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Just over twenty years ago Mills & Boon published

the first title in our new series of romances which we've chosen to celebrate 1992, a special year of European unity. We're sure that you'll [...] look forward to a novel each month which has that unique flavour of romance, European-style! (Editor's introduction to Steele)

The Euromance series lasted for over a year and while it did it took the reader to some European countries which rarely feature in romance novels. Charlotte Lamb's Deadly Rivals (1995), set partly in Greece, wasn't in the series but there's a short scene, in which the heroine discusses nationalism and the EU with a couple of secondary characters, that reminded me of the Euromance's pro-European attitude:

‘[...] If there is one thing we Greeks know about, it is ships. We were sailing the seven seas before the British stopped using coracles!’ Christos was half joking, half serious.

‘Chauvinist!’ teased Olivia and he laughed, a little flushed but defiant.

‘Well, why not? We all have our national pride, don’t we? You can’t say Britain doesn’t!’

‘True,’ she said seriously. ‘But we’re all Europeans now. I can’t wait for the day when we stop talking about our national pasts and start looking to our shared future.’

Christos grimaced at her. ‘Maybe we should but whether or not we ever will is anybody’s guess. Old habits die hard. I think the tribal instinct in all of us is the real problem. It’s in our genetic blueprint; we can’t argue ourselves out of it.’

‘Argue yourselves out of what?’ a sharp voice asked from behind him. [...]

‘Olivia and I were just talking politics,’ said Christos cheerfully. ‘I guess you could call it that. She’s a strong European – I’m not so sure it is going to work, politically.’

‘Economics is what the common market is all about, Gerald coldly informed him, his tone, his manner, leaving no room for discussion. ‘And it has to work, for all our sakes. [...]’ (98-99)

It's more than a little bittersweet to read in 2012 given that:

Greece has spent the past two years on a financial life-support that has kept its government ticking over, but which has destroyed its economy and pushed its entire democracy to the brink of collapse. [...] The price of the severest austerity programme ever imposed on postwar western Europe has been severe. Greece's economy is in severe depression [...]. Unemployment has skyrocketed, with one in two young people out of work.

Extreme policies in; extremist politics out. From being a rump just three years ago, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn now effectively polices parts of Athens and has infiltrated the official police force. (Editorial, The Guardian)

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Editorial. "Greece's austerity: democracy tested to destruction." The Guardian. Thursday 8 November 2012.

Lamb, Charlotte. Deadly Rivals. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 1995.

Steele, Jessica. Hungarian Rhapsody. Richmond, Surrey: Mills & Boon, 1992.

The EU flag was made available for download by EUROPA. The image of the Greek flag was made available under a Creative Commons licence and was created by Philly boy92.

'[...] you aren’t going to let me out of it.’

‘Like Pearl White tied to the railway lines?’ He gave his rather grating laugh. ‘Always at the last moment she is released from bondage, eh? I may not be a hero in a white stetson, moiya, but I’m not altogether a villain – won’t you believe that?’ (Winspear 65)

Romance heroes certainly can't all be classified as "villains" but there's no shortage of those who, to put it mildly, could be described as "not altogether a villain": such a hero may use a heroine as a pawn in a subtle plan to gain revenge, he may be an assassin or a morally ambiguous paranormal creature, he may rape or "forcibly seduce" the heroine. So why would a reader be drawn to such a character? Richard Keen, Monica L. McCoy, Elizabeth Powell have some theories about why

rooting for the bad guy is not as difficult to understand as it appeared at first glance. There are a plethora of reasons among psychological theories to explain why normal people occasionally find themselves rooting for the villain instead of the hero. (144)

1) The fundamental attribution error:

If a mysterious stranger appears from out of nowhere and attacks a character we know and love, it is likely that we will make the fundamental attribution error. We will assume that he is a bad man. However, the villains we root for are generally not strangers to us; we know a great deal about them—from narration, from flashbacks, or because they talk to themselves and we get to listen. [...] We know a great deal about how the situation is influencing him. It allows us to be as kind to him as we generally are to ourselves. (131)

Given that it's common to find romances in which the reader is expected to be "kind" to the hero, but relatively few in which the heroine has the same villainous tendencies, I wonder if female authors and readers are actually "kinder" when thinking about the actions of heroes than we are to ourselves. Some of the theories outlined later in the essay may help to explain this imbalance.

2) Mere exposure effect:

According to the mere exposure effect, the more often you are exposed to a stimulus, the more you like it (Zajonc 2). This is true for everything from what letters we prefer to our perceptions of other people. [...] Especially relevant to the question at hand, Bukoff and Elman (134) reported that photos that were rated as likeable, neutral, or unlikable, and linked with either positive or negative trait descriptors all received more positive evaluations after participants had been exposed to them repeatedly. Therefore, the original stimulus did not need to be positive for repeated exposure to make the image more appealing. Repeated exposure increased the ratings of all stimuli – even those that were rated as unlikable originally. We would then predict that a villain who becomes familiar to us through repeated exposure would be seen as more favorable. (134)

I can see this effect being a greater influence on the perception of characters in long-running series. The authors give Spike, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as an illustration of how these two effects might work together.

3) What is Beautiful is Good:

The repeated use of physically attractive people to play the role of the villain taps into another basic human tendency—the association of what is beautiful with what is good. In numerous studies, beautiful persons have been given higher ratings on measures of social desirability, intelligence, success, happiness, persuasiveness, and potency, than their less attractive counterparts (Dion, Berscheid, and Walster 285; Gross and Crofton 85; Kassin, Fein and Markus 346). In a study by Hoffner and Cantor (66), physical attractiveness, along with strength and humor, was one of the best predictors of which characters were liked.

In traditional media, the protagonist is portrayed as more physically attractive than the antagonist, leading audiences to prefer him (Sanders 147). In current media, the protagonist of the story is also often the bad guy, such as in the popular Godfather trilogy and the Ocean’s movies. Thus, when attractive villains are cast, we assume they possess more positive qualities than the less attractive good guys in the show, so, unsurprisingly, we prefer them. (135)

To put this in the terms Kyra Kramer and I used in our article about bodies in romance fiction: "As humans, we understand that we have a body; our consciousness is embodied in a physical self. This is the individual body, an 'expectant canvas of human flesh' [...]. Social beliefs are inscribed on the 'expectant canvas' of the body."

The authors add that:

According to a meta-analysis by Eagly et al. (119), physical attractiveness was most strongly related to ratings of social competence, adjustment, potency, and intellectual competence. On the other hand, it was not related to integrity or concern for others. This works out well for the bad guys we root for. Their good looks lead viewers to think of them as smart, socially skilled, and powerful while not necessarily expecting them to be nice. (135-36)

Given that "concern for others" is a common feature of romance heroines (see Vivanco and Kramer for heroines' nurturing behaviours), while intelligence and power are more commonly coded as "masculine" attributes, it would seem likely that beauty would more strongly benefit villainous heroes than villainous heroines. Indeed, quite a lot of "Other Women" in romances are beautiful and their beauty seems to be used to underscore their shallowness, vanity and/or promiscuity. The latter, thanks to the double standard, is judged negatively in women but, depending on the context, may in men be considered an indication of virility.

4) Schemas:

Schemas may have some influence on why we root for bad guys. In most movies, the protagonist is the good guy and usually good prevails in the end. When we have repeated exposure to this type of storyline, we will start to form a schema of this. The schema can then influence future movie experiences due to certain expectations deduced from the schema. Thus, if the good guys are usually the protagonists, then we should root for the protagonist. (136)

It's easy to see how schemas could affect frequent readers of romance novels. We know that the heroine is going to fall in love with the hero and they are going to have a happy ending, so even if a hero initially behaves like a villain, the schema of the romance form encourages us to "root for" him.

