Romance and the Defensive Crouch

4As someone who writes and reads about comics, I’ve see a lot of criticism practiced from the stance of defensive crouch. So Pamela Regis’ Natural History of the Romance Novel was, depressingly, familiar.

Regis’ position is certainly understandable. Romance novels are even more loathed than comics. As Regis says, academic discussion of romance has traditionally presented the romance genre as corporate crap and romance readers as deluded fools. There are almost never mainstream reviews or discussion of romance, even though (as Regis says) the genre is more popular than ayn other; 55.9% of mass market paperbacks were romance novels in 1999.

Regis stated goal is to confront and refute the prejudice against romance novels. The book is meant to show that “the romance novel contains serious ideas” (contra literay critics) and that it is “not about woman’s bondage” (contra feminist critics) but “about women’s freedom.”

Regis uses two main arguments here. First, she says that the happy endings of romance novels do not erase or trap the heroine, because marriage and happy endings are freeing, not constricting. Second, she argues that the romance novel has a long-standing, stable form, and that current romance novels are the direct heirs of classic, canonical works by Austen, Trollope,and Forster.

The first of these arguments is unconvincing. Regis argues that heroines in romance novels overcomes barriers to union with the hero. “Heroines are not extinguished,” she enthuses, “they are freed. Readers are not bound by the form; they rejoice because they are in love with freedom.” But if the choice is always the same choice, how is that freedom? Of course the novels present passionate monogamy as joyful. But critics like Janice Radway and Tania Modleski point out, with some justice, that monogamy and marriage, in real life are not always joyful, and that marriage as an institution is often constricting for women. They question whether the constant insistence that joy comes only with heterosexual marriage is actually liberating, or whether, instead, it might be in some ways a limiting failure of imagination. In Pamela, for example, which Regis sees as the earliest romance, is it really a happy ending when the heroine ends up marrying a rich asshole who has spent much of the novel attempting to rape her? Regis says that romance readers can tell rape in fiction from rape in real life, which I’m sure is true — but if fiction doesn’t influence real life at all, what’s all this about romance novels being freeing?

Regis’ second argument — that books like Pamela and Pride and Prejudice are romances — is much stronger, and in many ways does the work for romance that she wants it to. If Pride and Prejudice and A Room With a View are romance novels, after all, then most people would agree that romance novels can be great literature. Indeed, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre are significantly more canonical than just about anything that mystery genre or sci-fi has to offer.

The problem is that Regis tries to prove the older works are romances by arguing that romance has a single structure, defined by eight narrative elements. Pam Rosenthal summarized these as follows:

definition of society (“always corrupt, that the romance novel will reform”); the meeting between the heroine and hero; their attraction; the barrier to that attraction; their declaration that they love each other; point of ritual death; recognition that fells the barrier; and betrothal.

The definition tself works as well as these things can be expected to (though I’ll talk a bit more about this later.) But once having established the rubric, it tends to put a straight-jacket on the rest of the discussion. Most of Regis’ book is given over to book summaries showing that the plots fit Regis’ categories. First classic works are discussed, and they fit — and then modern works are discussed, and they fit. But the fact that they fit doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re any good. Nor does Regis’ repeated assertions that Nora Roberts or Janet Dailey are masterful creators convince me that they are. On the contrary, Dailey’s books sound wretched, as do Jayne Anne Krentz’s. Perhaps they have some historical interest (Dailey was one of the first important authors to use American and Western settings) but Regis certainly doesn’t make the case for any merit beyond that.

In fact, the insistence on defining romance by eight narrative elements does the exact opposite of what Regis claims she wants to do. Rather than making romance seem serious, it makes it appear rote and formulaic. If the best you can say for someone like Dailey is that she knows the form and uses it, then why should anyone care about her? Even Austen and Forster and Bronte seem to wilt under the faint praise. They all filled in the blanks skillfully? Whoopee.

Regis’ difficulty is that she wants to defend all romance. She is fighting for the honor of romance as a genre, or as a whole. She never, once, in the entire book, admits that any single romance, anywhere, might be formulaic, or badly written. She acknowledges that the Sheik is racist only in order to dismiss it rather than (for example) to think about how the “dangerous man” fantasies in so many romance novels indebted to the Sheik might also be touched by class and racial stereotypes, or to talk about how white women’s liberation so often seems to be symbolically assured by association with non-white people.

I’m not saying all romances are evil crap. I don’t think all romances are evil crap. But many romances are crap, and it seems like you need to acknowledge that somewhere if you’re going to make the case that some romances are good. And one important way to start thinking about romances as various is, I think, to chuck the formula. Yes, many romances can be made to fit into Regis’ pattern. But then, many can’t. Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina and Gone With the Wind are books that are very often discussed as romance novels, and which don’t fit Regis’ pattern in important respects.Regis talks about Gone With the Wind specifically, saying that readers who identify it as a romance are “misreading”; that they’re substituting in a happy ending based on their familiarity with the genre. In other words, Regis suggests that romance readers are so wedded to their narratives that their basic reading comprehension suffers. This is supposed to be a defense of romance fans how, exactly?

Why not, instead, accept that lots of romance readers see Gone With the Wind as a romance — which means, maybe, that romance novels don’t have to conform to a single formula? Similarly, Trollope’s most famous romance, between Lily Dale and Johnny Eames, didn’t end in a relationship — which was (as Trollope astutely noted) precisely why it was so famous and successful. Villette almost, almost consummates its romance, only to end in tragedy. And, for that matter, A Room With a View, which Regis sees as a romance with a happy ending, has an afterword which (as Kailyn Kent has noted) refuses and refutes the formula. Is A Room With a View not a romance if you include the afterword? Or, possibly, is there more room in romance than Regis’ formula allows?

Though Regis is reluctant to admit it, romance novels have been commodified and rationalized since the days of Forster and Trollope; the standard endings are, I think, more insisted upon. And yet, you can see leeway still. In Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me, most of the characters get married off, but at least one, Liza, remains a serial dater, too restless to settle down, and happy enough in that restlessness. Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which is certainly devastatingly romantic, gets much of its power from its commitment to, and interruption of, the romance narrative as a narrative — by both giving and withholding the happy ending. I read Atonement like three times in a couple of weeks and cried every one. If that’s not a romance novel, I don’t know what is.

This isn’t to say that only books that refuse the romance ending to some degree can be great novels. But it is to say that the possibility of resistance seems to me central to the possibility of freedom, and even to the possibility of variety. Maybe, rather than saying that romance novels bind women, or that romance novels free women, it might be better to think of romance novels as fascinated by, or concerned with, the issues of autonomy and love. Some writers may handle those themes thoughtfully, others not so much. But all romance novels don’t speak with one voice, any more than all women do.

102 thoughts on “Romance and the Defensive Crouch

  1. Interesting piece! I’ve found Regis’s “eight elements” approach useful in the classroom; it’s a handy way to line up texts to see their differences, rather like knowing metrical schemes so that you can spot the variations. In terms of the necessity of the happy ending, I agree with you about the idea of freedom, and I’d also note that the Romance Writers of America decided not to insist that the couple be together in their definition of the genre (on their website), and Jennifer Crusie’s account of the discussions behind that definition specifically refers to GWTW as a text that they wanted to include as a romance. You’re with the romance authors on this.

    Me, I’m happy to distinguish between the “romance novel” (couple gets together) and the “romantic novel” (they may not), not least so that I know what I’m getting into when I start reading. Maybe the best all-inclusive term is the one from another literary critic, Patrick Colm Hogan: “Romantic Tragi-Comedy.”

  2. Thanks! That’s interesting; I was under the impression that RWA had gone the “must have a happy ending” route. Nice to hear they didn’t!

    I just read two Crusie novels (Bet Me and Welcome to Temptation). She’s written a lot of criticism too, I’ve noticed, though I haven’t read any yet.

