Romance fiction is widely reckoned to be a very low form of
literature. Maybe the lowest, if we're not counting the writing at Groupon, or
on Splenda packets. Romance fiction: probably the worst! An addictive, absurd,
unintellectual literature, literature for nonreaders, literature for stupid people—literature
for women! Books Just For Her!
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Low or not, romance is
by far the most popular and lucrative genre in American publishing, with over
$1.35 billion in revenues estimated in 2010. That is a little less than twice
the size of the mystery genre, almost exactly twice that of science
fiction/fantasy, and nearly three times the size of the market for
classic/literary fiction, according to Simba Information data published at the Romance Writers of America website.
It would be crazy to
fail to pay close attention when that many people are devoted to something.
So, what is in all
these hundreds of millions of books? What is their strange allure? As it
happens I am in a position to say, because I read and love romance fiction. It's one of the genre things I collect
sporadically; I have a particular fetish for Mills & Boon and Harlequin
romances of the period between the late 1930s and 1980, what I think of as
their Golden Age. During this time, the two houses produced an immense and
vastly entertaining body of writing with a unique function and value in American
life. Or Anglophone life, to be more exact, since Mills & Boon was founded
in London (Whitcomb Street, W.1.) in 1908. Harlequin, which came much later, is
a Canadian firm.
Simone de Beauvoir
wrote in The Second Sex (1949) "[Woman] is defined and
differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is
the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject,
he is the Absolute — she is the Other."
In romance fiction
this formula is reversed, as scholar and former Mills & Boon editor jay
Dixon (who spells her name with a lower-case "j") observes in her
book The Romantic Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1995. Woman
is the Subject, man the Other. (This is a marvelous book, by the bye, far and
away the best one on the subject; thorough, scholarly, fun and beautifully
reasoned.)
Every Mills & Boon
romance is guided by the light of a single principle; the philosophical pole
star that emerged with the birth of the novel in our language from 1740-65, in
the works of Richardson, Fielding, Fanny Burney et al. In The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon, Dixon writes: "The underlying
philosophy of the novels of Mills & Boon is that love is omnipotent—it is
the point of life. It is the solution to all problems, and it is peculiarly
feminine. Men have to be taught how to love; women are born with the innate
ability to love."
Whether or not this is
actually true, I don't know, so I can't tell you. But can there be any doubt
that this single conviction has fueled the efforts of a vast proportion of
novelists, male or female, ever since the invention of novelists?
Men must be
transformed by love and enter into the woman's realm in order to emerge as
fully-realized human beings: this is the core message of romance fiction, Dixon
argues. We need one another; embrace this idea, and everything will magically
work out.
The part about it all
working out provides the fairy-tale gloss of these stories. For we all know
that even with all the understanding in the world, and all the best intentions,
it might not. Still, however foolish it may seem to the modern, knowing,
cynical reader, many find it very pleasant to withdraw into a fantasy place
where everything comes right in the end. "The good ended happily, and the
bad unhappily," as in Wilde's fizzy, bitter joke: "That is what
Fiction means."
In any case, whatever
her merits, Simone de Beauvoir will be no help to you at all when your
boyfriend has been unkind to you, but a romance novel might well help.
(Considering the unbelievable perfidies of her own boyfriend, Jean-Paul Sartre,
one may hope that Simone de B. resorted to Mills & Boon now and then, when the need arose. Or Françoise Sagan, at the very least.)
***
Romance literature is
underground writing, almost never reviewed or discussed in the newspapers or
literary rags, or at a dinner party. One is supposed to be embarrassed to have
a taste for it.
There are distinct
advantages in this poor-cousin status. Here is a literature entirely without
pretense; its authors are guileless, since they needn't conform to any external
ideal of literary performance. They are in no way trying to win a Booker Prize.
Consequently they are entirely at liberty to explore their own questions within
the few confines of their genre.
So there's no sniffy
condescension or po-mo posturing in a romance novel; they're the least stuck-up
books in the world. Everybody knows that they are written and read just for
kicks, and that gives the author an enviable freedom within which she may
permit her imagination to run riot. And does it ever. These writers have no
authorial brakes at all, and their irrepressibility is enchanting all by
itself. What other kind of author is free to name her hero Sin Water mount or
Don Julio Valdares, Tarquin Roscuro or Duc Breul de Polain et Bouvais? There is
generally a wild, far-flung and exotic locale: Queensland, the Western Cape of
South Africa, the Scottish Highlands. There are impossible situations, natural
disasters, a whole pantheon of dei ex machines, drama galore.