5) Aggresive Tendencies:

We propose, at least according to Freud’s approach, that vicariously experiencing aggression and violence in movies, television, and books may serve as an outlet for our aggressive tendencies (i.e., catharsis). In fact, since many violent movies also have sex scenes, you may be meeting both aggressive and sexual needs. (137)

6) Revenge:

Many of the bad guys we love are motivated in one way or another by revenge. [...] Revenge seems to be a stronger motivator for men than for women. [...] Taken together, these studies illustrate why we like bad guys who are seeking revenge. In part, we may identify with and understand their motivation. (138-39)

Romance heroines, on the other hand, seem to have a tendency to make martyrs of themselves and they often readily forgive those who have treated them badly. If revenge is not only "a stronger motivator for men than for women" but also one more closely associated with men, a villainous hero's revenge may make him seem more manly whereas a heroine who acted in the same way might be more likely to be considered devious and lacking in compassion.

7) Bad Boy/Nice Guy:

studies have shown that women seeking long term relationships valued niceness as the most salient characteristic, but niceness was devalued and other characteristics, such as physical attractiveness, became more important if the women were seeking more casual, sexual relationships [...]. The bad guys we root for in movies and on TV are almost universally attractive. Further, most (sane) people probably do not consider fictional characters when making long-term relationship plans. Thus it is easy to see how the driving force behind a fantasy “fling” with a bad guy is his attractiveness and swagger, rather than his niceness. (140)

8) Psychological Reactance

Psychological reactance is an emotional response to restricting rules and regulations. In general, psychological reactance results in increased desirability once that object/person becomes unobtainable. For example, [...] psychological reactance is observed if parents tell their daughter not to date a certain boy, a prohibition which results in the daughter fi nding that boy more attractive.

Psychological reactance can be easily applied to rooting for the bad guy. If, by societal standards, we are not supposed to root for the bad guy, then your freedom to choose whom to root for is constrained by others. Thus, by the definition of psychological reactance, one would find the bad guy more desirable. (140-41)

This presumably means that the more romance readers are criticised for liking to read about romance heroes who are nasty, brutish and anti-feminist, the more those heroes will become a "guilty pleasure."

9) Media Villains Versus Real Villains:

Before closing, we also want to stress that the villains we see in popular culture are often not reflective of real-life villains. Media villains tend to be good looking, intelligent, witty, and sexy. If you ever watch real-life villains on the news or on court television, you will be struck by the fact that they tend not to be at all attractive or charming. In fact, when a real-life villain is appealing, it is almost always given a great deal of media attention because it is an anomaly. It has also been pointed out that the villain in many romance novels and movies attracts the female with their swagger and dangerous persona, only to morph into devoted loving husbands and fathers by the end of the story. Therefore, the woman gets both the excitement of the bad boy and the security of a good man (Pelusi 58). In other words, many of the popular culture villains are more like misunderstood good guys than truly bad guys. (143)

Here, as in 7), the point is made that there is a difference between fiction and reality: it would be unwise to assume that a reader's preferences with regards to romance heroes are an exact match for her preferences outside the pages of a novel.

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Keen, Richard, Monica L. McCoy, and Elizabeth Powell. "Rooting for the Bad Guy: Psychological Perspectives." Studies in Popular Culture 34.2 (2012): 129-148.

Vivanco, Laura and Kyra Kramer. "There Are Six Bodies In This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).

Winspear, Violet. Bride's Lace. London: Mills & Boon, 1984.

The black hat was "Made in the USA by Resistol" and the photograph was provided by Miller Hats under a Creative Commons licence. It features a "3/8" diamond back rattlesnake band with buckle."

Norrey Ford's The Love Goddess (1976) is a novel about an academic. Admittedly, Professor Bart Ransom's research is rather more exciting than mine: he's working on an underwater archaeology site in the Aegean and requires absolute secrecy from his collaborators because the wreck promises to be so important it would attract the attention of "Pirates, hijackers! The word gold could bring them running from all quarters of the earth" (42). My research won't produce any gold or priceless ancient artefacts but there's something about Bart's explanation of how he feels about his work that did strike a chord with me:

“I’m thirty-one next birthday. I need a greally [sic] great exit line. I’m old for this kind of caper, if one does it professionally.”

“Young for everything else.”

“Unfortunately I don’t want anything else. If I make a real killing this time, I might be able to turn my direction without looking back over my shoulder to the sea. I don’t mean a cash reward, though I don’t despise money. I mean -”

“Prestige?”

“I’m as vain as the next man. But no, not entirely vanity. To add something, however small, to the sum of man’s knowledge of man. Think of it, Jacqui, the undersea world is the one great area of exploration left.” (53)

Since literary criticism is hardly as physically demanding as deep sea diving, I don't think I need to start worrying about getting too "old for this kind of caper" but, metaphorically, I feel that popular romance fiction is one of the great areas of exploration left. Yes, it has been studied for several decades, but there's still a huge amount of work to be done. Also, much as Bart fears for the safety of his find and knows that a "violent disturbance of the sea [...] could rob him of his dearest hope" (174), so Crystal Goldman recently warned that, "With no cohesive vision for which items to collect and little justification for fiscally supporting popular romance studies material, vital monographs, papers, and articles are not being preserved by libraries for future researchers’ use and may, indeed, be lost from record entirely." And yes, I do think the study of romance novels will "add something, however small, to the sum of man's [and woman's] knowledge of man [and woman]."

Eric Selinger's been planning a course whose official title is

"The Nature and Culture of Love," [...] My original plan for the course was to reframe my work on popular romance fiction as work about the "culture of love," so that I'd have leeway to bring in films or TV shows, advice books or pop songs, really the whole panoply of love-work out there, now and in the past.

Norrey Ford made her own small contribution to writing about "the nature and culture of love." Her heroine, Jacqui, wonders

What was love? How could she be so sure how she felt about Bart, when she couldn’t even define what love was? Or what hate was, for that matter? Maybe they were much the same, two sides of one complete whole. (170)

One thing Jacqui is sure of, though, is that,

Whatever the mind might say, the body had its own life urge, its own yearning.

Was this how Fenella had been trapped into an unsuitable marriage? A few years ago Hogan must have been a splendid animal, brown and supple. If Fenella had forgotten that marriage was a unity of mind and heart as well as body, nerve, muscle and pulse, that would explain her present unhappy situation. (100)

I wondered how representative these musings might be of the "culture of love" in the period in which Ford was writing, so I turned to Getting Married, a "Family Doctor publication published by the British Medical Association" in 1970. Here's part of what Dr Michael O'Donnell has to say about love:

love poses some pretty tough problems for doctors. Is it, for instance, an infectious disease? Or does it strike down isolated sufferers at random? Does it run a different course in male and female or in young and old? Let's cast a critical medical glance at the diagnosis, nature, and treatment of this strange affliction.

First diagnosis. Having grown up through the years when Hollywood films plumbed depths of banality never since equalled, I cruised into adolescence convinced that diagnosing love was no problem. I wasn't sure what it was but I was certain I'd recognise it when it hit me. When I met Miss Right and our gazes locked across a crowded room, schmaltzy music would swell unmistakably in the background. [...]

Later, when I became a doctor, I set about making a more scientific attack on the problem of diagnosing love. Surely, like any other medical entity, it must have recognisable symptoms and signs. Yet a desperate search through the vast library of words spun around the subject led me only to confusion.

