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A Picture of Krazy Kat

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Last week Eric Berlatsky (that’s my brother!) left a comment on the PPP Krazy Kat roundtable in which he argued that one of the hallmarks of the strip is the way that settings and backgrounds are so unstable. “Everything “behind” the characters is constantly changing and in flux without any rhyme or reason,” he says. ” “Instability” seems to be the watchword of the strip, with the possible exception of the “solidity” of Ignatz’s brick itself.”

Eric talks about this in regards to the strips’ social positioning; the queer BDSM Kat/Ignatz/Pup triangle, and/or Herriman’s own fluid, possibly closeted or masked relationship to African-American identity. However, it seems to me that it could also be read formally rather than culturally.

For example, take this strip I pulled from the internet at random:
 

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As Eric says, the background here shift insistently. In the first panel, Krazy and pup are positioned at night beside a tree on a straight road, with a curved rock formation off in the distance. The two panels below seem to be in daylight (the color of the sky blurring into the color of the ground from the panel above(. The tree disappears, and there are different rock formations (and what looks like a volcano) off in the distance. Then, in the next large panel, we see the (formerly straight) road curving off towards the obelisk, from behind which a gold moon rises. The sky is no longer the solid black of the first panel, but is instead a mass of cross-hatchings, almost ostentatiously referencing the hand that drew it. All this time, Officer Pup is explaining, with much assertion and repetition, that the waiting Krazy will never see a blue moon; declaring his faith in a natural order even as the world around him haphazardly shuffles trees and roads, creativity sliding out from under the rotund figure of law and order, who looks not unlike a big blue moon himself. Finally, Pup exits, and as Krazy lurches into quasi song (“Bee-Ell-oo-oo-oo Blue”) we see behind the monument (or did the monument just move over?) where Ignatz prepares to launch an ersatz blue moon balloon. Surely Krazy here is the reader, not so much gullible as eager to be gulled, while Ignatz is Herriman, the artist arranging and rearranging the props for the delight/confounding of all us waiting Kats. The arrangement of the two moons, one above the other on the page despite the alteration of all other visual cues, is perhaps the tell; the real paper moon is as fake as the fake paper moon, or perhaps even slightly more fake, since the blue acknowledges its artifice.
 
Stumbling on such a clearly self-referential strip wasn’t an accident I don’t think. Here’s another I picked out.
 

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Again, Kat as reader, Ignatz as creator, with the changing delights before the lens mirroring the giddy changes in background, as day swaps for night, trees replace rock formations, and the road arcs one way and then the other. Krazy even guesses that one misshapen piece of tschotskes is a “Komic”, in case we missed the joke. And then, the final turn-around, officer pup calls an end to the proceedings and the comic, returning to one of the strip’s most stable iconic images; Ignatz locked up in the dull jail, the world all bricked up and stolid till Ignatz (or Herriman) gets out to draw the next page.

And then there’s this:
 

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That center second line panel tilts to create a straight frame within a crooked frame, a deliberate drawing of a drawing, created this time by Pup and placed in its jailhouse place by Krazy — even the creator is unstable, and who is creating who. In the final row, the left-hand panel is inset, like a painting against the black sky, so that the prison wall with the fake Ignatz painting looks itself like a cardboard facade. Krazy and the duck walk towards the fake painting on the fake drawing, burbling garbled names of masterpieces, while Krazy throws that brick against the left to right run of the reading. Roy T. Cook suggested that the brick’s reverse zip “highlights the artificiality” of Ignatz’s action. Everything, in short, is what it shouldn’t be; the genius of the artist is to krazily wrong all rights.

Adrielle Mitchell talked in her post about the way that George Herriman reshaped the comics canon; in comments Alex Buchet points out that Krazy Kat is in many ways in the high art canon, much loved by people like Juan Miro and Gertrude Stein.

Given that, perhaps Krazy Kat’s place in the canon is in some ways to create the notion of a canon,or to make a strip which demands a kind of canonicity. Art presents itself as art through the assumption of individual afflatus — the vision as meme. Krazy Kat, in the insistence of its artifice, is almost(?) a parody of avant garde brio, virtuosically creating a new world with every panel. Herriman makes a space for comics creator as genius because he drew himself as genius, high art in a blue moon.

