misc-academic

When I was young I was read the story of the Elephant's Child

who was full of ‘satiable curiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions. [...] He asked questions about everything that he saw, or heard, or felt, or smelt, or touched, and all his uncles and his aunts spanked him. And still he was full of ‘satiable curiosity!

That poor little elephant suffers a lot as a result of his curiosity. He's not just spanked: he gets his nose irrevocably stretched by a crocodile. He learns, though, that the growth is a positive development and the story ultimately condemns the family who do the spanking.

I much prefer this story about curiosity and its rewards to the idea that curiosity kills cats or that bad things emerge when Pandora's Box is opened. So in the past when people have mentioned the possibility that the academic study of popular romance could involve overthinking  things, I was just puzzled. Isn't thinking about things always a good thing?

Recently, though, I've seen a couple of things which have got me rethinking the idea of overthinking.

for every person who is interested in interrogating and contextualizing her own choices in reading material, I feel certain there are more people who just want to read what they want without over-thinking it or being questioned in any way. I guess I am trying in a clumsy roundabout way to figure out if there are ways in which academic or “wonky”  incursions into the online romance community are perceived as a negative development and, if so, where, and for whom?

a college writing instructor, [...] offered a course that asks students to examine everyday arguments: that is, to use rhetorical and critical theory to construct academic essays about the arguments that we daily encounter in the news, in popular culture, and online. (1)

When I taught this course in the winter of 2011, I encountered a problem. For their third formal essay of the semester, students wrote a critical analysis of a television show of their choice; not surprisingly, most students picked programs that they regularly watched and enjoyed. This was by far students’ favorite assignment, and in fact these essays were the strongest and most sophisticated of the semester. One by one, however, students turned in written drafts that eviscerated the shows they spoke so animatedly and lovingly about in class. The student who had seen every syndicated episode of Friends scrutinized the show’s lack of socioeconomic and racial diversity. The student who routinely watched The Bachelor each week with her friends interrogated its portrayal of romantic love and marriage. And on the day when the final draft was due, Maria – who wrote a beautiful analysis of how the show Entourage perpetuates hegemonic masculinity – asked me, “Does this mean I can’t watch Entourage anymore?” (1-2)

If Maria’s Entourage essay gave the show a critical viewing, how was she watching it before? Was she viewing it uncritically? If so, how does this characterization of her viewing practices position Maria’s expertise about the show in the classroom? What knowledges, practices, or subjectivities actually comprise Maria’s expertise, and how do they compare to academic ways of thinking? Is there another way to understand Maria’s pleasure from watching Entourage besides saying it is uncritical? What kind of affect is pleasure, and where does it fit in the writing classroom? What happens when texts that students use primarily for purposes of pleasure and entertainment are brought into the classroom for critical analysis? What happens to students in such situations? And finally, how should I respond to Maria’s question? (2)

romance readers take part in shaping how textual conventions are understood, what texts mean beyond their narrative function, and how they circulate. Moreover, some women use popular romance fiction to maintain intimate connections to friends and family members, reflect on and transform their personal lives, and demonstrate collective and civic engagement online. These experiences may remain invisible in classrooms that focus primarily on the role of popular culture texts in reproducing hegemonic ideologies. (15)

critical literacy pedagogies can actually disempower students when such pedagogies invite popular culture texts into the writing classroom but position such texts primarily as ideological artifacts that require critical, academic “tools” to excavate their hidden meanings. (13)

In a post celebrating her blog's first anniversary, Pamela of Badass Romance said that

They're questions which also preoccupied Stephanie Moody who, as

Then

Like Pamela, Stephanie began to ask herself questions about questioning and critiquing:

What, in other words, if academics are not the curious little elephant but are some of the older animals in the story? I've never really taught any students, which makes it hard for me to see myself in this role, but could we be the pompous yet helpful Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake who asks the elephant "questions, in the Socratic mode of instruction" (Meyer)? Perhaps we're the Kolokolo bird, with its mournful cry of "‘Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out," sending the elephant off on a possibly instructive but also dangerous and painful quest? Or are we the crocodile, forcefully pulling the elephant's nose while trying to turn him into fodder for our careers?