And there is, always,
falling in love. I have often wondered whether romance novels mightn't
generally serve the same purpose for women that pornography does for so many
men. I do not mean as an aid to autoeroticism, though, so much as the imaginary
fulfillment of a profound imperative that is never too far from your mind.
Anyway, pleasurable as
all that is, romance fiction's deeper purpose is twofold. First, there is the
soothing, gentle balm they apply to the insecure and frightened part of our
nature. These are books with the set purpose of providing healing and
reassurance to the reader.
The romance heroine, though possessed of heart, intelligence and
beauty, is at the mercy of her own self-criticism most of the time. As the
story begins, she is scared and isolated, poor, or abandoned, or lonely. Not
infrequently, the book opens with her having just suffered some terrible loss;
her husband has just died in a plane crash, or her parents or beloved guardians
have died, and now she is forced to work as a paid companion to a rich and
disagreeable widow, maybe, or she's just come to Australia from England to live
with her grandfather, who is mean as a snake. Then she runs into an unusual and
interesting man who openly demonstrates his dislike for her, or else pretty
much ignores her entirely.
Difficulties will multiply.
And almost always, as the tension builds, the heroine is beset with doubts
about her own competence, attractiveness and worth.
That's just how I
feel! the reader cries inwardly.
This goes wrong, that
goes wrong. I am the worst, most worthless person, the heroine is saying to
herself half the time, thereby calling forth the reader's protective, sisterly
feelings. Both reader and heroine have a good cry, maybe. Then the heroine
redoubles her efforts to do all the things she needs to do. Find a job, grow up
and stand on her own two feet, care for a child, nurse someone she loves back
to health.
Since she is convinced
that she totally sucks in every way, the heroine will also be mostly oblivious
to the hero's growing attraction to her. All of a sudden, though, beside
himself with desire, he will pounce, just a bit; sometimes with the
"punishing kiss" and sometimes with gentleness. But there will be a
thrilling undercurrent of barely-restrained passion; he might "mutter a
curse under his breath." Bit by bit, the difficulties are negotiated, the
rival leaves town, the farm is saved. Our hero and heroine arrive at an
understanding, and the end of the book finds them, almost always, in a
passionate embrace.
The pleasure of moving
through this ritual of set plot points will be familiar to lovers of detective
fiction or spy novels. I use "ritual" advisedly because it really is
quite like a religious ceremony; comforting, calming. The pleasure involved is
almost wholly anticipatory, and if you don't know almost exactly what is going
to happen, you can't feel the pleasure of anticipation. The literary rituals of
genre fiction fulfill their purpose by pushing the buttons in your mind and
heart, one by one.
***
The second purpose of
romance novels is the exercise of imagination. This may sound paradoxical,
given that there is a definite formula to these stories. But they are indeed
vehicles for the imagination; each one a love rollercoaster, if you like, to
tempt our fantasies. To idealize. What would a really wonderful man be like?
What are the very best characteristics that men and women can have? What would
the most exciting possible moment in a love affair be like; how would the
tenderest lover behave?
So at the same time
that these books are about real issues, they are profoundly unreal and
fairy-tale-like. The same thing being true of fairy-tales: serious business in
a frothy, thrilling exterior. As a reader, this part appeals to me the most:
the opportunity to vamoose into a purely escapist story, which I guess also
explains my love for detective novels, fantasy, and sci-fi whether hard or
soft.
Dixon quotes Mills
& Boon author Violet Winspear as having said in Radio Times, "I think all women like to dream about marvelous
men," adding " I've never met any of them myself, I doubt if anybody
has."
***
So what is it,
exactly, that makes literature trivial? Is the point of literature to depict
something more like "real life"? If the formulaic qualities and
perfervid fantasy of romance novels bring them closer to superhero comics than
to Dostoevsky, what does this mean, exactly? What is the difference between
genre and "serious" fiction, now that Maus and The Left Hand of
Darkness and The Man in the High Castle have conclusively demonstrated that deeply
serious, insightful ideas may indeed come in a deceptively lightweight
envelope?
The key difference
between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Violet Winspear is—the beard, obviously, but in
terms of literary production, the difference is that the latter is thinking
more about you, the reader, whereas the former is thinking more about himself,
the author. Each approach has an enormous value, potentially. To put this
another way, Dostoevsky writes from deep inside himself, about his whole life,
every single thing he ever saw or learned; Winspear plies her craft according
to what she imagines it would please you to read, imagine or dream about,
though it's nearly impossible for a novelist to avoid revealing some of his own
ideas and beliefs about the world, however tangentially.
