Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Thank you, Sarah, for bringing Teresa’s article to my attention.  I follow Teresa, but do not read SquawkRadio on a regular basis.  Her fellow Squawker, Eloisa James, gave a similar inspiring speech at RWA last week about emotions, love, and the struggle for romance to find acceptance.  We could rehash the Ivy League educations of Eloisa, Julia Quinn, (and others as I learned at RWA).  We could point to authors who are “rocket scientists” such as Stephanie Laurens.  Instead, let’s just stop defending romance and celebrate it!  I recently lunched with a NYT’s bestseller and discussed the constant criticism of romance. Her response, “Nobody becomes stupid from reading.”  So I keep reading Teresa, Eloisa, Julia, and other fabulous authors who take me away from the mundane (laundry) to the heartbreaking (war).

Kim
Fort Meade, MD

Oh, @#%^.  My apologies to Candy.  Thank you, Candy, for a wonder blog!

Kim

Hi Candy and everyone,

I must confess to not being a huge reader of romances, though I’ve had the usual experience: read some of my mother’s as adolescent, discovered they were an excellent way to relax while trying to survive grad school. But I definitely struggle with them, as “women’s novels,” as objects of ridicule, and objects of sexual acculturation. Gosh, I learned or thought I learned all about sex whilst reading Silver Angel at 13.

I’m fairly new to this splendiferous website and am not sure if you’ve already discussed Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, but I do find her study, albeit dated, to be incredibly useful in mapping out the needs of women readers in our culture. It seems that the key function of romance novels is to provide safe play for women at risk—whether it’s economic, sexual—or even romantic—risk. So the rape fantasy is comprehensible, even crucial, in a world where rape is so frequently used in movies as signifiers of masculinity or devices of getting the plot rolling, rather than acts of personal violation. How many male versions of fantasy—spy novels, detective mysteries, etc—use a beautiful young woman, raped and (always brutally) murdered to launch the hero’s own victory? This is so pervasive that it’s almost a truth: Women’s tragedies are merely opportunities for men. Romances are coping mechanisms that provide a narrow safety net for women trapped in an unfriendly/male world all the while, as you rightly point out, reinforcing, perhaps stimulating what might be dying, traditional gender roles. (Oops, now that I’ve written this, I realize that you’ve said this in #2. Sorry for the redundancy.)

Medeiros is absolutely correct when she says “the most subversive thing we dare to do is to make the woman the hero of her own story.” Harriet Potter? Egad, talk about Rowling as traitor to young girls everywhere. It makes me so mad, especially with the Hermione character verging on virago. Nevertheless, to view romances instances of heroines “standing up to them” is nothing short of deluded. If the heroine ever stands up to the hero, it’s usually a matter of her “stamping her small foot” or “beating her little fists against his burly chest” as he laughs at her. This is absurd. Her only victory is, like her efforts, a slender one: She achieves greater personal freedom only within the confines of marriage to this one man. Speaking for myself, I prefer the honesty of “he dominates her; she agrees” rather than some pathetic attempt by the author to appease a more politically correct readership. Why delude the reader too?

Perhaps the most compelling and heartbreaking of Madeiro’s argument is that romances afford us some hope. Hope that one day your husband will be nice to you; one day somebody out there will understand you truly. For women in problematic relationships, this hope can act as a lifeboat.

Thank you for this amazing website! It’s so important that we women maintain a dialogue about what we read and what we need!

A disagreements, with you, Candy.

How many chic, urban heroines discover that Twue Happiness lies in a small-town life with lots of babies and a white picket fence?

What’s wrong with small-town life?  It’s right for some people and I don’t think suggesting that it is is gender-based as much as it is generation-based. Many of us, male and female, living in dissociated isolation - who can’t name the neighbors in the next apartment over, who could walk around the city for hours without seeing a familiar face - find comfort in the idea of a town where the hardware store owner was friends with your grandma and your kids can walk home from school. And the babies thing isn’t fair to pin on just the suburban heroines - it’s a happy-ending convention for most heroines.

I agree that there can definitely be a “stop trying to make it where you don’t belong, little lady” element to women moving to small towns. But I think the plot of a romance revolves around taking a woman with emotional holes and finding ways to fill them (no innuendo intended). A hero can provide sexual companionship and romantic companionship, but a desire for a community and a place to belong can come from a small town. So for some characters, the small town move can be a way or resolving a character need.

This is so pervasive that it’s almost a truth: Women’s tragedies are merely opportunities for men. Romances are coping mechanisms that provide a narrow safety net for women trapped in an unfriendly/male world all the while, as you rightly point out, reinforcing, perhaps stimulating what might be dying, traditional gender roles.

Totally agree with you Esther and I hadn’t thought of it that way before.

You bring up some interesting points/questions, Candy.  An example I have noticed in some stories is that there will be comments about a man’s fashion sense, implying that others may think it is so good because of a certain type of implied sexual orientation, only to have this same element reinforce his “manliness” because of course it wasn’t true!

And if you think about Harry Potter, just look at the stir J.K. caused when she mentioned Dumbledore was gay!

I’ve just returned to romance as a genre, after a few years of fantasy and assorted YA taking up most of my reading time. Whenever anyone brings up Romance-The-Genre, why we read it and what we get out of it, I am irresistibly reminded of Agatha Christie.

No, really. Agatha did include a ‘love interest’ in ‘A Mysterious Affair at Styles’, her first Poirot novel, but not because she wanted to. She felt that romance was out of place in a detective story. But a ‘love interest’ was mandatory, and so she wedged it in off to the side somewhere.

Love Interest is still mandatory, more or less. A Hot Babe - or, much more rarely, Hot Guy - is required for every self-respecting action flick, comedy (even most buddy movies), sci-fi, drama, fantasy, even supernatural and horror… and, of course, the chick-flicks! Books are no less prone to it than movies. Even books, movies and tv-shows aimed at children often have a sweet, nascent romance.

To me, Romance is just Fiction with its shirt off, shucking the explosions and the lame one-liners and the faux-gritty-realism and embracing the fact that what people are really interested in is… no, not Hawt Seks. It’s nice in its place, but it’s not nearly the consuming obsession that Hollywood and romance-critics like to think it is.

What people, almost all people, are really interested in is *people*. What they feel, what they do, and how they love. And most of us like to see a happy ending. To feel that somewhere out there, everything’s going to be all right. The ideal, for me, is anything that draws me into the characters and their relationships, that has me cheering for them when they cross that emotional finish line. Be it masquerading as action, fantasy or sci-fi, or honest shirt-off Romance… that’s what I call good romance.

. . . “What the romance novel is really all about is the archetypal human struggle of integrating the masculine and feminine aspects of our psyches.”

