popular culture

I've been finding out a bit more about Westerns, which are one of the (known unknown) dragons at the edge of my popular culture map and while reading the following description of them by Jane Tompkins I was struck by how many parallels there are with popular romance:

The ritualization of the moment of death that climaxes most Western novels and films hovers over the whole story and gives its typical scenes a faintly sacramental aura. (24-25)

This naturally sent me off to re-read what Pamela Regis has to say about moments of ritual death in romances:

The point of ritual death marks the moment in the narrative when the union between heroine and hero, the hoped-for resolution, seems absolutely impossible [...]. Often enough death itself, or an event equated with death, threatens or actually transpires at this point when the barrier seems insurmountable. The death is, however, ritual. The heroine does not die. She is freed from its presence. (35)

Tompkins's mention of a "faintly sacramental aura" also reminded me of Angela Toscano's comments about cliché in the popular romance, which she believes is, in a sense,

liturgical. It is a type of magical speech, as in the language of the Christian mass which transforms the substance of the wafer into the body of Jesus Christ. In the mass this is not metaphor but an actual substantive and physical change. In the world of the narrative, the cliché comprises a series of speeches that, like the mass, become the means by which a substantive transformation occurs in the persons and the bodies of the hero and heroine. The reiteration, the repetition, is the ritualization of the performative utterance. The repetition is what gives the utterance is transformative power.

As Toscano mentions, Lisa Fletcher has focused particularly on the phrase "I love you" so perhaps the speaking of this phrase, rather than the moment of ritual death, are the equivalent of the "ritualization of the moment of death" in the Western? Perhaps the parallels are rather nebulous but Tompkins does later describe "the apocalyptic moment of his shoot-out" as "the sacrament the Western substitutes for matrimony" so perhaps when the Western hero lets his gun do the speaking in a moment of ritualised death, this is the equivalent of a merged "moment of ritual death" and "declaration" ("The scene in which the hero declares his love for the heroine, and the heroine her love for the hero" (Regis 34)) in a romance novel.

Or maybe I'm wandering off at a tangent, with verbal echoes acting as my guides down a slippery slope which will lead to metaphorical destruction. Back to Tompkins on the Western:

The narrative’s stylization is a way of controlling its violence. It is because the Western depicts life lived at the edge of death that the plot, the characters, the setting, the language, the gestures, and even the incidental episodes – a bath, a shave, a game of cards – are so predictable. The repetitive character of the elements produces the same impression of novelty within a rigid structure of sameness as the thousand ways a sonneteer finds to describe his mistress’s eyes. Within a terribly strict set of thematic and formal codes, the same maneuvers are performed over and over. Thus, the question of how a particular action will take place is just as important as what will happen. Half the pleasure of Westerns comes from this sense of familiarity, spliced with danger [...] seeing the same characters do the same thing in a different way each time [...] deepens the experience. You feel you have a stake in how the event will unfold because you know the territory. Part of what the scene is about is its difference from earlier versions; every change in atmosphere, staging, timing, and emphasis producing a different meaning. The imminence of death in the story line and the setting generates these repetitions and makes them titillating. (25)

This appreciation of the subtle novelties which can exist within a rigid structure, and of the pleasures to be derived from "familiarity, spliced with danger" strikes a chord with me as a reader of romance novels. No doubt this is because both are "genre fiction." And the similarities between romances and sonnets have also been noted, by Jennifer Crusie.

As a follow-up to the mention of titillation, though, I let the verbal echoes carry me away again while reading Tompkins's description of the opening scene of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage:

The heroine, Jane Withersteen, a young Mormon woman who owns a large ranch the Mormon power structure covets, is about to watch her best rider, Bern Venters, be whipped by the Mormon elders because he is a Gentile. [...] Afraid that Bern would kill one of the Mormon elders she looks up to, Jane Withersteen has symbolically emasculated him by taking his guns away. But after Lassiter saves him, Venters asks for them back in an exchange that advertises the phallic nature of the regime Lassiter represents:

Talk to me no more of mercy or religion – after to-day. To-day this strange coming of Lassiter left me still a man, and now I’ll die a man. ... Give me my guns. (17)

[...] But even though the gun is obviously a symbol for the penis, manhood, in this scenario, does not express itself sexually. Violence is what breaks out when men get guns. (32-33)

So, we've got phallic violence and death in a type of popular fiction strongly associated with men; sex and the "little death" in popular fiction strongly associated with women. Given the existence of Western romances, though, I didn't think it could really be a case of "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" so I wasn't entirely surprised when I happened to come across the following in a review of Louis L'Amour's Radigan (1958):

It [...] would have been nice for the falling in love bit to be left out as this seems to be a bit of a redundant theme in westerns, leaving it out would have set it apart from other westerns, but [...] I won’t hold it against Louis L’Amour.

