An Open Letter to a Romance Novel Hero

Bastian Toussaint

c/oAnne Stuart

Black Ice

March 4, 2009

Dear Bastien,

But for the whole spy thing, you totally remind me of my ex-boyfriend. I am not exaggerating. You are him, down to the refusal to actually give a straight answer to even the most innocuous of questions. In fact, I have a deeply held suspcion that Anne Stuart may have actually based you on my ex-boyfriend. I have no proof of this because such evidence couldn't possibly exist. Yet, there you are . . .  or he is . . . or whatever, on the pages of a book. Dude, you even fuck like him. It's kind of scary, I'm not going to lie. Maybe Anne Stuart dated my ex-boyfriend or knew somebody who did. This is actually plausible since the ex is the living embodiement of the Duke of Slut. How he hasn't contracted syphillis is a wonder. Perhaps he, and you, too, has some sort of deviant immunity to sexually transmitted diseases. That would make sense as I'm pretty sure you are both Scorpios and as everyone knows, Scorpios are in league with Satan. It isn't a very good league. The Scorpios just exchanged their immortal souls for the superhuman ability to whore-it-up without any consequences and to succeed in their revenge plots against all would be detractors.

You're Kind Of A Douchebag, Devon.

This post is all about the ever popular and extremely beloved novel The Windflower by Laura London aka Sharon & Tom Curtis. Currently, this book is out of print, gosh darnit.

I've been thinking about Devon Crandall, erstwhile pirate and Duke of Earl. I've decided Devon's kind of a douchebag. 

Before I go any further I would like to take this opportunity to discuss the word "douchebag" which I feel is one of the most useful words in the English lanaguage when describing personages of adverse character. A douchebag has many definitions being a slang term. The way in which I define it is as follows: a person, usually a man, who is arrogant, entitled, and smug. These qualities are inspite of the fact that they regularly behave with a moronic stupidity usually only associated with the mildly mentally retarded or people who have consumed too much beer. A person can act like a douchebag (such as when they have too many of said beers) and yet not be a douchebag. Douchebags are often victims of fashions, victims of fads, and members of fraternal organizations. Often they can be spotted by the smirk on their face (see George W. Bush) and their inability to understand irony or sarcasm.

A Reflection On My Favorite Hero

I have just finished viewing the section in the BBC 4 documentary Reader I Married Him on heroes. The documentary discussed in depth four heroes of romantic literature: Mr. Darcy, Mr. Rochester, Heathcliffe, and Rhett Butler. Watching this I found myself at a loss because with the exception of my brief crush on Mr. Darcy at the age of 3 (I had seen the Masterpiece Theater version of "Pride & Prejudice" ) I cannot honestly say that as a teenage girl any of these literary gentleman managed to capture my heart. There was one, however, and the rest of this post is about to take on the flavor of a shameful confession because the fictional character I have been in love with all these years is the Vampire Lestat.

I know. I know. Don't say anything. And before you ask, I was never a goth kid (too much effort), I've never been to New Orleans, and I find most vampire novel excreble. So how did this happen?

Teresa Mederios' Heroines

This Saturday, which as everyone knows was Valentine's day, I went to my favorite bookstore accompanied by my mother. For paperback loves, it is used-book heaven and chiefly among its qualities is the very excellent romance section. I can never walk out of there without at least three books. This time I picked up Teresa Mederios' Thief of Hearts, one of hers I had not read yet. I have always loved Mederios ever since I first read The Beast and the Bride. Not only is she funny, but her heroines are outstanding.

I think one of the chief problems I have with many romance novels is that there is a discrepancy between the heroes and heroines as far as characterization is concerned.  More often than I would wish very compelling heroes are paired with heroines who are . . . flat.  I wouldn't go as far as saying that they are TSTL or TGTBT (Too Good To Be True) but merely lacking in dimension. I suppose that this is because the heroine  in many romances is merely acting as a place-holder for the reader. I know that there are those who enjoy or at the very least, over look this but I have no patience with place-holders, zeroes if you will. I enjoy falling in love with and rooting for the heroine as much as for the hero. Perhaps this is because I have always been a reader (I read early, frequently and everything) and therefore gender, looks, time, place, etc. I have no bearing on whether or not I identify with and want to travel along on the hero's journey. What does have a bearing on my desire to root for the protagonist is whether or not the author lets me see something about their character that is interesting, that develops them into a real flesh and blood person. It doesn't have anything to do with nobility or the classical definition of hero.  It has more to do with me wanting to see their humanity. In this respect, I think many romance novel heroines are lacking. They have this tendency to be paperdolls rather than actual women neither in what they say or what they do.