  3. Jenny’s work (as both novelist and critic) was what got me interested in popular romance as a focus for my scholarship. The essay is on her website; here’s the money quote:

    “After weeks of debate, I can state without fear of contradiction that we’re not going to get a definition that pleases everyone. There were those who suggested that the definition include “love between a man and a woman” and those who pointed out that it would be a bad idea to make RWA officially homophobic, given that respected publishers like Naiad Press have been publishing lesbian romances for years. We’d like this definition to be reflective of the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. There were those who insisted that the genre prohibit adultery and require marriage at the end, and there were those who pointed out that some people should keep their moral standards out of other people’s stories. There were those who insisted that the definition must stipulate a happy ending, and those who pointed out that a lot of great romances didn’t have happy endings, and that it would be a bad idea to frame a romance definition that excluded the book most people cite as the greatest romance of the twentieth century, Gone With the Wind . Oh, we had a high old time debating this one.”

    Full piece here: http://www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays/i-know-what-it-is-when-i-read-it-defining-the-romance-genre/

  4. Did anyone suggest just not having a definition? That’d be what I’d do.

    Regis specifies that a romance has to be about the heroine — which is a problem since there are lots of gay romances, as Crusie points out.

  5. Not having a definition, though, just leaves the definition up to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who’s writing about the genre out in the media. I think it’s a wise choice; the costs are minimal, and if it helps cut through the snark and clarify discussions, that’s a good thing.

    At the Princeton conference (2009), Regis made a point of revising her definition so that it’s about the courtship and betrothal of one or more “protagonists,” precisely because of the proliferation of gay and bisexual romances. She’s used that definition ever since.

    BTW, there’s an interesting 10th anniversary discussion of Natural History over at JPRS. http://jprstudies.org/issues/issue-3-2/

  6. It doesn’t necessarily clarify discussion, though. Genres aren’t actually determined by definitions, I would argue. They’re fuzzy and socially determined and always negotiated. So a definition obscures the nature of the thing that’s being discussed, which is the opposite of clarifying.

    Not sure why the media shouldn’t be part of a discussion about what is and is not a romance. Again, these things are determined in multiple ways; it’s not one of those things where experts define it, or should define it.

  7. :) You’re right about genres, of course. But I take definitions to be part of the ongoing discussion, rather than ends to it, and of course definitions also then get fed back into the evolution of the genre, as authors accept or resist them.

    The fact that the RWA has one definition, Regis another, and the RNA (the British novelists group) yet another is, to me, a very good thing–not just for the genre, but for me as a reader and critic. Gives me words to think with, terms to triangulate, etc.

  8. I agree with you about Regis’ book, Noah. I’m going through it again for a piece I’m working on and she is pretty defensive about the genre, though understandably, I suppose. Eric’s right, though, it is useful in class, with students, especially skeptical students who have trouble getting around their anti-romance prejudices enough to critically engage a text.

  9. I can see it’s usefulness in the classroom. Reading it on my own was just frustrating; not a lot of meat there.

    Whereas Radway and Modleski’s books are both really provocative and adventurous, I think. Made me much more interested in thinking about romance than Regis’ did.

  10. Wow; this piece where Sarah Frantz says that in her editing work on romance titles she uses Regis’ eight elements to browbeat authors who try something different is pretty depressing.

    Sometimes I’ll receive a submission about two characters falling in love that might be sweet and wonderful, but isn’t a good romance narrative, because there’s no narrative tension, nothing to keep the reader moving forward. When I talk with the author, I’ll pull out Pam’s Essential Elements list and it helps authors understand that I’m not just being mean, that “essential” means precisely that, and that understanding these elements can help them formulate ways in which to build a better romance narrative for publication.

    So it’s become an actual formula used to restrict the genre and make sure that nobody does anything too inventive with it, and Frantz thinks that’s awesome. Maybe she should reread the part of Regis’ book where she talks about how editors often don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, and that when they invent these rules they often miss opportunities.

  11. I agree that Regis is least helpful when making the case for any partcular romance novel’s quality. But you’re unfair to say that she only rates books by how well they fulfill her criteria. Indeed, her long defense of Ruth Gilles Seidel’s novel seems to me to be based upon her attempt to demonstrate the complexity of the plot. That doesn’t work either, but I think it’s a better example of her method, or lack of it, when it comes to practical criticism.

    But it’s not as a work of practical criticism that I’m coming to appreciate Regis (and more and more as I go on, I should say). It’s as a history (qua her title) of the romance genre as it develops, first along with and then athwart, the history of the literary novel (and probably other genre forms). I do think there’s meat there, especially because the development of the literary novel had and has so much to do with discussion discussions of love and personal life.

    Which was where I came in, by understanding Longbourn as a romance, a literary, and a historical novel.

  12. …and here’s Pamela Regis, demonstrating again her spiritual affinity with comics scholarship:

    The most modest work of fiction, including romance fiction, is a greater accomplishment than the finest work of literary criticism.

    Really? 50 Shades of Grey is better than the essays of Virginia Woolf? Nora Roberts’ barely adequate prose is better than G.K. Chesterton on George Bernard Shaw? James Baldwin’s literary essays are all ipso facto of less worse than his novels? What the fuck?

    Eddie Campbell would be pleased, though.

  13. Very fun to watch you engage with those pieces, Noah. I wish you’d been there at PCA to respond!

    As a poetry scholar, I wholeheartedly agree with you about that “most modest work of fiction” dictum. Good criticism is much, much harder to write–and much more worthwhile to read, I think–than not-so-good fiction, poetry, drama, what-have-you, and thus a “greater accomplishment” in every sense of the phrase. She presents that as an article of faith, an axiom, so I didn’t bother to try and argue with it, but I, too, flinched.

    That said, I didn’t find Sarah’s comments particularly depressing. I’ll have to think about why. I suspect it’s because I think of romance fiction as a neo-classical genre, rather than (so to speak) a romantic one. If an author comes to me and says “hey, I’ve got this great sonnet I want to publish, but it’s only twelve lines long and it’s in common meter,” or “but it’s 17 lines long and in free verse,” I’d have a comparable response. That said, I suspect that if Sarah saw a manuscript that departed from the prototype model that Pam sketches in the ways that, say, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” flouts the norms of the villanelle, she’d know a good thing when she saw it.

  14. Whoops; hadn’t read your post Pam.

    And forgot the link to that Regis essay:

    http://jprstudies.org/2013/06/ten-years-after-a-natural-history-of-the-romance-novel-thinking-back-looking-forward-by-pamela-regis/

    Pam, re your comments. I guess there is some discussion of the history of the development of the form…though that doesn’t seem super thoughtful to me either, I have to admit. For example, she doesn’t really talk much about how P&P was read at the time, or how Forster was. They weren’t seen as romance novels exactly, I’m pretty sure. And she rejects the idea that the Harlequin production line had much of an effect on genre content, which seems really extremely unlikely. She doesn’t talk much about the links to literary fiction either, does she?

    I guess I can see the historical being valuable because no one else had done it, but I don’t find her especially subtle or thoughtful. Obviously lots of folks find her useful though.

    And it’s Kathleen Gilles Seidel, right? Regis says this about her

    Seidel incorporates the eight essential elements of romance, and two of the three incidental ones, in a manner so masterful that it leaves no doubt as to the vitality of the form in contemporary hands.

    So…I think you’re technically correct that she’s making a qualitative claim based on masterfulness and complexity. But practically speaking she does so little effective analysis beyond pointing out the elements through plot summary that the claim for mastery seems to me to end up as little more than a claim that the elements are there and are being manipulated.

  15. I wonder if this won’t be one of those cases in literary criticism where the richer, more developed work (Modleski / Radway) ends up stifling later criticism, which I do think is what happened, while a more schematic work ends up sparking and provoking further developments? My sense is that Radway, for example, has been read rather reductively over the years in romance scholarship, in a less-than-generative way, while Regis has been read more productively, especially her opening chapters, where the “definition” and “elements” are found. Interesting.

  16. Huh…comparing the romance and the sonnet. I’m not really sold on that. The rules for sonnets are really quite clear. On the other hand, many of the most popular and important romance novels (like Gone With the Wind) don’t follow the formula that’s being presented as the standard that can’t be violated.

