Color-blind Romance

Several months ago, someone praised us on this blog for publishing romances between characters who are not merely blandly typical white Americans. The praise was a little more than we deserve, perhaps. We haven’t gone out of our way to produce edgy romantic pairings, for instance. But it’s true that we’ve featured a number of romances with African-American lead characters, not all of whom are Denzel Washington or Halle Berry physical types with white facial features (“Love Potion II,” “Love’s Redemption”).We’ve also done a story with Asian-American characters (“Beloved Rivals”). We’ve even done a story with Asian-Canadian characters, “Trust in Me.” (I’m not claiming any credit for our romances between Americans and foreign nationals, such as “Broken Enchantment,” since those already are common in all romances.) Race and ethnicity have not been major issues in these stories, just facts like other physical details. Although they could have been. But men and women in love have pretty much the same feelings no matter what they look like or where they hail from. And they always have plenty of potential for conflict without bringing race or ethnicity into it. Last night, when Barack Obama accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, I watched his speech and thought, “This guy thinks he can make this country’s future better.” It was a good speech and it left me with a hopeful feeling. Only later, when other people commented on the historic nature of an African-American man being nominated to run for president by a major national political party, did I think about how much the country has changed. Growing up in an international city like Washington, DC, and then living in New York City for a decade, with its massively diverse racial and ethnic population, has made me comfortable with differentness in a way that many others in America perhaps still are not. Hence my concentration on Barack Obama’s message rather than on who he is historically. Yet, things have changed. Today, we have another historic nomination: John McCain has chosen a woman governor, Sarah Palin, to be his vice presidential running mate. This is the first time a woman has had this role in the Republican party. And considering Senator McCain’s age versus her age (72 to 44), it’s proof that an old dog can learn new tricks. Which is good news for our country, because it means we don’t have to stay mired in out-dated attitudes that don’t serve our nation well. And there is even better news about the younger generations who will eventually dominate this country. More and more, people’s outlooks are not so dependent on where they were born and into what social setting. This is another byproduct of the Internet, of course. The Way We’ll Be, a new book by John Zogby, details the results of extensive surveys from all ages and demographic groups. He specifically cites 18- to 29-year-olds as “the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history.” That’s what we need, what he calls “the first color-blind Americans.” What all this has to do with romance is simple enough. There was a time when most of the romances published in this country were written by white citizens of the British Commonwealth. There was plenty of racial and ethnic bias in those books, mostly implicit rather than explicit. (And there still is. How else can an entire story take place in Africa but feature only white people?) Then American authors took back romance. Uniquely American situations and solutions began to permeate romance. These included men being willing to change jobs to accommodate the careers of the women they loved (Jayne Krentz’s innovation), open discussion of sexuality and of female sexual response (fewer deflowerings and more women who knew what they wanted in bed), and stories about women who survived sexual abuse (rape survivors, spousal abuse victims who escaped, and more). We also started to see, slowly, stories about characters of mixed ethnic background. Yes, stories about American Indians, but modern ones, about reality-based conflicts. And we began to read about Italian-American and Latino characters with strong family ties and their struggles to honor such ties even as they fell in love with people of different ethnic backgrounds. And we saw entire publishing programs of romances written by African-American writers about African-American characters. Of all sorts of types and backgrounds. Asian characters have very slowly crossed into romances, too. Gay and lesbian characters are finally beginning to show up, although mostly as secondary characters so far. Epublishing has opened the doors to stories that conventional publishers seldom have dared take a risk on in the past and still are hesitant about today. Since the young generation is the most Internet linked, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing the edgy plots and situations from online publications. The audience is out there, and it is color blind. Even though we don’t have a truly color-blind society yet, our recent political events are clearly signaling that we are heading in that direction. Fiction mirrors that fact. In our story, “Trust in Me,” there’s obviously some racial difference between the hero and the heroine, and nobody notices. It’s just there, a non-issue. I think that’s what color-blind romances should be. Stories in which the differences make no difference. We will be nominating more African-Americans and more women in presidential campaigns. And we will be writing more color-blind romances. Good for us.

