Tag Archives: romance

Voices from the Archives: Miriam Libicki on Lost Girls

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Cartoonist Miriam Libicki wrote for HU for a while…but this comment was from before she’d come on board. She’s commenting here on my review of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls. I’ve left punctuation as is.

wow. i was reluctant to read another review of yours, cause so often they just make me feel lousy. but you were so spot on on the points of lost girls which disappointed me, some of which i hadn’t realized myself.

i went in expecting to like it, as moore is responsible for one of my most reliable sexual fantasies (invisible man ravishing his way through the girls’ school? hot. & i never thought of it before, but it could be seen as a perfect mixture of a common hetero male fantasy (lots of sex with lots of interchangeable nubile young chix) & a common hetero female fantasy (sex with a faceless/invisible partner, so that it is all about your body & sensations)), but i was vaguely annoyed &… bored through lost girls, a lot more often then i was turned on.

i knew some of what i didn’t like was the interchangeability of all the parts, & the fact that the characters were so secondary to their sex scenes. i didn’t put my finger on the “women’s porn is about relationships” (to totally overgeneralize), but i think it’s true.

i don’t read romance novels, cause the ones i was exposed to were badly written & had gender roles that were distasteful to me. i am occasionally & guiltily a big sucker for chick-flicks of the romantic comedy type, & i’ve really enjoyed some slash fic.

much of slash fic is about relationships. even if it’s gonzo fucking, the fact that you’re supposed to know who the characters are & how they interact in canon, makes it emotional. & my favourite slash author happens to be a sexually frustrated lesbian, whose stories are all about straight guys longing with great longing for their straight best friends.

so i think you’re also right, & i hadn’t considered before, that unrequited longing is a big turn on (for women, or at least women who are me). that’s why i started off really liking alice, when she seemed like an elderly dyke who could only look at young women & verbally seduce herself. when she started having sex with everything, she became a lot more boring.

the lecturing got me down, too, but it wasn’t as frustrating as why i was so often bored by the sex stuff (yes, it was pretty male-y in the way that penetrative sex was the only sex worth having… i actually dig girl-on-girl, but, you know, more of the dykes to watch out for variety). now i feel like i understand it all better.

so after all that tmi, thanks!

 

Romance and Convention

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The battle against conventionality is, perhaps, always a losing proposition. If you lose, you lose. If you win, on the other hand, you simply become a new orthodoxy… which is perhaps even worse.

As a case in point, consider E.M. Forster’s “A Room With a View.” Published in 1908, the book belabors frozen Victorian pieties with a will. The moral center of the novel, Mr. Emerson, is a working-class atheist who refuses to let his child be baptised — with a pagan enthusiasm he extols the virtues of passion and truth and love, while around him clergymen waffle and bluster and cover over pure emotion with the dead scum of starched collars and gospel cant. Lucy, our heroine, is a typical, uninteresting girl whose great soul is revealed only through the incongruous enthusiasm with which she attacks Beethoven and Schumann at the piano. Art and true passion go together, which is why there are no artists who have fucked up their love lives. In any case, Lucy does not fuck up hers, and against the wishes of her family and friends and the whole of society, she takes the hand of Mr. Emerson’s son, George, and has “a feeling that in gaining the man she loved, she would gain something for the whole world.” Life, after all, is a struggle between the truth of individual passion and the conservative constriction of tradition — in being true to her heart, Lucy strikes a blow for all hearts everywhere, and brings merit into the world.

And, indeed, Lucy does change everything — or, at least, she’s part of a change in everything. Who now would argue against marriage for love, even to a middle-manager? Certainly not the creators of *The African Queen*, the Bogart/Hepburn vehicle filmed forty years after *A Room With a View.*

*African Queen* is set far, far from England, in German East Africa at the opening of World War I. Still, there are similarities. In *African Queen*, as in Forster, parsons don’t come off so well; Samuel Sayer (Robert Morley) is onscreen just long enough to show that he’s a blustering, envious, intellectual nonentity, capable of pathos only because of the utter failure of his life. His mousy sister, Rose (Hepburn) quickly shows she’s worth ten of him — not by playing the piano, but by the improbable enthusiasm with which she guides a boat through the rapids. That boat belongs to Charlie Allnut (Bogart), on whom Rose’s passion quickly alights, in despite (of course) of religious strictures and all hidebound convention.

Such is the eternal triumph of romance over convention. Except…well, if the triumph has reached the point where it’s eternal, isn’t it a convention itself? Our heroine’s unexpected depths — whether it’s the intensity of her Beethoven, or her love of boating, or (as in Pretty Woman) her love of opera or (as in Twilight) her vampiric superpowers — surely, at some point, those unexpected depths cease to be quite so unexpected and become a rather tiresome trope? When does individual passion become a claustrophobic expectation in itself?