Seems Louis lived up to his name. And to change genre but not location or topic, here are some lines from Rawhide:

Through rain and wind and weather,

Hell bent for leather,

Wishin' my gal was by my side.

All the things I'm missin',

Good vittles, love, and kissin',

Are waiting at the end of my ride. [...]

My heart's calculatin',

My true love will be waitin':

Waitin' at the end of my ride.

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Peters, Tony. "Book Review - Louis L'Amour - Radigan." 3 January 2010.

Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Lives of Westerns. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Toscano, Angela. "The Liturgy of Cliche." 27 Nov. 2011.

I thought I'd begin the year with a quote of relevance to any scholar of popular culture who wishes to explore the relationship between fictions and the societies in which they are produced and read:

The advantages of fictional materials in the study of social attitudes are twofold: because the novelist must create a world in which to set his characters and actions, the novel enables us to see how the writer places character types [...] in a context of social and philosophical belief. In addition, the novel is a work of fantasy and imagination as well as an imitation of reality; its patterns of action often reveal covert attitudes or judgments which significantly qualify the explicit positions taken by the writer. [...] Ambiguities of this sort are far less apparent in success manuals or political tracts where the element of imagination plays a minor role.

Novels, on the other hand, are problematic as a source of popular attitudes because there is no way of knowing just how representative they are [...].The writer is an individual. How can we infer with any certainty that his views reflect those of a larger social group?

Some students of popular attitudes have dealt with this problem by concentrating their attention on bestsellers. They assume that, because a book is widely read, it must reflect the accepted beliefs of its readers. This is probably a safer assumption in the case of non-fiction than fiction. Novels may be best-sellers because readers find the story or characters interesting irrespective of the attitudes expressed by the author. [...] While best-sellers presumably do not express attitudes completely abhorrent to the majority of their readers, it is not safe to conclude that a novel is popular because it accurately reflects the attitudes of its readers. (Cawelti viii-x)

That cautionary note's worth pondering, I think, given the flood of speculation there's been about the success of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Picking up on the point that "the novel is a work of fantasy and imagination," here's an argument against romance being singled out as the most unrealistic/fantasy-filled type of popular fiction:

  To desire is necessarily to exist in a state of fantasy: it is to entertain the possibility of obtaining something one does not have - power, love, adventure. Given that all desire is fantastical by its very nature, it might seem odd that some projections of desire are criticized because they seem inauthentic. Popular romance fiction, for instance, has long been derided as the worst kind of fantasy. There is the sense that publishers such as Silhouette, Harlequin and Mills & Boon provide emotional and erotic titillation for women who are too weak to achieve fulfilment in 'real life'. Only such fools, with no genuine hold on reality, could lend credence to the impossibly beautiful, monolithic, creatures to be found in these novels. There is the suggestion that these works are not so much fantasy as false consciousness. The passion is at once euphemized and overstated; this is pornography for those who cannot bear to own up to sexual appetite. Alternatively, such caricatures of desire may provide an excessive compensation in the sphere of the erotic for a variety of other wants: the imaginary lover can requite not merely sexual loneliness, but also a poorly paid job, or a general feeling of insignificance. Of course such criticism could also be offered of the characters and scenarios of male-oriented popular fiction, who are usually every bit as predictable and fantastic: the spy who is equally adept at unlocking women's desires and unravelling the plans of evil empires; the silent, unbreakable Western hero; the detective who outwits and outpunches low-life villains. The hard-boiled quality of masculine fictions suggests a claiming of the real, even though we as real readers in the real world may detect the wishfulness of it all. (Stoneley 223)

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Cawelti, John G. Apostles of the Self-Made Man. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.

Stoneley, Peter. “‘Never Love a Cowboy’: Romance Fiction and Fantasy Families. Writing and Fantasy. Ed. Ceri Sullivan and Barbara White. London: Longman, 1999. 223-235.