Utilitarian Review 11/16/13

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Brian Cremins on representing music in comics with Gil Kane and Bob Dylan.

Annie Murphy on women and exclusion in comics.

Chris Gavaler on Thor vs. the Dark World of DC.

Ng Suat Tong argues that Michael DeForge needs better critics.

Caroline Small argued that comics criticism needs more critic-practitioners.

Kristian Williams talked about the morality of Watchmen, Fail-Safe, and Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Ng Suat Tong responds to Kristian’s post by asserting that Ozymandias is less of a bastard than John F. Kennedy.

For our first PencilPanelPage post, Adrielle Mitchell talked about Krazy Kat and the comics canon.

I talk about why I try to get women writers on HU.

 
Utilitarians Everywhere

On the Atlantic I wrote about

—Lily Allen’s crappy new video, the impossibility of parody in pop, and how you should buy Valerie June’s album.

—Leigh Moscowitz’s new book, The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media, and assimilation as dialectic.

At the Dissolve I wrote about the mediocre political documentary Caucus.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—my son explaining conceptual art.

—a great documentary about bees dying off

 
Other Links

This is a really depressing piece about treatment of women in the comics industry.

Ariel Chesler on men’s reproductive rights and fatherhood (the linked Anna March piece is worth reading too.)

Danielle Paradis on Joss Whedon redefining feminism.

Our own James Romberger is an Eisner Award judge.
 

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Why Care About Women Comics Critics, Anyway?

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Last week, Heidi MacDonald wrote a lengthy post discussing the lack of women in The Comics Journal (especially the print version). R.Fiore, long-time Comics Journal writer, responded as follows:

The question I have is this. Suppose the Comics Journal website finds that it is getting enough content from a predominantly male pool of writers to satisfy its needs. What is the problem with that? I pose this strictly as a question. Commentators here seem to be assuming that the problem is self-evident, but it doesn’t seem quite so obvious to me.

I posted this in reply:

There are a number of reasons to try to get more women contributors, it seems like. First, and again, TCJ is still (as Heidi suggests) an important touchstone for comics criticism and for canon formation. When TCJ prints a massive article about Crumb’s lawyers rather than having anything at all about female cartoonists, it sends a message about what’s important. That message can matter (see Annie Murphy’s piece about how discouraging as a cartoonist she found tcj’s approach to female cartoonists.)

Perhaps more importantly, TCJ’s mission is to cover art comics. Failing to engage with female critics and female cartoonists is a failure of that mission. TCJ should do better in this regard (especially the print edition) because otherwise they are failing by their own standards.

Finally, the world remaining what it is, men and women are not treated equally, which means that women have experiences and perspectives which are different from men. Those perspectives are valuable in lots of ways. Paying attention to women can involve being more thoughtful about the role of gender in the work of all cartoonists; it can mean seeing women creators as more central and so having a different canon (say, focusing on the history of children’s book cartooning rather than on EC; or thinking about shoujo rather than superhero comics). Not that all women share common interests or anything, anymore than all men do (Qiana Whitted who writes for HU is very interested in EC as just one example.) But, gender and genre share a common root and have a certain amount to do with each other, and so including women will tend to have an effect on content, and help make tcj (esp. the print version) feel less like a guy’s locker room filled with aging hippies who can’t talk about anything other than Crumb.

In some ways the fact that you have to ask the question is symptomatic of the problem, maybe? This is feminism 101 stuff. Discussions of canon and inclusion are really old hat in literature and visual art. The fact that comics doesn’t get it makes comics look really backwards and staid and a more than a little ridiculous. If you care about comics being taken seriously as an art form (which is TCJ’s mission) then including women as writers and pieces about women is a no-brainer. Are comics art, or are they a nostalgic pastime for male hobbyists? If you want the answer to be the first of those, you need to include women. (And just to be clear, I take this as what Frank is saying in this piece, which is very much to his credit.)

Maybe just to expand a little bit…first, I should note that both Tim Hodler (tcj.com’s co-editor) and Frank Santoro (who writes the post where R. Fiore commented) are on the same page as me here in terms of thinking that more women contributors are important. Fiore’s arguments are Fiore’s and not (thankfully) the position of tcj.com.