Symptoms were alleged to vary from the traditional: Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I've found you, to the trendy: You turned me on when we got into bed so why not tell me your name, darling. The reported signs were equally baffling: a raised temperature - Sighing like a furnace; mental confusion - Bewitched, bothered and bewildered; absent-mindedness - I left my heart in San Francisco; incipient deafness - There were bells all around and I never heard them ringing; and an oft-reported heightened sensitivity to the effects of the moon, the month of Joon and a sentimental "to on". How can you diagnose that lot?

[...]

Let's try a dogmatic statement and declare that love, like Gaul, can be divided into three parts. Part One, of whose existence there can be little doubt, is pure sexual attraction. Most healthy males, if locked in a room with a celebrated public sex-symbol, could soon convince themselves that they had fallen in some sort of love with her - if only to justify to themselves the hectic physical activity in which they would be likely to engage. Similarly, the adolescent girl who years for nothing more than to be crushed in the arms of the latest hairy pop singer to twang his guitar in her direction, has caught a nasty infection of Part One.

Dignifying sexual attraction with the title "love" tends to raise the hackles of certain earnest ladies and gents. But I suspect much of their disapproval arises from envy. Most of them have reached an age when opportunities for even vicarious excitement grows depressingly limited [...].

Part One, after all, is the segment of love that makes the world go round or, at least keeps it populated while it's spinning. It is also an important ingredient of that complicated mix that sustains one of the great mysteries of existence - how two people can live together for a lifetime without actually murdering one another.

Love's second component, Part Two, tends to take over where Part One leaves off. It's got something to do with companionship, a sharing of interest, sympathy, and respect. [...] Its gradual and sustaining development explains the success of many marriages "arranged" for purely social, financial, or religious reasons. Part One alone tends to lead to brief spectacular firework displays. When combined with Part Two it can lead to what marriage guidance counsellors like to call "a happy long term relationship".

Part Three is a more ephemeral entity - a magic distillation of anguish and ecstasy, of great misery and even greater happiness, that not only turns timid creatures into brave adventuring heroes, but often reduces the most competent and confident of citizens to anxious dithering worriers. It is the rocket fuel of poets, painters and musicians and has, in its time, driven men to murder, madness, and the slaying of dragons. Part Three, in short, is the cause of all the incomputable symptoms: the head-in-the-clouds effect, the living-in-a-little-word-of-our-own phenomenon, the dramatic shedding of all sense of responsibility, and the sudden impromptu indulgence in deliciously crazy behaviour. [...]

The danger of Part Three is that its pursuit can become an end in itself. Love makes actors of us all and, for many of us, acting has an irresistible allure. Beguiled by the theatrical possibilities, we deceive ourselves that we have fallen in love with somebody when we're really just smitten with the idea of being in love. (17-20)

Norrey Ford's Jacqui is obviously aware of Part 1, and over the course of the novel she and Bart demonstrate that they do have the "companionship, a sharing of interest, sympathy, and respect" necessary for Part 2. I didn't spot many signs of Part 3, though. I wonder if (perhaps if one were feeling particularly charitable) in some other romances one could blame some of the "Too-Stupid-To-Live" behaviour engaged in by the protagonists on that, rather than on poor characterisation?

Have you come across any romances which you think are particularly insightful with regards to the "nature" and/or "culture" of love? Or are you a love goddess, with some insights of your own to offer?

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Ford, Norrey. The Love Goddess. Toronto: Harlequin, 1976.

Goldman, Crystal. “Love in the Stacks: Popular Romance Collection Development in Academic Libraries.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 3.1 (2012).

O'Donnell, Michael. "Is it really love?" Getting Married. London: Family Doctors Publications, 1970. 17-20.

The RWA revises its definition of the romance novel from time to time, but it used to state, among other things, that

Romance novels end in a way that makes the reader feel good. Romance novels are based on the idea of an innate emotional justice -- the notion that good people in the world are rewarded and evil people are punished. In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.

This isn't quite a promise of eternal life with a God who is love but there is, as Bridget Fowler has observed, “a parallel with religion, to which the romance bears strong resemblance [...] religion is [...] the plane on which the masses express their true material and social needs [...] the romance is also the ‘heart of a heartless world’” (174-75). Fowler is quoting here from Karl Marx, who stated that “The wretchedness of religion is at once an expression of and a protest against real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people” (131). David Margolies, too, uses parts of this quotation from Marx in order to describe romances: “As in Marx’s description of religion as an opiate and the heart of a heartless world, the romance offers escape from an oppressive reality, or justifies it as a vale of tears that women pass through to salvation” (12).

Fowler notes that “Gramsci was [...] the first to extend to mass culture the Marxist analysis of religion as an opiate, later to be followed by Brecht, who referred cynically to the culture industry as ‘a branch of the capitalist narcotics industry’” (31). With specific reference to Mills & Boon romances, Alan Boon once acknowledged that “It has been said that our books could take the place of valium, so that women who take these drugs would get an equal effect from reading our novels” (McAleer 2) and “the assumption that Harlequins are ‘addictive’ [...] has been frequently stated by representatives of the company” (Jensen 41). Tania Modleski analysed the supposed effects of consuming this addictive product:

Harlequins, in presenting a heroine who has escaped psychic conflicts, inevitably increase the reader’s own psychic conflicts, thus creating an even greater dependency on the literature. This lends credence to the [...] commonly accepted theory of popular art as narcotic. As medical researchers are now discovering, certain tranquilizers taken to relieve anxiety are, though temporarily helpful, ultimately anxiety-producing. The user must constantly increase the dosage of the drug in order to alleviate problems aggravated by the drug itself. (57)

Theresa L. Ebert also draws parallels between religion and romance novels, but rather than drawing on Marx's metaphor of opium addiction, she turns to Hegel:

Religion as a mode of thinking, what Hegel calls ‘picture-thinking’ (Vorstellung), is the global logic of the popular. Both religion and the popular render the unseen, the immaterial, the abstract as sensuous, material, and individual – the ‘Word made flesh’ – through ‘picture-thinking’. According to Hegel, ‘the reality enclosed within religion’ and, I would argue, within the popular, ‘is the shape and the guise of its picture-thinking’. The ‘guise’ of reality in ‘picture-thinking’, whether religious or popular, is an inverted reality and through its sensuous, particular, imagining, produces an inverted consciousness.

She adds that

Like religion, popular texts explain the material by the immaterial and substitute a change of heart in the subject for the material transformation of objective conditions. Popular texts such as women’s romances and chick lit, in other words, re-orient the subject but leave intact the objective social conditions in which she lives. They do this by supplanting social justice and economic equality with love, intimacy, and caring. The affective is inverted into the material and the material into the affective.

The importance the RWA's definition gives to "emotional justice," would seem to provide support for this view of popular romances. However, the very parallel drawn by Ebert and others between religion and romance novels suggests that that it is not inevitable that romances should ignore the "material transformation of objective conditions."  For instance,

Liberation theology emerged as part of a broad effort to rethink the meaning of religious experience and the role the Catholic church ought to play in society and politics. The poor are central to these efforts, but not in the traditional sense of objects of charity or of hope for a better life after death. The idea that the poor shall inherit the earth takes on more immediate and activist tones, with concrete efforts to enhance the role of poor people as legitimate participants in religion, society and politics. Institutions, the Church included, were urged not only to help, speak for, and defend poor people, but also to trust and empower them, providing tools of organization and a moral vocabulary that made activism and equality both legitimate and possible. (Levine)

and

The central importance to Friends [Quakers] of the Testimony of Equality is exemplified by their corollary theological belief in "that of God in everyone." The idea that everyone has at least potential access to God’s leadings was a radical declaration of theological equality when first formulated by [George] Fox. It has since gone on to play a defining role in the history of Quakerism. The principle of equality is manifested, for instance, in the recognition and status accorded to the rights and gifts of women from the very earliest incarnations of the Quaker movement. To a group of people who held that women no more have souls than does a goose, Fox countered with the words of Mary, who said that: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour" (Fox, The Journal, 1646-7, pg. 11). In the following century, the Testimony of Equality led Friends to free their slaves and assume leading roles in calling for the abolition of slavery. By the time of the American Revolution, it had become plausible to declare the fundamental equality of all human beings to be a self-evident truth; though it would still take centuries for this truth to be fully enacted in the laws of the land. (Earlham School of Religion)

African-American romance author Beverly Jenkins sees her work as having both a political and a religious dimension:

it seems like that it’s been my ministry—tap, tap, tap on the shoulder—to do that, to bring that 19th century to life in a way that people can access it, people can be proud of who they were, and still see the struggle in a real light—you know, a real light, so that it’s not glossed over.