I have never found this to be so with Teresa Mederios' heroines. I think this is because of the way that she introduces them to the reader. For example in Thief of Hearts we are introduced to Lucinda Snow not by her looks but by her reactions to the events going on around her, we are privy to her thoughts as she overhears a conversation aboard a ship and in a few lines become aware of how she thinks, how she behaves, how she views herself and how she believes other people see her.  This is very typical of Mederios. She shows us who her characters are by their behavior and interior perspective rather than as an object viewed by others. Her heroines are very much subjects. Regardless of whether or not they are fat or thin, beautiful or plain, rich or poor, you always know what sort of person she is in those first few moments.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a very low tolerance for heroines defined mainly by their beauty. It isn't that I automatically dislike a story if the heroine is beautiful, it is just that I think that often the author gets lazy and infuses the heroine with beauty alone and no other quality. Georgette Heyer's Venetia is very beautiful but this is not her defining characteristic in the story. Her defining characteristic is her acute sense of the absurd and the ironic. Even before you know she is beautiful,  Heyer gives her an initial dialogue that on the surface seems so very domestic but is, beneath, mocking. Mederios utilizes a similar technique, fixing into the words her heroines speak, their responses to those around them and the way they see the world a unique something that makes them more like real women and less like puppets in side-show. And because they are so very real and likable from the beginning even when they do things that are silly or foolish, I as the reader never feel they are TSTL because the behavior is based on the limitations of their character and perceptions not on the writing. It is very hard to forgive a heroine who you have been told repeatedly, if not explicitly, is perfect when she does something retarded or asinine. It becomes charming or at the very least, understandable, in a  heroine who has from the first been as flawed and as real as an actual person.

Review-ish

It is rare for me to have a visceral reaction to books these days even though I read as many as I ever did. And I read often. No, I read a lot. I probably read 4 books a week.  When I was young I would fall into the book to such an extent that I would have physical reactions to the words: increased heartbeat, anxiety over the fate of the characters, tears, etc. experiencing in my own body what the characters were experiencing on the page. This is probably one of the reasons I have become and always will be a reader. It isn't simply the escape of reading, it is the ability to live another's life. Wherever you go there you are except sometimes with the right book.

I picked up Carolyn Jewel's Scandal based on a review I read over at AAR.  They only gave it a B+ but I would give it an A. Not only did it create that rare visceral reaction in me but it had the equally rare quality of making me brood over it afterwards. In part this was because the characters were so well drawn that they had become flesh and blood people. It is much more common for me to experience characters as creations on a stage rather than as real people. Most of the time there is a veil between me and the stage, that invisible fourth wall that they speak of in drama classes, is something I always sense.

I don't always want to fall into the story so completely as I did with Scandal. It can be emotionally difficult. I admit to being one of those people that tend to absorb other people's emotions and vibrations, taking them into myself as if they were my emotions. It can be draining. 

I have been trying to think why the Earl of Banallt and Sophie Evans' story had such an effect on me but I have a great amount of difficulty trying to pinpoint exactly why this story, of the stories I've read in the past while, was different. I have come to the conclusion that it was the prose itself. There is something in the way that Jewel writes that is very dissimilar to most other romances.  With many romances, I think that there is a tendency to follow if not a formula, a pattern of language and story arc as a sort of form.  I liken it to reading sonnet after sonnet and then suddenly finding yourself thrown into the immediacy of a pop song as you drive home. There's something in the three chords, verse, chorus, verse equation that hits you in the guts. Not that a sonnet cannot do the same thing but I believe it is the defamiliarization of the emotion, the lack of sameness to the way the moment is presented that makes that shift from one form to another so powerful.

Without the book in front of me I am unable to give any kind of close reading of Jewel's book in order to illustrate my point (I'm at work and the book is at home); however let me briefly discuss what I found specifically so compelling. Jewel takes a cliche idea (the plain, country mouse and the rake) and twists it. The book opens in the middle of things. Our hero and heroine have already met. They were friends of sort having met through her wastrel of a husband. Sophie is still wounded from that marriage, from the falling out she had with Banallt just prior to her husband's death. She's on the defensive. Banallt, on the other hand, has come to realization that he loves Sophie deeply and wants to marry her. The reader gets all this in the first chapter. What I mean by twisting the old story, is that usually we find that it is the hero who is guarding his heart because of a failed first marriage, that it is the hero that has to come to the slow realization of his true feeling towards the heroine whereas here, we have the opposite.