I read this differently than Candy did. The point of the quote was what to say to people when you don’t want to have a discussion justifying romance and you need to shut them up. Because of that I read it is Medeiros’ throwing out something that sounds complex and academic simply to discourage further discussion. I didn’t necessarily think she believed it.

It’s late and I’m too tired to form a full thought, but to the extent that it is true I think it has something to do with the question of who the reader identifies with. People have suggested that readers identify with the hero as much or more than the heroine (I think that varies from reader to reader), even though romances are almost always focused on the heroines journey. It seems to me that this creates a type of duality or integration.

After I’ve had some sleep and some caffeine I may feel terribly embarrassed for having said that. Time will tell.

Nice to hear from you, Candy.

When I was a kid, I read as a kid.  Now that I am a woman, I still read as a kid only with more sex and dirty words. 

I think we read different stuff during different phases of our lives.  I read more romances when I was younger, then shifted to science fiction and fantasy as a young wife because that’s what my spouse brought to the marriage.  Now I read a lot of mystery.  The themes that wound through my entire reading life were a love of humor and adventure, but none of my reading tastes have been monolithic.  I enjoy romantic elements in much of what I read, just as I love laughter and excitement.  I read escapist literature not to compensate for some excruciating sociological burden, but to hide out from the mundane in my life.  My gradually increasing awareness of gender inequities and feminist issues slowly eradicated my tolerance for many of the conventions of old skool romance, just as returning to college in my thirties made me excruciatingly aware of what constituted good writing and what simply sucked.  Romance, like any other genre, runs the gamut when it comes to writing quality.  Furthermore there are an incredible number of sub-genres within romance.  Isn’t it a little presumptuous to assume that readers are choosing romances for a narrow set of motives? 

I don’t think that it’s possible to make vast generalizations about why people read romance. Hell, I don’t even think that readers even share a definition of the genre.  While many of your readers and most of what’s currently written are all about the erotic side of romance, how many of us still trot out a Georgette Heyer as their favorite romance novel of all time.
The regular romance consumers that use the library where I work don’t seem to fit any set pattern, and I would be ashamed to catch myself making assumptions based on their reading taste.
 
Actually, I’ve always seen a dichotomy between pleasure reading and “serious” literature, but I have never felt that these different types of reading were necessarily exclusive of one another.  We read romance or mystery or westerns or whatever for fun, because they give us pleasure without a huge investment of time or deep thought.  They teach us stuff too, especially if the author is a dedicated researcher.  Let’s face it, SBs like to learn stuff, so that’s a big attraction.  And what is more comforting in a complex world than a really satisfying HEA?

To me, this is reading like a kid—a book-lusting, readaholic kid, but a kid just the same.  I know I’m not alone in this, but as a youthful book worm,  I read anything and everything but loathed book reports and totally despised the “classics” forced down my throat in high school.  I bullshat my way through more great books than I can shake a stick at, all the time reading my own light lit choices, liberally seasoned with humor and romance.  Later on, when I returned to school, I finally understood the attraction of the great book, and I became pretty damn good at literary analysis too.  I could still lay on the bullshit, but now I actually read and enjoyed the book and the game of analysis.  I still believe that there is a point where it becomes merely pompous to over-analyze something that is done primarily for personal enjoyment.  I think it is also kind of demeaning to make assumptions about romance readers.  I mean, isn’t that woefully similar to the kind of crap one gets from those who denigrate the entire genre and its readers?  I mean it’s one thing to say that romance readers are seeking upbeat stories steeped in hope and the perfect vicarious kiss, but it’s another thing entirely to postulate that they are somehow trapped in misery or risk and that romance novels are a palliative for the inadequacies of their lives.

Oh hell, I think I started this with the simple idea that it was a mistake to over=analyze something done primarily for pleasure.  Then look what I did—my bad.

Excellent post.  My one vaguely useful thought is that the notion of “integration” might work if you look, not at how the hero and heroine change to incorporate more feminine or masculine characteristics, but rather at how the HEA of the two characters is symbolic of a single psyche’s warring sides coming together.

Now, I don’t really buy that kind of reading, because to my eye it smacks of cheap psychoanalysis.  But it might be what she meant.

One thing that bugs me, on the topic of gender roles and confrontations between the hero and heroine, is the way in which strident bitchiness and unfunny snark have come to substitute for actual strength of character—call it pseudo-strength.  There’s a particular tone that I think has become very widespread, at least in the urban fantasy/paranormal romance end of things, that I’ve become very jaded about, because it copies its forebears but doesn’t do so well.

(The hero of the book I’m currently drafting has for some reason volunteered himself for all kinds of feminization.  No, I’m not sure what provoked that.)

@Lisa on the

  How many chic, urban heroines discover that Twue Happiness lies in a small-town life with lots of babies and a white picket fence?

point

But a lot of the time the heroines character has been built in such a way, that I struggle to believe her being happy with the limited options in small towns. And the fact that she generally with little ado, gives up a career that she has busted a gut for to sit at home and pop out babies.. It DRIVES ME CRAZY!
It just appears too often for me, and often just not fitting the character IMO. But I have many problematic issues with the romance heroine, which is why I often have to take breaks from reading romance novels and there are some categories I just can’t touch.

I am also with Lori on Medeiros’ usage of the “archetypal” thingy.. I read it as something to spit out to stop them ragging and avoid a debate?

spamword: move37 it is probably going to be 37 years before I can move back to my small country hometown. :(

PS As usual I got sidetracked..
I did want to reply to this in Candy’s post:

This men from Mars, women from Venus outlook is just plain weird to me,

But isn’t that realistically what 95% of the romances are based on??

And there was something else.. but the brain is on a melt down from work.. and it is now gone. sigh

Wonderful and thought-provoking blog as always, Sarah!

It probably lost something in the translation because I usually give it in an oral speech but I did want to clarify that the “romance novels being about the integration of masculine and feminine aspects of our psyches” was given for purely tongue-in-cheek purposes as something to say to a romance critic to shut them down because they seem to enjoy ridiculous psycho-babble. HOWEVER, I totally enjoyed your analysis of that very theory! You took it to places I’ve never seen explored before.

Oh! And one more thing your blog made me think about was that when we write, we’re not just the heroine, we’re the hero as well. People often ask me if my heroines are “me” but the truth is that the heroes also represent another facet of my personality. Just something else to think about!

Well, fiddle! I meant Candy too!!!  Thank you CANDY for such a wonderful blog ;)

Okay, I’ve had my coffee so I had one more thought and then I’ll go away and let you discuss amongst yourselves. I just wrote the perfect example of the heroine standing up to the hero in my new book. She is essentially at this point his captive (sorry, but I make no apologies for adoring captive fantasies—not a big fan of censoring ANY woman’s fantasies) and all of his men are afraid to ask him just exactly how his mother came to haunt a local wood.