As Rita B. Dandridge has written, "Black women's historical romances document race as a social and political construct that is anchored to a systemic body of laws based on color difference, privileging whites over blacks" (5-6).

In For Love and Money I was very focused on reading romances as literature (as opposed to "trash") and therefore didn't have spend much time examining their implicit (and occasionally explicit) politics. It's something I'd like to look at more closely in future.

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Dandridge, Rita B. Black Women's Activism: Reading African American Women's Historical Romances. New York: Peter Lang, 2004.

Earlham School of Religion. "The Quaker Testimonies."

Ebert,Teresa L. "Hegel's “picture-thinking” as the Interpretive Logic of the Popular." Textual Practice. iFirst Article (2012). [Abstract]

Fowler, Bridget. The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century. Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Jenkins, Beverly. "Jenkins on History." Transcript downloaded from The Popular Romance Project.

Jensen, Margaret Ann. Love’s $weet Return: The Harlequin Story. Toronto: Women’s Educational P., 1984.

Levine, Daniel H. "The Future of Liberation Theology." The Journal of the International Institute 2.2 (1995).

Margolies, David. “Mills & Boon: Guilt Without Sex.” Red Letters 14 (1982-83): 5-13.

Marx, Karl. “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction.” Trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley. Critique of Hegel’s “Philosphy of Right.” Ed. Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970. 129-142.

McAleer, Joseph. Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. 1982. New York: Routledge, 1990.

RWA, "Romance Novels - What Are They?" 8 July 2007. Preserved by the Internet Archive.

The image was created on the 23 February 2012 at the Städtmuseum in Trier by Antonio Ponte (saigneurdeguerre) and made available under a Creative Commons licence at Flickr.

Issue 3.1 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies was published today and I was very pleased to see that it includes a review of For Love and Money. Maryan Wherry concludes:

Laura Vivanco’s analysis of the category romance is both meticulous and inspiring. And while Vivanco limits her examples and discussions to category romances by Harlequin Mills & Boon and the HQN imprint, her application of Frye’s mimetic modes begs for expansion to texts and authors across the genre. This piece of literary criticism should serve as a template for romance scholars to move from defending the genre to discussing its values and complexity as a literary art.

This is extremely gratifying; I'll sit and bask in the sunlight of that praise for a bit....

It would wrong of me, though, not to mention that the review does make a couple of criticisms:

If there is a weakness to this study, it is the author’s reliance on long block quotations, which can become distracting to the overall discussion and inhibit readability. The introduction, which flirts with a defensive tone, is also perhaps a bit disappointing, as it suggests that the field of romance criticism hasn’t progressed since Jensen’s study; certainly it stands at odds with the assertive, upbeat sense of the book as a whole.

I was working with primary texts which I can't expect my readers to know well (or, in most cases, at all) so perhaps that meant I was more inclined to use longer quotations, which provide a bit more context and also give readers more of a taste of the individual authors' "voices." As far as quotations from academic secondary texts are concerned, I was hoping that the book would appeal to interested general readers as well as to romance scholars, so again perhaps that meant I included slightly longer quotes than would have been necessary if I'd only been writing for a scholarly audience. Having said all that, though, it hadn't even occurred to me that any of my quotes were too long. I think that a "reliance on long block quotes" may form part of my usual writing style. I'll bear this criticism in mind for the future but I can't promise to change; I suspect that what seems "too long" to one reader may seem just right to another.

Regarding the progress of the field, as Eric Selinger and Sarah Frantz write in their introduction to New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction:

critical work on popular romance fiction - the books, the readers, and the romance publishing industry - has been going on for decades. A sociological study of reader preferences, comissioned by Mills & Boon, opened the field in 1969. [....] Given its distinctive status as the despised and rejected "other" of modern literary writing, it should come as no surprise that popular romance has been treated very differently, by scholars and critics, from other forms of genre fiction. Mystery and detective novels, science fiction, fantasy, horror: all found critics to praise them as vigorous upstarts, evolving (at least at their best) into literature worthy of the name. The foundational studies of popular romance fiction make no such claims. (2-3)

The pace of change in the field of popular romance studies has accelerated greatly in recent years, particularly since IASPR and JPRS came into existence. That's not something I emphasised in the introduction and, again, it was because I was trying to pitch the book at a variety of audiences.

I didn't want to harp on about the criticisms of Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances, but I did feel they needed to be addressed, not least because for all I know, some some potential readers may not get further than the subtitle of the book, The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance, before they burst out laughing at the very idea that there could be such a thing. I felt I needed to engage with those people and their preconceptions before launching straight into an "assertive, upbeat" analysis of the romances.

Maybe I was overcautious. I think, perhaps, it's again a matter of taste: I know in the past I had one essay which attempted to launch straight into new analysis of romances returned to me with the comment that I should include more references to older critics such as Radway and Modleski.

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Selinger, Eric Murphy and Sarah S. G. Frantz. "Introduction: New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction." New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays. Ed. Sarah S. G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2012. 1-19.

The photo of the deck chair was taken by Mark J P and was made available via Flickr under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic licence. The Three Bears were created by Arthur Rackham and are in the public domain. I found them at Wikimedia Commons.

Romances, particularly category romances, are often considered ephemeral works which are of little or no interest once they become dated. A recent article by Professor Tom Baum of the University of Strathclyde's Business School, however, suggests  that as they age they may actually increase in historical value.

In the abstract for "Working the Skies: Changing Representations of Gendered Work in the Airline Industry, 1930-2011," Baum argues that "The influence of the media, whether print, celluloid or contemporary electronic, on life and career choices, particularly from a gender perspective is well documented [...] and, therefore, gaining an understanding of their role in the representation of gendered work, both historically and in a modern context, is of considerable value." He elaborates in the essay itself:

As Miller and Hayward (2006) rightly point out, many occupations remain substantially gender-segregated, notwithstanding equality legislation that has been in place for over 30 years. Likewise, role allocation on the basis of ethnicity (Adler & Adler, 2004) is widely reported in the literature. Such role stereotyping is clearly the product of diverse social factors but consumer print representation cannot be understated as a significant factor which reflects and, perhaps, stimulates change with respect to role allocations in the workplace and wider society. In a general sense, work and work roles have featured in literature since classical times, representing prevalent practice and social norms of the era in question. (1187)

One of Baum's primary sources is Betty Beaty's Maiden Flight, first published by Mills & Boon in 1956 and later reprinted by Harlequin. Beaty had "Served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force" and "Worked as [an] airline hostess" (Grey 55) and

From her flying experience came such books as Maiden Flight and South to the Sun, which ingeniously combine the love interest with behind-the-scenes glimpses of life as an air-stewardess. [...] Beaty's close connection with flying - directly, and indirectly through her husband (who was one of the first post-war commercial transatlantic pilots) - led her to write five slightly tougher novels in the name of Karen Campbell. (Grey 56)

For obvious reasons, works of fiction do have to be treated with some caution by those engaged in historical research:

It is, of course, a matter of some contention as to the extent to which romantic, comic or other representation of a particular phenomenon is adopted as a general perception of reality within a particular or wider community and certainly within the authoritative body of writing about a subject. Morgan and Pritchard (1998, p. 5) argue that “image creators are themselves products of particular societies. The images and representations which they create thus not only construct, but also reinforce ideas, values and meaning systems”. (Baum 1187)

Baum complements his use of works of fiction with quotations drawn from autobiographical and academic texts, and he thus frames a quote from Beaty's Maiden Flight with statements by academics:

Ashcroft (2007, p. 9) refers to “the deliberate historical construction of airline pilots as elite, fatherly professionals” and the juxtaposition of the two roles is well illustrated in Beaty’s (1956, p. 46) novel

Most of the crew were staying at the St. George but the Captain waited in the car to be taken to La France, a larger and slightly more expensive hotel, which the Company felt assisted the maintenance of a captain’s dignity.