The image of "Hard-boiled detective Race Williams" came from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain.

As I mentioned in my previous post, for the final instalment in this series about popular culture's known unknowns and unknown unknowns I'm calling on the expertise of Dr Hannah Priest, who very kindly agreed to write a post for me about female werewolves.

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It’s a pleasure to have been asked to contribute to this response to Erin Young’s article on paranormal romance. Like Laura, I begin my response by ‘treading carefully’, as I am aware of ‘known unknowns’ in my own sphere of knowledge (and I’m sure there are ‘unknown unknowns’ too). My current work does not concern contemporary paranormal romance specifically, but rather the wider cultural history of female werewolves. While the novels of Carrie Vaughn and Kelley Armstrong have a significant place in the recent history of female werewolf fiction, I am interested in how they might read in relation to the longer history of presenting she-wolves. Are Kitty and Elena ‘new’ takes on an older tradition? Or are they based on more traditional tropes of presentation? As Laura mentioned at the end of her second post, I am also interested in the ways in which the presentation of the paranormal romance werewolf intersects with lycanthropy in contemporary horror and urban fantasy.

When researching the long cultural history of werewolves, gender is a vital consideration. The question as to why there are more male werewolves than female werewolves has received a number of answers: that lycanthropy is a metaphor for masculine aggression, nobility or psychological bifurcation is the most common response. However, the question itself can be dangerous, as it suggests that a) there is one tradition of werewolves to be explored; b) we can understand or define this tradition by exploring its most common manifestations; and c) manifestations that deviate from the norm are unusual variants that, while interesting, do not alter what the tradition means.

When we actually look at the roughly thousand-year history of female werewolves in literature (and, later, film) – to say nothing of the various European folklores that include werewolves – and compare it to the (admittedly longer) history of male werewolves, I would suggest that it is more productive to consider the female werewolf tradition (which I have termed ‘lycogyny’) as a separate, though intersecting, tradition to that of male werewolves. While these traditions share many tropes, they also draw on different influences and cultural principles. Put simply: when we read a female werewolf, we are accessing a distinct and semi-independent cultural history. Writers of female werewolves do not simply take a male werewolf and give it breasts.

This leads me to this first issue I found when reading Erin Young’s essay on Vaughn and Armstrong’s fictions: in the explorations of their lycanthropy, Kitty and Elena are read against male werewolves, with little reference to other female werewolves. Young states, for instance:

one depiction of the werewolf is notably absent from contemporary paranormal romance: the half-wolf, half-human construction that is recognizable in film examples like Lon Chaney Jr.’s performance in George Waggener’s The Wolf Man (1941), or Michael J. Fox’s comedic portrayal in Rod Daniels’ Teen Wolf (1985). The werewolves of werewolf romance transform completely, from human to wolf, and from wolf to human. They also possess a great deal of control over the transformation. (209)

I am not denying that this is true. I would question, though, the relevance of The Wolf Man and Teen Wolf to an examination of Kitty and Elena. These ostensible precedents seem somewhat arbitrary, and specifically male. While the ‘Wolf Man’ paradigm has become a standard cinematic way of representing the male werewolf, this is a late twentieth-century trope. Earlier fictions of male werewolves rarely refer to ‘half-wolf, half-human’ creatures, but almost exclusively rely on complete transformation. This is also true of fictions about female werewolves, and the female of the species has remained stubbornly resistant to the hybrid mode of depiction. Female werewolves are much more likely than males to move from one discrete form to another (the Ginger Snaps trilogy being a notable exception to this).

Young describes Vaughn and Armstrong’s description of werewolf transformation as an ‘alteration’ (209), but, in fact, we might compare it to Victorian narratives about female werewolves (Clemence Housman’s The Were Wolf, for instance), in which transformed women are indistinguishable from natural wolves. Similarly, when Young argues that ‘the transformation does not involve a loss of memory’ (209), we might remember that very few werewolf narratives have actually used the memory-loss trope – it has been used in twentieth-century cinema, but is not by any means the only presentation of lycanthropy (male or female) through the ages.