However, when his men fall silent, she steps into the fray to ask him (resulting in spit-takes and appalled silence from his men). Now why does she do something that might be construed as so foolish?

Because even though she knows he has both ultimate physical and emotional power over her in that moment, she also knows at some subconscious, core level of her being yet to be explored that THIS MAN WILL NOT INTENTIONALLY HURT HER. And that gives her the courage to stand up to him when everyone else around him is cowering. He can’t help but respect her for it, which adds another level to his growing feelings for her. He basically tells her, “If my men were this bold, we’d have bested the Bad Guy a long time ago.”

Generally speaking, when a book’s protagonist is a woman, or somebody not strictly heterosexual, or a racial minority, all of a sudden, it’s immediately tagged as A Book About the Other.

But are women in romance novels really the protagonists?

On a percentage basis of the entire genre, my impression of current romance novels is that the heroes are primarily the protagonists while the heroines are the primary point of view character (or narrator) and that if the hero has a point of view that it’s been heavily filtered through a feminine narrator to fulfill the female fantasy aspect Candy mentioned above.

The hero has generally has the major emotional character arc, the hero has the goals while the heroine tends to be reaction mode, the hero still is the one to primarily confront/defeat the villains (not always still talking percentage impression here). The heroine are generally victimized/traumaitized (romance tropes: fated mates, captive, blackmail/revenge, secret baby, etc.) Yes, the heroines survive and score moral victories but again these victories seem to be the result of reaction rather than action on the heroine’s part or through action by the hero. Hence my perception that the hero is generally the protagonist and not the heroine.

Leaving my comment here because my mind is whirling and I’m still pondering the full extent of Candy’s post and I haven’t read the rest of the comments yet.

Great article.

Lisa took many of the words out of my mouth (fingers) for the small town heroine. I relate to her, because I did leave the big city to move to a place I’d only experienced through vacations—it was/is my grandmother’s hometown and she would bring me here to visit her family. I don’t think of myself as lacking ambition, so much as longing for connection. My husband mentioned moving here before I did, because it was a secret dream, so maybe he’s the one who couldn’t cut it. :)

I can read about someone leaving a small town to go to the big city, but I secretly think she’s making a Big Mistake. (Kidding, sorta.)

Pam, I think your argument of reading for the sake of childlike pleasure (to paraphrase terribly) is important and something we need reminding over and over. I reread all my childhood favorites, and gosh darn it, when I read Jane Austen for the first time I gobbled it up with childlike “what-happens-next”? hunger too.

Sorry, Candy, I think Pam was responding to my remarks about why readers read romance when she says: “it’s another thing entirely to postulate that they are somehow trapped in misery or risk and that romance novels are a palliative for the inadequacies of their lives.” Speaking from personal experience, I didn’t start rereading romances till I got married. I was suddenly interested in other possible romances when my own seemed fixed. So I may have been thrusting my own reasons for reading romances onto a larger population.

That being said, when it comes to romances, of which there are inordinate amounts being published monthly, many of whose fans pre-order, the success seems unwarranted. Firstly, much of the writing is lousy. Some is divine, but one has to wade through much purple prose to get to it. Secondly, the stories are so repetitive in the most minute ways. Candy’s already enumerated some of those frustrations, and there are so many more. How many more pirate captains can a girl read about? (Apparently many.) How many identity-changing plastic surgeries? Rakish, masculine, dark heroes? Gods, give me a sensitive, slender man any day!

(The ultimate “repetition” of girl meets guy, they overcome some obstacle, girl gets guy, is the one I believe that we read romances for with childlike or not so childlike pleasure.
And men have their myths too—like in those spy and detective novels that fill their own needs—so I’m certainly not suggesting women are special here.)

This is all a long way of saying that childlike pleasure is not enough an explanation for why so many women read romances, so many shoddily written romances, so many identical romances. Why can’t a sociological phenomenon or “excruciating sociological burden” be true? We easily look back at Victorians and say, they loved Gothic romances because their own lives were so sexually repressed—only they could have birthed and popularized a sexual monster like Dracula. We may claim to read romances for pleasure or escape from “the mundane,” but culture is porous. Our decisions are not entirely conscious; the Victorians certainly didn’t say, “We are so repressed we must read about vampires to alleviate sexual guilt.” We read what’s there; we read to respond or succumb to the mores around us. Reasons for pleasure or escapism are never merely arbitrary.

Sorry if I sound strident. I just find the argument of “simply escape” to be a catchall blanket that covers rich possibilities for learning. It may make us uncomfortable to consider ourselves as part of a sociological phenomenon, but why? We shouldn’t be frightened or resentful or anything of examining ourselves and our motives.

On the small town thing in romance—I think Candy was pretty clear about not having a problem with it in & of itself. The problem is how common it is in the genre and the fact that it’s often presented as the HEA for a character for whom it makes no sense. I have the same issue because I strongly believe that the HEA needs to fit the character rather than being some one-size-fits-all stereotype.

Also, the fact that a heroine wants connection doesn’t necessarily mean she’s should be in a small town. Using myself as an example, small town life does not give me connection. It makes me feel like everyone is all up in my business, which makes me withdraw. I am much more able to be part of a community in a larger town/city where the interaction is voluntary. 

I feel the same way about the number of romances that end with the coupe married and instantly pregnant. That’s a perfect HEA for some characters. For others it’s not, but it gets tacked on any way. That always leaves me scratching my head and wondering how in the world I’m supposed to feel about the ending.

to Candy: I’m sure I’m biased by my personal experience - I lived in the greater Washington DC area and found it one of the coldest places I’ve ever been. My neighbors were either anonymous or so horrible/creepy you wished you didn’t know them. The commute was too awful to have a life outside of work. My best friend had the same experience, but with Atlanta instead of D.C.

I’m from a small city, not from a small town, but it’s a Midwestern city that thinks like a small town (nobody’s more than three degrees from anybody else if you start asking).

You say heroines argue for a need for fulfillment outside of romance - I think that’s what a small town (or small city) can offer. There are, believe it or not, interesting careers here - especially university careers - it’s not suicide to move here. So I definitely believe that the small-town happy ending is plausible, and it’s certainly to my taste.

But I agree with you that many (possibly MOST) stories with heroines moving to small towns do not tell this kind of story. They pick heroines who ARE happy in the city and then say never mind, you weren’t actually happy, time to go home with the hero and discover what happiness really is. In this case, I’m sure it is gender based (all women want something cozy, not something fast-paced, even if they don’t know it) and that really sucks. But I don’t think you can assume this is always about gender - sometimes it’s about character.