    It feels a lot more like various corporate dictats from, say Marvel or DC comics. “None of our characters are allowed to get married!” “Draw like Jack Kirby!” Or whatever corporate editing fiats are handed down this month.

    I don’t know that good criticism is hard to write necessarily, any more than good literature is hard to write; it really depends. I don’t think Chesterton ever broke much of a sweat, and I know Philip K. Dick wrote about as fast as he could type, but they still are both better writers than me no matter how much I work on whatever it is I’m working on. But dismissing criticism because it’s criticism is just like dismissing romance because it’s romance; it’s a genre prejudice, and one which obscures genre history to boot.

  17. I bet the lack of interest in Radway and Modleski has to do with the fact that they aren’t fans, and are both skeptical of the genre, at least to some extent. Neither of them is really as hostile as they seem to be painted (in Regis’ book and other places) but they do want to think about the way women are not free as well as the way that women are free, and there seems to be some resistance to doing that.

  18. Hm. The counter-examples ring true, but I think the point remains: by any definition of “accomplishment,” writing good criticism is quite an accomplishment. Maybe I’m just painfully aware of how hard it is to write well (really well) about romance and poetry, and how easy it seems to be to get bad or mediocre criticism into print (literal or e-).

    What I meant about Radway and Modleski wasn’t that there wasn’t interest in them, but that they seemed to have overshadowed the field for quite some time. It’s hard for me to think of really interesting work on popular romance that either of them sparked; rather, they’re so commanding as critical voices that they put the kabosh on things, at least in the US, just as the genre itself was developing in some really fun and interesting ways.

    You’re quite right, though, that their skepticism about the genre–and, in Radway’s case, about its readers–deeply annoyed and offended a lot of people. FWIW, the younger generation of romance scholars, in their 20s and 30s, don’t seem bothered by this nearly as much. It’s the middle-aged cohort who seem to have had that reaction, mostly: the ones who still fall into the “defensive crouch.”

  19. Our comments crossed paths in the ether–perhaps you’re one of those young whipper-snappers of whom I speak! In any case, I look forward to reading the piece (and the book, somewhat later, inshallah).

  20. (I love the link you draw in the Kitt piece between Radway and the incest motif. Reminds me a bit of what I see Crusie doing with Radway and “Psycho” in Welcome to Temptation: taking a critic’s insight and playing with it, as a novelist should.)

  21. Maybe it’s the freedom of being a dilettante, then. :) I’m a bit older than you are, and when I first read Radway, oy, did I bristle!

    Older and calmer now, of course. Am “immensely / Wise, and have given up earthly attachments, and all that,” as the poet says.

  22. Yes, the co-authored one. It’s not a perfect piece, but I remember quite vividly the pleasure I took in making that connection in the classroom, the first or second time I taught the novel. The essay I’m proudest of is the one on Laura Kinsale’s “Flowers from the Storm” in the New Approaches book–well, that and the one I’m working on now, about a Susan Elizabeth Phillips novel. Should be out around the time of your Wonder Woman book, I hope.

  23. Yeah, Kathleen Gilles Seidel. Thanks. And thanks for the quote, which makes my point and yours at the same time.

    And thanks to Eric for the link to the roundtable, particularly to his own remarks there about Northrop Frye, which are spot on, which is another way of saying they’re exactly what I think, as I make my slow, belated, delicious way through The Anatomy of Criticism. There’s lots of Frygian meat clinging to the bones of Pam Regis’s book, Noah. (Frygian? Who knew?) The more I entertain Regis’ logic, the more I find I need Frye. And the more I read Frye, the more convinced I am that romance fiction is doing something real and interesting (even if I read, or even like, a comparatively small sampling of it). I’m still chewing over this, for example:

    The possession of originality cannot make an artist unconventional; it drives him [sic] further into convention, obeying the law of the art itself, which seeks constantly to reshape itself from its own depths, and which works through its geniuses for metamorphosis, as it works through minor talents for mutation

    Which isn’t to say that genius is to minor talent is the same as decent writing is to crap. You’re right about the defensive crouch. But that’s not the only thing going on.

  24. That’s a great essay. I just wrote about the way romance novels are self-conscious about reading over here. (that’s a cache since the site isn’t working for some reason.)

    Oddly, I like your essay more than the book in a lot of ways. I think your reading is pretty much right on, but I still found the novel kind of disappointing…less on the level of theme than in terms of characterization and plotting. It’s maybe a bit like Twilight; the efficiency of the mechanism designed to produce empowerment is impressive, but rather gets in the way of the falling in love part that is kind of what I’m looking for in romance. Crusie is a substantially better writer than Stephenie Meyer in most respects, but I don’t really end up caring about Sophie or Phin a whole lot more than I care about Bella and Edward (maybe less; I rather like Edward.) As opposed to P&P or Judith Ivory’s Black Silk (which I just finished), where the characters feel more specific and less like placeholders for reader empowerment (though I think many of the points you make about reading and discovering one’s own imaginative life could work quite well with Black Silk where Submit (what a great name) ends up writing a story about the heroes romantic adventures much as Sophie does.)

    It’s interesting; romance as empowerment fantasy is seen to some degree as vindicating for the genre, it seems like, whereas one of the main knocks on superhero comics is that they’re empowerment fantasies. (Twilight actually blends those two — superhero and romance— in pretty interesting ways, I think.)

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  26. Pam, it could be I don’t know enough about Frye to appreciate Regis! That quote is interesting. I was a little befuddled by it, but found the longer context, which helped some:

    An original painter knows, of course, that when the public demands likeness to an object, it generally wants the exact opposite, likeness to the pictorial conventions it is familiar with. Hence when he breaks with these conventions, he is often apt to assert that he is nothing but an eye, that he merely paints what he sees as he sees it, and the like. His motive in talking such nonsense is clear enough: he wishes to say that painting is not merely facile decoration, and involves a difficult conquest of some very real spatial problems. But this may be freely admitted without agreeing that the formal cause of a picture is outside the picture, an assertion which would destroy the whole art if it were taken seriously. What he has actually done is to obey an obscure but profound impulse to revolt against the conventions established in his own day, in order to rediscover convention on a deeper level. By breaking with the Barbizon school, Manet discovered a deeper affinity with Goya and Velasquez; by breaking with the impressionists, Cezanne discovered a deeper affinity with Chardin and Masaccio, The possession of originality cannot make an artist unconventional; it drives him further into convention, obeying the law of the art itself, which seeks constantly to reshape itself from its own depths, and which works through its geniuses for metamorphosis, as it works through minor talents for mutation.

    So, in terms of romance writing, it seems like he would argue that not following the formula (by not having a happy ending, or by not really having a barrier, or some such), would not be original, but could be seen as instead linking to earlier examples of the form (like GWTW, or…I’m not sure what romance wouldn’t have a barrier, or wouldn’t make much of it? But anyway….)

  27. I’m very glad you liked the essay! It grew incrementally over several years of back-and-forth with Kate, my co-author, as I got to know the novel better. Your reaction to its characters and plot is not at all uncommon, and many of my students feel the same way. I did, too, the first time I read it, but after three or four times, I feel differently about Phin & Sophie & Co. Very warm spot in my heart for them, individually and as a couple. And the final scene makes me grin and tear up, every time, which doesn’t happen often.

    Let’s be careful, when talking about happy endings, not to assume that one kind of closure is older than the other. I’m not sure that “earlier examples of the form” are more or less likely to include those eight essential elements from Regis’s scheme. Again, I’ll defer to Hogan here: the romantic tragi-comedy, where a couple wants to be together, is blocked, and either manages to get together in this life (the comic subset) or fails to (the tragic subset), is one of the two most common plots in world storytelling, showing up in both oral and literate traditions all around the world. Both versions are old, and widespread; in his account, the comic version is more common, cross-culturally speaking, so that he sees the tragic love story as a “truncated” version of the full narrative prototype, one which often implies that the couple will be together in death, or the afterlife, or the next incarnation, etc., so that you can see a sort of shadowy version of the comic ending, even there. (Just as, I’d argue, you can see a shadowy version of tragedy, or at least post-lapsarian loss, in the final paragraph of Welcome to Temptation, but that’s another issue, maybe.)