Second, when I say that engaging with women as writers, cartoonists and readers is central to TCJ’s mission of seeing comics as art, what I mean is that, both academically and popularly, gender is, and has been for years, an important lens through which people judge and think about art. For an increasing number of audiences in an increasing number of venues, having something intelligent to say to half the population matters in terms of evaluating aesthetics. So when TCJ seems unable or unwilling to include women in the conversation, that suggests it, and comics, is an unserious, irrelevant backwater, rather than an art form that matters.It makes comics look more like video games than like visual art or literature.

To talk about HU, one of the things I’ve focused on consistently and deliberately is getting women to write here. I wouldn’t say this is altruistic, exactly; after all, HU doesn’t pay, and there are plenty of other places women comics critics can write if they’d like to, whether on tumblr or their own blogs or group sites like Manga Bookshelf. So when women (or men) write at HU, I’m pretty clear that they’re doing me a favor, not the other way around.

So the reason to get women to write on HU is not to promote women. Rather, the reason to get women on the site is, first of all, because there are lots of women who have interesting things to say about comics and art, and so it benefits the site to have them here. And, second of all, because I want a website and a community which includes different perspectives, including the perspectives of that half of the population which isn’t male.

For the print TCJ editor Gary Groth, this isn’t something to worry about. Gary (quoted by Heidi) says that he is “gender-blind when it comes to good writing. And to subject matter.” For Gary, there are, or should be, no consequential differences between men and women. This is a fairly popular position (and not just among men.) Equality is a worthy goal,and it’s easy (not necessary or even always logical, but easy) to go from an argument of equality to an argument of sameness. It’s tempting to say, well, we want men and women to be treated equally; therefore, the way to do that is to assume that they are in fact the same in every way that matters.

I don’t find this convincing, though. In her recent book Excluded, Julia Serano, who is a trans woman, and a biologist, argues that gender is a complex trait. What she means by this is that how people experience gender and sexuality — the things that make me a heterosexual white guy who doesn’t watch sports — are determined not by nature (the fact that I have a penis) or by nurture (the fact that my dad was our main caregiver) but by a combination of factors which aren’t easily predictable or reproducible.

Seeing gender as a complex trait is a way to avoid gender essentialism; since everyone’s experience of gender is individual, there’s no one trait that you can point to and say, women are (or should be) like that, or men are (or should be) like that. But it’s also a way to avoid what might be called an essentialism of absence; the insistence that gender makes (or should make) no difference at all. It’s true that neither biology nor culture are determinative. But it’s also true that both biology and culture matter. Individuality is a sign of complexity, not a sign that our bodies and our social milieu have no effect on us. And if, say, you’re mainstream comics, and 90% of your audience is male, or if you’re the print TCJ and Heidi has to go through with a magnifying glass to find evidence that women exist, that’s not a fluke or an accident. It’s not a result of being gender blind. On the contrary, it’s a gendered fact which has something important to do with the way you interact with people who are, for a complex of social and biological reasons, women.

Along those lines, I would say that the fact that it has been somewhat difficult to get women contributors here is an important indication that the effort to recruit them is actually important and worthwhile. As I said before, there are no lack of women critics writing all over the web. Yet, despite an active effort on my part, HU still skews quite male.

I don’t think it’s a mystery as to why that is. I’m a guy, and I got into comics criticism through writing at TCJ, so much of my initial audience and much of my social network for writing comics criticism skewed male. In addition, my interests and background are focused on male genre product. I grew up with superhero comics, and while I don’t exactly follow them anymore, coverage on this site still I think points in that direction to some degree. In addition, I have a quite confrontational and polemical writing style, and so does a fair amount of writing on the site. There are many women who are perfectly comfortable with that approach to blogging — certainly more than have any interest in superhero comics, if the demographic data are correct. But, still, I think my particular pugnacity is coded male in a lot of ways.