I think Jennifer Crusie’s Manhunting is a good example of a heroine who moves from the city to a small town without it being misogynist. Some of my favorite Susan Elizabeth Phillips MALE heroes (like the Bonners) are giving up the city for small town life. So it can be about the character and not the genitals :)

The problem is how common it is in the genre and the fact that it’s often presented as the HEA for a character for whom it makes no sense.

to Lori: Well, you said it better than my rambling. I need to type faster or think faster!

I have not read all the responses in detail, and there is a lot of thought-provoking analysis here, but one point seems important to me:  romance is a broad genre, so it is hardly surprising that analyses and generalisations that apply perfectly to some examples of it are flatly contradicted by others.  If we really want to indulge in detailed analysis of romance as a type, we need first to establish and define the numerous sub-types and sub-sub-types that exist.  There are sub-classifications according to culture and chronology, as well as the obvious plot-based groups.
What does apply to all conventional romance (as it also does to some traditional forms of other fiction genres, such as the whodunnit detective tale, in which a puzzle is solved and the villain punished) is that the story comes to a satisfying and just conclusion:  you can call it the HEA, but I would prefer to put it in terms of satisfactory closure to that particular story.  This is one thing that all readers of romance enjoy.  Real life does not always work out that way, needless to say, but sometimes it does, and reading a convincing and realistic story, with characters that are well-drawn and fully realised, in which obstacles are overcome and life resumes an even tenor, is both comforting and inspiring.

I’m sure I’m biased by my personal experience - I lived in the greater Washington DC area and found it one of the coldest places I’ve ever been.

And to prove that it really is all relative—I’m having a completely different experience with DC. I find it really comfortable. People actually talk to you on the street here—in a nice way, not some creep stalker thing.

My perception is different from Lisa’s for at least 2 reasons. First, I came here from LA. ‘Nuff said. Second, the idea of living in a place where you’re never more than 3 degrees distant from everyone else give me hives.

This is a perfect example of what we were both saying about the HEA needing to fit the character. LIsa and I don’t belong in the same book. Neither of us is wrong at all, but if we both ended up with the same HEA that would be poor writing.

I didn’t read all the comments but just wanted to put my 2 cents in.
I find that I stick with the romance authors who do dig deep into internal conflict and work it out by the end.

I read romance in the beginning I think because I believed and hoped in love though my home was so dysfunctional and my parent’s marriage such a poor example to follow. Romances helped me believe in hope of love being real in one’s life.

I have constant physical pain but am also a healer, if that makes sense, so the escape into the pain of others and it’s ultimate conclusion in a way that at least make sense in a happy sort of way helps me blank out my physical pain while I’m reading and writing.

Personally I agreed with Teresa. I got a bit lost in the treatise by Candy but will read it again another day and as I get to know this world of authors better, being a novice with only one novella accepted but not published yet, maybe I’ll have more to say.

My heroes are gentle and kind to their women- I guess because my husband is- he’s had to take over the house because I am so incapacitated- and just now he had to massage my leg to help the pain of excruciating muscle spasms go away. So I guess because that’s the kind of man I live it, it’s the kind I write about.

Anyway, it’s an interesting topic and one I’ll be back to visit again.

what purposes do you think romance novels serve? Do you see our psyches as gendered? Does it even matter? Do you think romance novels, more than other genres, attempt to bridge this gap?

I’m trying to finish up painting the room that my daughter is moving back into this coming Thursday and my hands are a little achy, so excuse any typos and/or missing words. 

I was thinking about Candy’s post as I painted and it occurred to me that most genre fiction—whether it is romance, science-fantasy/science-fiction, spy thrillers, what have you—reassure us that justice will prevail in the end.  The bad guy/girl will be caught and/or killed, the evil plot will be stopped, and the universe will become “as it should be”.  In the case of romance, you may not have the evil villain doing villainy thing, of course, unless you are reading romantic suspense or a paranormal.  You will, however, still see that if you behave the “right” way (and here is where you see a lot of the reinforcing of traditional roles and values), you will get your happy ending.  Granted, the “right way” can vary somewhat from book to book, author to author, and generation to generation.  However, if you see a hero that acts like a complete asshole, his behavior will be explained in a way that makes his behavior acceptable (some explanations are better than others) or he will change his asshole-y ways or both.  Typically, the heroine has punished said behavior by the end of the book by banishing him in some way (she’s stopped seeing him, won’t take his calls, is leaving him, etc.) and the hero must (and does) grovel the appropriate amount to atone because justice (and the HEA) cannot be achieved without bad behavior being punished somehow, even if it’s the hero. 

As for the heroine, if she is a wild child who parties and runs around with “the wrong crowd”, something bad will have happened to her sometime before or at the very beginning of the book to set her back on the straight and narrow.  Once again, bad behavior cannot be rewarded and wild, possibly sexually promiscuous, party girls are, by the standards of most romances, not behaving appropriately. 

Whatever the transgressive behavior, if it’s the hero and heroine that are committing it, they must find their way back to the right sort of behavior to get their HEA.  If it’s ancillary characters that act against the norm, they are either the ones trying to keep the couple apart or they are the wacky friends that are perennially alone.  If they are really transgressive, such as the promiscuous best girlfriend, they are frequently cannon fodder in the romantic-suspenses.  So, do the right thing (as defined by the culture) and atone for any straying from the proper behavior (marriage to make up for pre-marital sex, for instance; or raising the secret baby alone because “she should have known better than to succumb to her overwhelming desire for the strangely non-Islamic Middle Eastern prince”; or groveling—publicly, if possible—to apologize for believing that she secretly seduced his brother even though everything she ever said or did indicated that she wouldn’t do that and she never actually met the man; etc.), then you get to have your HEA and our sense of justice, consciously or unconsciously goes “ahhhhhhh” in contentment.  Anything else, of course, would not be Justice.  Besides, if “wrong” isn’t always punished then those of us who behave properly might just as well have run about doing all sorts of bad things if the bad boys and girls get to be happy in the end, too.  Those sorts of thoughts would make us anxious, not content and happy, and would make reading the books much less pleasurable. 

At least that’s my current theory on why we read genre, any genre, fiction.  Or it could be the paint fumes.

AgTigress said: 

What does apply to all conventional romance (as it also does to some traditional forms of other fiction genres, such as the whodunnit detective tale, in which a puzzle is solved and the villain punished) is that the story comes to a satisfying and just conclusion:  you can call it the HEA, but I would prefer to put it in terms of satisfactory closure to that particular story. 

Okay, so that was a lot more concise than what I just posted, but that’s what I was trying to get at.  (And I need to type less or quicker, one or the other…)

Lori,
I know that small town living isn’t for everybody, and that it doesn’t provide connection for every one—I was speaking personally. Because it does provide a source of happiness for me, I tend to relate to characters who have a similar experience.

Anything that a character does that isn’t consistent with who they are is a flaw—move to a big city, move to a small town, eat meat after we’re hammered with the fact that the heroine is a vegetarian. I don’t think there is any dispute that a character acting out of character is going to be jarring and possibly book-ruining.

