection of fears and her reactions to her friends’ situations. Her “I curse the day you were born” line is endearing. It’s so completely useless, so in concert with Charlotte’s way of mincing quickly in her high heels. What’s a nine months pregnant woman doing in stilts like those? But it packs a wallop anyway. It declares her love and loyalty to Carrie. What surprised me about this movie was not merely the classic romantic suffering that Carrie’s storyline epitomizes so perfectly. But that she eventually sees beyond her own hurt. Instead of just forgiving and forgetting, she learns from it. Carries realizes that she failed Big in a crucial moment and caused her own suffering. We’re used to mocking Bridezillas, and there seems to be nothing of the Bridezilla about Carrie as she happily accepts the perfect gown and finds the perfect venue for her dream wedding. Yet she implicitly asks Big to be a prop on her big day, as Bridezillas do. She ignores his needs (and some of her own; she originally planned to get married in a simple suit). And in a leap to more socially expected behavior, Carrie pressures Big to play the role, as so many women push their men to, through formal events and daily family life, as if it all isn’t ringing hollow to them. Big’s character shows some depth at last when he needs Carrie to get him through the misery of his third fancy wedding day. And she doesn’t understand at the time, or come through for him. When they finally do reunite (again!), we want it to happen. That’s the ideal ending of the romantic suffering plot. Not that the woman gives in. Nor that the man gives in. But that they both have grown. That they both recognize how fragile and important love is. When Big kneels of his own accord, and proposes because he wants to, their romance is finally complete. Classic romance at its best.

And Since We’re Talking about Villains...

In romances, villains can be redeemed, but few villainesses get that opportunity. The villainess in a classic romance may try to control or ruin the heroine’s life, but her real purpose is to win the hero away from the heroine. It’s a tougher job description than just being a villain. And she almost never gets a sequel book in which the writer shows her mending her ways. In modern contemporary romances set in America, we don’t see a lot of villainesses anymore. The reason is that women’s and men’s lives intersect much less formally today than they used to. Women and men often have the same jobs and work together as equals. They may exercise at the same fitness centers or in the same running club. They may meet up socially in groups, and mingle freely. They have access to each other via Internet sites. And they can join the same community associations as equals, not necessarily as gender-separated subgroups such as the ladies’ auxiliaries of old. Why does all this access mean fewer villainesses? Because in a world in which women are not competing with each other directly in some female-only social pool (it used to be the typing pool) for the attention of men who are on a higher social and financial rung than they are, woman-to-woman competition just isn’t all that important. If women can leave their small towns and have thousands of men to choose from in big cities, they don’t need to compete with their elementary school nemesis or the boss’s daughter or the town rich girl for the few attractive young men who go to their high school. If the primary meeting place between the sexes is not a formal dance, there is no belle of the ball. The matriarchs of the old social world wield little or no social power to exclude today’s young women from access to eligible men by reason of lack of birth, wealth, or social graces. Which is not to say that all of these ages-old situations don’t still apply in some locales or social subsets. A young woman living in an ethnic community with strong bonds may be constrained to follow all kinds of traditions, some of which may put her in direct competition with other women, and some of which may insist that she be subservient to other women who rank higher in the social structure, including women of her own family. And this can work to her disadvantage in winning her hero. But for the majority of American women, meeting new men is the issue, finding attractive ones, and establishing serious relationships. None of which has anything to do with a villainess. Unless she happens to be your best friend who is so hot that the