  28. By “older” I didn’t really mean that tragic endings came before happy endings; just that in terms of formal requirements, romance novels are at the moment reluctant to have not so happy endings. So someone using a tragic ending might be reaching back for a precedent (though obviously P&P is earlier than GWTW.)

    I actually cry pretty easily…but can’t imagine doing so at Welcome to Temptation. (Or at Bet Me, which I had a similar reaction to; i.e., funny and well written, but not really emotionally gripping.)

  29. My own sense is that anyone using a tragic ending in the US today isn’t trying to write a “romance novel” as the genre has been understood here for the past thirty years or so. They’re writing a love story, which is currently conceptualized here as a different but overlapping genre. That said, there are some wonderfully rich and ambiguous endings out there, either pressing at the boundaries of the HEA or subtly revising it from within. I think of British author Alex Beecroft (the ending of “False Colors”), for example, and Crusie in “Fast Women,” too. Hence my sense that the exigencies of the form-as-understood aren’t really getting in the way of more interesting endings, although I could be wrong.

    I never cry at the end of Bet Me, but WTT? Really? Those final paragraphs really press my buttons, or whatever the phrase should be. Yup: just checked, and even out of context, first thing in the morning, they did. Will need to write about why someday.

  30. ” in the US today isn’t trying to write a “romance novel” as the genre has been understood here for the past thirty years or so. ”

    Right; that’s why someone who was trying to write a tragic ending as a romance might be considered original…or, in Frye’s definition, might actually be more true to the form (or true to an earlier version of the form, or some combination thereof.)

    It seems like a big part of what you mean when you talk about people thinking of writing a romance is people whose novel is going to be *marketed* as a romance, right? That is, the genre is a function of the marketing, rather than the other way around. I suspect that that’s very much the case, as it is for example in country music, which was a marketing category before it was a form, to the extent these things can be sorted out.

    That’s sort of the point about Atonement. It’s marketed as literary fiction, but could it be a romance if marketed that way? It certainly has a lot in common with romance. Love story, obsession with writing as self-reference, fascination with historical milieu as a pleasure in itself. There’s an optimistic, emotionally fulfilling ending too, I’d say.

  31. I guess it depends what you think the purpose of genre definitions is. From a literary perspective, clearly there are strong links betweeen love stories with tragic endings, women’s fiction featuring romantic relationships, and romance with either HEA or HFN endings. All of them can be romantic literature. But from a marketing perspective, they are very different. If a reader picks up a book marketed as a romance and gets a love story with a tragic ending they will, quite rightly, feel cheated. Just as a reader who picks up a book marketed as a mystery would feel cheated if they get a thriller with an ambiguous ending. That doesn’t mean you can’t play with genre conventions at all, it doesn’t mean that the books have to be formulaic, it doesn’t mean you can’t do something new. It does mean that, from a reader’s perspective, if you push the genre boundaries too far, they break and you’re writing a different genre.

    You claim that Gone With the Wind, Wuthering Heights and Anna Karenina are often discussed as ‘romance novels’. By whom? Because they aren’t. They may be romantic and even, in the case of WH, Romantic. But they are not part of the romance genre. I honestly can’t see why that distinction is so problematic to you.

  32. Oh, and Atonement?

    “There’s an optimistic, emotionally fulfilling ending too, I’d say.”

    Wow. I feel like I read a different book from you. I found the ending disturbing and profoundly unsatisfying, and I felt like that was sort of the point. It was about as far from optimistic as I can imagine. And if I’d read that under the impression it was a romance I’d definitely feel cheated.

  33. GWTW and Anna Karenina are often listed among the greatest romances ever. (Google around; you’ll find them.) Eric was saying that the US romance association specifically tailored their definition so it wouldn’t exclude GWTW.

    I read romances, at least occasionally (and more recently.) And I feel cheated when the optimistic ending is too pat, whereas I adored Atonement (crying over and over, as I said in the piece.) So…appeals to readers aren’t appeals to actual readers, you know? They’re an appeal to what you think an average reader thinks. It’s an imagined community — often imagined by marketers. Which means that genre definitions are often basically marketing copy. Which is fine, but not a reason to take them as gospel, I don’t think. Especially because marketers are quite often wrong about what the audience wants or might buy. Formulas can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

  34. Oh, and I find the distinction problematic because I don’t think it’s accurate, mostly. I’m interested in genre theory,and I think the hard and fast distinctions you’re asking for obscure more than they illuminate.

  35. Ros, Gone With the Wind came up in Jenny’s essay as an example of a novel that someone on the RWA’s definition committee, at least, wanted to include: “There were those who insisted that the definition must stipulate a happy ending, and those who pointed out that a lot of great romances didn’t have happy endings, and that it would be a bad idea to frame a romance definition that excluded the book most people cite as the greatest romance of the twentieth century, Gone With the Wind.”

    That was more than a decade ago, though, and now I’m not sure GWTW would rank up there–in fact, as a “novel with strong romantic elements,” it wouldn’t even qualify for a RITA nomination anymore, yes?

    I’ve found Crusie’s interest in GWTW puzzling as well, but since I haven’t read it, or seen the film, I didn’t really feel qualified to comment.

    The same goes for Atonement: never read it, and never really wanted to, since I knew that it didn’t have a happy ending. If something were marketed as a romance, and didn’t have a happy ending for the central couple / trio / whatever, I’d be really angry, as a reader. Put the corn in the corn can and the okra in the okra can, and don’t bait & switch me with some literary succotash, bub.

    That said, I love (and I mean LOVE, as in, it’s my favorite book) A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which has a double plot, so it can be a “romance novel” and a tragic-ending “romantic novel” all at the same time. But I read it first as literary fiction, so my expectations were different. And I do think that genre is a function of marketing, paratext, etc., just as much as it is of a text itself.

  36. I really, really love Atonement. And it speaks directly to your discussion about meta-textual writing in Welcome to Temptation (though it’s conclusions are less optimistic about writing as empowerment.)

    It’s interesting that the metaphor you end up with for genre there is the supermarket.

    Re an earlier point; there are actually mysteries that don’t work out the way you’d think they would. Trent’s Last Case, for example (a classic); the detective doesn’t solve the mystery (or at least that’s my memory.)

    I think romance is a broader genre than mystery, and more interesting for that. But that’s me.

  37. I can’t take credit for the metaphor, alas! It’s from Sarah Bird’s “The Boyfriend School.” But I think it’s a good one, and speaks to my current mode of engaging with books, for better or for worse.

    Is your sense that some of the romance novels with pat endings would have been better books if the author / editor / publisher / genre had let them end differently? That’s certainly a thinkable thought; I’m currently watching a Korean TV romance where the writers / producers / market wouldn’t let the characters behave or pair up in the ways they seemed suited to, and it’s made me lose interest in watching the final episode, out of that disappointment. And I do think that some genres (especially SF) delight in ending any old which-way, throwing the audience curve balls. (I was going to write “SF/fantasy,” but really, what are the odds that the Others will slaughter everyone, including the dragons, in Game of Thrones?)

    Thinking more about marketing for a second, back in the days of VCRs and movie rentals I sometimes brought home films which were marketed as romances but turned out to be “romantic,” with tragic endings that were just as forced as any poorly written HEA. Those really ticked me off, both because I’d been lied to by the marketing copy and because the filmmakers seemed to me to be gunning for a kind of smary, self-congratulatory seriousness. It’s as though the they were simply refusing to give the audience an HEA ending, because those are for A) children, B) women, and C) uneducated bumpkins, while we sophisticates know better. Humph. I’ll take pat over that any day.

  38. Sure, sad endings can be as forced and stupid as happy ones. I like lit fic less than romance overall, I think. I certainly don’t think a sad ending is ipso facto better than a happy one (not much that’s better than P&P.)

    The romance element I’m most interested, or that I read for, isn’t the happy ending, is I guess where I’m coming from. So having that be emphasized so much irritates me. Like I said, Atonement is a much more successful romance for me than is Welcome to Temptation (though not more than P&P.) And I adored Paradise Kiss, a manga romance where the main characters don’t end up together (and thank goodness, because the guy, while charming and sympathetic, is a terrible person in many respects.) Wrote about that here.