One thing that’s great about the romance genre is that it’s so vast a person (that would be me) can read one romance every day or so and never have to dip into the types of books Candy is commenting upon.  I primarily read historicals because I have always loved learning more about how people used to live and because I really want an escape from the ordinary of today.  If I feel the heroine is too stupid to live or doing something completely unrealistic or is too young and virginal for the hero, I stop reading the book and pick up another one, even if the offending book is by an author I generally adore.  Life’s too short to waste reading something that just doesn’t appeal to me.  So I never worry about the types of plots you are discussing because I just avoid them.  I have been a feminist forever and I’ve pretty much been an uppity broad for a long time, too.  I have the power to pick what I read and I love this blog because it does admit that not all romance novels are well written or worth reading.  But those that I read give me happy moments in a life filled with a host of other troubles and that’s all I ask of them.  If you don’t like what’s happening in some books, don’t read them but find something else that makes you happy.  If they’re still being published and purchased, it’s because they make someone happy and while I probably wouldn’t have much in common with that someone, I won’t deny them the opportunity to enjoy.  For example, I stopped reading anything from Harlequin Presents after just a couple of them because the heroes were impossibly arrogant (I like some arrogance but those guys are way too) and the heroines were impossibly passive (like I said I’m an uppity broad from waaay back and my preferred heroines at least have those tendencies) but I know they’re very popular.  The bottom line is that I’m happy to know romance can encompass all of us!

And to Teresa Medeiros—I cried.

My secret word is soon39—if only it were true!  Somehow while I wasn’t looking, I’m soon a much larger number that ends in 0!

Um, gals… your link to Teresa Medeiros’ post should say: Why she WRITES romance novels, not why she reads them.

I realized that I didn’t respond to these questions from Candy’s post, even though I quote them:

Do you see our psyches as gendered?

I think that our ideas of what parts of our psyche is masculine and what parts are feminine is culturally based and largely out-dated.  For example, our culture dictates that nurturing is feminine and competitiveness is masculine.  However, in the last 20-30 years, we’ve seen a definite shift towards the idea that it is not just okay, but desirable, for a man to be nurturing and involved with his family.  Conversely, as more women have achieved prominence in business, politics, and athletics, it is accepted that women can be as driven and as competitive as a man.  (Though whether or not that could be considered “desirable”, as nurturing is with men, could obviously be debated.) 

Does it even matter?

I think, especially at this point in time, calling our various traits our “masculine half” or our “feminine side” has little to do with actually viewing ourselves that way, ie, a dichotomy of masculine and feminine that needs to be more fully integrated.  Instead, I think it’s just a verbal shorthand to reference traits that have, historically, been labeled masculine or feminine.  (And in Teresa Medeiros’s case, I read it as exactly what she later confirmed—a way to shut down someone that is literally or figuratively sneering at your choice of reading material while simultaneously implying, or saying out-right, that you must be dim if you enjoy it.)

Do you think romance novels, more than other genres, attempt to bridge this gap?

I liked what Marie Brennan said:

the notion of “integration” might work if you look, not at how the hero and heroine change to incorporate more feminine or masculine characteristics, but rather at how the HEA of the two characters is symbolic of a single psyche’s warring sides coming together.

If you were to look at it that way, then yes, romance would, more than other genres, attempt to bridge the gap or, at least, do it more effectively.

This is a perfect example of what we were both saying about the HEA needing to fit the character. LIsa and I don’t belong in the same book. Neither of us is wrong at all, but if we both ended up with the same HEA that would be poor writing.

Ooh. Well said.

During my first term of college, my poli sci professor announced to the entire class that the only reason that romance novels enjoy the success that they do is because the HEA represents a kind of utopia, in which everyone ends up happily ever after.  He also claimed that this was why it mainly appealed to women because men are able to look passed the HEA to find the real meaning in a novel.  Inside I could not believe how stupid he was—especially since most of the men I knew read at most a comic book—, but outside I didn’t let him know that I disagreed with him or that I thought he was a misinformaned, arrogant asshole.

The next term, after barely recovering from the other prof’s arrogant, bigotted asshattery, I was assualted by another professored, who procalimed that not only are Americans the only culture that is obsessed with HEA, resulting in the high numbers of romance novels bought each year, but also that when a romance novel is number 1 on the Best Seller lists it is because the chain book stores put an extremely high emphasis on romance novels by placing them in storewindows and leaving them out right in front where everyone can see them.  He then admitted to moving dozens of those non-books and replacing them with real literature, such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, and on one occassion Sylvia Plath (shuddering as he said this because God Forbid a woman write serious literature.)

While I can’t really argue with the thought that a romance novel is in effect a Utopia, I don’t believe that this is the main reason why people read romance novels.  That is just an out, a way to excuse reading a genre that is believed to be subpar because of that HEA, since serious novels can never set out to make the characters happy.  Serious novels can only be serious if they leave the reader depressed in the end.  Even books that aren’t strictly romance novels (such as In Her Shoes) can’t be considered literature because the main characters end up living a peaceful, happy existence.  They’re called Chick Lit, which is such an insulting name in and of itself because it assumes that you must be a “chick,” which in my mind is someone who wants to look smart, but is really an airheaded bimbo sitting next to a built-in swimming pool, wearing a barely there bikini and sipping her girly cosmo or daqueri.  This is a ridiculous assumption.  Anyone can read so-called Chick Lit, just like anyone can read Heminway, Steinbeck, or Plath.

Don’t get me started on the term “kiddie lit”.

I

think that our ideas of what parts of our psyche is masculine and what parts are feminine is culturally based and largely out-dated.  For example, our culture dictates that nurturing is feminine and competitiveness is masculine.

I have to disagree.  There is a great deal of cultural influence, but there is also a biological basis that is hard-wired, and shared by species other than our own.  There are, by and large, some very common differences between typically male behaviour and typically female behaviour, though they are points on a continuum with a considerable area of overlap.  This is evident not only across human communities over both space and time, but also in the behaviour of other essentially gregarious species in which individuals of both sexes and all ages live together—not merely some other primates, such as chimpanzees, but also amongst canids, for instance.  You don’t need as many males as females, for one thing, so males are more disposable (one male can fertilise large numbers of females, and often does).  In all mammalian species, females are essential for the survival of young and males are not, and though there are plenty of instances other than human ones where the males assist with this, they can’t do it all:  the females can.
The point about being human is that we are able to vary these natural tendencies in all sorts of ways to a greater extent than is usually done by other species.  This, I think, is what has led to the current idea that inherent male/female disparity is wholly a product of cultural mores.  The cultural mores play an immensely important part, but the rock-bottom basis is biological, and none the worse for that.