It doesn't matter
whether you call this "serious" literature or not, really, though it
seems to me that when millions and millions of people are involved in the same
reading, it is very serious indeed.
***
"Can I make him happy, Contessa?" "You love him
for himself… [And] I believe your mutual interest in Persian rugs will be a
strong bond between you."
—Anne Weale, Now or Never (1978)
—Anne Weale, Now or Never (1978)
You can tell a Golden
Age romance very easily by the weird beauty of its cover art and typography.
They are irresistible. Oddly, the covers I prefer also contain the stories I
prefer: a little old-fashioned, and crazy as hell, glittering with imagination
and lunacy. They are free of the ploddingly explicit sexual detail of today's
romance, or the outright depravity of earlier ones like The Sultan's Slave or The Fruit of Eden.
"Serious" or
literary fiction is supposed to be that way because it's meant to be like
Dostoevsky, leaving no stone unturned in the human psyche, shocking us, showing
us things we'd never understood or even thought about ourselves before. There's
not much room for fun in books like those.
But surely it's not
necessary to point out that the rarefied world of American literary fiction is
brimming with dull, predictable and zero-ly engaging books. Most
"literary" novels, in fact, take not one single risk, offend no
taboo, and leave every sacred cow grazing undisturbed in the placid fields of
their conventionality. Which is the riskier, edgier, more involving story? The
lit-fic novel du jour—some lukewarm retread of Desperate Characters, probably—or The Sheik (1919), E.M. Hull's febrile, terrifying
account of the abduction, rape and eventual "taming" of a tomboy
Englishwoman by handsome, cruel tough guy Sheikh Ahmed Ben Hassan? The recent
reading of which made me realize that we only think we don't have taboos.
This brutal, vulgar and wildly popular book was later made into
a film starring Rudolph Valentino, who became a superstar as the result. But no
way couldThe Sheik ever be made into a
film today. It is far too depraved. I keep thinking it must be to do with the
war. That's a likeness of its author, Edith Maude Hull, at right, by the way.
Keep that visage in
mind as I run you through the plot. First, the Sheik abducts our heroine and
takes her back to his desert lair, where he commences to rape her every few
pages. She is moderately peeved at him for raping her all the time but still
finds him amazingly handsome, though "cruel," which, pretty much. She
finally manages to escape, only to be abducted yet again, but this time by some
other lord of the desert. So she is right in the middle of being strangled by
this new abductor (she won't let him rape her) when just in time, the Sheik
arrives to reclaim his property, erm, mistress, and after a ghastly struggle
slowly chokes that horrible fat old black-toothed Ibraheim Omair to death right
in front of her on the divan, in revenge, smiling all the while, "till the
dying man's body arched and writhed in his last agony, till the blood burst
from his nose and mouth, pouring over the hands that held him like a
vice." Oh and the Sheik turns out to be not even an Arab, but the son of a
mean Scottish earl and a Spanish princess instead. She ought to have known! He
has "the famous Caryll scowl," she exclaims, smacking herself on the
forehead. (Okay, she doesn't smack herself on the forehead. Also, English
people can't spell.)
Anyway, believe it or
not, she stays with him because now they're "in love" in her
Stockholm Syndrome-induced crazytown in the desert forever.
I don't know. Usually,
I just prefer my escapist fiction a little less terrifying and horrible. There
can be a little bit of abduction! But not too much.
***
In the middle of
writing this, I was overjoyed to learn, reading here, that Awl commenter mascarasnake was in
possession of information regarding that rarest of aves, a grandfather who read
romance fiction for pleasure:
[M]y teetotal, suit-wearing
farmer Grandfather always had to hand [...] Silvermints and what we referred to
as his 'dirty books". They were Mills and Boon (Harlequin in the US, I
think?) and a source of complete fascination to me. Looking back it seems
bizarre that the only things he read were church newsletters and books about
eighties careerwomens' love lives.