    So…I guess I feel like the desire to wrap everything up happily can interfere with what I’m reading for, which would be exploration of relationships and catharsis, more or less.

  39. Basically, I’m interested in falling in love with two people, and in exploring that love. If the happy ending is so important that it forces the author to be untrue to the characters and their relationship, then I’m not on board.

  40. I like the manga piece–and it sounds like I’d enjoy the manga, too. Recently read a lesbian romance, Nell Stark’s “Homecoming,” with two college-age heroines. She handled the “betrothal” element nicely, I thought, in terms of not being untrue to how young the women were. The couple are together at the end, and a gift has been given (surrogate for a ring), but the only formal commitment is a proposal to remain roommates the following year. Vicki Dahl does very good things with that element as well. (You can see that I like using the Regis terms as a shorthand, and find them useful for that.)

  41. Happy new year, all! I’m late to this conversation, but I’ve enjoyed the post and comments and appreciate the links to all these resources. I’ve decided to include a romance novel in an upcoming class – a first time for me – so these discussions are becoming more and more helpful.

    I read “False Colors” based on a recommendation in a previous thread and agree with Eric that I thought this and other gay/lesbian romance novels find really interesting ways to modify the happy-ever-after formula (that’s what HEA stands for, right?). It was very satisfying even if at the end I still found myself worrying about the safety of the protagonists more than with other stories.

    But man, the definitional project… I have gotten so sick of going through these motions in comics studies that I can barely stand to have the conversation any more. I get why it’s important for shaping the contours of any genre/discipline, clarifying the terms of the debate… the boundaries are useful in some respects, if only because it is so fun to see writers/artists break them.

  42. “Basically, I’m interested in falling in love with two people, and in exploring that love. If the happy ending is so important that it forces the author to be untrue to the characters and their relationship, then I’m not on board.”

    That’s absolutely your prerogative. However, since romance as a literary genre following the RWA definition is hugely successful as it is, I don’t see that there’s much reason to expand the definition to suit your tastes. There are plenty of ‘mainstream’ novels featuring love stories which may or may not have happy endings. There’s already some fuzziness between genres with, for example, Nicholas Sparks’ books. But I am struggling to see why you are so invested in seeing this hugely popular genre make changes that its core readership (by which I mean women) aren’t calling for.

  43. I’m not saying anyone should make changes in what they’re writing. I’m saying that the definition fails to capture the entirety of what romance is. The definition is inadequate not because folks should write different kinds of romance, but because people actually do write different kinds of romance, and the definition given doesn’t capture that.

    Many of these romances that don’t fit the definition (like GWTW and Paradise Kiss) are really successful in their own right, fwiw.

    I do think that insisting on definitions can have problems for the long term health of genres, and can restrict creativity — if you’re throwing out manuscripts because you don’t think they conform to someone’s definition, you can miss the next big thing. As just one example, Regis’ insistence on heroines as central to romance could have put up barriers to gay romance if it had been taken seriously (and gay romances are very successful with women these days.) But that’s a secondary consideration, really. The main point is that the definition isn’t especially accurate. In part because it leaves out things that various readerships, including women, seem in practice to treat as romances.

    Also…success can be measured in various ways. Dollars spent is one way. Cultural capital is another, and there romance actually is notably unsuccessful. I think that has a lot more to do with misogyny than with the RWA’s definition. However, romances are often dinged for being formulaic. Pointing out that those formulas aren’t actually central to the genre could be useful tactically in those arguments.

    If you look around the internet, Sparks’ books almost always appear on lists of best romances, incidentally.

  44. Maybe as an analogy…you could say, only things on country radio are country music. In reply, I might say, no, there’s country that doesn’t get played on country radio. Then you’d say, why are you trying to get the people who play country music on the radio to change what they’re doing?

    Does that make sense? I just feel like we’re talking at slightly cross-purposes.

  45. Well, when I teach the romance novel, I often start by sketching out a Venn diagram with three categories: the Romance, the Romantic Novel, and the Romance Novel. The Romance Novel is a subset of the other two, and it’s the subset that ends with the protagonists together. As Pam says in her book, taking the long (Frygian) view, the Romance Novel is a variety of Comedy; the Romantic Novel can be comedy, tragedy (Sparks calls his books “love tragedies”), or whatever, because it’s a broader category.

    I mean, you could say that Othello and Much Ado About Nothing are the same genre–they’re both plays about love, and they both have villains that stir up unfounded jealousy–but I still don’t see what’s gained by lumping them together that way, or what’s lost by calling one a tragedy and the other a comedy.

  46. Othello seems like a stretch. It’s not about them falling in love, and the relationship between Iago and Othello is way more important than the one between Othello and Desdemona.

    More importantly, no one calls Othello a romance, do they? Has anybody ever? I tend to see genres as socially constructed, not formally, so how people see these things is pretty important.

    That being said, if someone wanted to say that Othello was a romance, and had a good argument for it, I’d listen, and maybe learn something. To turn it around, what’s lost by doing that?

    Or, to put it another way, one thing that’s gained for me by seeing Atonement as a romance is that it’s a way to think about how important meta-fiction is to romance; it puts it in conversation with Waiting for Temptation, which I think is really interesting and potentially productive. I think Atonement is a lot better than Waiting for Temptation…so seeing them both as romances is a way to have that conversation without ending up in a place where you’re saying, lit fic is better than romance, and the differences here are about lit fic vs. romance (which I don’t think they are, necessarily.)

    (I bet that lots of people see Romeo and Juliet as a romance, incidentally. Including me, at least to some extent.)

  47. Hrm. You could see Othello and MABN and Romeo and Juliet as “love plays”: plays about what love is, and how it goes well or awry. And then you could have an interesting conversation about them. But if you told me that all three were comedies? I’d be puzzled.

    Meta-fiction is important to “romance,” broadly considered, AND to romantic fiction, AND to the romance novel. And to the rom-com. It’s important to all kinds of love culture, for reasons that are fun to think about. That’s why it’s good to investigate and compare instances of love culture to one another. But that doesn’t make romcoms, romance novels, and love-tragedies all the same thing, to me.

    And to say that Atonement is “better than” another book only makes sense if you specify what it’s better at, to me! ;)

  48. Well, sure. I think it’s prose is significantly better for one thing, and I think it has a much more thoughtful take on how meta-fiction and empowerment work together (or, more to the point, how they don’t always.)

    But my point about categories is that the application of genre depends on what you’re trying to do. Saying, “I don’t see how this would be helpful” is fine, as long as you’re not presuming that because you happen to not see any utility right, right now, while typing out a blog comment, doesn’t necessarily mean that nobody is ever going to have a use.

    I think the main use of the romance novel definition that’s been tossed around is marketing. Houses create an audience; audience knows what they’re getting. That’s fine, but my interest in the romance is only tangentially related to marketing, so I don’t feel like I need to (or want to be) constrained by that definition.

  49. Well, here’s a practical question, then. I’ve been asked to write an encyclopedia entry on “the romance novel.” Not sure who will be reading it, or to what end. So do I focus on Pam’s / the RWA’s version of the romance novel (which is to say, the one with the happy ending)? Or do I not?

    At my journal and at the conferences on “popular romance studies” we haven’t insisted on happy endings: we’re interested in romantic love in popular media, period. But if I’m asked to write / talk about “the romance novel,” it’s probably because someone’s interested in that category that the publishers and audience, here in the US, have settled on, for now. So for the encyclopedia, my inclination is to go with the Regis / RWA definition, with a nod to the existence of the broader genre and a reference to the British term for that broader category (“romantic novel”). Make sense?

    In terms of “Atonement,” it sounds like it’s better at a number of things–but not necessarily at producing the particular feeling of emotional satisfaction that I’m usually after when I read a romance novel: the happiness of seeing characters I care about arrive at an ending that strikes me as happy, so that I feel good for / about them in that particular way. “Welcome to Temptation” does that for me quite effectively–more so, I think, than it does for you.