The paradigm that Young suggests is subverted by these novels, and their construction of ‘no undesirable bodies, no helpless lack of control, no tragic loss of memory or fear of the atrocities one may have committed in werewolf form’ (209), is well-represented by films inspired by The Wolf Man, but has never been the dominant mode of presenting female werewolves. It is also not particularly common in other literary genres containing female werewolves: horror, for instance, often erodes the difference between the woman-in-human-form and the woman-in-wolf-form. In fiction, we might look to Thomas Emson’s Maneater or, more strikingly, Tom Fletcher’s The Leaping, in which the only female werewolf has far less of a break in identity than her male peers. These texts bear comparison with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose only female werewolf (Veruca) has far less ‘tragic loss of memory’ and ‘fear’ than her male counterpart (Oz), and Trick ‘r Treat, whose lycanthropic transformation is far from ‘undesirable’.

Despite some compelling discussion of Vaughn and Armstrong’s work, Young sadly continues to discuss aspects of Elena and Kitty’s gendered presentation as ‘new’ without reference to traditions of presenting female werewolves. Most striking in this respect is her claim that Elena’s ‘lycanthropy effectively denaturalizes the domestic sphere, along with its gendered expectations and values’ (219). This is true in the case of Armstrong’s fiction, though I would question its direct application to Vaughn’s. However, rather than being a ‘new’ development in female werewolf fiction, it is one of the most common and abiding tropes of lycogyny. While earlier representations of male werewolves often work to reinforce masculine, hegemonic ideals – I’m thinking particularly of medieval romance narratives like Marie de France’s Bisclavret and the anonymous Guillaume de Palerne – female werewolves (or their medieval counterparts, the wives and stepmothers in werewolf narratives) have consistently denaturalized and subverted the domestic sphere (or other spheres with ‘gendered expectations and values’). We might look to the presentation of Grendel’s mother in Beowulf (a creature associated with wolves, if not a werewolf) as an early example of this. With her perversion of patrilineal society (her son’s heritage is matrilineal, with descent from Cain’s daughters), aggression towards the meadhall and its inhabitants, and alternative ‘family home’ in the mere, Grendel’s mother stands in sharp and violent opposition to the ‘gendered expectations and values’ of the domus.

However, we don’t need to go this far back: Shakira’s 2009 hit ‘She-Wolf’ told us:

A domesticated girl, that’s all you ask of me

Darling, it is no joke. This is lycanthropy.

For Shakira as for the anonymous poet of Beowulf, and numerous other writers in between, lycogyny necessarily requires a rejection and denaturalization of the domestic sphere. In truth, Elena and Kitty are much less forceful in this than other female werewolves – they do not, for instance, kill/kidnap their own children, like the wife of Rosamund Marriott Watson’s ‘A Ballad of the Werewolf’ – which might raise the question of what exactly the ‘alteration’ here is. For me, paranormal romance’s true subversion of lycogyny lies in the nostalgic yearning for the pre-lycanthropic domestic – it may be denaturalized in the narratives, but this often runs contrary to the heroine’s desires.

There is much that I agree with in Young’s article, and (as Laura stated in her post) this response is not a know-it-all corrective. Rather, I also want to draw attention to a common issue with studies of contemporary paranormal fictions: which precedents should be cited. In the case of werewolves (and, perhaps even more, vampires), the temptation is to hold up twentieth-century cinematic monsters as the tradition and to read twenty-first-century romance iterations as a subversion. Sadly, more often than not, it is also twentieth-century cinematic male monsters that are held up as the norm, denying a long and complex history of presenting female monsters. If we follow this approach, we will undoubtedly read paranormal romance’s creatures of the night as subversive and paradigm-altering. However, this is a misleading simplification that ignores millennia of literature and story-telling.

When writing "Flexible Heroines, Flexible Narratives: The Werewolf Romances of Kelley Armstrong and Carrie Vaughn" (2011), Erin S. Young deliberately stepped into an area bounded by "known unknowns" since she was dealing with two unfinished series of novels. While scholars of popular culture may have very good reasons for wishing to comment on such texts, they inevitably run the risk that later developments in a series may invalidate or undermine their findings. Young states that

the works of Kelley Armstrong and Carrie Vaughn [...] violate the conventional romance formula by omitting “the betrothal,” as well as any other indicator of “happily ever after.” (204)

In Armstrong's series "Elena explicitly rejects Clay’s renewed offer of marriage, and she refuses to attempt procreation" (208) and in Vaughn's

Kitty explores a number of romantic relationships with different partners in different locations.