So the site has more male writers than female ones for a lot of reasons, and if I wanted I could just go with that and we’d have a boy’s club with, presumably, even more writing on Watchmen than we have already. And I like Watchmen (that’s why we have so much writing on it!) But over the long haul (or even over the short haul) I think that would get pretty boring. I want to have folks contribute who are interested in things I”m not, as well as in things I am. I want to have different perspectives, not people telling me all the time what I want to hear. I want, in short, to have people on the site write about race in cosplay even though — or rather especially because — I don’t know a ton about and certainly don’t participate in cosplay. I want to hear Caro talk about why Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s take on female authenticity and the body is important, even though I have little interest in Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and never thought at all about the relation of the body to authenticity. I want to have folks write about the history of yaoi and bishonen in Japan, even if I don’t read a ton of yaoi. And obviously, men could write about all those things. But the fact is that they’re all gendered topics, that they’re all presented from a specifically female perspective, and that they all appeared on the site because women wrote about them.

To put it another way, deliberately reaching out to women writers is not in opposition to, in Gary’s words, “good writing”. Rather, having women writers, in my view, is central to making the site worthwhile, challenging, and relevant — and when I fail to do that, the site is less worthwhile, challenging and relevant than it should be. I don’t want my own limited relationship to biology and culture to be the be all and end all of what the site can be about, because that’s stifling. It’s not a matter of saying, well, I’m a feminist, so HU needs to represent women. Rather, it’s a matter of believing in the feminist proposition that women have valuable things to say.
 

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Erica Friedman had this comic inside her high school locker because the woman on the front reminded her of a fan-fic character she wrote. Erica’s essay about it is here.

 
 

Utilitarian Review 11/8/13 — Welcome to PencilPanelPage!

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News

We’ve got an exciting announcement to make. The wonderful blog PencilPanelPage is going to be moving onto HU. PPP is a comics blog with an academic slant. They’re going to post every Thursday, kicking things off with a Krazy Kat roundtable which will run for several weeks and be cross-posted here and at their old location (where you can also catch up on their archives if you haven’t been over there.

PPP is going to be independently edited, and they’ll have guest posts and roundtables from time to time. You can read more about the blog and contributors here. They’ve posted a farewell which you can also check out.

All posts on PencilPanelPage can be found through the PencilPanelPage category tag. There’s also a tab on our homepage which will show all the PPP posts.

Qiana Whitted, who’s written for us occasionally, is a regular on PPP, so we’re psyched to have her contributing more regularly. We’re also thrilled to welcome Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, Michael A. Johnson, and Adrielle Mitchell.

So check back Thursday to find the first PPP post, and the start of their Krazy Kat roundtable. Please take a minute when you do to welcome them aboard in comments!

And thank you to Jacob Canfield for making the adjustments to our site so PPP can fit in comfortably.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Susan Kirtley on hating Betty and Veronica.

Bert Stabler has Frederic Wertham decapitate Art Spiegelman, Scott McCloud, and others.

Ng Suat Tong on pro-KKK outsider art.

Ng Suat Tong on how even comics critics don’t care about comics criticism.

Alex Buchet continues his prehistory of the superhero with a discussion of the Superman and Superman.

Me on Michael DeForge and how comics aren’t for kids anymore.

Shonté Daniels on racial difference and cosplaying.

Chris Gavaler on Age of Bronze and comic book gods.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

On Salon I wrote about Amazon’s censorship of erotic ebooks.

I also talked about the Salon piece on HuffPost Live, so this is your chance to see me live and stuttering. Selena Kitt was also interviewed, and is less stuttery and more awesome.

At the Atlantic I talked about

—Gloria Steinem as a Disney Princess

—the Tea Party and the virtues of petty jealousy.

— Joss Whedon’s not very impressive speech about the word “feminist.”

At the Chicago Reader I reviewed/recommended Julia Serano’s great new book Excluded on making feminist and queer communities more inclusive. Buy it at once!

At Splice Today I talk about when to write for free and when not to.
 
Other Links

James Romberger interviews Frank Santoro about his graphic novel Pompeii.

Anna March on making fatherhood a choice.

Tom Spurgeon interviews Jeet Heer.

Notorious Phd on the Daily Mail profiling young female historians.

Amanda Hess interviews Melissa Gira Grant about sex work.

Tim Hodler’s response to crit of tcj and the fanta kickstarter. Brief but worth reading.

Sam Riedel on DC’s new video game crapola.

Alex Pareene on racist old men.

A nice piece about early Grendel.

You’re a Dismembered Meme, Charlie Brown

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Michael DeForge wants you to know that comics aren’t just for kids anymore.