Banallt as a character is very interesting. It is stated repeatedly throughout the text that he is beautiful, yet what comes across more than his outward appearance is his character. Jewel gives us a very clear idea of the man he is and the man he was and how one could become the other and why. There are no dramatic villains here. Neither Banallt's deceased wife nor Sophie's dead husband act as the dark gloating ghosts of something like Rebecca.  In fact, Banallt's wife has had less of an effect on his character than other incidents in his past. Tommy Evans, Sophie's late husband, is more of a villain but of the shallow, fortune hunting type. More importantly than his character is Sophie's feelings toward him which can be summed up as complex. She loved him, she hated him, she was disappointed by him, she learned not to trust him and yet she still wanted his love and admiration. This emotional ambiguity is not something I see a lot in romance. Or rather, to put it more accurately, many authors tell us how the characters feel towards each other but I, as a reader, do not see how they feel about each other. It never breaks through that fourth wall to become a living, breathing aspect of the person.

I've been attempting to write a story for a long time. This is not something new to me that I've just now decided to try my hand at. Rather, I have always been a writer (I wrote a play when I was 10, for example). But I have this disturbing feeling that my characters are flat, that they don't have that emotional zing to their personalities that makes them live on after the story is finished. It is a kind of magic and I'm just not sure how one acquires the knack for it or if it just happens to an author, unexpectedly and out of the blue much the same way it happens to a reader.

Heroes

I have just finished editing the paper I gave at the 2008 PCA. It went from an 8 page speech into a 15 page writing sample for graduate school applications.  It was through this process that I came across Lilian R. Furst's The Romantic Hero, or is he an Anti-Hero? ¹ an article that was published before I was born (frightening!) and has led me into contemplation on what makes a romance novel hero or to put it another way, what makes the romance hero different from the Byronic hero, the anti-hero, or the epic hero?

Furst says of the traditional hero that his

"essentially outward-looking orientation, his role as leader of men, his readiness to sacrifice himself to the cause he has espoused: all these traditionally heroic features are in diametric oppositon to the Ichschmerz that is the core of the Romantic hero" (57).

The Romantic hero she refers to is the one I have always thought of as the Byronic hero but I suppose that is a more specific version of the same.  Regardless, it is not the heroes of romance novels she speaks of but the heroes represented in the literature of the Romantic time period.  Later Furst differentiates the Romantic hero with his modern counterpart, the anti-hero, saying:

"What is lacking in the Romantic hero, however, is the modern anti-hero's ironic self-detachment. It is not only that the Romantic hero takes himself too seriously and too solemnly.  His very idealism raises absolute standards and lofty expectations which preclude the spiritual flexibility, the willingness to shift position and even to compromise inherent in an ironical attitude" (66).

This leads me to ask the question: If the traditional hero is defined by his relationship to the external--that is the tribe, the group, the gods and his duty to them; and the Romantic hero is defined by his relationship to the internal--that is his idealism, his freedom, his soul and the actualization of his ego; and if the anti-hero is defined by his irony, his pettiness, his ordinariness and the glorification of the mundane world; then what defines the romance hero? A very confusing term and since it is so easily conflated with romantic let me coin a term for convenience's sake and call the hero of the romance novel the erotic hero since he owes a debt to Eros.

It seems to me that what these heroic literary models have in common is that their definition of self, of character is created in the tension between the "I" of ego and "the world" of the group.  That the hero, regardless of his type, is in conflict with both himself and the outside world. Whether he battles the Trojans or the his own inner demons, the hero's glory, his fame, his heroism is dependent upon his individual actions and in-actions--what he does and how he does it. The continuation or rebirth of the group relies upon the personal actions of the hero and the glory of the hero offers immortality both to his own name and to that of his tribe; but it is a glory always earned in the defeat of, or the flight from Otherness. Ernest Becker talks much about the hero in his book Escape from Evil ² as a process by which the heroic action makes immortal the symbolic systems of the tribe so that while individuals do not live on their meaning does. In this way, heroes, whether they  be the monster-slayering heroics of the epics or the humanistic and ego-centric exploits of the Romantics,  share the commonality that their heroism is based upon a singular individual who is the primary focus of the story and who, through a journey either external and internal, meets the Other and defeats it; it is the heroic character alone which the reader follows on the transcendent journey.  The encounter with the monstrous Other is either resolved through their defeat in battle, as in the epics, or in the tranformation of Other into an mirror that reflects back the hero's own soul as in the existential wanderings and tragic deaths of the Romantics who are not unlike an angst-ridden Narcissus.  Other can be many things--opposite creeds, religions, races or nationalities--but the ultimate Other is always the female, is always woman and she is made either monstrous or a mere Echo of the male ego.

The erotic hero, unlike his cousins, is not defined by his defeat or transformation of the Other but his exchange with the Other.  So that while all heroes encounter Otherness, the romance hero is the only one who is defined by his realtionship to that Otherness in a meeting which is neither fight nor flight.  Rather he falls (as in falls in love, falls from grace), a word that I hope connotes the slipping of certainty, an action that shifts the all encompassing  "I" from subject to object.