In The African Queen, certainly, the romance between Rose and Charlie seems rooted in social expectations. Through the early part of the film, the most notable thing about the relationship between Hepburn and Bogart is the almost preternatural lack of chemistry. Both are certainly likable, but there’s nothing in their body language that suggests intimacy or even interest. And, indeed, why should there be interest? Rose and Charlie are likable, but as romantic partners they both leave a lot to be desired. Charlie is a drunk and a layabout. Rose is almost frighteningly repressed — so much so that she urges Charlie to sail his boat downstream to kill a bunch of Germans basically on the grounds that she’s bored.(Rose doesn’t even know what World War I is about when she concocts her plan.)

Of course, Rose’s love is supposed to redeem Charlie’s seedier side, and the attack on the Germans is meant to be heroic rather than pointlessly bloodthirsty. But the “supposed to” ends up sounding awfully, uncomfortably loud. The scene post-coitus where Rose struggles to figure out how to address Mr. Allnut, whose name she doesn’t even know, is cute, and Hepburn, with a mixture of embarrassment and affection, sells it. Still it ends up being perhaps a bit more revealing than the filmmakers intended. These two people don’t know each other; they don’t have much of anything in common. A relationship between them is probably, from any even vaguely realistic perspective, going to turn to shit as soon as Charlie finds the wherewithal to get his hands on a fairly constant supply of liquor. Given all that, why do they have to get together again?

Of course, they have to get together because they’re the stars and it’s a romance and that’s what happens in a romance. That’s genre and if you don’t like the genre, you probably shouldn’t be in the theater. But at the same time, it’s hard not to see the African Queen and feel like it, and many more like it, have pretty much done for poor Forster. Unsuitability in African Queen is now a feature, not a bug, as far as convention is concerned. The clergy are barely a joke; passion is so thoroughly awesome that it needs to be externalized by blowing up boatloads of Germans. In this context, Lucy isn’t following her heart so much as her genre predestination. If Forster really wanted her to show her unique individuality, he would have had her join a nunnery…or, perhaps even more shockingly, marry the supercilious Cecil and have it turn out he wasn’t such a bad egg after all. As it is, *A Room With a View* ends up feeling like a lengthy sermon preached to the converted…and, for that matter, to the conventional.

Reality, bah. Give me soaps!

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Imagine my joy that a thread containing a great many generalizations about romance and soap opera offers analysis of only two categories of texts: literary fiction by men (mostly Proust and Updike) and Marvel comics (albeit ones that are, loosely, “open to female perspectives.”)

Sigh.

I think this happened because people, in trying not to denigrate soaps and romances, were focusing on the elements they have in common with things that really aren’t romance or soaps. But in the process, it feels a little like the actual things that makes those genres feel the way they do, the things that make them emotionally appealing, are lost. Romantic situations do not a soap opera make — if I really want Robert Scorpio, Mr. Darcy will just not be good enough! Certainly romantic (i.e., dating, marriage, non-casual sex) and domestic situations are commonplace in the romance genre and the soap opera genre. But just having romantic or domestic situations at the center of a narrative, to me, is not enough to place it in those genres, and certainly not to actively gender the work female in the way those genres generally are.

That’s because what makes romance and soap opera “feminine” isn’t simply that they’re about romantic situations, or even that they’re about domestic situations in the broader sense. What makes them “feminine” is that they’re preoccupied with emotional motivations, more than just emotional experiences, and in that respect they mimic typical and stereotypical intrafemale conversation, including but not limited to gossip. (It’s circular, of course, because familiarity with these genres has shaped and colored and affected and even defined intra-female conversation, but nobody is claiming gender is not a social construct…)

In American soap operas, especially since the 1960s, a character’s motivations are generally multifaceted and involve a lot of duplicity, suspiciousness, victimization, competition, manipulation, machination, and whatever emotional anything can be thrown in to make human interaction complex, confusing, and melodramatic. (I don’t have the sense telenovelas are much different.) But the narratives are structured not to make the viewer care, but to give the viewer room to analyze and sort out those complex and dramatic motivations — what makes this character feel and act this way, why is she plotting, are there secrets in her past, is he telling the truth? The long duration of the narrative isn’t about building emotional relationships with characters — that’s an epiphenomenon of the intimate view of their lives. It’s about revealing those motivations slowly so that there’s more time to analyze and speculate about them, more time to gossip with yourself and other fans of the show about the characters. I think you could make a good case that the reason soap operas are vastly less popular now than they used to be is that women, even women who stay home with kids, are far less homosocial, so they have less opportunity for (or interest in) the types of conversations that used to circulate around soap opera plots. Soap opera is a deeply _social_ genre.