What both of these series offer, then, are heroines whose paranormal attributes play a key role in their refusal—and sometimes, inability—to marry and bear children. (208)

However, in novels which were presumably published after Young completed her research, Kitty becomes engaged and by the beginning of Kitty Raises Hell she has a husband. As for Elena, she does eventually become a mother.

The "unknown unknowns" made their presence felt while I was reading Young's argument that traditional romance fiction reflects "Fordist" economic conditions, while the new type of "paranormal romance" emerges as a result of the socio-economic conditions prevalent in later decades:

Fordism designates the period of welfare capitalism in the United States between the 1950s and the 1970s, an era of postwar mass production characterized by the stable employment and unionization of working-class laborers. Flexible accumulation marks the transition from mass production to small-scale production, the rise of the service industry, and the growth of “flexible” employment arrangements (in terms of hours, contracts, work locations, etc.). I argue that the conventional romance narratives of the 1980s and prior reflect romantic relationships in the context of Fordist capitalism. The paranormal romance subgenre that emerges in the 1990s, on the other hand, explores the changing constructions of male and female subjectivity under flexible accumulation. [...] The heroines of “paranormal romance,” like the multi-volume structures that contain them, fully embrace the “dynamics of a ‘throwaway’ society” as they experience a multitude of romantic relationships, sexual encounters, and adventures that yield only temporary satisfaction. (205-07)

The hypothesis is an interesting one, but it does not seem to take into account novels such as Forever Amber (1944) and the Angelique series, which appear to have been "unknown unknowns" to Young. They're "known unknowns" to me but thanks to All About Romance, I am at least aware that the former featured a heroine who

had multiple partners and faced many perils before finally ending up with her "one true love." [...] Forever Amber was published in the 1940s, but it did have a lasting impact. [...]

the Angelique series by Anne and Serge Golon [...] were sprawling historical adventures about a French woman during the time of the Sun King - Louis XIV. Angelique peaked in popularity in the 1960s, were hugely popular and still remembered today [...]. But while many UBS's shelve them under romance, they aren't really romance novels and have more in common with Forever Amber. (Marble)

According to Elaine Showalter, Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber

revealed its age's secret desires and myths. The headstrong Amber - beautiful, empowered, resilient - represents a rebellion other women identified with, even, like my mother, as they hid the book away in the cupboard.

The novel came out in England in 1945. While English women were weeping over Celia Johnson's stoic portrayal of sexual renunciation in Brief Encounter they were also bonding over the bawdy, upwardly-mobile Amber St Clare. Forever Amber was published at a time of social upheaval in Britain, the beginnings of the welfare state and the erosion of an ethic of social and marital deference. Divorce petitions skyrocketed during the war, rising from 9,970 in 1938 to 24,857 in 1945. Moreover, Winsor's readers, the majority of them women, identified with Amber's calamitous life and admired her fortitude in times of hardship. The great fire of London would have seemed familiar to those who had had lived through the blitz. The random nature of plague would ring true for those who had lived with the constant fear of buzzbombs and V2 rockets.

As for Angelique, in the 1980s Rosemary Guiley stated that her

adventures have been so often mimicked that they now seem like stock fare. She sails to Africa, is kidnapped by ruthless pirates and sold to a sultan for his harem. She escapes that, too, and returns to France, only to leave again for the New World with yet a new lover, of course, and the feeling that anything is possible. With Angelique, anything is. (98)

All this rather suggests that the "paranormal romance" heroines whom Young examines are not quite as groundbreaking as Young's essay seems to imply, and Young's argument about two distinct economic periods producing two distinct types of heroine would seem to be undermined by the fact that heroines whom,

like the multi-volume structures that contain them, fully embrace the “dynamics of a ‘throwaway’ society” as they experience a multitude of romantic relationships, sexual encounters, and adventures that yield only temporary satisfaction. (207)

appear to have flourished under Fordism.

So much for some of the "unknown unknowns" of romantic fiction. But what about "unknown unknowns" in the area of the paranormal? Could it be that some of the "paranormal romances" examined by Young were replicating the "dynamics of a 'throwaway' society" primarily because they were drawing on the conventions of, say, fantasy, speculative fiction, erotic fiction and/or horror? This would appear to be the opinion of Paula Guran, whom Young quotes in her essay and who argues that

There are paranormals that would be best classified as belonging to a subgenre of fantasy or mystery or action/adventure or erotica or suspense or horror or historical fiction . . . By combining the aspects of so many “types” of literature, paranormal romance is becoming a type unto itself.