  50. It sort of depends. I think it’s better as a romance than Welcome to Temptation…but that’s in part because happy endings aren’t what I go to a romance for, necessarily.

    ” it’s probably because someone’s interested in that category that the publishers and audience, here in the US, have settled on, for now.”

    Sure; it sounds like that’s what they want. I’d probably give them something slightly different if it was me — but this is probably the least among many reasons why they asked you and not me!

  51. Pingback: Linkspam: 01/03/14 — The Radish.

  52. Pingback: The Problem of Genre | Nyssa Harkness

  53. Hey Noah–I never answered your question about the context in which I teach romance. I have yet to teach a romance novel (I usually include one in my black women writers class) to a student who isn’t at least a little bit hostile. English majors don’t take the books seriously, find the endings unbelievably optimistic, roll their eyes at the sentiment, and tend to be cynical about love. Regis (whose book I like less and less as I re-read it and argue with it) offers a useful framework to provide them some critical distance.

  54. Ah; okay, that makes sense.

    I wonder how much of the resistance is genre rather than content based? I mean, Shakespeare comedies have love and happy endings; so do lots of non-romance novels.

  55. Some of it is certainly genre based. They have been taught, implicitly and explicitly in their classes, that popular genre (of all sorts) is beneath their intellectual concern. Love stories in something like Romeo and Juliet are fine because (1) the love story is beside the point and (2) the love story often ends tragically or bittersweetly. English majors often don’t know what to do with characters who feel good, or stories that are aggressively happy. At least the ones I teach.

  56. Hello, Norah, is this discussion still going? I’m from the UK, an English classics geek, and doing some private research on romance and the oppression of women, and so read this. I was expecting to find strong arguments. To be honest, I was disappointed.
    I’ve just finished reading this book. I agree with your comment that the author is defensive about romance to the point where she is totally uncritical of it .- It’s almost as if she subscribes to the New Age idea that all criticism is bad and indicates something wrong with the critic. But to claim, for instance, that Nora Roberts is a great writer of romances, she has be comparing her with some other writers.
    I thought she was entirely mistaken in describing the heroine of Pamela as finding a (relative) freedom – even Samuel Richardson admitted in a letter of 1749 that Pamela was only able to be happy with Mr B because of her ‘slavish submission’ (his own words). Where is the freedom in that?
    And where was the freedom in Diana’s masochistic surrender to love of the Sheik?
    But what really disturbed me was that the coolly objective treatment of rape in romance in the book. She seems to think that Pamela marrying Mr B after his rape attempts is fine, and if you don’t think so, it can only be because you don’t accept marriage can be a happy ending.
    What puzzled me is she mentioned a book by Nora Roberts ‘Inner Harbor’ (must remember my US spelling) as having a scene where the ‘hero’ abducts and ‘ravishes’ the heroine. I was disturbed by Regis’ treating this as being of small consequence, but what
    really puzzled me was I then looked at the reviews on Goodreads to see what the readership made of this, if so (I am happy to say that a fair number of reviewers speak out against rape in romances there.) It wasn’t mentioned, whereas there were some excellent reviews on ‘The Shiek’ and abuse. She speaks of this ‘sex scene’ in the book being ‘reviled’ but if so, it must have been long ago. I can find not a whisper online about this.
    Very odd.

  57. Hey Jessica! Well, Regis’ book is somewhat old now…and I think pre internetish? I think the romance conversation online is probably somewhat different than when she was writing…

  58. Lo, Noah, I only meant reviews of the book. They were really good on Goodreads about challenging the rapist ‘hero’ of ‘The Sheik’. Now I suppose I will have to read it to find out, and as it is I will have to read ‘The Shiek’and expect to be sick…

  59. Whoa; reading the Sheik is dedication. That book sounds awful.

    I really, really made people mad when I wrote in a mainstream article that Nora Roberts is awful, but…she’d kind of unreadable. Her success is a bit of a puzzle.

    What authors do you like? I’m always looking for recommendations; romance is so big it’s tough to figure out what to read. I’ve been reading a bunch of Jennifer Crusie novels, which are quite fun…

  60. I can fully credit Noah, from what I’ve encountered of romance readers, that they would hate that article of yours. Do give me a link, if you have one. Id like to read it.

    Romance writers and readers do seem to be highly contradictory about this; they claim that they want ‘literary recognition’ of the genre, and yet, if any of their icons are subject to the same literary standards by a critic as other novels, they are indignant. Your expression ‘defensive crouch’ sums it up, it seems.

    Pamela Regis dismayed me by back pedaling on the issue of rape in romance, as if it doesn’t matter. She seems far more offended by criticism of it as ‘bodice rippers’ but doesn’t seem to accept that it has to some extent deserved that reputation. Also there is the whole issue of strong versus sentimental writing. Women need to learn to write unsentimentally, and romance writers don’t seem to want to do that. Sentiment is a particular mental approach, as I see it, favoured by romance writers. This may be the root of the problem.

    I actually wondered, from Regis’ hurt tone, if she wasn’t a covert writer of romance under a pen name?

    I’ve only read extracts of Nora Roberts so far, and I have to admit, I haven’t been impressed by what I’ve read at all.

    On my reading on romance, I’m a novice. Probably I should be asking you, I think. I’m a geek of classic English Literature, so I’ve read Gaskell, Austen, the Brontes’ etc and YUK YUk I’ve ploughed thorugh all of Richardson but ‘Grandison’. I think most of my reading has been of works that don’t truly qualify according to Regis’ definition at least, classic and mordern.

    I’ve been looking round historical romance, traditionally published and otherwise, on Amazon, and to be honest, most of it is purely terrible, and as for the duvets and lager in eighteenth century England; yes, well…

    More years ago than I care to admit, as a teenager, I read awful Victorian romances by Charles Garvice (a best seller then) and Helen Mathers, Mrs Humphrey Ward,etc. My parents went to auctions, and got job lots that included a lot of old books, including those, and shoved them on the acres of shelving to fill ’em up (they used to rennovate old mansions before it became fashionable here in the UK).

    Also, my mother read Georgette Heyer and Mary Stewart recommended them to me as amusing. I read them happily at twelve, but a couple of years later I realised that I hated them because of the reactionary assumptions about class and sex roles, though I couldn’t have put that into those terms then. I only ever read two Barbara Cartland’s.

    A few years ago, on taking up writing myself, I was interested – I see now, naively – in ‘extending the genre’ of romance, questioning the unrealistic lack of sordid details in it ( heroes almost never make fools of themselves, or vomit, even with concussion; for some reason, their Regency London streets never have fecal matter and dead cats in them) and particularly, going for a qualified happy ending rather than the absurdly improbable happy ending of traditional romances and also, extending the subject matter to query (mildly?) whether the HEA between a couple is in any way a satisfactory general conclusion.

    Reaction has been mixed; a lot of puzzlement; some good feedback. all this is Indie published, of course…

    When I wrote a spoof of the cliches of Regency romance about highwaymen (you know, he’s always a disgraced Earl), which actually I did very gently, the hate campaign of blistering one star reviews on Amazon was staggering.

    This has made me a bit disillusioned with how far it is possible to extend the genres of romance. I will keep plugging away at it, though…

    I do love some of my fellow Indie writers borderline writing. Rebecca Lochalann’s ‘Child of the Erinyes’ series. That is fantasy with strongly romantic elements.

    I haven’t yet tried Jennifer Crusie; I believe she is very defensive about the romance genre, but perhaps I’d be impressed with her writing?

  61. I don’t know that I agree that sentimental writing is bad…as with most things, it depends, I think. I like HEA’s too…though I think it can be interesting to play with it.

    This is the piece where I mentioned that Nora Roberts isn’t so great; there’s a list of recommendations too, though not sure the slideshow is working… I like Kathleen Gilles Siedel quite a bit; Cecelia Grant’s historicals. It sounds like you might quite like Judith Ivory’s Black Silk, which is very well written, imo. Jojo Moyes is an interesting writer who plays with happily ever after in interesting ways (wrote a review here) Laura Kinsale’s “His Lady’s Heart” is a very well done medieval romance. (You can search the “romance novel” tag on this site where I’ve written about a number of these.) “Outlander” is fun too.