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The cover of DeForge’s Incinerator is a bland desecration of comics past. Snoopy’s instantly recognizable backside suffers a decontextualizing detournment, transformed into a torso for the wrong bald-headed kid walking through a typically scrungy alt comics landscape, his tail a bulbous, inexpressive phallus between legs lifted with jaunty incongruity above the junk and debris. Bleak plant-like and rock-like globs ooze at stochastic intervals, the stripped-down iconic style suggesting the world of Peanuts determinedly uglified by underground grunge.

The adultification, not to say adulteration, of Peanuts is a familiar alt-comics trope. Chris Ware and Dan Clowes tend to try to capture Schulz’s rhythms and then layer on sex, drugs, scat, and other supposed markers of maturity. DeForge, refreshingly, goes for a more blatant approach.
 

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The sad, anatomically challenged amalgamation is set upon by a gang of college students; weaponized maturity mugs the beloved icon of childhood,leaving it groaning in a ditch. The torso has to be taken to a vet while the rest of the sorry creature goes to a hospital. Separated, the beagle body dies, leaving only that bald-headed kid, suffused with pathos.
 

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Rather than the Schulz’s grass-level camera, we’re here treated to a crazy look down; a god’s eye view if god were stuck up there with the knick-knacks on the teetering top of a bookshelf. Or, perhaps, we’re looking down at the comics page itself; the sophisticated adults with the book of childhood spread out before us, distant and oddly angled, too small to fall into. We stroke our chin with the analyst in the chair, seeing the mundane neuroses in the formerly fanciful images.

The de-beagled hero goes through his alt comics paces, attending group therapy, reveling in nostalgia for the comic icons of his childhood,
 

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participating in a tender romance. On the final page, the beagle torso, like all those childhood pamphlets, is chucked in an incinerator. The image before it burns is of the girlfriend in dominatrix garb whipping the naked protagonist as he barks. The innocent goofiness of childhood is chucked for sexual perversion. Get rid of that doofy tale and you can see the penis which was hidden there all along.
 

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It’s certainly possible to see this as an absurdist Fort Thunder satire of the alt-comics and underground obsession with Peanuts, with being grown up, and with the conflation of the two — artsy hipster tripped out weirdos mocking the differently literal immature maturities of Chris Ware and R. Crumb. But it’s also possible to see Incinerator as a kind of avuncular celebration of those immature maturities; a humorous, self-aware, nostalgia for other folks’ nostalgia, and for the role it’s played in the development of comics past.
 

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Growing up, trying new things, is energizing. The Rorschach-blot-feces lunch forms an interesting pattern, it’s very repulsiveness an ironic attraction. Adulthood is still what’s on offer, but an adulthood less bleakly blank than Ware’s or Clowe’s, in no small part because it sees Ware and Clowes as comfortingly familiar predecessors. Thus, adulthood here means building on Schulz’s absurdity (and Clowes’ and Ware’s) rather than on his (or their) existential despair. It means using Peanuts, and Peanuts’ successors, as visual tropes rather than as a blueprint. Adulthood becomes an at least intermittently pleasing agglomeration; lack of integration, the loss of the coherent circumscribed world of childhood, becomes its own pleasure. The lost thing provokes not just nostalgia, but joy at the missing piece. If Lacan’s child looks in the mirror and feels celebratory at the illusory image of an integrated self, DeForge’s adult looks at the comic and feels celebratory at the illusory image of a haphazard collage cyborg, the aging self as bits and pieces of one’s own past.
 

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Part of that delightful adult collage, it seems, is the image of a woman. One of the female college students in the crowd at the beginning of the story later becomes our protagonist’s rom/com, Jeff Brown sweetie, and finally his dominating mistress.
 

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That flaccid arm across her shoulder contrasts with the cruel, stark phallic trees framing the hearts which seem less like a vibrant expression of love than like de rigeur filligree tacked up to the moire background. This is not a story, but the garbled image of a story; not love but the parodic potency of recognizing parodic lack of potency. The girlfriend, as marauder or sweetie or dominatrix, never speaks. Unlike Schulz’s Lucy, or Sally, or Marcy, or Peppermint Patty, she has no tale of her own. The protagonist’s self is the past, but the woman’s self is simply image, signalling various comfortably denuded narratives of coherence: teen rebellion, love, sex. The silent, faceless Snoopy is discarded, the silent, many-faced female is picked up with new arms. The one coherent attribute of adulthood is a recognition of absurdity. All the rest, no matter how soaked in sentiment — be it comics, woman, torso, or heart — is just a part of the caducous bricolage.