This clear distinction between the professional (and male) pilot and the rather more flighty (and female) attendant was no accident. Hopkins (1998) refers to deliberate steps taken by airlines to emphasise differential status within the airline workplace that included introducing a ship captain’s uniform and associated props, such as formal rank title and using loudspeakers for pilot–passenger communication by which means the pilot’s image was transformed into that of an elite officer. (1188)

One aspect of being a flight attendant which perhaps made the job seem particularly suitable for a romance heroine was that, as mentioned in the blurb of Beaty's South to the Sun, it was thought that "Of all the professions open to women, the one with the highest marriage rate is surely that of air stewardess." In the final chapter of Maiden Flight the heroine, air stewardess Pamela Hughes, accepts a proposal of marriage from Engineer Officer Roger Carson and

The [...] stereotypical and romantic desired outcome of a career in flight is very clearly represented when Beaty (1956, p. 191) concludes her story with  

And then, as he kissed her again, all the generally accepted theories of flight were for Pamela shattered and disproved. For here, after all her flights, as she was standing quite still on the ground, had come the wonder and excitement of taking off on a new adventure, the soaring beauty of moving over a high heaven, and the peace and security of a safe landing after a storm – all the pure joy of flight packed into the small circle of Roger Carson’s arms. 

This romantic ideal, that working for the airline was, in a sense, a staging post on the inevitable life-journey towards marital bliss and home-making, was an important USP (unique selling proposition) within the role that this form of novel was expected to play in attracting young women into the industry. (1188)

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• Baum, Thomas. "Working the Skies: Changing Representations of Gendered Work in the Airline Industry, 1930-2011." Tourism Management 33.5 (2012). 1185-1194.
• Grey, Elizabeth. "Beaty, Betty." Twentieth-Century Romance and Gothic Writers. Ed. James Vinson. Detroit, Michigan: Gale, 1982. 55-56.

I've been reading Anne Cranny-Francis's Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (1990). In it she defends genre fiction, whose

audience commonly attracts a negative reception from critics who, in accordance with the high/low culture division institutionalized by a now outmoded, but still powerful, modernist aesthetic, regard the mass audience of popular fiction as degraded consumers of formula art. This judgement contains an assumption that modernist writing (and possibly its realist predecessor) is non-formulaic, which is highly questionable. Genre fiction, it might be argue, foregrounds its conventions, rather than stitching them seamlessly into the fabric of the text and so its ideological framework may be, or may appear to be, self-evident; modernist and realist fiction, on the other hand, uses less mannered conventions and so achieves an apparent 'naturalization' which has the effect of obscuring its encoded ideological statements. Both genre fiction and its 'high brow' counterparts (realism, modernism, postmodernism) utilize a variety of textual conventions, some of which are more visible than others. (3)

Many of the conventions foregrounded by popular romance seem to be drawn from, or related to those to be found in, fairy tales, for although romances are not (with a few exceptions) actually fairy tales and "The vast majority of romance novels do not consciously invoke specific fairy tales [...] many still implicitly draw on the tradition, its conflicts and quests, and occasionally its motifs" (Lee 57).¹

According to Cranny-Francis, "the fairy tale  as popularized by the translation of folk-tales collected by the brothers Grimm"  (104) is "encoded with dominant ideological discourses - such as patriarchal gender ideology" (104). For example,

In his study of folk and fairy-tales, Breaking the Magic Spell, Jack Zipes raises a series of questions about the Cinderella story which leave little doubt about its contemporary ideological function:

Though it is difficult to speculate how an individual child might react to Cinderella, certainly the adult reader and interpreter must ask the following questions: Why is the stepmother shown to be wicked and not the father? Why is Cinderella essentially passive? ... Why do girls have to quarrel over a man? How do children react to a Cinderella who is industrious, dutiful, virginal and passive? Are all men handsome? Is marriage the end goal of life? Is it important to marry rich men? This small list of questions suggests that the ideological and psychological pattern and message of Cinderella do nothing more than reinforce sexist values and a Puritan ethos that serves a society which fosters competition and achievement. (Zipes [...] 173 qtd. in Cranny-Francis 87)

Quite a lot of romances explicitly allude to Cinderella but often this is a shorthand "means of indicating that the novel includes a woman who is poor, perhaps working in a menial job, and who then meets a rich and handsome man" (Vivanco 91-92). Strictly speaking, though

Cinderella's status as a gentleman's daughter makes her more acceptable as a future king's consort. It also places her above the status of peasant. Cinderella is not usually a rags-to-riches tale, but a riches-to-rags-to-riches tale. (SurLaLune)

So when Cranny-Francis comes to discuss popular romance fiction, she turns to another fairy tale:

As Carolyn Steedman observed in Landscape for a Good Woman, one of the principal fairy-tales of our society is that 'goose-girls can marry kings'. [...] Inequality of class is as much a mechanism of the romance as the gender relationships and this may be both an essential feature of the romance and a key to its operation. The desire these texts encode is not sexual, but economic; the desire for solid middle- or upper-class status, for money and power. Since we live in a society in which men hold economic power and in which a woman's status is identified with that of her husband, then finding an appropriate husband is the problem. To make this search more palatable, less seemingly acquisitive, it is displaced into gender terms. The woman's search becomes a sexual and emotional one, a matter of fulfilling her natural, heterosexual needs for sexual and emotional fulfilment - and eventually for children. (186)

This view of romance is very similar to that of Jan Cohn who, a couple of years earlier than Cranny-Francis, observed that

It is a commonplace of romance that the heroine will marry well, a given that the hero will be rich. The heroine's accomplishment, moreover, her success in marrying well, must seem almost an accident; it is never her purpose. The idea of a romance heroine setting out to marry successfully is doubly denied. She never seeks marriage in any form, and when she finds her hero, she is never drawn to him by the signs of his economic power [...] she is a negation of the purposeful, self-interested, mercenary woman. (127)

This isn't to say that there are absolutely no romance heroines who set out to marry a rich man, or that there are no romance heroes who are poorer than their heroines, but as Blythe Barnhill at AAR recently wrote, in romance

Wealthy Regency Dukes are a dime a dozen, and the Harlequin Presents line is based on wealthy, exotic magnate heroes. All of it got me thinking, is this what we want in a book? Is it our real fantasy? Is it not enough to be in love and comfortably middle class? Does our drop dead handsome, ripped hero also need to be able to whisk us off for a luxury cruise, buy us dresses from the best London modistes, or buy the company we work for if our boss is a sexist jerk? Obviously, it’s a popular fantasy, often with Cinderella roots. But is it too popular…or anti-feminist?