Dip into Romance

There is a typical romance scene that appears in ranch romances and in some historical romances, too. The heroine takes a nude dip in the old swimming hole. And the hero comes by and catches her. He either embarrasses her and makes her beg for her clothes, or he joins her and seduces her on the spot, or some version of the two. Regardless, she’s clearly at a disadvantage because he has caught her in the nude. But he’s the man she’s going to end up with, so his unchivalrous behavior is part of a courtship, or at least a sex duel. To a man in love (or even not in love), seeing a healthy, nubile young female rise nude from the water would be exciting. Men’s sexuality is reputed to be distinctly visual in nature. (I say reputed because I have lived long enough to see many flat statements about sexuality revealed as socialized bias and misinformation.) And so it would be a moment of beauty (and lust). I am not sure what the point of this kind of scene is in a romance. Maybe it’s a way of freeing the heroine of the ugly trappings of whatever clothing (and thus behavior) custom demands she wears. Maybe it’s merely a way to get the characters beyond bickering to an awareness of their sexuality and their attraction to each other. But it’s a common scene in a romances and it can be beautiful. Yet this very scene is one that in a bible tale is all ugliness, “Susannah and the Elders,” and is the basis for an even uglier modern opera, “Susannah.” In the bible, Susannah, a married woman, takes a bath nude outside on her own property, and some men see her. They accost her and try to extort sex out of her. When she refuses, they lodge a false accusation of adultery against her. In the bible story, a champion appears, Daniel, who proves that the men are liars. Susannah’s good name is restored, and her life is saved (since adultery carried a death penalty in those days). Not a pastoral bathing tale, but at least there’s a happy ending for the heroine. The nasty men are put to death. In the opera “Susannah,” Susannah lives out in the woods, already an outsider in a narrow-minded, small Tennessee town, and she has the habit of bathing nude in a stream. Church elders in search of a baptism stream wander onto her property and see her. And they are aghast (maybe at their own visceral response, too, but they don’t admit it). To their narrow minds, bathing in the open air is a sin. They pillory her in the community for her unseemly behavior. Susannah doesn’t understand it and so the calls to repentance don’t move her. But the town makes her so miserable that she becomes prey to the traveling preacher, a hypocritical man who claims to be praying for her soul, but soon is claiming that he is a lonely man and needs a woman. He seduces her. Eventually, Susannah gets avenged, but by then her innocence, both sexual and psychological, has been destroyed. Proof that being perceived as sexy is enough to turn a woman into a hardened slut, presumably. What a miserable story! Why on earth does the mainstream of American artistry gravitate to such messed-up, unhappy tales? Why be so interested in showing the bad about people? And why always show sexuality as a destroyer, when it is the giver of life? There is a strong strain of misery in American modern drama. And I have to ask why. America’s 20th century was painful in part, but compared to other countries, we got off lightly. Sure, we had the Great Depression. But we won World War II on foreign soil, not our own. We went on to bask in several decades of economic and political and social world dominance. Which is exactly when Carlisle Floyd wrote “Susannah.” What’s wrong with this picture? I don’t see why serious American dramas, especially operas, are so miserable. One reason some of us stick to genre fiction is that mainstream writing seems fixated on the unpleasant. In the biblical tale, a savior proves the accusations against Susannah are false. But in the American opera, the town starts off against Susannah and it just gets worse from there. The trouble is, you can’t learn anything useful from a miserable tale like the opera “Susannah.” There is no effective communication, no honest negotiation or arbitration between her and the town. Seeing this opera does not tell an audience member how to rectify a similar problem in her or his own life. In fact, after seeing an opera like this, you might want to go out and slit your own throat because people are no damn good. What’s so weird about this strain of depressing, supposedly realistic American dramatic art is that it ignores the typical American can-do efforts to triumph over bad situations. We constantly see actors and politicians and other public figures work hard to change the public's opinion of them. Not merely during political campaigns, but also when they get into trouble (often of their own making, unlike poor Susannah). They use damage control and spin to work on public opinion. They go on talk shows like “Larry King Live” or “David Letterman” and apologize for being idiots. They write confessional articles in Parade Magazine, the multi-million circulation Sunday newspaper insert, or allow an interview with People Magazine, the pro-celebrity gossip rag. Or they stand in front of a press conference with their betrayed wives, and publicly repent. And public opinion swings in their favor. Not only do we learn how to manipulate public opinion, we also teach ourselves how to mend our personal and business relationships. Books such as Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Herb Cohen's How to Negotiate Anything offer methods of learning how to deal with difficult situations. Robert M. Bramson has a book entitled Coping With Difficult People, and there are many more of the same ilk. We have an entire category of books called self-help. So why are American dramatists so fixated on stories in which nothing goes right? On failures? One answer may be that these dramas are merely symbolic to them, and not actually about the characters at all. Thus, Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” about the Salem witch trials, is really about McCarthyism. And so is “Susannah,” some claim. But the problem is that these dramas are tragedies. And McCarthyism ended, maybe not with a crystal clear act by an heroic avenger, but with a rising tide of outrage against it. Our serious dramatists have failed to show such public outrage that turned the tide. Yet in our popular movies, public outrage scenes are common. Movies in which the little guy is up against the big evil corporation or political machine routinely end with the populace coming out en masse to support him or her. But these are popular culture movies, not art. Romances are popular culture, too, and are much disdained because by definition they are success stories. Two people fall in love, conquer obstacles, and end up together. Yes, of course there are moments when communication breaks down, or moments like the classic catching-the-woman-in-the-pond scene, when one character tries to gain an advantage over another. But in romances we get past the sticky situations and resolve the problems. We celebrate the beauty of sexuality, including in a natural setting, and we allow people to be happy. Is that too much to ask? I don’t think so. Dousing ourselves with depressing stories in which the good guys lose does not help gird us to fight the good fight. We could use some optimism about now. So dip into a romance. It’s bound to cheer you up.

