Are We There Yet?

This series is exhausting me. What series you may ask? Does it matter? I don't read series anymore. I can't. I can't bear it. They make me feel like a nine year old on a cross-country car trip in which the car is a 1958 Edsel with no air conditioning and a 60 year old man at the wheel who refuses to stop for bathroom breaks or go over 40 miles an hour. In other words, all I want is out.

Let me clarify what I mean by a series. Here's what I don't mean: anything with an end, a destination, if you will, a clear narrative arc leading to a conclusion despite the number of volumes. Or anything in which each book is loosely connected to the last one, where the old characters appear or are related to new ones but aren't the main focus of the new story. Let's take a little quiz, shall we?

Harry Potter? Not a series because, and this is very important, it ENDS. That, my friends is the key difference. There is a finale, a closure, a cut off point for the story arc.

What about Jo Beverley's Company of Rogue books? Not a series because each book stands alone and you can read them out of order, some not at all, and never be left out of pertinent plot points. Characters from one book appear in other books, but it is like visiting old friends and you don't feel like you are being jerked around on a never-ending merry-a-go-round of drama, like an episode of "Days of Our Lives" in which ten years in real time only equals about 48 hours in soap opera time.

A Cheap Trick

While researching my PCA/ACA paper I came across a most interesting book entitled Endless Rapture by Helen Hazen. Now for those of you who don't know, romance scholarship has now been listed in waves (Thank you, Eric Selinger for confirming this at dinnerlast week) and this book falls into the first wave which also includes Radway and Modelski. Most of these, as everyone knows, tend to be more pejorative than not. Hazen, however, seems to be taking the opposite tack. The following is going to be my attempt to summarize her argument.

What is at issue is how rape is constructed in 1970's bodice rippers. These rapes vary but they are events that mainly transpire between the hero and the heroine. Hazen is attempting to answer the question "If rape is bad then why does it show up in romances?" Hazen believes that the two general responses to this matter of rape are misguided and wrong. The first response to the contradictory nature and problematic portrayl of rape in romance solves the matter by positing that the rape fantasy indicates women really do want to be dominated and raped. The other response is that of first wave feminism (although in the book she only refers to it as feminism) which simply denies the fantasy. Hazen theorizes that feminism and romance are coming at the same problem albeit from different ends and wants to identify the connection between the "pleasure" women get from reading about rape in romance and the anger that suffuses the women's movement when it comes to rape and sexual exploitation.

Haute Goth

I had a dream last night . . . of course, I'm sketchy on the details . . . but it seemed to be one in which I was a romance novel heroine in the Victorian period and some fella was proposing to me.  And, of course, though I can't remember the details I remember the overall atmosphere of the dream: disturbing and anxious are the two adjectives that come to mind.

It is very clear why I dreamt this: not only have I been mostly reading romance novels I have also been working on my paper for the upcoming PCA conference. My paper this year is on the Gothic so I've been reading a lot of literary theory about it. It's turned my mind to mush. This is not the first vaguely Gothic dream I've had since beginning this paper. I will not bore you, gentle readers, with tales of my dreams. There's nothing so dull as hearing someone else describe what their brain fired at them during the night. Rather what I'd like to discuss today has to do with a small observation I have been coming to all these weeks of reading about the Gothic.

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.