There is a great deal of cultural influence, but there is also a biological basis that is hard-wired, and shared by species other than our own. 

I agree and I could have spelled that out more clearly.  It should have been “a large portion of our ideas of what parts of our psyche is masculine and what parts are feminine is culturally based…”  In fact, I picked competitiveness as opposed to aggression, which I think is more biologically based (though I could be wrong, since it’s been a while since I read anything on it).  But the fact that some of our responses are rooted in biology doesn’t change the fact that many of the traits that a great many would tell you are innate to one sex or the other are actually cultural constructs.  Nurturing, for instance, is largely learned through socialization (specifically your own parents and/or caregivers) but we are imprinted, culturally, that it is inherently feminine.  I put forth that a man who grew up with nurturing caregivers (parents, etc) is going to be much more “naturally” nurturing than a woman who did not.

In fact, I picked competitiveness as opposed to aggression, which I think is more biologically based (though I could be wrong, since it’s been a while since I read anything on it).

That sentence should have read:

“In fact, I picked competitiveness as opposed to aggression, which I think is more biologically based (though I could be wrong, since it’s been a while since I read anything on it) because I think that competitiveness is something you find equally in both sexes, but it is usually considered a “masculine” trait.

Sorry, I should have caught that when I proofread.

I came late to reading romance (when I retired at 52) and am a glorious addict at age 53 so the question of why I have fallen in love with this genre is much on my mind. While reading Ms. Medeiros essay yesterday, I sensed her remark

. . What the romance novel is really all about is the archetypal human struggle of integrating the masculine and feminine aspects of our psyches.

to be tongue-in-check. but I found a strong current truth there as well. 

I have read just enough Jungian theory on archetypes and self-integration to be dangerous,  but even my murky understanding leaves me with an appreciation for the freedom the theory promises. Unfortunately, there can be much scariness in making a head-on examination of those aspects of ourselves that are not already integrated - I think that’s the point of why we hide them away.  But in the middle of throughly enjoying the imagined world of a romance writer, where I have some assurance that this process has a guarantee of HEA by the end, I can relax enough of my personal reality to be open to the thoughts, actions and emotions of the characters.  And even try them on for size. 

Having opted for a big city career that required me to “run with the wolves” far too frequently, I saw that inner conflicts generated by city/town, career/family, duty/love/fulfillment do not hinge on one big decision but on thousands of little ones made repeatedly.  When an author writes of the inner struggles of an alpha male to make these same choices, she presents me with a safe little lab to make peace with my own shadows, even the ones that I tend to identify as male and aggressive and selfish, etc.  When the heroine has to look at the impact of her choices on her life and loved ones, yet another little safe zone is established for examining/weighing/resolving the impact of the thousands of choices I made.  By way of example, I am still doing a happy dance after reading Cherish by Catherine Anderson, where many of these conflicts and their impact were made explicit, as was the integration of male and female archetypes within the psyches of the h/h individually. Even the times characters are TSTL (the topic of another of Ms. Medeiros’s essays on the same site) and make choices I cannot understand, the process of asking myself why I care about these stupid fictional characters usually helps me recall my own TSTL moments in a way that prompts a wee bit of inner healing. 

So what if I try to justify my romance addiction with a little Jung?  My husband says I’m happier and my lovin’s better anyway!  Thanks to Ms. Medeiros for her essays.  And thanks to Ms. Tan for writing a rocking post that pulled in a lurker into the fray.

It’s articles like this, and the accompanying comments, that keep me reading SBTB every day.

Well, that and the Photoshop contests.

Couldn’t agree more. This is what I found, but did not necessarily want to, in my thesis. On he outset, sure the women always win. But they win a certain type of battle. Motherhood and marriage are inevitably the road to happiness. They are more often enveloped in the hero’s world than the other way around.

But that’s not to say that I don’t really enjoy a good romance….

Ok, so I was just going to be content to lurk, as usual, but I really wanted to comment on the gendered psyches thing. To contextualize my views, briefly, I’m an openly libertine woman whose 32 yr journey has taken me from femme-y tomboy to hard butch to me (a sort of integration of the two).

I think psyches are an amalgamation of biological imperatives, cultural norms (fluid though they may be), and our personal opinions (conscious or not). I think that there are portions of our minds that behave in ways we would call ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. For example, while spiders reduce me instantly to screaming & full-blown freakouts, a cliché ‘girly’ response, 70’s muscle cars immediately elicit my inner 17 yr old boy who wants to discuss them endlessly.

I’m pretty sure that my love of romance novels has little, if anything, to do with integrating the two halves of my whole, more that I enjoy a good love story, and always have.

Tina C:  thanks for clarifying;  I now see that we are pretty well in agreement.  :-) 
I have heard some people speak of gender stereotypes as though they were solely the product of cultural conditioning, and that male and female animals have no innate biological/behavioural differences at all other than the mechanics of their reproductive systems.  This is not so, as anyone who knows creatures of another species well can attest.  There are some differences, elements that can be called masculinity and femininity, but there are no sharp lines, and the complexity of humans is such that the range of possibilities is vast — even within the same individual.
Lexie’s post above seems to me to be a very telling illustration of just how complex and interesting human self-identification can be.  And men and women are long-lived animals, which gives us the opportunity to change a lot over time on an individual basis.

But they win a certain type of battle.

This has been my problem with romance, particularly historical romance, from the outset.  Don’t get me wrong - I adore romance - but I don’t think it really is a genre that celebrates women, so much as simply panders to, and rewards, existing gender stereotypes.

Very rarely do you see a heroine who is capable of besting the hero.  Or the heroine who can save herself from her own troubles.  If the heroine does “win” by book’s end - it’s a victory that is almost solely on the hero’s terms, and the victory is made possible only because the hero finds the heroine sexually attractive. 

Truly progressive portrayals of heroines - women who are intelligent, emotionally mature and sexually experienced (and not demonized for it) are so very rare.  I’ve always wondered why romance, a genre written largely by women for women, seems stuck on arrogant Alpha males and the young, passive, often painfully naive virgins who love them (Harlequin Presents, any MM releases, anyone?).

Very rarely do you see a heroine who is capable of besting the hero.  Or the heroine who can save herself from her own troubles.  If the heroine does “win” by book’s end - it’s a victory that is almost solely on the hero’s terms, and the victory is made possible only because the hero finds the heroine sexually attractive. 
Truly progressive portrayals of heroines - women who are intelligent, emotionally mature and sexually experienced (and not demonized for it) are so very rare.