Utilitarian Review 11/2/13

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On HU

Chris Gavaler on Carrie, Jean Grey, and misogynist apocalypse.

Me on The English Teacher and why, despite its claims, it isn’t really set in my hometown of Kingston, PA.

Ng Suat Tong on the Trigan Empire, history and fascism.

Benjamin Rogers on fall comics from Hic&Hoc.

Me on the regency romance as feminist utopia in novels by Pam Rosenthal and Cecelia Grant.

Kimball Anderson on bodies and selves in Dollhouse and Kaiba.

Chris Gavaler on Captain America and the war on terror.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about:

—12 Years a Slave and historical accuracy.

—how strict copyright laws hurt educational materials.

At Splice I wrote about

—Valerie June’s phenomenal Pushin’ Against a Stone. Best album of the year.

—Jonathan Bernstein and why the best political pundits don’t know what they’re talking about.
 
Other Links

Tessie McMillan Cottom on why poor people “waste” money on luxury goods.

Julia Serano on why bisexual people don’t reinforce the gender binrary.

The Regency as Feminist Utopia

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A week or so back I wrote a piece for Salon in which I talked about the way in which self-publishing and ebook erotica has fit into and challenged romance genre themes and conventions. In the discussion, I talked about Janice Radway’s classic 1984 study Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.

I’ll admit, I hadn’t quite realized how controversial Radway’s study is. Romance readers, it turns out, hate it, arguing that it’s condescending, simplistic, and blinkered in its narrow anthropological focus on one small group of romance readers. They also are infuriated by Radway’s suggestion that romance provides women with a compensatory escape from unsympathetic husbands and lives stifled by patriarchy. Pam Rosenthal added that she was “pissed re use of Radway cuz it ignores a generation of feminist-inflected romance discussion since then.”

In the course of the twitter conversation, Janine Ballard recommended a couple of romance novels that she thought might challenge my view of the genre (and perhaps make me more skeptical of Radway.) Two of the books she suggested (both regency romances) were Cecelia Grant’s “A Lady Awakened” and Pam Rosenthal’s “The Slightest Provocation.” So, having read both (and enjoyed both, with reservations) I thought I’d talk a little about ways in which they do, in fact, seem to dovetail with Radway’s discussion, and ways in which they don’t.
 

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The most intriguing part of Radway’s argument, to me, is her suggestion that romance novels are an expression of a desire for nuturance which, she suggests, is often denied to women in patriarchal society. Using the theories of Nancy Chodorow, Radway argues that romance novels imagine men who, beneath a hard, distant exterior, are actually soft and nurturing. Romantic heroes are mothers in disguise.

Both Rosenthal’s “The Slightest Provocation” and Grant’s “A Lady Awakened” fit this theory surprisingly well. Or at least, both take care to link mothering and romantic love. Grant’s protagonist, Martha Russell, has at the beginning of the novel just lost her drunken husband. Without an heir, her home will go to his brother, known among the servants for having raped multiple housemaids. In order to prevent that, Martha engages Theo Mirkwood, a neighboring sensualist exiled to Sussex by his father, to sleep with her every day in hopes of producing a heir that can be fobbed off as her former husband’s. Theo, then, is not so much a lover as a mother-maker, and Martha’s emotional isolation is specifically tied not just to her lack of love for men, but to her barrenness. Anxieties around mother-child are paired and mirrored in the anxieties around lovers, so that both are solved simultaneously — with Martha able to nurture a child when she finds herself able to allow Theo to nurture her.

The plot of Rosenthal’s “The Slightest Provocation” doesn’t deal with mothering so obviously. But its first scene makes the connection very strongly, as Emilia, the Marquessa of Rowen, bonds with her first baby and simultaneously regrets her husbands lack of affection. In a passage that (given the rest of the text) is pretty clearly supposed to be erotic, Emilia prepares to breastfeed, noting that “She felt the most remarkable sensation in her breasts, which had grown hard, and moist at their tips.” But then a wet nurse comes and takes the baby away, in part so that Emilia will be ready to have another baby (a back-up heir) in short order. “The milk and her tears dried up, and her menses started again a few weeks later.” Again, the thwarting of motherhood and the thwarting of romantic love are linked. Romance means mothering; a loving man becomes loving mother. The delight is in the gender mix-up, as Rosenthal makes clear in a remarkable passage.