Maybe I'm overthinking things and should just sit back and enjoy some pictures instead?

 

 

 

Pretty, aren't they? But I'm still asking questions. And in case you're wondering, Stephanie Moody concludes that

and so

I'm not sure that academics who are also romance readers "position such texts primarily as ideological artifacts" but I can see how we might come across as doing that. In which case, we might seem to be taking an authoritative position which disempowers other romance readers.

On the other hand, the online romance community isn't being forced into a college composition classroom, and those of us who are both academics and romance readers are still romance readers, so should being an academic (or simply being a reader who takes a more academic/"wonky" perspective) disbar someone from taking "part in shaping how textual conventions are understood, what texts mean beyond their narrative function, and how they circulate"?

 

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Meyer, Rosalind, 1984. "But is it Art? An Appreciation of Just So Stories." Kipling Journal 58 (232). 10-33. Qtd. in Lewis, Linda. "The Elephant's Child." Kipling Society, 30 July 2005.

Moody, Stephanie Lee, 2013. "Affecting Genre: Women's Participation with Popular Romance Fiction." Ph.D thesis. University of Michigan.

During the recent Australian election campaign the "Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee" promised that

A Coalition Government, if elected, will crack down on Labor’s addiction to waste by auditing increasingly ridiculous research grants and reprioritising funding through the Australian Research Council (ARC) to deliver funds to where they’re really needed. [...] There will be no reduction in research funding. In fact, the Coalition has announced new research into dementia and diabetes. (Briggs)

One of the academics whose research was singled out as an example of the "ridiculous" responded by arguing that "Philosophising is, like all intellectual work, work" (Redding). The Coalition, however, evidently doesn't think of all intellectual work as equal: only some is "really needed." Perhaps the only "intellectual work" which is deemed "work" by such politicians either produces tangible products or trains others to work outside academia. That would seem to have been the position of Governor Rick Scott of Florida, who in 2011 declared that:

We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on, those types of degrees, so when they get out of school, they can get a job. (qtd. in Lende)

I can't help but see parallels between this sort of politician and the Protestant Reformers who

stripped down the list of admissible callings, lopping off not only the beggars and rascals whose idleness cumbered the land but the courtiers and monks who were no better. The medieval summum bonum, a life of contemplation and prayer, suddenly was no vocation at all. "True Godliness don't turn men out of the world" into "a lazy, rusty, unprofitable self-denial," William Penn insisted, joining the attack on the monasteries; faith set men to work in the occupations of the secular, commonplace world. (Rodgers 8)

The constant stream of attacks on the humanities makes me wonder if we're coming up for another dissolution of the monasteries, only this time

it is the humanities and several of the social sciences that many public leaders have come to see as irrelevant (or worse) [...]. Notwithstanding the dizzying pace of change in the economy, policy leaders seem to imagine that a tighter focus on patently job-related fields of study now in short supply — STEM and selected "career fields" -- can somehow build the full range of skills and knowledge [...] society will need. (Schneider)

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Briggs, Jamie. "Ending More of Labor's Waste." 5 Sept. 2013.

Lende, Daniel. "Florida Governor: Anthropology Not Needed Here." PLOS blogs. 11 Oct. 2011.

Redding, Paul. "Philosophy is not a 'ridiculous' pursuit. It is worth funding." The Guardian. 17 Sept. 2013.

Rodgers, Daniel T. The Work Ethic in Industrial America 1850-1920. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.

Schneider, Carol Geary. "A Dangerous Assault." Inside Higher Ed. 8 February 2013.

The image of a monk at work in a scriptorium came from Wikimedia Commons.