The Girlfriends Movie, a New Twist on an Old Tale

Have you ever seen the romantic movie, “How to Marry a Millionaire”? It’s got Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, and Betty Grable sharing a fancy apartment, hoping to land monied husbands. In an excellent 2004 article in Vanity Fair, Laura Jacobs describes this common subgenre of women’s movies, usually three girls looking for husbands. She cites “Three on a Match” and “Moon Over Miami,” as well as the glossy 1954 movie, “Three Coins in the Fountain.” The Best of Everything was a bestselling novel for Rona Jaffe in the 1950s, written especially to be turned into a high-gloss women’s movie in 1959. Although it seems like just another in the same subgenre, it marked a subtle change in this kind of movie because it wasn’t specifically about women seeking husbands. It was about a young woman seeking her fortune in the big city, and what happened to her and to other women she knew. Of course they were looking for true love, but they weren’t looking to marry rich. These women did not have an easy time of it. Men put them down and betrayed them, both personally and professionally. It made them crazy, or it made them victims. Other women (Joan Crawford), themselves betrayed, were bitter and hateful to them. Bad things happened before the narrator main character (Hope Lange) managed to reach equilibrium and a presumed happy ending with yummy Stephen Boyd. The book doesn’t give this character a romantic happy ending, though. Flash forward to 1995 when Waiting to Exhale, the bestselling book by Terry McMillan, was made into a glossy movie. In it, a group of women who are friends have difficulties achieving satisfying personal relationships with men, while easily succeeding in their careers. I confess that I found much of “Waiting to Exhale” confusing, because I hadn’t read the book before seeing the movie. I did not entirely understand who all the main characters were or what they were to each other. The betrayed wife was easy to recognize and empathize with, as was the single mom beauty salon owner. But the other two women didn’t seem all that different from each other; they both were being victimized by lying boyfriends until finally dumping the jerks. Much of the movie focuses on depressing aspects of romantic relationships: Husbands who abandon wives for newer models, lonely women who try too hard, cheating boyfriends who lie to wives and girlfriends, and revenge. But what did “Waiting to Exhale” have that “The Best of Everything” and the many others of its ilk in the past didn’t? There is the wonderful, extended girlfriends scene, which is worth the whole movie. This scene celebrates friendship between women, and it’s just great. It’s nice to see such very different women together as friends. There’s a healing quality to friendships that are accepting of differences and of follies. These women are not judging each other, and they are not rivals. They aren’t in the same room just to borrow each other’s clothes and get ready for dates with men, the way the women in earlier movies were. They are present for each other, spending time with each other, enjoying time with each other. In this respect, “Waiting to Exhale” was revolutionary. The bottom line is the very positive message that it’s bearable to make mistakes and to suffer bad things in search of true love if you have good girlfriends to sustain you. “The Best of Everything,” both the book and the movie, leaves one with a much more negative message, that young women have to weather a difficult learning experience—that most men can’t be trusted—all alone. The main characters have gotten through the confusions of early adulthood, but not with illusions intact. I prefer the more positive message of “Waiting to Exhale,” even though the story starts with illusions being shattered and continues that way. By the end, Bernadine (the always stunning Angela Bassett) wins her fair share of the family assets in court and finds some romantic hope for her future. And Gloria (Loretta Devine) gets Marvin, the solid, dependable man played by Gregory Hines. The most put-upon of the women, Robin (played by Lela Rochon), tells off her unapologetically unfaithful lover and sends him away. Plus, Whitney Houston as Savannah finally sees through her own lying lover and refuses to let him play her anymore. In neither movie do all of the women end up marrying and living happily ever after. But they do improve their understanding of who they are and what they need from men. And all along, these women have each other. Maybe today’s movies are more realistic, and sometimes more depressing. But they also celebrate female unity in a way the old movies did not. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, published in 1996, was a rather muddled book and it was turned into almost as confusing a movie in 2002, which probably explains why it was not a blockbuster hit. The strongest, most appealing element was the sisterhood of the women through many years and many tears. This story isn’t about marrying well, or marrying money. More and more today, we’re seeing stories about the true bonds women form with each other, and how those bonds sustain them through life’s vicissitudes. Unfortunately, the frequent problem in women’s lives is their romantic relationships with men. But with good girlfriends, we can survive.