... said Christine

I don’t agree—necessarily—but that may be because I don’t understand quite what you mean.
a) heroine who is capable of besting the hero—what does this mean? Besting him in business? Smarter than him? Need more parameters please.
b) heroine who is capable of saving herself—I’m sure I can think of heroines who saved themselves (the gals in Nora’s KEY Trilogy for instance) but I guess bonus, they got a hero too.
c) truly progressive portrayals of heroines—I’ve been racking my brains to think of a book(s) that have that because I “think” I encounter said heroine a lot, in historicals and contemps, but my brain is not giving my examples :( Who comes to mind for you for a truly progressive heroine?

I studied Jungian theory and I’m going to assume that when Medeiros says:

What the romance novel is really all about is the archetypal human struggle of integrating the masculine and feminine aspects of our psyches.

she means it as a Jungian would. She’s using the terms he used.

In real life, a woman isn’t the feminine principle and a man isn’t the masculine principle. A real life human being has both in their psyche. Some of it is more unconscious than others, but it’s all there.

Writers struggle to make our characters as real as possible, but in the world of the story in Jungian theory, the entire story represents the entire psyche. The characters represent various aspects of it, such as the masculine and feminine principles. The integration Medeiros is referring to isn’t the relationship’s effect on the character, but the relationship itself. The relationship stands for the integration of the feminine principle and the masculine principle.

Alpha males are not feminized or emasculated. They learn to work with the female to form a relationship. This is the integration of the masculine and feminine principles Medeiros speaks about, this form of cooperation and often compromise.

Building stability and family is the result of this integration. The more integrated our psyche, the more stable we are and the more productive we become.

Exorcising demons is bringing the unconscious to the light of the conscious, the definition of integration.

There’s a lot more Jungian theory at play here. The muse is the unconscious’ way of making itself known (through the transcendent function). It is a way to work out issues you might not even realize you have. Analyzing what we write is akin to dream analysis.

“Truly progressive heroine”—Sophy of Georgette Heyer’s “The Grand Sophy”—she even completely engineered her own HEA. There was nothing she couldn’t, didn’t and wasn’t capable of doing. She doesn’t fit the sexually experienced category but sexually knowledgeable, without a doubt.

@ Janet W:   I was talking more about historical romances then contemps; and I should have been clearer on the whole.  I was actually thinking of making an addendum to my post, but I didn’t think anyone was going to pay attention to my bitter ramblings.  ;)  Also:

a) heroine who is capable of besting the hero - I haven’t encountered too many heroines who are smarter or more capable than the hero.  That’s what I was talking about.  For example, like in Anne Stuart’s Shadow Dance, as well as others: if she can speak a smattering of conversational Arabic, then he is fluent.  If she is smart, then he is the chessmaster: happily manipulating her to do just what he wants her to do.  In a few contemps I’ve read, as well, if the heroine is allegedly a good businessperson, then the hero comes in and totally outshines her in every way.  It always seems that, in sort of all areas, the hero sort of “tops” the accomplishments of the heroine.  Ah, god - does that make sense?

b) heroine who is capable of saving herself - I’m sure there are exceptions to this situation, but I, personally, haven’t seen many.  Usually, if the heroine is in danger, the hero comes in and rescues her.  It’s rare to see a chessmaster heroine who can deftly manipulate the situation in order to get out of trouble on her own, without help from the hero.  Or, god forbid, a heroine who knows what to do to get out of danger, and then makes/tricks the hero to do her bidding to help her.

c) truly progressive portrayals of heroines: Just what I said.  Someone who is intelligent (doesn’t make dumb choices), emotionally mature (knows how to communicate with the hero, doesn’t act like a 14 yr old in a woman’s body) and sexually confident (not a virgin, technical virgin, virgin widow, or the heroine who had three relationships and all of them were shit).  I also think that well done assertive heroines (who are not TSTL) are rare.  I don’t know if this is “truly progressive”, but intelligent, emotionally mature and sexually confident heroines do strike me as rare in romance novels, or really - any novels.

Did that make more sense?  ;)  I admit, these are just my jumbled, disorganized opinions after having read romances for many years.  Off the top of my head, I can think of quite a few counter examples to each of my arguments (like you did with Sophy); but what I’m talking about is the genre tropes and trends as a whole, the way I see them from my personal reading experience.  I know that many authors subvert these ideas - Nora Roberts, for one - but a lot of authors, on the other hand, seem content to write in these tropes.  Probably because people enjoy them and find them erotic.

It totally makes sense ... you’re saying and I’m agreeing (now that I get what you’re saying) that what you describe is very much the norm and the occasional Roberts/Heyers/et al that we point to are the exception, not the rule. And that even if the heroine is walk on water smart/brilliant/competent/charitable/whatever, the hero is going to be more so. I’m exaggerating here but yes—thanks for the clarification.

I voted for Nora & Jesus because after all, is there a difference? But I LOVED the Stephanie Meyer & Stephen King one. Good job!

Understood and agree with you Christine!
This has been a major problem with me in my years of romance reading.. sometimes I can put it aside, but it still bugs the living daylights out of me.

Liz-

I cannot agree with you more.  I read pretty much equal parts “serious” literature and trash, and I am always struck by the fact that in order to be “serious”, it seems that book must not have a happy ending… and I spent a lot of time thinking about that idea, and realized that I shared that idea.  Anytime a book or even a movie had a happy ending, I automatically assumed it was “lighter”.  This disregards, of course, those rare books that manage to be happy and sad at the same time.  Anyway, it’s all very cynical and troubling, but I think it says something that right after I finish letting F Scott break my heart, I reach for a romance to remind me that finding love doesn’t mean I’ll end up burning to death in a lunatic asylum while my alcoholic husband runs around with a younger woman.

The other thing I wanted to comment on is how bothered I am by the fixation on motherhood and childbearing in romance novels.  I can dismiss it easily enough in the historicals I favor, because it’s easier to take when I justify it to myself by saying that at that time, this was the norm for women, etc, and it’s presentism to make them want anything else, and that sort of makes it okay.  But, I find it extremely troubling in the handful of contemporaries I’ve read.  I, myself, don’t want kids, and I often feel like a freakshow for that… surely there are other romance readers whose happy ending doesn’t include a litter of brats.  I actually avoid contemporaries for that specific reason, and even branched into some Emma Holly, only to find that even amid teh buttsecks and threesomes, our heroine wants to be a mommy.  Not that threesome/buttsecks would or should preclude a desire to reproduce, of course!  But why perpetuate the myth that there is something unfeminine about not wanting kids, or that women who don’t want kids are “bad” or unwomanly?

Also, I second the comments of those who notice that women in contemporaries (and historicals) often give up their careers to be with their heroes… not all of the time, of course, but often enough for this to be troubling.

Wow, what a wonderful post, Candy! I’m so glad I was able to read this.

Add my voice to the other’s who thought that

What the romance novel is really all about is the archetypal human struggle of integrating the masculine and feminine aspects of our psyches.

was tongue-in-cheek. But other comments on this line are very interesting!