"There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Not content with annoying philosophers and scientists, though, the evolutionary psychologists seem to have decided to annoy those of us in the arts and humanities too. Recently some of them set out to uncover the "Mating Strategies Exemplified by Austen's Characters" (Kruger et al 199).

Their credibility was somewhat undermined by an early use of the world "natural":

Jane Austen is well known for her rich descriptions of female protagonists and their varied experiences in their quest for male partners (Harman, 2009), and thus, it seems natural to explore women’s mating strategies as depicted in her texts. (199)

Really? I'd have thought they'd want to distinguish between natural/biological influences on behaviour and nurture/social factors. That's perhaps a minor nitpick, but they also suggest that Austen had an "intuitive understanding of women's reproductive concerns" (199). I'm sure it suits their purposes to depict Austen as someone who was intuitively in touch with women's innate biological motivations: this would make her novels an invaluable source of primary information for them. I'm not sure what "Janeites" would feel about this, but I very much doubt it's a view which would find favour among "Austenites":

Michael Hayes

locates the difference between the two groups via discourse:It is also easy to recognize the legitimacy of two very different discourses: Janeite, which tends to be informal, intimate and personal accounts of her social and sentimental costume dramas, and Austenite, which is formal, intellectual and objective in its explication of her ironic, moral and subtle narratives that constitute a social and moral analysis. (221)

According to Hayes, the Janeite discourse is dependent on both personal narrative and period trappings, while Austenite interaction is marked by a more academically rigorous and formal evaluation of the same work. (Gross 4)

Moreover, I feel sure that those who "regard her as the most unflinchingly satirical of all great novelists" (Mullan) would be less than happy about these academics' assumption "that her characters should be immediately comprehendible to young adults, such that they would understand the various mating strategies the characters employ" (199).

Here's a description of the kind of research they undertook:

Men preferred the long-term strategist (Jane Bennett) to the flirty Lydia Bennett for both a long-term committed relationship and a short-term relationship, but did not have a preference for a one-night sexual relationship. Men preferred the short-term strategist (Maria Bertram) to the commitment-seeking Fanny Price for a one-night sexual relationship, but did not show a preference for other relationships. However, in a third comparison (Emma Woodhouse from Emma and Mary Crawford from Mansfield Park), men did not indicate any relationship preferences. (200)

This reads to me like a game of "marry, shag, kill". In this game

you have three people, and you have to decide wich of the 3 you would do what with. Shag, being the one night stand, marry, being you spend the rest of your life with them (which means you can shag them as many times as you want), and kill, I think is self explanatory.

Admittedly the academics left out "kill" but they seem to have replaced it with "a short-term relationship." What's really interesting to me is that

In both the preliminary and current study we decided that although Elizabeth Bennett is the central character, we chose to focus on her sisters Jane and Lydia because of their starkly contrasting personalities and mating strategies. (200)

In other words, they preferred to focus on the less nuanced characters. Would Elizabeth's success, that results from what might almost be called an anti-mating mating strategy, not have provided support for their theories? Furthermore, the graph in Figure 1 suggests that when it came to choosing between Jane and Lydia in the "shag" scenario, slightly more men chose Jane than Lydia, which was not really in line with the hypothesis

that participants’ ratings for a character’s attractiveness would be a function of the mating strategy the character exemplifies in the text, even when this information is excluded from the descriptive passage. (205)

They had "expected men to prefer Lydia [...] for non-committed sexual relationships" (207) but acknowledged that in the descriptive passage which the men read before making their decision

she is described very unfavorably. She is said to be ignorant, a poor listener, and unintelligent, all of which are negatively evaluated personality characteristics. It remains interesting, though, that although she is described so negatively, approximately half of the men preferred her for a hypothetical short-term and a brief, sexual relationship. (208)

What I find "interesting" is the fact that the men weren't being given a wide range of options. So, given a choice between a woman with an extremely unattractive personality and another whom one might reasonably doubt would consent to a "non-committed sexual relationship," opinions were split about which was the least-bad option. It certainly isn't a ringing endorsement of Lydia's mating strategy or, I would suggest, of the hypotheses underlying the approach of the academics carrying out the study.