Straightaway I wrote
and asked her about it, and in response to my questions, which amounted to
PLEASE TELL ME EVERYTHING, she kindly replied:
My grandfather was born
in 1909, to a typically large Catholic family […] Most of his brothers went to
America but he remained on the farm he grew up on. He married my Grandmother
when he was in his thirties and she was in her twenties. They lived and worked
together on a small farm in the West of Ireland, with not particularly good
land, and had eight children. They grew their own food, had eggs from their own
chickens and milk from their cows, but things like store-bought food and new
clothes would have been a rarity even when my mother was growing up in the
sixties. […]
As a child I didn't
think my Grandad's choice of reading material was anything unusual, I just
assumed that Mills & Boon were what all grandparents read. I'm not sure who
gave them to him initially; it was most likely my Granny or one of their four
daughters. The nearest village has a church, a few pubs and a small store so
most of his books were bought for him by his children. My mother and I often
bought a stack in a secondhand bookstore before we went to visit for the
weekend in the eighties. His chair in the kitchen was in front of a window and
there were always a few books stacked on the sill, waiting to be read. My
mother told me that, as the plots were so similar, my grandparents developed a
system to keep track of which books they'd already read by putting their
initial inside the cover once they finished. They both admitted that if they
didn't do this it would take a while to realize they were rereading. […]
I'm not sure that he
was a particularly romantic husband; it definitely wasn't a roses and moonlight
stroll kind of relationship. He was a good husband and father and I think they
were happy together, but it was a different era and I don't think romance was
the main objective when they married.
I wonder.
In learning about the
very few men who read these books (some 9 percent, according to the RWA website,
but I've never met even one, myself) it struck me how women are far more free
to read anything they like than are men, just as we are so much more free than
men to wear any clothes we like. Nobody is going to bother a woman about her
reading, whereas American men are only just barely permitted to admit to having
a taste for Jane Austen. Even then, they are liable to blame this girly
transgression on a sentimental high-school teacher.
There are quite a lot
of questions on Yahoo! Answers asking whether or not it's okay for a guy to read romance novels. And pretty much
everyone answers Yes, read what you like, it is okay, though one pointed out
that he might like to read them in private.
In our world, very
little provision made for men to feel or express tenderness openly. And yet one
can't help but suspect that nearly everyone has his gentle, unwarlike side.
It's this, I suspect, that that those young men who are devoted to the animated
TV show "My Little Pony," and who are known as Bronies, are looking for, at least in
part: a place where they might not only free themselves of the imperatives of
machismo, but also manifest their gentleness freely and without restraint, be
playful, permit themselves to imagine freely.
When we really become
equal, maybe "just for women" won't be seen as less, or weird, or
lame, as it appears mascara snake’s grandfather already understood. Women visit
the country of "just for men" all the time, unimpeded; we can read
Tom Clancy or Patrick O'Brian and nobody bats an eyelash, because we are
allowed to be curious about men's fantasies of things. We have a visa for their
country, and yet they are not permitted into ours, in some sense. The world of
letters being the paradise of liberty that it is, it is perfectly fine for
anyone to stick to just one kind of book, or just one authorial gender, or one
genre, or one color of binding, just as he likes. But if men are curious about
our side of things, as I imagine many of them must be, I should think it would
be interesting to them to visit, and maybe we should invite them, as I am doing
now.
***
Among its hundreds and
hundreds of writers madly scribbling all over the globe, Mills & Boon employs just one
male writer, Roger Sanderson. "The broad-shouldered
Yorkshireman goes weight training three times a week, mountain climbing at the
weekends and enjoys a drink with friends at his rugby club in Waterloo,
Merseyside," the BBC reports. He writes under his wife's name, Gill
Sanderson; they have four sons. "Gill" Sanderson has written more
than 80 romances. He would probably have been a soldier otherwise, he says.
The encyclopedic jay
Dixon says that the manuscripts submitted by men to Mills & Boon usually
contain obvious howlers that no woman would ever write, such as having the
heroine explicitly admiring herself in a mirror. (Definitely a male author's
tic in imagining what being a woman is like, I've noticed it before; they had
it in that movie Switched, for example.) But she adds: "I can find
nothing in Roger's romances that would alert even an experienced reader to the
fact that he is a man… Roger is one of the few men who does have the
knack."
"I'm happily
married and I have been in love, therefore I have the basic
qualification," Sanderson told the BBC, adorably. "I know what it
feels like and from there everything will develop."
***
Among the many
unexpected gifts of the e-reader, anonymity is one of the most valuable.
Romance is one of the fastest-growing categories in ebooks, in a maybe-related
development.
As Alison Flood wrote recently in the Guardian,
"No longer are [readers] forced to conceal the covers of their latest
purchases (The Sultan's Choice, say, or The Temp and the Tycoon) from fellow commuters. Instead, they can
follow their heroine's romantic adventures with impunity, safely protected by
the anonymity of their e-readers."
Maybe the opening of
this new door can help in developing a better understanding between men and
women. To be free to see how the other half lives. And beyond that, to a
greater understanding of literary activity itself, which is only a matter of
someone else's ideas, someone's awareness of life, made manifest for others—for
anyone else at all—to experience and enjoy.
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