Confusion, befuddlement, sweet sea of swirling distraction; she couldn’t tell (didn’t know and obviously was in no position to say) whether she was moving or sensing, doing or done to, lover or beloved or both at once.

Was it possible to be both at once? Could one sort it out, separate the each from the both of them, find the beginning or skip ahead to the ending? While the snake swallowed its tail, beyond words or thought, where there was only the endless circle, the ring of pure light, the blank low sound of ohhhh, words faded to humming, ecstatic spiral of sensation? After heroine and hero have pushed and pulled, teased and taunted, come and gone and come and come again, to this quick, bright, simultaneous and happy confusion, bonds loosed and boundaries no longer distinct? Where does one pick up the story again, the then and now, he and she, lover and beloved?

Radway, paraphrasing Chodorow, argues that romances are based in the fact that women, unlike men, “possess quite permeable ego-boundaries…their adult internal psychic world…is a complex relational constellation that continuously demands the balnce and completion provided by other individuals.” As a description of all women everywhere, that seems pretty reductive, but as a gloss on what’s happening in that passage from Rosenthal, it works nicely. A utopia of pleasure in which ego is lost and relation becomes the self, a “ring of pure light” which seems like it could describe birth as easily as sex, with “boundaries” between selves “no longer distinct.”

Radway tends to see this imagined feminine utopia of love, interrelation, and mothering, as compensatory — it is as a way to escape from an unpleasant patriarchal reality in which men are not caring and women are not nurtured. This, too, could be seen as fitting both Grant and Rosenthal’s books — though in a more consciously feminist vein than Radway proposes. That’s because both authors are quite explicit in presenting love and relation as a solution to, or antidote to, patriarchy.

In “Awakened,” for example, Theo, the wastrel, finds his sense of duty and ambition through his love of Martha — and that sense of duty and ambition makes him, not a masterful hierarchical patriarch, but an egalitarian leader by consensus.

When had he become this man, as easy about command as though he were born to it? He gave respect in extravagant handfuls, never fearing he might diminish his own store — and indeed he did not. The more he deferred to the expertise of others, the farther they would follow him down any path. One could see that in the way people stepped up to undertake this or that part of his plan.

In complement, Martha’s love of Theo leads her out of her widowed isolation; he gets her neighbors to call on her, much to their pleasure and hers. In her troubles he tells her “You have more allies than you know, if you would only learn to trust them” — which is a prelude to the entire community uniting against the dastardly Mr. Russell and forcing him to give up his desire to take possession of Martha’s house. Love is not just an individual troth, but a communal good, which binds men and women, masters and servants, laborers and landowners — and banishes evil, here figured deliberately as the patriarchal monstrosity of the rapist.

“The Slightest Provocation” is just as sweeping. Set in a period of famine and labor unrest in England, the love of Mary and Kit prevents bloodshed and thwarts the British government’s patriarchal schemes to foment revolution in the interest of passing repressive legislation. Mary’s long delayed declaration of passion “My husband, my darling my only love—” is issued as Kit and she are in the middle of an elaborate ruse to dissuade a number of laborers from marching on London, where they will surely be arrested and perhaps eventually hanged. Love saves lives and bridges class — a truth underlined even more emphatically at the end of the novel when we learn that Kit is the illegitimate son of Lady Emilia’s carpenter and worker, Mr. Greenlee. The novel that began with Emilia barren of milk and love ends with her and her long-time working class lover happy in the knowledge that their son, Kit, has found happiness as well.