Mate Selection: "Mr Collins meant to choose one of the daughters" (illustration by Hugh Thomson, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Gross, Ursula Marie. "What Happens Next: Jane Austen's Fans and Their Sequels to Pride and Prejudice." MA thesis. Washington DC: Georgetown University, August 2008.

Kruger, D. J., Fisher, M. L., Strout, S. L., Wehbe, M., Lewis, S., & Clark, S. "Variation in Women’s Mating Strategies Depicted in the Works and Words of Jane Austen." Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology 7.3 (2013): 197-210.

Mullan, John. "Jane Austen is not that soothing: Suggestions that her fiction is an escape into a calmer, less crazy world miss the novels' stinging satire." The Guardian. 11 July 2013.

In the introduction to my For Love and Money I argued that many Harlequin Mills & Boon romances "are well-written, skilfully crafted works which can and do engage the minds as well as the emotions of their readers, and a few are small masterpieces—as I shall show" (15). However, as Jackie C. Horne points out in her review of my book,

as Vivanco never gives her readers a definition of just what constitutes "literary art," readers are ultimately left unable to judge whether or not any of the 147 books she discusses embody it, or which among those 147 are "small masterpieces."

I was using the words in a very basic sense. "Literature" can be defined as:

The result or product of literary activity; written works considered collectively; a body of literary works produced in a particular country or period, or of a particular genre. Also: such a body of works as a subject of study or examination (freq. with modifying word specifying the language, period, etc., of literature studied). (OED)

"Art" can be used to refer to "Any of various pursuits or occupations in which creative or imaginative skill is applied according to aesthetic principles" (OED), so one might use "literary art" to distinguish between written works and examples of the dramatic arts or the visual arts.

The Oxford English Dictionary's first definition of "art", though, refers to "Skill in doing something, esp. as the result of knowledge or practice" and, "With modifying word or words denoting skill in a particular craft, profession, or other sphere of activity." The "literary art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon romance" can be taken to mean the creative and imaginative skill (which is honed through practice and the acquisition of knowledge) required to produce a written work of romance fiction published by HM&B. To romance readers it may seem rather unambitious to claim that HM&B authors have some skill, but given the number of times words such as "churned", "mass-produced" and "formula" are invoked when HM&Bs are under discussion, it seemed to me that I had a job on my hands just trying to show that there's any skill at all required in their production.

Some authors are, of course, more skilled than others and a "masterpiece" is

A work of outstanding artistry or skill, spec. the greatest work of a particular artist, writer, etc.; a consummate example of some skill or other kind of excellence. Also: a piece of work produced by a craftsman in order to be admitted to a guild as an acknowledged master. (OED)

That refers to the medieval guild system, in which an individual would hope to work their way up from apprentice to master:

Apprentice - A Medieval Guild Apprentice was sent to work for a 'Master' during his early teens. The Apprenticeship lasted between 5 and 9 years depending on the trade. During this time the apprentice received no wages - just his board, lodging and training. An Apprentice was not allowed to marry until he reached the status of a Journeyman.



Journeyman - A Medieval Guild Journeyman was paid for his labour. During this time the Journeyman would create his 'Masterpiece', in his own time, which he would present to the Guild as evidence of his craftsmanship in the hope of being accepted as a 'Master'. It was difficult to reach the status of 'Master' and much depended on the Journeyman's standing and acceptance by the top members of the Guild



Master - A Medieval Guild Master craftsman could set up his own workshop and train his own apprentices. (The York Guild of Building)

There were a wide range of guilds, each with different skills and requirements, but it seems that in general

The middle of the thirteenth century brings us to the point when economic motives, group solidarity, and craftsmanly pride, no doubt combined in varying proportions from place to place, led some guilds to require a test of competence for mastery. [...] At first, the competence of would-be masters does not seem to have been formally tested, but by the middle of the fifteenth century, masterpieces were required in an increasing number of cities of north and central Europe.