The relationship between fairytales and the depiction of disability in romance hasn't been commented on as often but Sandra Schwab has noted that

The ability to see clearly and the loss of sight play an important role in the historical romances The Bride and the Beast (2001) and Yours Until Dawn (2004) by the American author Teresa Medeiros. While Yours Until Dawn features a blind hero, large parts of The Bride and the Beast are set during the night, and the darkness makes the heroine unable to see the face of the male protagonist. In both books the physical inability to see clearly is not only connected to a lack of recognition, but is also indicative of a lack of psychological insight.

Given its title, I can't help but wonder if The Bride and the Beast draws on the tale of Beauty and the Beast.

At the recent 2012 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, Ria Cheyne discussed romances depicting disability and remarked on the frequency with which disabilities are cured by love. I wonder if there's something here of Rapunzel:

The Prince was beside himself with grief, and in his despair he jumped right down from the tower, and, though he escaped with his life, the thorns among which he fell pierced his eyes out. Then he wandered, blind and miserable, through the wood, eating nothing but roots and berries, and weeping and lamenting the loss of his lovely bride. So he wandered about for some years, as wretched and unhappy as he could well be, and at last he came to the desert place where Rapunzel was living. Of a sudden he heard a voice which seemed strangely familiar to him. He walked eagerly in the direction of the sound, and when he was quite close, Rapunzel recognised him and fell on his neck and wept. But two of her tears touched his eyes, and in a moment they became quite clear again, and he saw as well as he had ever done. Then he led her to his kingdom, where they were received and welcomed with great joy, and they lived happily ever after. (SurLaLune)

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Barnhill,Blythe. "Is This Our Collective Fantasy?" All About Romance. 24 Sept. 2012.

Cohn, Jan. Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women. Durham: Duke UP, 1988.

Cranny-Francis, Anne. Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.

Lee, Linda J. “Guilty Pleasures: Reading Romance Novels as Reworked Fairy Tales.” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 22.1 (2008): 52–66.

SurLaLune. "Annotations for Cinderella."

SurLaLune. "The Annotated Rapunzel."

Vivanco, Laura. For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance. Tirril, Penrith: Humanities Ebooks, 2011.

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1 I've explored the relationships between Harlequin Mills & Boon romances and fairytales in chapters 1 and 2 of For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance.

The image of the geese came from Wikimedia Commons and was created by LadyofHats, who dedicated it to the public domain.

Writing about "chick flicks," Imelda Whelehan has commented that their

postfeminist discourse is characterised as deploying what might be regarded as broadly "feminist" sentiments in order to justify certain behaviours or choices, but these sentiments have become severed from their political or philosophical origins. Postfeminism in popular culture displays a certain schizophrenia in the way women are often portrayed as enormously successful at work and simultaneously hopelessly anxious about their intimate relationships, over which they often have little control or for which they seek continuous self-improvement. The world of work is generally portrayed as allowing female success, but there are glimpses of sexism which present enough problems that women have to solve for themselves or in consultation with their close girlfriends; beauty, fashion and adornment remain highly prized as part of the arsenal of the high-achieving woman, so that postfeminism equates with excessive consumption, while at the same time expressing sentiments of empowerment and female capability. The things that make women miserable are often covertly laid at the door of feminism and can be summarised thus: "feminism gave women social equality, choices and freedoms, but those choices have emotional costs which individual women are constantly trying to resolve and balance." It is feminism, then, that is positioned as creating the most significant challenges for postmodern women, even though all that feminism did was to foreground the reality that the traditional feminine sphere of the home remains painfully exclusive from the world of work and almost entirely the domain of women. (156)

Romances, by contrast, tend to focus on women's success in the field of "intimate relationships," though they may also show heroines achieving success at work. The differences don't end there, however: while I certainly don't think that all romances are feminist, there are many that are and I discuss some of them in "Feminism and Early Twenty-First Century Harlequin Mills & Boon Romances" which was published today in the Journal of Popular Culture.

I found that a "focus on female sexuality and a woman’s right to experience sexual gratification is something that the Modern romances share with Second Wave feminism" (1066). Since they also acknowledge that even highly gratifying sex cannot, on its own, provide a firm basis for a long-term "intimate relationship," these novels explore what more is required in order to achieve a successful marriage and, much as

Second Wave feminists “critiqued marriage as yet another form of sexual slavery” (hooks 78–79) [...] In Modern romances the damaging consequences of unequal marriages in which the woman is treated as a commodity, providing sexual and reproductive services in exchange for her upkeep, may be shown through the stories of secondary characters. (1069)

The stories of the protagonists themselves, in the feminist romances of both the Modern and Romance lines, seem to offer the reader an alternative model for relationships of the sort outlined by bell hooks:

When we accept that true love is rooted in recognition and acceptance, that love combines acknowledgment, care, responsibility, commitment, and knowledge, we understand there can be no love without justice. With that awareness comes the understanding that love has the power to transform us, giving us the strength to oppose domination. To choose feminist politics, then, is a choice to love. (104)

According to Whelehan,

earlier, more positive accounts of the meanings of postfeminism have waned as more and more critics identify the seductions of the term as comforting us with the assurance that feminism‘s work is over. Postfeminism depends upon notions of feminism and feminist politics for its existence, but it often resorts to parody to diminish the historical importance of Second Wave feminism. (158)

However, although some of the feminist romances I looked at did reject some of the more radical aspects of second wave feminism, they did not do so in order to position feminism as the source of "the most significant challenges for postmodern women." Furthermore, although HM&B author Ally Blake has declared that some of them contain "post-feminist twentysomething heroines,"

in a personal communication she elaborated that she thinks of “feminists as the women who openly fought for women’s rights, and post-feminist [women] as those of us who believe in those rights and enjoy having them.” (Vivanco 1084-85)

What is clear is that this is not the postfemism present in the films described by Whelehan, in which "The constant return to the theme that full empowerment and heterosexual romance are incompatible has meant that under mature postfeminism men increasingly are being put under erasure" (169). On the contrary, in these romances empowerment (albeit not full empowerment, given that the protagonists still inhabit a world in which sexism has not been eradicated) and heterosexual romance are compatible.

One may still critique romances for the support they offer to "compulsory coupledom" but, unlike Whelehan, who observes tiredly that

For many of us in the business of offering feminist critiques of popular culture in the twenty-first century, it can seem like we‘re simply tilting at windmills. This article touches on those sensations of boredom and ennui which trouble a feminist cultural critic attempting to make sense of the postfeminist distractions of popular culture. (159)

I feel encouraged by the feminist romances I've read: they demonstrate "that romance writers and readers are themselves struggling with gender definitions and sexual politics on their own terms" (Radway 18).

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Blake, Ally. "The Changing Face of Romance."

hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge: South End, 2000.

Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. 1984. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991.

Vivanco, Laura. "Feminism and Early Twenty-First Century Harlequin Mills & Boon Romances." Journal of Popular Culture 45.5 (2012): 1060–1089.

Whelehan, Imelda. "Remaking Feminism: Or Why is Postfeminism so Boring?" Nordic Journal of English Studies 9.3 (2010): 155-172.

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The image of the 3-week-old Polish Bantam chick was created by Charles M. Sauer, who made it available under a Creative Commons licence at Wikimedia Commons.