    If you want more grit, or a questioning of romance tropes, you might try “Longbourn” by Jo Baker? It’s Pride and Prejudice from the viewpoint of the servants, and it’s very good.

    I think romance readers have gotten a lot of crap, and a lot of it sexist, over the years, so there’s good reason for them to be skeptical of a lot of criticism. But yeah, some portions of the community can be very unwelcoming to folks who don’t talk about the books in exactly the right way (people get very angry if you question HEA—though historically it seems obvious that romances have sometimes not had happy endings, and really don’t even always have happy endings now). Though I’ve had enthusiastic reactions to some of my writing on romances too…it kind of depends. But there’s definitely a group of folks who hate my writing about romance, see me as a sexist outsider, etc.

  62. I didn’t phrase that properly about women writers and sentimental writing (and of course, there are male romance writers, though a minority). I didn’t mean to say that outside romance, there aren’t many women writers who write very strongly; it would be absurd to say that, given Margaret Attwood, Anne Rice, etc. Rather, that women romance writers need to cultivate a stronger, less sentimental style to be taken seriously.

  63. Well, women do get a lot of crap, not just about writing romance, sadly.
    I know what you mean,Noah,about happy endings. I don’t like sad endings for the sake of it. I write more happy endings than sad ones, though a bit more conditional. But things need to be less ‘flowers and rainbows’. Wicked characters may reform, certainly; I like that, myself. But they will need to do a lot of work to change unless we are talking about alternative reality.

    What I don’t like about romance HEA’s, is the lack of solidarity with other women, a philander’s previous victims, say, often portrayed savagely as ‘the bitch’ (and that’s taking sexist thinking on board). That’s the problem; oppressed groups will express a lot of the ideology of their oppressors.

    But when we think of it – isn’t romance, in its emphasis on individualism – very much a form appropriate to advanced capitalism, just as presumably, the Arthurian legends were appropriate to feudalism and the Robin Hood legends, too?
    Regis goes on and on about ‘affective individualism’ and the private propert of heriones in modern romance until I got really fed up with it.

    I’ll follow your link, thanks, that’s really interesting, and I must try some of those.

  64. That’s a very astute article, Noah. It doesn’t seem to me to be so strongly worded about Nora Roberts that fans had real reason to be outraged. I read harsher criticism of Shakespeare frequently.
    I am intrigued at your comments about how sentimentality can be used effectively. It may depend on how one defines the term, perhaps? I always see it as a style that appeals to easy solutions and hearts and superficial emotions. But you may see potential I have missed.

  65. Sentimentality is pretty closely linked to romance…but yeah, it probably depends on how you define it. dictionary says “excessive tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia”, so I guess the question is, does “excessive” have to mean “too much for aesthetic purposes” or can it mean, intntionally hyperbolic which works aesthetically in context. I’d say something like the end of the Winter’s Tale is excessively tender…but it’s great, kind of because it’s so obviously manipulated/false/sweeping…

  66. It was about the lack of objective books on literary criticism – Pamela Regis’ is hardly objective – and neither are the blogs about romance – which tend to be written by authors of romance.
    It’s interesting that the definition of ‘sentimental’ seemes to have changed over the years. My old 1980 ish Chambers dictionary uses it in quite a perjorative way, ‘partly insincere feelings’ with ‘sentimemntality’ as ‘sloppiness’ etc. My new Collins dictionary gives much the same definition as yours.

  67. Gah; sorry, can’t find it in the spam filter.

    I don’t know that arts criticism can ever be objective…there is romance scholarship that’s less focused on fan perspective. Tania Modleski’s book from a while back takes a skeptical approach; it over generalizes, but has a lot of interesting things to say. There’s some other more academic scholarship in recent years too…

  68. Thanks, Noah. All leads appreciated. The only ones I have are from Regis’ book.
    Yes, that is a problem with arts criticism. People can try and be fair, I suppose.People have often been unfair about romance, but the problem is that its defenders come across as defending all and any romances written, however bad, as a result. I note you make that point yourself.
    Oh yes, I said in that lost post too that I agree the ending of ‘A Winter’s Tale’ is hyperbolic, but of course, as you say, Shakespeare knew what he was doing. You acccept it after the horrors the previous acts of Leonotes (or however you spell his name) and his servants, exposing the baby etc, it is a balm, and somehow fitting.

  69. Janice Radway’s book on romance is another one not from a fan perspective. Regis dislikes her, and has some valid criticisms, but I overall liked her book a lot.

    And yes, the reaction to romance criticism can be to just circle the wagons and say taht any criticism is bad criticism… There was a lot of negative fandom criticism of that Holocaust romance between a prisoner and a camp commander last year, though…

  70. Just a quick note to say how much I’m enjoying this conversation, Jessica & Noah. The dynamics of popular romance criticism are interesting, and would be a good topic for someone to study, comparatively. There was a deliberate effort by scholars in the 2000s to avoid what was seen as the condescension of the first round of scholarship, and An Goris has an interesting piece about the rituals of “matricide” towards Radway and Modleski that were involved in that.

    Noah, I find myself thinking a lot about your “defensive crouch” formulation–and as I’ve read a bit more work on other popular fiction, I’m struck by how various the stances of scholars are. If I recall correctly, S. T. Joshi is incredibly dismissive of some Lovecraft fans (the “boys,” as he calls them) even as he’s defending the work itself, maybe even as a _way_ to defend the work. And Mark Scroggins’s book on Michael Moorcock makes some interesting gestures early on toward the reputation of sword & sorcery fantasy. Worth a look.

  71. Yeah, Joshi is really a jerk. (as he demonstrated in the recent controversy over changing the Lovecraft bust for the WFA.)

    I’m most familiar with comics, where there is definitely defensiveness around longstanding dismisal of comics. It’s taken the form of canonizing earlier fan critics though…academic comics criticism comes out of fan scholarship, mostly, rather than fan scholarship being a reaction against academic criticism (as seems to be the case in romance.)

  72. Hello again,Noah and Eric.

    You know (aren’t I a geek) I’ve found a quote from Samuel Richardson’s correspondence that really undermines Pamela Regis’ premise about Pamela coming to achieve independence and strength through her romance with that unspeakable Mr B.
    I knew I’d read it somewhere in Terry Eagleton’s writing, and it’s in ‘The Rape of Clarissa’ page 90, where he quotes a letter of Richardson’s of 1749 from this Selected Letters: –
    ‘It is apparent form the whole tremor (? tenor in eighteenth century language?) of Mr B’s behaviour that nothing but such implicit obedience, and slavish submission, as Pamela showed to all his injunctions and dictates, could have made her tolerably (in italics) happy, even with a reformed (italics again) rake.’
    If Richardson – no supporter of women’s rights, except to remain unmolested – talks of her ‘slavish submission’ then I don’t see how on earth a modern academic like Pamela Regis can argue that Pamela achieves ‘independence’ through her marriage to Mr B, as presumably this refers to the long tedious bit after Mr B sees the error of his ways, and lectures Pamela and everyone else on wifely duty. He goes on doing that on and off through that wearisome sequel ‘Pamela in her Exalted Condition’.

  73. I have to admit, I have never read Pamela. I just read Shamela recently, though, which I adore (also Joseph Andrews.)

    It’s interesting to me that parodies of romance don’t actually function as part of the romance genre…as opposed to superhero parodies, which are central to superhero stories (or science fiction parodies, which are still science fiction, although not as central to the genre.)

  74. Sorry; got sidetracked!

    I think Pamela is definitely a romance…but yes, it doesn’t sound very liberating by present day standards. But, that’s not *that* unusual in the romance genre; Pamela isn’t less liberatory than 50 Shades really, is it?