The task imposed on painters was generally the execution of a panel of given dimensions; on sculptors, a statue; and on glaziers, a panel of stained glass. The subject is sometimes specified, along with the nature of the material to be used and the technical procedure to be followed. [...] The kind of skill to be demonstrated may be illustrated by the stipulation of the Strasbourg guild statutes of 1516, which call for the aspirant to make a picture of the Virgin or 'some other appropriate image with garments that are carved [which] he should paint, polish, gild, varnish, along with other decoration.' Such requirements may similarly be thought of as tests of standard skills, acquired in a period of apprenticeship during which the novice was by all accounts kept busy with the grinding of pigments, the preparation of grounds and similar technical procedures....[T]he documents only hint at the expectations of the jury through laconic phrases: the work must be 'well and suitably made,' 'in the appropriate manner and style,' and the like. (Walter Cahn, Masterpieces: Chapters on the History of an Idea, Princeton, 1979, as excerpted here, pp. 10-12)

So I was thinking of "masterpieces" as works which are outstanding because they showcase the various skills required to produce literature of the kind published by Harlequin/Mills & Boon i.e. relatively short novels which are tightly focused on the achievement of a happy long-term romantic relationship between the protagonists. Those skills would include an ability to match the register of the writing to the mimetic mode chosen, effective use of modal counterpoint, appropriate use of metaphor and perhaps additionally the ability to rework mythoi and/or use literary allusions and metafictional elements in ways which will delight rather than bore a frequent reader of HM&Bs.

Any such assessment will, of course, be somewhat subjective but I hope I have at least outlined some of the criteria on which one might base an assessment of the skill demonstrated in any given work and presented my readers with enough examples that, should they choose to read the novels in full, they might find at least some that they would consider to be "masterpieces".

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The image depicts Benjamin Franklin as a printer's apprentice and came from Wikimedia Commons.

I've just updated my main page so that it mentions my latest research: I'm currently working on a series of essays about Americans’ beliefs and attitudes as expressed in US romance novels. The novels I'm planning to discuss include:

• Linnea Sinclair's Games of Command
• Rose Lerner's In for a Penny
• Jennifer Crusie's Fast Women
• Pamela Morsi's Simple Jess
• LaVyrle Spencer's Morning Glory
• Beverly Jenkins's Belle
• Karin Kallmaker's In Every Port

There will of course be some category romances in the mix too.

That's a long-term project; in the shorter term, the next issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies should include an essay I've written about Georgette Heyer. It probably contains more information than you ever wanted to know about early nineteenth-century Leeds (unless you're particularly interested in the history of Leeds) but the amount of detail demonstrates Heyer's commitment to historical accuracy when creating the settings of her novels. There's also a little bit in there about the history of jigsaw puzzles.

I'm not sure I've received my first bad review, exactly, but it's clear that Dr Kate Macdonald didn't come away from reading For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance with her view of romance novels changed for the better. Her review of it is up today and, if anything, it seems I've reinforced her belief that they're formulaic, which is quite the opposite of what I was trying to do. Kate, who reviews for Vulpes Libris and teaches at the University of Ghent, concludes that

Vivanco spends most of this book struggling to persuade us (me) that these novels sprout from a deep, rich bed of nutritious literary quality, and share a common standard of literariness. But it’s the formula that Vivanco is critiquing here, not the writing. Because these novels are so formulaic, they are policed rather than edited. Anything that transcends the formula will be edited out if the publisher thinks that The Reader or The Buyer (much more important) will not like it, so applying the principles of literary criticism to a formula seems a bit pointless. Also, I do think Vivanco reads too much into her subject.