But what does it mean to fall? What does falling do to the hero? How does falling help to satisfy the inequity that seems to inevitably arise between "Self" and "Other"?

In my next post, I hope to examine the nature of falling.

______________________________________________________________________________________

¹ Furst, Lilian R. "The Romantic Hero, Or is He an Anti--Hero?" Studies in the Literary
Imagination 9.1 (1976): 53

² Becker, Ernest. Escape from Evil. New York, NY: The Free Press, 1975.

Beautiful Heroines Make Me Want to Stab Things: A Rant

Despite the fact that I consider myself to be a very advanced reader--that is I read not only for pleasure and escape but also for knowledge and criticism, or whatever it is that distinguishes the two--I admit to a certain low brow reading habit in that I project myself into the hero.  When I can't do this I get angry. These days I often have a hard time reading about beautiful heroines.  I fully concede to the fact that this is because I do not consider myself a beautiful woman and thus it becomes difficult to relate or transpose myself into said heroine. Rather, I consider myself to be soundly average with the added drawback of being smart and not the least bit submissive--and if you don't think that's a drawback then you've never grown up in Utah. I swear to you all, sometimes it is like living in the worst parts of a Jane Austen novel. The point is that sometimes beautiful, endlessly desirable heroines with all their sexual knowledge or blazingly rampant naivete (see the heroines of Barbara Cartland and Laura London) make me very cross-eyed and stabby-stabby.

I realize, too, that I am a hypocrite in that I love, love the endlessly desirable, beautiful heroes. I know, that's a double standard if there ever was one, however, being a female I feel rather entitled to my hypocrisy for the simple reason that men have made physical and visual desire their sole provenance and have entirely left out the second sex.  Like when a hot woman and an average man are walking down the street or sitting at a restaurant together no one wonders why she is with him. They just assume that it is because he has money or personality or something. Whereas a beautiful man and an average woman would be goggled at with everyone wondering what he was doing with her?

The thing that really sticks in my craw is that it isn't even true.  The implication about beauty, I mean. You know, that it brings you happiness or joy. Ultimately it makes no difference. Oh sure, random people are more likely to treat you better and give you free scoops of ice cream at the gelato place but it doesn't seem to make any kind of difference in whether or not your husband will cheat on you, file for divorce or turn out to be gay. And of course then you get old and die and where is beauty then? Yet somehow everyone's still under the misguided impression that it is beauty that tames the rake. It isn't. I don't consider Diane Keaton any less attractive than Annette Benning yet Warren Beatty stayed with Annette not Diane. What's up with that? Probably something more to do with temperment and time of life than looks.

Not that looks don't matter because clearly they do but anyone who has checked out the personal ads on Craigslist will quickly learn two things: desire and beauty have nothing to do with one another and people are sick fucks. (seriously, message me and I will link you to something shocking, perverse and graphic that will make you snort milk out your nose).

-sighs- I'm not even sure if this is a trend of the novelists themselves. I think my abhorrence of the beautiful heroine is entirely due to the back cover. They are written thusly:

Verena McAdams may have only been a common haberdasher and former nun but her fiery blonde hair and courtesan's body made other promises. Overwhelmed by bussiness debt, she was forced to do the one thing that no gently bred lady should ever contemplate: file for bankruptcy.

Simeon, Lord Ravenscock seemed the typical ton rakehell but he had a dark secret: he practiced law on the side.  When Verena McAdams walked into his solicitor's office with her virgin's eyes and knowing hips, he knew that pro bono or not, this case would pay him in something other than legal fees.

By the time I get through the first little summary where it tells me how hot Verena or Serena or Belinda is, I've discarded the book and moved on to the next one on the shelf. It's like in the movie She's All That where we are supposed to believe that nobody noticed how freaking adorable and edible Rahcel Leigh Cook is . . . okay well maybe I'll let that one go because it is supposed to be high school and everyone knows teenagers are basically retarded sociopaths, but still, you get my point.

I'm not really interested in beautiful heroines unless you can somehow make me forget that they are beautiful. That is, I don't want to read about people who have one shiny characteristic and nothing else. You know how it is where in some books they keep mentioning how damn witty someone is but is never manifest that particular claim in the dialogue or how smart and ditto. Authors! Show don't tell. Jesus, that's creative writing 101. A character should have depth and their one gigantic attribute, whether it be beauty or penis, should not be mentioned every other page. The most loveable things about people aren't their looks. Besides, familiarity breeds obliviousness. At a certain point, you stop seeing how hot someone is and just start seeing Ted.