I did not come to paranormal romance from Romance. I suspect that many other paranormal readers come from the same literary turf I do—science fiction, fantasy, and horror. (Introduction 12)

My background as a reader is rather different from Guran's: if I were to make a map of my knowledge of popular culture, I'd have to mark the area of paranormal fiction with a sign reading "here be dragons, werewolves, vampires etc". It's pretty much a "known unknown" for me, so I turned for help to Dr Hannah Priest, whose "current research focuses on monsters and monster theory in late medieval romance and 21st-century urban fantasy."

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• Guiley, Rosemary. The Romance Reader's Guide to Printed Pleasures. New York: Facts on File, 1983.
• Guran, Paula. "Introduction: What is ‘Paranormal Romance’?." Best New Paranormal Romance. New York: Juno Books, 2006. 7-17. [If that link doesn't work, it should be available via the Internet Archive.]
• Marble, Anne. "Bodice-Rippers & Super Couples."  All About Romance. 15 May 2003.
• Showalter, Elaine. "Emeralds on the Home Front." The Guardian, 10 August 2002.
• Young, Erin S. "Flexible Heroines, Flexible Narratives: The Werewolf Romances of Kelley Armstrong and Carrie Vaughn." Extrapolation: A Journal Of Science Fiction And Fantasy 52.2 (2011): 204-226. It should be noted that Young's "Corporate Heroines and Utopian Individualism: A Study of the Romance Novel in Global Capitalism", Ph.D. thesis, University of Oregon, 2010, can be downloaded from here.

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones. (Secretary Rumsfeld, DoD News Briefing, 12 Feb. 12 2002)

In the context of the study of popular culture, "reports that say something hasn't happened [before] are always interesting to me." One relatively recent example, examined by Pam Rosenthal, is

Katie Roiphe’s Newsweek cover story a few weeks ago, which purported to let us in on a couple of big brave surprising secrets.

• That young successful working women might have erotic fantasy needs social equality can’t satisfy.
• That feminists are “perplexed,” and “outraged” by this situation.
• And that therefore feminism is some clueless, useless, irrelevant call back to some mythical “barricades.”

Pretty standard Roiphe, I discovered [...]: like a girl Columbus, her thing evidently is to “discover” something that’s been there all along, and then to congratulate herself for her boldness while conveniently forgetting that anybody – least of all any of those irrelevant feminists – had ever had similar (if not braver, more honest, challenging, nuanced, and radical) thoughts on the subject.

Pam was, obviously, unimpressed by Roiphe's report because what are apparently "unknown unknowns" for Roiphe are "known knowns" for Pam:

The story of how women got our own erotic reading still has yet to be told in its entirety. But if I were to try I’d begin by positing two distinct yet subtly related sources, both pretty contemporaneous. The advent of the bodice-rippers and of the sex-positive feminist discussion I cut my writing teeth on.

It was at this point that I questioned Pam's starting point. Why, I asked, not start further back still with, for example,

E. M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919) which, according to Q D Leavis, was “to be seen in the hands of every typist”? Or Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks (1907)? I haven’t actually read it, because it’s more romantic/erotic fiction rather than romance, but

With hindsight it can be argued that Three Weeks broke down a great deal of Edwardian sexual prejudice and hypocrisy: it can, however, also be seen as a wildly titillating fantasy and a foray into voyeurism. (Mary Cadogan, And Then Their Hearts Stood Still, page 75)

 And then, having hastily done a little bit more research, I added:

Sarah Wintle’s article on The Sheik, [...] puts it, as you say, “in the context of a period of sexual reform”:

To flaunt this book in the early 1920s, Alexander Walker suggests in his biography of Valentino, was to flaunt your emancipation and daring; to enjoy openly its primitive sexual fantasies was to show a truly modern insouciance in the face of the fashionably shocking vagaries and transgressive energies of human feeling celebrated in modernist and jazz-age primitivism. Such energies and drives had recently been highlighted by Freudian psychoanalysis and by the popularizing of the new science of sexology which had led to the publication, in the same year as The Sheik, of Marie Stopes’s manual, Married Love. In one way at least the book’s open treatment of female sexuality contributed to its popular version of modernity. (Wintle 294-95)