I've read (and continue to read) a lot of Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances and, as I stated in For Love and Money, I believe that "many are well-written, skilfully crafted works which can and do engage the minds as well as the emotions of their readers, and a few are small masterpieces" (15). Kate, however,

could not see why anyone would want to read the writers whose works were quoted by Vivanco. I was more than disappointed by the quality of the writing in those quotations: I was appalled. [...] Vivanco quotes from many, many separate works, and the only way I could tell them apart was that the older texts, predating the 1950s, had a recognisable style, some sense of a person writing, rather than the formula. I could imagine someone speaking the dialogue in those quotations, and I felt interested in the stories, the characters, their voices. This was not the case with the extracts from the more recent novels, written, as Vivanco says in her title, for the money. I’m not at all surprised that wise novelists, some of whom are now famous, used pseudonyms when they wrote for this romance manufactory. But clearly there is a vast and satisfied readership out there who want to read novels written like this: they choose to buy these books, and that’s the problem.

And if someone's not convinced that the novels have any literary merit, it's not surprising that they're going to want to see them studied them from a different angle:

The romance genre is notorious for not normally being considered worthy of literary criticism, so Vivanco’s study is a good addition to the new romance studies.

However, I have caveats. I don’t think Vivanco has studied these generic, formulaic novels in the most interesting way. I have worked on very similar fiction, mass-market novelettes published in the 1890s. I got nothing of interest by looking at their literary quality, but found vast amounts to write about when looking at them as book history. Thinking about these novels as part of daily reading, and looking at their context is fascinating for understanding their readers’ reading tastes, and how much they would pay for it. Janice Radway did this in 1984 (Reading the Romance) for the American romance market. Looking at how Harlequin Mills & Boon romances are marketed, and what exactly their formula is, and why it works so well, would be valuable socio-literary book-history.

As Heather Schell has noted,

Evolutionary psychology has popularized the notion that men’s everyday behavior can be better understood by comparison to the habits of large mammals—most especially the more aggressive of the primates—living in patriarchal, aggressive societies. [...] Our cultural fictions have embraced this narrative wholeheartedly but changed the comparison to more charismatic megafauna: dogs and wolves. (109-110)

Popular romance fiction has certainly "embraced this narrative wholeheartedly": the terms "alpha male" or "alpha" are frequently used to refer to the "tough, hard-edged, tormented heroes that are at the heart of the vast majority of bestselling romance novels" (Krentz 107). The term

“Alpha” was originally used in early twentieth-century studies of animal behavior to refer to the dominant individuals in rigidly hierarchical animal societies, such as some types of insects and, in later work, large mammals like primates and wolves. (Schell 113).

One should, however, tread extremely cautiously when comparing animals and humans, not least because "There is a long-standing debate within the field of sexual selection regarding the potential projection of stereotypical sex roles onto animals by researchers" (Dougherty et al 313). According to Dougherty et al,

The subjectivity provided by anthropomorphism (endowing nonhuman animals with human-like attributes), zoomorphism (the converse, endowing humans with nonhuman animal-like attributes), and the sociocultural surroundings researchers finds themselves in, can bias what research is done, how it is done and how the resulting data are interpreted. [...] Perhaps the clearest case in point concerns the study and interpretation of sexual behaviour in nonhuman animals. (313)

For example,

Karlsson Green & Madjidian (2011) showed in their survey of the most cited papers on sexual conflict that male traits were more likely to be described using ‘active’ words, whereas female traits were more likely to be described with ‘reactive’ words, that is, in terms of female traits being a response to male behaviours or male-imposed costs. They ascribed this difference (at least in part) to the anthropomorphic imposition of conventional sex roles on animals by researchers (caricatured as males active, females passive). (314)

However, not all stereotypes of women's sexuality cast us in a passive role and "a gender bias in the use of language may depend upon which particular sexual conflict is being studied" (315).