guys at the club prefer her and ignore you. Still, that does not make her a genuine villainess. A romance villainess isn’t an accidental spoiler. She deliberately sets out to improve her own chances of success with the hero by actively sabotaging the heroine. She does everything she can to highlight her social perfection, as opposed to the gaucherie of the heroine. She dresses provocatively when the heroine does not, and she has wealthy social and business contacts that could be a dowry to the hero, all of which make her more valuable to him. What the romance villainess does not have is a heart. She doesn’t do love. She does money and power, expressed as fame, connections, appearances, and deals. Romance heroes classically have been quite willing to have liaisons with villainesses. Mr. Rochester toyed with a brilliant heiress, deliberately making poor Jane Eyre sick with jealousy. But although uninterested in exploring their own hearts, villainesses have a shrewd ability to recognize the emotions of others. Think of all the catty remarks Miss Bingley makes about Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, hoping to convince Mr. Darcy that the heroine is beneath his notice. Does it work? No. Darcy is drawn to Elizabeth by the power of love, a power so strong that even he unwillingly admits it is totally against common sense. With the disappearance of the older social structures, the villainess in modern romances changed from being the socialite or boss’s daughter to being a cold-hearted career woman. They were all over romances for a while, a backlash against feminism. The problem was that as a type, even that woman was sympathetic. The women reading romances slowly learned how hard it was to be a career woman, regardless of all the media hype about superwoman. Even the most conservative of romance readers soon had friends or relatives who were career women, or were themselves. Wanting a career just didn’t seem so bad or unfeminine anymore. So romance writers upped the ante. The villainess wasn’t just cold and ruthless in business. She became cold and ruthless in her intimate life. And that leads us to the most twisted of all romance clichés, the abortion. It’s a controversial topic, but not in romances because just about 100% of the time it is described with horror as something the heroine would never, ever consider. And as something the villainess did. She was the hero’s first wife and she had an abortion because she cared more about her career than her husband or baby. She was his whacko (ex-)girlfriend and she was moving up, man by man, and refused to be slowed down by a baby. She was an utterly selfish movie star or model who refused to mess up her figure with a pregnancy. And so on. Although in real life, many decent women have had abortions for various reasons that they felt were morally justifiable or economically necessary or simply life-saving, in romances abortion is always portrayed only as the selfish action of a cold-hearted villainess. Romance readers are mostly looking for an optimistic, even sugar-coated view of life, and this isn't it. They don't want to be slapped in the face by a brutal reality, or be judged as bad themselves. I have known a lot of real-life women who have had abortions, none of them is a villainess. And all of them have expressed regret, something that a romance villainess never shows. It's a cliché whose time has passed. Now that romances have moved beyond the melodramatic clichés of a closed society with few options or opportunities for women, we don't need to reconsider the role of the villainess. Is the other woman who wants the hero a villainess? Or just the wrong woman for him because she will not make him happy? Or is another woman a villainess because she wants to foil the endeavors of the heroine or the hero, irrespective of romantic considerations? As our society changes and women openly achieve positions of power different from those they held in the past (such as matriarch or social arbiter), it is quite possible that the romance villainess could become a powerful antagonist without being a romantic rival to the heroine. What if a woman is the head of the company? Or the powerful senator who manipulates political outcomes? If women’s roles expand as antagonists, the romance villainess wouldn’t just be the cliché glamorous bitch from hell with the heart of ice. And then maybe the romance villainess would have the potential to be redeemable.