Romance is just a capsule from that, a solved problem. It’s not interactive — it’s fantasy with an idealized happy ending — but it’s still about motivation. Sometimes the framework focuses on sexual attraction and other times on social attraction (or social obstacles to attraction), but the emotional kernel of a typical formula romance novel is a shift in the man’s motivation from self-serving to heroine-serving, or in both main characters’ motivation from individual-serving to cohesive couple unit-serving. There it’s the repetitive pleasure of a single, longed-for, idealized motivation, rather than the sustained drawing out that you get in soap opera, but motivation is still the emotional heart of the genre.

The point of BOTH genres is peeling the onion of those motivations and establishing not social familiarity with or even affection for the character, but the kind of psychological intimacy that gives you a reliable gauge about why a person behaves a certain way. That is not a side effect; it is not a tool for effective characterization — that psychological intimacy is an end in itself.

I don’t really buy that Jaime Hernandez has been trying to write “female genre fiction” all these years, although it definitely seems to be genre of some kind. But when it’s described like this, from Dan’s review:

“In taking us through lives, deaths, and near-fatalities, ”TLB” and “Return For Me” encapsulates Maggie’s emotional history as it moves from resignation (Maggie fails to purchase a garage, i.e. fails to fulfill her dreams) to memories of loss, to sudden violence (a theme in this story) to love and contentment.”

I really don’t expect genre at all. Maybe a kind of pulp realism…or perhaps it is closer, in its deep structure, to this “romance” you all see in Marvel comics, which is maybe a different and less-well-codified subgenre of romance.

Jaime’s work, though, to me in my limited experience and from Dan’s description, seems much more concerned with capturing emotional experience — getting the emotional experience of the character down on the page in a powerful and compelling and convincing enough way that it invokes a connection to that emotional experience, and a sympathy and affection for the character, in a reader. It’s not that the characters don’t have motivations, of course they do — but their motivations are presented pretty straighforwardly, in the service of making the character make sense and seem real. The humanity of the character is the point. Believing in the characters is the reward.

I don’t knock that kind of emotional theater, but just to be clear — that ain’t romance or soap opera. It doesn’t satisfy anything comparable to the things that urge me to go consume some conventionally gendered-female genre material (or the similar “literary romances.”) I go to female genre material either for a safe and predictable space to indulge thinking about the social complexity of emotional motivation (without the real-world drama that ensues when you overscrutinize your real-life friends’ motivations) or for idealized fantasy of a minimal-drama, happy-ending world. One reason I am, generally speaking, not in the least bit interested in more realist work, including Jaime’s but also, say Theodore Dreiser’s, is that I do not need a book, comic or otherwise, to provide me emotional experiences or to present to me what is real in the world. All I need to do is call my girlfriends for a nice, long chat — the ones with babies in intensive care, brain-damaged adult children, elderly dependents, cancer-ridden siblings, failing or complicated marriages, miscarriages, unfulfilling jobs, no jobs, frustrated ambitions, low self-esteem, high cholesterol, and houses they can’t afford. They — and their low-drama compatriates with good jobs, great legs, smiling children, couture-filled closets, beautiful spouses, stellar wine cellars and glossy educations — are much more real than anything Jaime, or any other realist writer has to offer on the truth-in-narrative front.

So when Dan gushes that “They’re real,” the only response I really have is “why, then, wouldn’t my time (and yours) be better spent caring for the actual people in our actual lives who have similar or worse problems?”

Now, I can absolutely respect a realist-to-melodramatic book that offers rare, meaningful wisdom on WHY those experiences happened to people — and by “rare and meaningful” I mean some insight into the social and psychological conditions that shaped those experiences that a bright, socially adept, adult female wouldn’t have already gained from the routine business of conducting her social and familial life. I respect Dreiser for that reason (even though I have no interest in ever reading Sister Carrie again if I live to be 1000.) I need something extra-real to make a book worth the distraction from my actual real life.

Which isn’t to say that Jaime’s work does not do those things, doesn’t have anything extra-real. It’s just that the extra-real stuff is what I’d have liked the TCJ reviews, and discussions of this kind of art in general, to pinpoint and grapple with. Emotional verisimilitude and compelling characters and being real are just the bare minimum I expect of competent fiction. It’s not what gets you praised; it’s what gets you published. So given that, Mr Critic, what makes the experiences of these “real” characters so unique in the world or so idiosyncratic a representation of the social tapestry that it’s worth my time having fictional experiences with them when I could be having real ones with my family and friends (or having fictional ones that offer something really artistically challenging or intellectually ambitious, independent of all the emotional schtuff)?

That’s a question that, for my taste, isn’t answered — by critics or by fiction itself — nearly often enough.
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Update by Noah: This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.