The point about being human is that we are able to vary these natural tendencies in all sorts of ways to a greater extent than is usually done by other species.  This, I think, is what has led to the current idea that inherent male/female disparity is wholly a product of cultural mores.  The cultural mores play an immensely important part, but the rock-bottom basis is biological, and none the worse for that.

So wait, what’s inherently feminine and what’s inherently masculine? What do all the dudes do and what do all the ladies do?

It’s amazingly hard to determine exactly what is a uniquely “manly” or “womanly” trait, without being reduced to “Well, uh….isn’t it obvious?”. I think everybody brings their own confirmation bias with them on this issue, and that leads us to assume something is “obvious”, when it might be entirely different for someone else. It seems obvious that X is a defining male trait….except here’s a woman who does it. Even biology is uncertain, when you have some people who are biologically one sex, but are completely certain in their minds that they’re the other. It’s an interesting subject to think about in general.

Candy,

To be honest with you, when I explore this site, I tend to just dive in and read it as a continuum of ideas.  Esther was correct in saying that I was responding primarily to her post, and I should have specified that.  However, I was also responding to the following:

In any case, women in real life are still disproportionately the targets of sexual violence and domestic abuse, and romance novels provide vehicles for exploring some truly scary shit, with happiness and hope for healing for both hero and heroine provided by the happiness and stability they find with each other.

I am not comfortable with this idea because, when it comes to sexual violence and domestic abuse, there should be better ways to “exorcise demons.”  If we read objectively, and see the heroine’s trials and trauma as some kind of social symbol and the HEA as a promise of resolution and happiness, it feels to me as though the reader—well, this reader, anyway—is trivializing the problem.  If read emotionally by someone who is dealing with abuse in her own life, it seems possible that faith in the HEA could prove fatal.  How many women enter relationships believing that they will reform their partner, or stay in abusive relationships because they believe he really loves them?  Even a whiff of rape, violence or even coercion makes me squirm and that goes for Taming of the Shrew or John Wayne spanking Maureen O’Hara, as much as it does for romance novels.  An author would have to be incredibly skillful to resolve this sort of situation in a way that I could accept.  I’m not talking about conflict between hero and heroine (no story without it), but about situations when gross inequities are enforced or furthered by violence or abuse.  Sometimes just knowing he could beat you up if he wanted to is oppression enough, and no amount of sex, love or domestic bliss could heal that scar.  That is the real “scary shit” and romance novels just don’t seem to address it for me.

There was an awful lot of substance to this thread even at the point where I commented, and it’s become progressively more interesting.  I am embarrassed to admit that I lost track of the original questions that was posed and responded like the little BS-meister of my youth.  However, the goal was not to BS; I guess I just followed my own obsessions into a tangent.  Most of the discussions of gender and sexual stereotyping don’t have a lot of meaning for me, perhaps because I seek out unconventional characters and situations anyway.  I know it’s an important discussion to have, but it doesn’t resonate with me. 

Your first question was “What purpose do you think romance novels serve?”  My short (well, long) answer was that they were fun.  They make the reader feel good. I do think that the genre has evolved along with social and cultural attitudes, and perhaps the role of the romance novel has evolved too.  Then again, maybe not—readers are still looking for the *sigh*.

More specifically, romance novels reinforce the notion that two people together can become more than they are as individuals—the whole greater than the sum of the parts.  The stories can be framed as quest or puzzle or fencing match, but all of them should result in one or more transformative moments that take your breath away.  HEA doesn’t really happen to the hero and heroine; it happens to the reader who can close his or her eyes and relive that moment when a couple becomes something greater than two isolated individuals.  I’m having a hell of a time writing this without inadvertent double-entendre.  It’s important because this concept applies to more than romance novels.  There are stories of friendship, parenthood, and other relationships that present these kinds of complex, layered bonds between human beings, and there is something exquisitely satisfying about them. 

The other quality I look for in romance is intensity.  I started to write emotional intensity, but that’s too limiting.  Intellectual intensity, beautiful writing,  sexual passion,  yearning, faith, honor—if the writer conveys these qualities as white hot, complicated, and utterly authentic, I’m hooked.  Again, not limited to romance, but absolutely required for romance.

To sum up, I think romance novels appeal to readers longing to believe that humans can become better than themselves or perhaps more truly themselves in the course of building a relationship.  The emotional satisfaction that romance novels give their readers is proportional to the intensity and passion created by the interaction of hero and heroine, and neither of these qualities is limited to a single aspect of their relationship.  Furthermore, these elements are important in many types of fiction and not limited to romance.  Finally, while romance offers these satisfactions to me and perhaps some other readers, I’m sure that for many others, these qualities are totally irrelevant.  I still believe that the purpose of the romance novel is ultimately determined by the individual reader and not by some nebulous social imperative.  And I guess I like it that way.

Abby writes:

I actually avoid contemporaries for that specific reason, and even branched into some Emma Holly, only to find that even amid teh buttsecks and threesomes, our heroine wants to be a mommy.  Not that threesome/buttsecks would or should preclude a desire to reproduce, of course!  But why perpetuate the myth that there is something unfeminine about not wanting kids, or that women who don’t want kids are “bad” or unwomanly?

Coming at this from the opposite end of the spectrum (straight erotica or even pr0n), one could make an argument that the buttsecks/threesomes etc. plus the wanting to be mommy thing is not primarily intended to “motherize” the erotic romance heroine, but rather to “eroticize” the erotic romance reader.  Looked at from the perspective that the heroines having these wild and erotic sexual adventures—without the usual consequences of raunchy sex=skanky villainess—are, in fact, possessed of the same hopes, dreams, and somewhat similar sensibilities as the readers of said heroines’ adventures, actually widens the dialogue about feminine sexuality.  By saying “hey, these kinky broads aren’t that different from me” (while in pr0n or straight erotica they’ve always been these exotic, plasticky creatures without other context to their existence) then we can also say, “hey, maybe I, the reader, could stand to try something new in my own sexual dialogue without getting automagically hit with the Shame-hammer.”

@ Christine - part of the problem with “heroine smart, hero smarter” is that in most romances, a layer of conflict exists that has the hero and heroine in direct opposition.  Of course he has to be the one she can’t outsmart, because if she could, then there would be much less conflict between them (and they’d be a little more boring to read about).  Emotionally mature, sexually confident, intelligent heroines are probably not found all that often because they don’t have a character arc to go through in order to grow and change throughout the story.  When I think back on the stories I really love, both characters do change by the end of the story—maybe not in the same way, and maybe the trappings are different (and in some cases, as with the “family reunion picnic with potato salad and masses of babies” epilogue, waaay overdone), but both main characters make changes in order to fit the relationship into their lives.

spamword - planning69 hur hur hur hur