I’d argue, then, that Rosenthal and Grant don’t contradict Radway’s analysis so much as they complete it. Radway, again, saw the romance as a kind of idealized feminine vision created in the teeth of male reality; a fantasy in which the barren partitions of patriarchy could dissolve in a nurturant bi-gendered relational egolessness. Rosenthal and Grant certainly respond to that vision — but they, like Radway, draw out its political subtext. In these novels, the 19th century setting, portrayed in loving realistic detail, is exciting precisely because its rigid hierarchies are so ripe for overthrow — the patriarchy bending and flowing into sweet, soft communal affection. The purpose of the Regency is to save the Regency for, and with, feminism. If Radway had written romances rather than anthropological treatises, you have to imagine that these are the sorts of romances she would write.
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While I think Radway would love these books, though, I can’t exactly say that I did. Both of them were well-written. Grant in particular, is a masterful stylist. This description of one of Martha and Theo’s first sexual encounters, for example.

Her hands fell at random places on his back and stayed there, passively riding his rhythm like a pair of dead fish tossed by the sea. Or rather, one dead fish. The other still curled tight, like a brittle seashell with its soft sensate creature shrunk all the way inside.

That’s lovely, and also bitingly funny — the sort of thing Jane Austen might have written if she’d been willing to follow her characters into bed. And then there’s this scene, again in bed:

“My mind rules my body. Not the other way round…..”

“I’ll pleasure your mind as well. I’ll speak of land management the whole time.”

“You’re depraved beyond my worst conjectures.

The joke is, she really is obsessed with land management. I laughed out loud at that. Why can’t rom-coms ever have banter that witty? For that matter, why exactly is romance so universally considered to be crap while Elmore Leonard or John LeCarre or J.K. Rowling or for that matter Jonathan Lethem are supposed to be taken seriously? Grant’s prose is better than all those folks’, I’m pretty sure.

At first, as I was zipping through the ebook, I was planning to buy everything Grant had written and read it ravenously. I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about Rosenthal, but still I enjoyed her high spirits, her forthright sensuality, and her sly meta-moments. There’s a very clever passage in which Peggy, a servant girl muses about the pleasures of following the lives of the nobility, and thinks about how her sisters ; “real-life problems are dull and intractable,” she notes. “Peggy didn’t see why you shouldn’t get a little amusement from people whose lives remained cozy and comfortable…” A neater apologia for romance couldn’t be penned.

So, if there’s so much to like about these books, why the reservations?

In two words, the end. The end. The cheerfully feminist, sweepingly optimistic end.

Don’t get me wrong; I know romances end with the main characters happy. I’m not against that. On the contrary, I really, really liked ramrod-straight, censorious Martha and dissipated but puppy-dog eager Toby, and Rosenthal’s Martha and Kitt as well. I wanted them to get together; I wanted them to be happy. But does everybody need to get a happy ending? The eloped couple stopped before they do anything rash; the silent, bitter former maid given her moment to confront and overawe her rapist; evil plots foiled; every couple united; the very cows singing with content. “Lady Awakened” won’t even allow any deception, no matter how prudent, to mar the march of aggressively joyful virtuousness, and so the book’s long, exquisite representation of reticence is released in a single artless confessional belch.

Again, I think I understand the appeal. The vision of love uniting everyone, the idea that romance can usher in not just personal but political utopia, is part of both books’ central message. But, for me at least, it’s just too much. My belief in the love is supposed to guarantee the utopia, but instead the unlikelihood of the utopia undermines my belief in the characters and their affection. The world just doesn’t change that easily; pretending that it does knocks me out of the fantasy and makes me depressed. Elizabeth and Darcy are real in part because Charlotte Lucas and Elizabeth’s ninny of a sister are there to show that, yes, this is the world I know, where stupid people stay stupid and people have to make compromises, and not everything turns out for the best for everyone. But in “Lady Awakened” and “The Slightest Provocation”, utopia eats the characters. There, in the steady, omnipresent light, they cast no shadows, turned into flat, smiling ghosts, lobotomized advertising images selling equality and love with a blank, depersonalized cheer.

Complaining because a utopia is unrealistic is a bit pointless, I guess. And of course you could conclude that I’m not the intended audience here and leave it at that. But the thing is, I want to be the intended audience. I want the happy ending. For that matter, I find the feminist utopia appealing. I want more bitter in my sweet not because I disdain the genre pleasures, but because I crave them. Maybe, after all, these romances could use a little more of Radway’s pessimism; a little more of her second wave view of patriarchy as a bleak, not easily movable weight. I fear I need a touch of sadness and despair in order to access the joy.