Mary observes of Tim, “It was almost as if he lived within her mind as an entity quite distinct from his real being” (73). When Danny kisses Amanda, “It was as though a missing piece of the puzzle was put back in place. He was a part of her” (71). Jesse remarks of Althea, “Truly, it was like she was inside him” (149), while Daniel lauds Jenny, “She was more than beside him: She was in him, the best part of his heart” (41). Ian Mackenzie likewise “dissolves” into Beth (217); when they kiss, his inner monologue expresses the desire “to pull her inside him, or himself inside her. If he could be part of her, everything would be all right. He would be well” (214). (133)

According to Emily M. Baldys these quotes are instances of an

oddly consistent metaphoric trope in which able-bodied characters are represented as incorporating disabled characters, literally and metaphorically taking disabled characters inside themselves. I contend that the trope of romantic incorporation is motivated by the threatening potential of disabled sexuality and used [...] to enact the bodily containment of threat. (133)

I'm not so sure. As Baldys admits, in the third example "Morsi’s phrasing places the able-bodied character inside the disabled character instead of the other way around" (133). More significantly, the "trope of romantic incorporation" is one I've seen frequently in novels in which both characters are able-bodied. Here's an example from Carol Arens' Renegade Most Wanted (2012):

If it had been possible for a woman's soul to flow out of her body and into a man, that's the way it would happen. If not for the constraints of the flesh, she would be right there, inside Matt's heart. (317)

A very short while later the "romantic incorporation" is reversed and made literal as "He slipped inside her" (318) and

he rocked against her womb. A wave crashed inside her. It washed pleasure from the point of their joining to her clenching fingers, then tumbled to the tips of her toes.

Maybe flesh was no barrier to souls after all.

Hadn't her wedding vows declared that the two shall become one flesh? (318-19)

I think passages describing "romantic incorporation" can perhaps be explained by extrapolating a little from some of the ideas Baldys outlined earlier in her essay.

Compulsory heterosexuality—the ideology that positions heterosexuality as a default, biologically derived identity and enforces its normalcy through pervasive cultural mechanisms—has been a common idiom in queer and feminist studies since 1980, when Adrienne Rich published her influential essay coining the term. More recently, scholars writing within disability studies have proposed an analogous conception to Rich’s formative idea. “Compulsory able-bodiedness” is an ideology that positions able-bodiedness as the default position and bolsters itself through cultural forms that represent ability as original, authentic, and normal. This concept, as theorized by Alison Kafer and Robert McRuer, posits a complex interrelationship between heterosexuality and able-bodiedness. Kafer explains that heterosexuality is threatened by disability’s associations with deviance, while able-bodiedness is threatened by the relationship of queerness to illness and medicalization (81–82). Thus, the two ideologies are “entwined” (in McRuer’s terminology) and “imbricated” (in Kafer’s) such that each is contingent on the other: the default heterosexual subject is necessarily able-bodied, and the default able-bodied subject is necessarily heterosexual. (127)

The "trope of romantic incorporation" seems to suggest that there is a third ideology entwined with the other two. Catherine Roach has observed that

To the ancient and perennial question of how to define and live the good life, how to achieve happiness and fulfillment, American pop culture’s resounding answer is through the narrative of romance, sex, and love. The happily-in-love, pair-bonded (generally, although increasingly not exclusively, heterosexual) couple is made into a near-mandatory norm by the media and popular culture, as this romance story is endlessly taught and replayed in a multiplicity of cultural sites.

Given that these narratives are "increasingly not exclusively [...] heterosexual," I think they cannot simply be described as a part of "compulsory heterosexuality." Rather, they perhaps indicate the existence of what one might term "compulsory coupledom" which often, but not always, complements "compulsory heterosexuality" and "compulsory able-bodiedness" and which should at times be analysed separately from them.

According to Bella M. DePaulo and Wendy L. Morris

A widespread form of bias has slipped under our cultural and academic radar. People who are single are targets of singlism: negative stereotypes and discrimination. Compared to married or coupled people, who are often described in very positive terms, singles are assumed to be immature, maladjusted, and self-centered. (251)

Given that romances always feature "individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work" who "are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love" (RWA), it would seem likely that romances could be seen as a "cultural mechanism" which helps to enforce "compulsory coupledom." Certainly Kyra Kramer and I observed a pattern in many romances in which becoming part of a couple completes/perfects the "Phallus" of the romance hero:

“Phallus” refers to the socio-political body which expresses aspects of masculinity associated with the Father, such as authority, the capacity to administer punishment, and the ability to love and care for those under his protection. If a full range of Phallic traits is evinced by a hero then his socio-political body is a Completed Phallus.

At the beginning of a romance novel, however, most heroes have Incomplete Phalluses. Such heroes tend to demonstrate authoritarian or aggressive aspects of Phallic masculinity, including “the threat of violence, the law-giving nature, the ownership of the world, a power vested in physical presence” (Cook 154), and few of the softer qualities, such as care-giving. In a romance in which the Incomplete Phallus displays many of the negative characteristics of men in patriarchal culture, the hero of the romance can also be “its villain, a potent symbol of all the obstacles life presents to women” (Phillips 57). [...]

The feminine equivalent of the Phallus is the socio-political body we shall term the Prism [...]. Even though a romance heroine’s Prism is initially incomplete, it nonetheless focuses her hero’s powers, enabling his Incomplete Phallus to fulfil its potential in a socially acceptable manner and become a Completed Phallus.

Becoming part of a couple also completes/perfects the heroine's Prism.

There are, of course, romances which do not follow this pattern and in any case I would not wish to suggest that all romances imply that the unpartnered are incomplete: the protagonists of romance are sometimes depicted in contexts which include happily-single secondary characters. Nonetheless, the extent to which such contexts can mitigate the focus on the achievement of a romantic relationship is limited because, by definition, a romance has to prioritise the depiction of the central couple (or occasionally threesome or more).

Baldys states that the "demands of compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness" are "intertwined" (127); it appears they may also be intertwined with compulsory coupledom:

never-married men do run the risk of being labelled 'queers', 'fairies' or 'queens'.

In an analysis of Australian attitudes, Penman and Stolk (1983) found that single women were described as unfulfilled, incomplete, unattractive, and less happy than married women" (Callan and Noller 97, emphasis added)

The idea that single people are "incomplete" evidently has a long history, for Plato's Symposium contains a tale in which it is explained that "the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love" and that it came about because

the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast.

These early humans attacked the gods and as a punishment Zeus declared that he would "cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers." According to this myth, all humans are incomplete, and when we fall in love it is because we seek to become whole once more. Obviously the story is not one which can be taken at all seriously but there is nonetheless a

tendency to refer to marriage as a union of two persons into oneness [which] often prompts married people to refer to their spouse as their "other half" or "better half". Unfortunately, it gives rise to the idea that an unmarried person must be fractured, being only half of a whole.

Therefore, the implication is that we must go about looking for another person to provide completion to our being. In other words, a person who is unmarried is incomplete as a person and has less than a full existence than a married person has. (Yeo 11-12)

In romance novels, the formation of a couple sometimes accompanies the curing of disabilities. Baldys notes that

One strain of ableist fantasy suggests that cognitive disability can be “overcome” in one way or another through the extraordinary power of heterosexual relationships. Simi Linton identifies such an “overcoming rhetoric” as one of the clichés that structure dominant meanings and response patterns assigned to disability. “The idea that someone can overcome a disability,” she writes, implies “personal triumph over a personal condition.” Linton argues that this idea is not a concept native to the disability community, but rather “a wish fulfillment generated from the outside” (165). This wish-fulfilling fantasy, in romance novels, finds expression in a process of narrative rehabilitation through which the effects of disability are represented as mitigated or overcome by the characters’ blossoming love. (Baldys 134)

Although I've not read the novel Baldys gives as an example of "the most extreme (and credulity-straining) measures to rehabilitate disability" (134), I've come across a number of romances in which blind protagonists regain their sight as well as novels in which previously infertile protagonists become pregnant or father children. Deborah Chappel has observed the transformations which occur in LaVyrle Spencer's novels and argues that

the changes in Spencer's protagonists (regularization of speech, dimming of freckles, development of healthy-looking bodies) are sometimes so pronounced that it seems inner, emotional reality has the power to improve the material world. Love, and the hope love engenders, operate as forces in the world. [...] Thus, in The Gamble Agatha's limp becomes less and less pronounced and she is able to achieve the three seemingly impossible wishes she expressed in the opening chapters: she can dance, swim, and ride a horse. (110)

Baldys believes that the depictions of disability in romances differ "from depictions in canonical literature, where disability has traditionally functioned as a 'cipher of metaphysical or divine significance' (Quayson 17)" (138) but I'm not so sure that this is the case. As Catherine Roach has observed, "The story of romance is the most powerful narrative in Western art and culture, sharing roots with Christianity and functioning as a mythic story about the meaning and purpose of life, particularly in regards to the HEA ending of redemption and wholeness."