  75. I found ‘Shamela’ funny too;I felt a bit guilty about that, as in a way it was implying that maidservant’s weren’t in much danger of sexual violence; or maybe I am reading too much into that? I haven’t been able to force myself to read ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ yet.If it was ludicrously melodramatic, like the late Victorian romnances of Charles Garvice, it might be a good laugh, but it doesn’t even sound as if it’s anything but sentimentalised descriptions of dominance and submission. I suppose I will have to read it – along with ‘The Sheik’. Defenders of the liberating potential of romance, such as Maya Rodale (who’s book on the liberating power of romance ‘Dangerous Books for Girls’ I didn’t find very convincing) argue that all the SM bondage stuff is consensual, which I suppose might offer a slight improvement on the theme of Pamela if so.
    I think Pamela(!) Regis for the purposes of her book, falls over backwards to find an ’empowering’ outcome in what is often seen as the original romance, when there just isn’t one. I don’t understand this; I think it would have strengthened her argument to admit its shortcomings in this regard. I’m sorry to say that I suspect she knew that most people find it too dull to read (let alone the sequel) and that therefore, she could imply things regarding the theme which are – shall we say – economical with the truth? She makes no mention of the letter that Terry Eagleton quotes – yet surely as a reputable academic she should have been aware of it because she does quote one of Richardson’s letters – about his daugthter’s dowery, and she takes a good few side swipes at Eagleton, partly because of the basic ideological difference over capitalism. Wouldn’t she have had research assistants doing the donkey work, and combing his correspondence, looking for such pitfalls?

  76. I liked Maya’s book! (and interviewed her about it.) I think portrayals of bondage etc. aren’t necessarily anti-feminist (I wrote a book about that more or less.) 50 Shades is really poorly written and celebrates incapacity in a way that wasn’t very enjoyable or thoughtful though (imo.)

  77. ” I think it would have strengthened her argument to admit its shortcomings in this regard.”

    Yes…especially since she could then say, “look, this canonical book is sexist, but later romance writers undermine these tropes/provide better representations…”

  78. I found some of the arguments good -ie, the ‘Too Human Robot Theory’ and some fairly weak – I reviewed that yesterday on amazon.co.uk. yesterday.
    [[ttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Dangerous-Books-Girls-Reputation-Explained]]
    I hope that link comes out; mine rarely do.
    It was good that Maya Rodale used humour, anyway. The amount of humour Regis displayed could only be discerned under a microscope.

    I thought that Regis had a post as Professor, but maybe I’m wrong? Or maybe she didn’t at the time she wrote that book?
    Here in the UK I’ve hard from research assistants that they have to do all that sort of thing for their Professors… Of course, with the educational cutbacks, there are less of them.
    I wouldn’t assume, myself that bondage would be necessarily repressive. I can’t understand its appeal, myself, but…

    As you are something of an expert in this field, perhaps you can advise me; all about the web, I see blog after blog angrily defending romantic novels and their readers from ‘the detractors’. But these detractors are totally silent! There are no anti romance blogs, for instance, and all the works criticizing romance seem to date from the 1990’s…Presumably, then, the criticism is implied, or verbal. Or maybe it is via exclusion…

  79. Pam is, indeed, a full professor, as am I. Rumors of our research support are greatly exaggerated. :) Not sure whether it’s a UK / US difference, but very few humanities professors I know–except those at elite Ivy League institutions–get help from students for their work, and that’s a longstanding issue, not due to recent cutbacks. We’re mostly our own donkeys here, for better and for worse.

    About “the detractors,” my sense is that a lot of this is either verbal (“you read THAT?”) or a matter of casual asides and inaccuracies, whether in newspapers or in peer reviewed journals. And of course the 1990s were when Regis was at work on her book, if it was published in 2003, so she’s much closer to that round of detraction, both chronologically and generationally speaking.

    Continuing to enjoy this conversation!

  80. Mainstream discussions of romance can still be aggressively dismissive. This piece by William Giraldi is somewhat infamous:

    https://newrepublic.com/article/117814/50-shades-grey-academic-study-feminist-point-view

    He conflates 50 Shades with all romance novels, and compares romance novels to racists. It’s an amusingly written, but ignorant and (imo) sexist review. And it’s the only coverage that appears in mainstream venues often; it is really, really hard to get mainstream venues to do romance reviews, ime. I tried to get a mainstream venue to let me write about Rodale; the editor, a woman, told me she wouldn’t okay it, basically because she thought romance novels were crap. So…yeah. There are detractors out there.

  81. Eric: Those research assistants were at Cambridge (where I’d gone to visit somebody) so I suppose that makes sense.

    Noah: That certainly is the exact opposite from Pamela Regis’ position. She will not concede in her work that there are any bad romance novels. That writer refuses to accept the possibility of there being any good ones on the basis of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. That is a bit sloppy logically, to extrapolate from the particular to the general… His remarks about Tom Clancy are interesting, though.

  82. Right…I mean, it’s clear he’s never read any romance novels, which is part of what’s frustrating for romance readers. Folks who don’t know what they’re talking about get to promulgate invidious stereotypes to the mainstream, without much pushback. And it kind of happens all the time.

    The defensive response isn’t always productive, though, as you say. I had someone flat out tell me, “you shouldn’t write about romance novels until you’ve read hundreds” which seems like silliness to me. Romance novels aren’t that much different than other books. Obviously you want to take care with sweeping generalizations, but the fandom isn’t the only valid perspective, surely…

  83. Goodness, hundreds? I do find the attitude that all criticism is negative criticism a bit disturbing in all areas where I encounter it. It seems to have originated with ‘New Age’ positive thinking gurus. But how can literary criticism be criticism if it is only praise?

  84. She might have said 100? I can’t remember precisely…

    I may even have read 100 at this point. As generally with these things, depends on what you mean by “romance”. Does Austen/Trollope/Forster/George Eliot count? Regis says yes, and I tend to agree with her on that…

  85. Interesting. Well, I read my first Norah Roberts, ‘Inner Harbour’ and I was disappointed. Impressively strong writing about the hero’s past misadventures gave way to a sentimental style.
    I might even qualify for a hundred soon, myself, then, but mainly through some Beta reading and ‘the classics’. But I did read twenty ‘Georgette Heyer Regency Romances between the ages of twelve and fourteen, then realized how much I disliked the right wing outlook.

    I’ve only read three of Eliot; I suppose ‘Midldlemarch’ could count as a romance, as it’s got an HEA, but ‘The Mill on the Floss’ had a tragic outcome. What struck me most about ‘Adam Bede’ was the tragic story of Hetty and her baby; it was so awful; but of course, there was a happy ending for Adam and Dinah.

    Interestingly, I have always found the endings of ‘Mansfield Park’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility’ disappointing; Edward and Colonel Brandon were so dull. I wanted Fanny Price with a busily reforming Henry Crawford, and Marianne with a chastened Willoughby. Someone accused me of being ‘stupidily romantic’ about that.

    I think somewhere above, Eric distinguished between the romance novel and the romantic novel, and in the latter a sad outcome was allowed (can’t scroll back without losing this text?)
    It could be that these categories are, for instance,well known by writers and readers and I just don’t know them.

    What then is the official line on HEA’s in the romnance community, I wonder; it seems a bit different between the US and the UK. Is there a split on it? Are conditional happy endings allowed? And how much of sordid reality is allowed – ie, filthy streets in Regency London? Or does the book then veer off into being a romantic novel rather than a romance?

  86. Two very good articles, Noah. The one about swashbucklers is very funny. Interestingly, though I found Colonel Brandon and Fanny’s Edward (it was Edward, wasn’t it, not Edwin; never can remember, oh dear) dull, I really liked Edward Ferrars.
    I must read ‘Me Before You’ some time. It sounds an exceptional book.
    It interests me how it’s classed on amazon, as ‘women’s fiction’ not as romance, whereas the sequel is categorized as ‘romance, contempoary’. I don’t know if the author choose the categories, though, or her publishers.

  87. Probably publishers choose, would be my guess…

    I really like Moyes in general, and Me Before You especially—though it’s gotten something of a critical drubbing from the disabled community, since having your disabled character commit suicide lines up too neatly with invidious tropes. I still think there’s a lot of worth there, though, despite the problems.

  88. Pingback: Criticism and Romantic Novels – Sophie de Courcy and More

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