Villainous Potential

Sometimes there’s an attractive character in a romance who acts like a villain, but in every other sense is not. Georgette Heyer, the grand dame of Regency and Georgian romances, was so taken with her villain in The Black Moth that she wrote These Old Shades to redeem him. It was unusual at the time to have a romance end with a chapter showing the villain of the piece regretting his behavior, after the heroine was safely united with her hero. But that’s how The Black Moth ends. And although the character names in These Old Shades are different, the first chapter specifically refers back to the last one of The Black Moth. Presumably, Heyer’s editor back in the 1920s thought that a story with continuing characters would not appeal to romance readers. But also, the redeemed duke of These Old Shades is a cut above the villainous duke of The Black Moth. Skimming both books to remind myself of the details, I was almost captured back into that lovely, perfectly described historical never-never world that Georgette Heyer was unsurpassed at creating. No wonder I still keep all of her romances, when I have recycled thousands of books I’ve read since first reading hers. Georgette Heyer revisited the idea of redeeming rogues in other novels, but her other villainous heroes never were allowed to cross the line and be outright villains as in The Black Moth. Decades later, other romance writers have centered entire stories on the redemption of a villain. But before you can redeem a villain, he must actually be one. Centuries ago, a villain was a mere henchman, a servant. But when we think of a villain today, we think of a mastermind, a grand plotter, someone who wants to bend people and events to his advantage. Whatever the villain’s vices, they must not be petty. Heroes are larger than life and so are villains. Maybe he’s a puppet master, coldly manipulating other people for his own ends, and not caring about their pain. Maybe he’s a firebrand, determined to forge the world in his own image, willing to destroy anyone who stands in his way. But he’s never just an ordinary man who makes bad choices. A villain who is to be redeemed must start out as a good person. He can’t be a psychopath whose nastiness was apparent from childhood. Instead, something happened along the way, and today he is shut off from most feelings of compassion. Come to think of it, that’s Rigoletto in the opera of the same name. He’s physically deformed and has been scorned his whole life because of that. Suffering twists him into a person who enjoys seeing others suffer, who actively wallows in the filth of human behavior. When the one pure love in his life, his daughter, is defiled, he crosses the line and tries to have his enemy murdered. Needless to say, the opera does not end happily. In a romance, the villain who is going to be redeemed doesn’t get so twisted that he can’t recover. It just seems that way. In fact, in the hands of an expert writer, that’s the major conflict of the story. Will the heroine inspire the hero to redeem himself, or will he pass up the opportunity that she offers? In Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades, she was breaking new ground. The outcome wasn’t a sure thing. Later writers, notably Barbara Cartland, imitated the key situation in Heyer’s work, and now it’s basically a cliché that a heroine will reform a rake. But the one reformed in Heyer’s book was substantially colder and more villainous than a mere rake, a pleasure seeker who indulges in immoral conduct. No, a true villain has to be a man with a blacker past than mere public drunkenness, immoderate gambling, and hanging around with women of ill repute. But how does a good man turn into a villain? Perhaps his own innocence and goodness are abused by others. He draws into himself for his own protection. And he begins to act in ways that will please him first of all, regardless of the consequences to others. Or perhaps, the good man looks around him and decides that being bad will gain him more than will being good. Stanton Peele, the eminent psychologist, has written frequently about who turns to crime and who does not. Peele points out that it isn’t just a movie cliché that two brothers in an impoverished neighborhood will make radically different choices, one becoming a priest, one becoming a criminal. It’s a well-documented fact. The environmental situation is not the determiner. Individuals choose whether to be good or bad, whether to be upstanding citizens or drug addicts. Which also means that they can change, and that’s why redeeming a villain in a romance is believable. It can happen in real life. Villains can get tired of being bad. The initial, vengeful pleasure involved may fade to ennui and self-disgust. And just think of the unpleasant people with whom villains must associate. In the Richard Brinsley Sheridan play, “The School for Scandal,” a naive lady associates with a gossipy, backbiting group of people headed by Lady Sneerwell. Her henchman is named Snake. Their friend Mrs. Candour carries vicious tales. And so on. H is for Homicide, a Sue Grafton mystery in which her detective heroine, Kinsey Milhone, goes undercover in a Los Angeles barrio describes in minute detail how boring, annoying, and scary it is to be around vicious petty criminals day and night. When the naïve heroine comes along, wanting to pull the villain into the light, wanting him to find his path to redemption, she’s also offering him a rescue from being around people who reinforce his villainy, but also his disgust with himself. She’s showing him that he can lead his life differently. Some of this is through her sheer innocence or goodness. Radiance, you might say. The villain yearns to bask in her glow. And some of it, depending on the heroine, is through her stubbornness and her own determination to win this one. Yes, of course the villain must himself change if he is to achieve redemption. But the love of a good woman is a classic motivator. The wonderful line, “You make me want to be a better man,” from the Jack Nicholson movie “As Good as It Gets” encapsulates the villain’s reason for trying to change. As for the heroine, well, women are known for seeing potential in men. Even in villains.