Could we go back further still? Jodi McAlister has recently drawn parallels between modern popular romance novels and the works of Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood and Aphra Behn, which

got thrown in the immoral rather than the immortal basket [...] not because of some arbitrary distinction between the romance and the novel but because they were dangerous. Their literary form is the form Richardson was trying to remake in a moral form when he wrote Pamela. Social anxieties about what women read and what they took from it were rife [...]. Female fantasy, whether or sex or violence or revenge or passion, taking place as it did outside the controlled bounds of patriarchal society, was considered frightening and perilous.

To me the history of erotic fiction is still pretty much a "known unknown" or even an "unknown unknown" and, as a medievalist, it seems to me as though I've leaped from a period in which, "Contrary to the modern stereotype that views males as more susceptible to sexual desire than females, [...] women were often seen as much more lustful than men" (Decameron Web), to a period in which it's necessary to argue that women are at least as interested in sex as men are. Quite how that cultural shift took place is another "known unknown" to me because I haven't done much background reading on the history of sex and sexualities.

I can only conclude that any scholar of popular culture has to tread extremely carefully. We may have detailed maps of the "known knowns," but beyond them lie the "known unknowns," those areas of popular culture about which we know we know little. And then, beyond them, are the "unknown unknowns." Before we accept reports that "something hasn't happened" before, we might want to try to do more research, to verify whether one of those "unknown unknowns" is the knowledge that it has, in fact, happened before.

I'm well aware that, however much I study popular romance, there will always be vast areas that remain "known unknowns" to me. I hope, therefore, that my next post, which looks at an article by Erin S. Young, will be taken not as the gloating of a smugly self-satisfied know-it-all, but as the conclusions of a romance scholar who is constantly being humbled by finding out just how much she still has to learn about popular culture.

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• Cadogan, Mary. And Then Their Hearts Stood Still: An Exuberant Look at Romantic Fiction Past and Present. London: Macmillan, 1994.
• Wintle, Sarah. ‘The Sheik: What Can be Made of a Daydream’, Women: A Cultural Review 7.3 (1996): 291-302.

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.

In my last post I quoted Pamela Regis, who told the 2010 IASPR conference that "our discipline values complexity in its study texts." The following quote from an essay by Deborah Kaplan demonstrates this, and also illustrates the way in which the popular romance's assumed lack of complexity has tended to lower its value in the eyes of literary critics:

Jane Austen as one of the mothers of the Harlequin or Silhouette novel?  Such a genealogy makes many an Austen devotee smile.  We know Austen’s novels to be so much more complex and nuanced, so much more culturally and linguistically enriching than the mass-market romance.  And yet, recent popular representations reveal a distinct trend: the harlequinization of Jane Austen’s novels.  If Austen is one of the ancestors of the paperback romance, recent films of her work are now the heirs of this popular form.  The two most explicit descendants in this romance genealogy are the films of Sense and Sensibility, adapted by Emma Thompson and directed by Ang Lee, and Emma, adapted and directed by Douglas McGrath.

By harlequinization I mean that, like the mass-market romance, the focus is on a hero and heroine’s courtship at the expense of other characters and other experiences, which are sketchily represented.  As the tip sheet suggests, the hero and heroine’s plot should begin in the first chapter—no wasting time with matters as extraneous as the heroine’s life anytime before she first encounters the hero.  Harlequinization does not require a plot closely patterned on Pride and Prejudice’s.  But it does necessitate an unswerving attention to the hero’s and heroine’s desires for one another and a tendency to represent those desires in unsurprising, even clichéd ways.

I began to gear myself to write a long and detailed defence of popular romance novels (and in particular of Harlequin/Mills & Boon ones) but then it occurred to me that (a) I've already had one published and it was over 200 pages long and (b) often, simplicity is more my cup of tea anyway.

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Kaplan, Deborah. "Mass Marketing Jane Austen: Men, Women, and Courtship in Two of the Recent Films." Persuasions 18 (1996): 171-181.

Regis, Pamela. “What Do Critics Owe the Romance? Keynote Address at the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).

Image of a cup of tea from the Open Clip Art Library.