Perhaps in romances the curing of protagonists' disabilities, which takes to a new and literal level the metaphorical use of words suggesting that love makes a person whole/completes them, serves as a kind of secular miracle bearing witness to the power of love (and compulsory coupledom, compulsory heterosexuality and compusory able-bodiedness)  by implying that when a man is united to his wife, not only are they "no more twain, but one flesh" (Matthew 19; 6) but that sometimes, in addition, "The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk" (Matthew 11:5).

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Arens, Carol. Renegade Most Wanted. Richmond, Surrey: Mills & Boon, 2012.

Baldys, Emily M. "Disabled Sexuality, Incorporated: The Compulsions of Popular Romance." Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 6.2 (2012), 125–141.

Callan, Victor J. and Patricia Noller. Marriage and the Family. North Ryde, NSW: Methuen, 1987.

Chappel, Deborah K. "LaVyrle Spencer and the Anti-Essentialist Argument." Paradoxa 3.1-2 (1997), 107-120.

DePaulo, Bella M. and Wendy L. Morris. "The Unrecognized Stereotyping and Discrimination against Singles." Current Directions in Psychological Science 15.5 (2006), 251-254.

Plato. Symposium. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive.

Roach, Catherine. "Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).

RWA. "About the Romance Genre."

Vivanco, Laura, and Kyra Kramer. “There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre”, Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).

Yeo, Anthony. Partners in Life: Your Guide to Lasting Marriage. Singapore: Armour, 1999.

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The image of a dovetail joint comes via Flickr where it was made available under a Creative Commons licence by Jordanhill School D&T Dept.

Beauty, it has been said, is in the eye of the beholder. It's an assertion to which Lucy Gordon's The Italian's Christmas Miracle appears to give some support. Alysa, the heroine,

had never been pretty. Her face was attractive but, to her own critical eyes, her features were too strong for a woman.

'No feminine graces,' she'd often sighed. 'Too tall, too thin. No bosom to speak of.'

Her women friends were scandalised by this casual realism. 'What do you mean, too thin?' they chorused. 'You've got a figure most of us would die for. You could wear anything, just like a model.'

'That's what I said - too thin,' she'd responded, determinedly practical.

But then there was the hair - rich brown, with flashes of deep gold here and dark red there, growing abundantly, streaming over her shoulders and down to her waist, making her look like some mythical heroine. (8)

Perhaps romance, too, is in the eye of the beholder? Alysa finds

herself overlooking the River Arno. A multitude of lights was on, their reflection gleaming in the water, and in the distance she could see the Ponte Vecchio, the great, beautiful bridge for which Florence was famous. [...]

'It's the sort of place people mean when they say that Italy is a romantic country.' [...]

The ironic way she said 'romantic' made him look at her in appreciation.

'It can be romantic,' he said. 'It can also be prosaic, businesslike and full of the most depressing common-sense. Romance doesn't lie in the country or the setting, but in the moment your eyes meet, and you know you're living in a world where there's only the two of you and nothing else exists.' (48-49)

Alysa and her interlocutor have, however, lost trust in the reality of that "world," for Alysa has travelled to Italy

to mourn the man I loved, but who betrayed me, abandoned me and our unborn child, a child he never even knew about, then died with his lover. She had a husband and child, but she deserted them as he deserted me. (11)

Overlooking the Arno, her companion is Drago, the deserted husband, and during the course of the novel they learn the truth about the dead while attempting to shield others from the reality of the motivations of James and Carlotta, a pair of deceased lovers who justified their actions by insisting that "we had to be realistic" (40).

Drago and Alysa's experiences have taught them that romance is unreliable, and perhaps that romantic love renders one unable to see reality: 'We can be fighteningly blind when we don't realise that things have changed for ever [...] And perhaps we fight against that realisation, because we're fighting for our lives" (35). An  emotion-free reality, however, is not without its problems.

It was a technique she'd perfected months ago, based on computer systems.

It started with 'power up' when she got out of bed, then a quick run-through of necessary programs and she was ready to start the day. A liberal use of the 'delete' button helped to keep things straight in her head, and if something threatened her with unwanted emotion she hit the 'standby' button. As a last resort there was always total shut-down and reboot, but that meant walking away to be completely alone, which could be inconvenient. (16)

Her solution seems to have dehumanised her and Drago is of the opinion that it has merely substituted emotional pain for "another kind of hell" (41).

This being a romance, Drago and Alysa do, of course, fall in love again. Together, the novel suggests, they have found true love and Alysa tells Drago that "I believe that your love will be with me for all eternity" (185). Nonethless, the novel raises a disquieting question: if emotions (including romantic ones) are part of reality and what make us fully human but are also, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder, or the heart of the lover, can there ever be security in love?

Perhaps only the dead can realistically be said to achieve it. Earlier in the novel, on the Ponte Vecchio, Alysa has seen that the railings around the statue of Benvenuto Cellini

were covered with padlocks. Hundreds of them.

'Lovers put them there,' the shop owner confided. 'It's an old tradition. They buy a padlock, lock it onto the railings and throw the key into the River Arno. That means that their love has locked them together for all time, even unto death.'

'How - how beautiful,' Alysa stammered. A terrible dread was rising in her. [...] 'Even unto death,' she murmured.

'That's the part that always affects them,' he said. 'They know they'll be together for eternity.'

There in her mind was the picture of James and Carlotta, [...] dead in the same moment. Together for eternity. (59-60)

As Lynne Pearce has observed in an article about romance and repetition:

The fact that there is no possibility of death-bound lovers repeating, and hence discrediting, their UR-passion explains why tragedy remains the most cast-iron means of supporting the view that love is exclusive, non-repeatable, and forever. The fact that so many tragic lovers actively seek death as a means of protecting their love from compromise underlines the principle that “true love” eschews repetition.

I'll end on a prosaic (and realistic?) note about iron and binding: the padlocks on the Ponte Vecchio and elsewhere have generally been considered a nuisance by the authorities and months later, when Alysa returns to the bridge, she discovers that "The railings that had once been covered with love tokens were stark and bare" because "the council has ruled against them. If you get caught hanging a padlock there's a fine, and every now and then they clear them all away" (127). Outside the pages of the novel the campaign against the padlocks of eternal love contines: just this week it was reported that

Thousands of 'love padlocks' on a Roman bridge are being removed with bolt-cutters in order to protect the ancient structure. [...] The city council said rust from the locks, which hang off chains, is harming the fabric of the bridge. (BBC)

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BBC. "Rome's Ponte Milvio bridge: 'Padlocks of love' removed." 10 September 2012.

Gordon, Lucy. The Italian's Christmas Miracle. 2008, Christmas Marriages & Miracles (Richmond, Surrey: Mills & Boon, 2011). 3-185.

Pearce, Lynne. "Romance and Repetition: Testing the Limits of Love." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).

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The image of the Ponte Vecchio is a cropped version of the panorma at Wikimedia Commons,where it was made available for use under a Creative Commons licence by its creator, Grenouille vert.