Gothic Glamour

When we think of Gothic novels, we think of dark, brooding, handsome Gothic heroes. But they must have an equally dark, brooding setting for all that misery and intrigue. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about the glamour locales of Gothics before. Most classic Gothic novels are centered in a mansion or a castle, or at least a very big house on an estate. They involve wealthy families with live-in cousins, aunts, and servants. There are guest houses and artists’ studios on the property. A constant parade of friends, hangers-on, and associates comes to call, to stay, or to party. Today, the term for such estates is a compound. But whether the Gothic house is a modern mansion behind electronic gates with grounds guarded by dogs, or a crumbling old castle in the middle of nowhere built by an eccentric millionaire, the house itself is always extremely significant to the story. And to the mood. In a Gothic novel, it’s not enough to have a big house. The house has to be unique, idiosyncratic, and unashamedly grandiose. If the mansion isn’t at least a century old and filled with odd turrets and balustrades and stairways that lead to mystery rooms, then its surrounding structures must be significant. These can range from a dangerous cliff overlooking the sea to an old gazebo that contains some long-held secret. And of course secret passageways, priest’s holes, and hidden compartments in floors or walls are important, too. The Gothic heroine has a secret to uncover, and there usually is a range of locations she must search. Additionally, the house in a Gothic must have shadows. Even if the heroine arrives at a sun-filled Florida mansion, she must perceive darkness in every corner. The palm trees must create somber silhouettes through the windows, symbolic of the darkness that entraps the family that lives in the house. America is full of mansions that would be perfect for a Gothic novel, and probably have already inspired some. Built by rich men to display their wealth, these abodes are lavish and eccentric. Perhaps you have visited Biltmore, in North Carolina. It’s the largest private home ever built in America, and it’s a copy of a French chateau in all its imposing yet cold external style touches. It would be easy to imagine a heroine getting lost in such a huge building, or being followed by a killer through its extensive gardens. Visit the Franklin D. Roosevelt estate, Hyde Park, near Poughkeepsie, NY, and you’ll see a cozier version, but with similar dramatic views, masculine library, and more. Within a few miles of it is another Vanderbilt estate whose architecture is imposing. The interiors ring the same changes: The billiard room, the dark paneled library, the lighter ladies’ sitting room, and so on. Up in Toronto, there is Casa Loma (whose interiors were used in an X-Men movie, by the way), with its Hollywood Gothic, mock-medieval architecture that reminds one of old Zorro movies. Down in Florida there is the Vizcaya, an homage to a Italian villa. And what about the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, the over-the-top estate of William Randolph Hearst in California? It certainly helped inspire some of the more Gothic scenes in the movie “Citizen Kane.” Obviously, the social life of people living in grand mansions is different from that of ordinary citizens. Descriptions of lavish parties and balls, garden teas and masquerades, and even dangerous games of hide and seek are important in a Gothic novel. Readers love to hear about families whose home include ballrooms. If the family no longer gives such entertainments, then past glamour is evoked through tales the heroine is told by servants or relatives. The Gothic romances written many years ago were about families who could afford to hire a live-in governess, or a paid companion of genteel background, or a secretary. People who had full-time housekeepers and other staff. Gothic novels thus always have had an air of being about people who live a special kind of life. The heroine of course discovers that despite the dress balls and fancy clothes, the hero can be a troubled man and his family has a severe problem that needs resolving. The Gothic heroine herself has no glamour. She’s usually a somewhat down-on-her-luck, sensible young woman of no great beauty who has a kind heart. Because she’s scrupulous about doing her job right, she starts looking around her and asking questions, often questions that no one in the family has ever dared to ask. She becomes the catalyst who changes the sick atmosphere of the Gothic house by uncovering its long-held secrets, airing out the truth along with long-sealed rooms, and thereby saving and reinventing lives. Of course, if there are villains in the Gothic house, they do their best to use the secret rooms and crumbling masonry to foil or outright kill the heroine. Today’s modern Gothics don’t necessarily have all these trappings. They may even be a quiet duel between an isolated heroine and a loner hero, with the interference of a hidden villain or group of bad guys. But without the house as the centerpiece, it’s really not a Gothic novel. After all, the title of the classic Gothic novel that pretty much started it all is The Castle of Otranto. Not Manfred, the name of the main character. Ownership of the castle is the major focus of Horace Walpole’s over-the-top story from 1764. The best of modern Gothics treat the family home as the indisputable center of the tale. Looking at these mansions, it’s no wonder that they have already inspired Gothic romances and will do so again in the future.