Dougherty et al studied the language used in scientific papers describing

pre- and postcopulatory cannibalism. In terms of the taxonomic coverage, 23 of the species were spiders (35 papers and two reviews), six were mantids (six papers) and one was an orthopteran (one paper, concerning the sagebrush cricket, Cyphoderris strepitans). (314)

They found that,

In terms of the words used to describe females, while sexual cannibalism is predicated on the fact that one of the pair ends up being the meal of the other, some of the words used to describe female behaviour are a long way short of being value free: for instance, females have been called ‘voracious’ or ‘rapacious’ more than once. Moreover, if we are concerned with either the causes or consequences of negative sexual stereotyping more generally, the use of such words suggests that there may be scant comfort in our findings here of the assignment of active agency to female animals in the context of sexual cannibalism. Not least this is because it is well-known across human culture that sexually aggressive or violent females are themselves a negative stereotype: from the Gorgons of Greek myth to the femme fatale, the ‘black widow’ or the ‘lethal seductress’ of today. (316)

Given that scientists describing animal behaviour can be influenced by stereotypes derived from human culture, interpreting human behaviour in the light of potentially-anthropomorphised accounts of animal behaviour is problematic. As Dougherty et al conclude,

scientists may bring preconceptions and oversimplifications from their sociocultural surroundings, with ‘general principles’ merely serving to validate those preconceptions. This will forever be an inescapable part of science, and something that we must always be aware of and try and guard against as much as we can. However, there is also the concern that scientific findings about sexual behaviour (or indeed anything else) may travel the other way and provide the basis for sociocultural norms that are chauvinistic, demeaning, or that justify oppression and violence towards some members of society (for instance women or in terms of sexual identity [...]).  [...] We suggest that the key message that we should put across is that there are no easy lessons about how we should live or love to be learned from nonhuman animals. (318)

Two of the three papers cited in this post are available online. See below for details.

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Dougherty, Liam R., Emily R. Burdfield-Steel and David M. Shuker. "Sexual Stereotypes: The Case of Sexual Cannibalism." Animal Behaviour 85.2 (2013): 313-322.

Krentz, Jayne Ann. "Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 107-114.

Schell, Heather. "The Big Bad Wolf: Masculinity and Genetics in Popular Culture." Literature and Medicine 26.1 (2007): 109-125.

It's been years since I've come across comments about romance as scathing as Warren Motte's. In 2007 Julie Bindel stated that

My loathing of M&B novels has nothing to do with snobbery. I could not care less if the books are trashy, formulaic or pulp fiction [...]. But I do care about the type of propaganda perpetuated by M&B. I would go so far as to say it is misogynistic hate speech.

Unlike Bindel, it turns out that Motte cares extremely deeply about whether "the books are trashy, formulaic or pulp fiction" and, also unlike Bindel, Motte focuses all his attention on just one romance: Sharon Kendrick's The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable-Girl.

The fact that an entire 16 page-article in an academic journal has been dedicated to a discussion of just one Harlequin romance could, in theory, be taken as an indication that, at last, the "continuing assumption that popular romances neither invite nor repay the kind of focused, individual inquiry that academics bring to other texts" (Selinger and Frantz 10) is being rejected outside the field of romance scholarship. Unfortunately, in practice this would seem to be a case which demonstrates that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: there would seem to be more than a little sarcasm in Motte's statement that

The volume bears the distinctive imprint of Harlequin Books, a sure guarantor of quality, I had always been told. For I realized that I had never actually read a Harlequin novel, and I told myself that I must repair that yawning lacuna in my literary education. (120)

Not having read The Playboy Sheikh's Virgin Stable-Girl I can't comment on its merit as a work of literature. I have, however, written at length about Harlequin Mills & Boon romances and I can therefore state with confidence that anyone who chooses to judge all HM&Bs by their experience with just one is likely to end up with a very skewed view of them since one novel cannot be representative of the diversity in authorial talent as well as in literary "mode" and subject-matter to be found in HM&Bs. For the record, Smart Bitch Sarah, who has been known to recommend some Harlequin romances very highly, gave this one a D- and was of the opinion that "This book is high entertainment. It’s so ridiculous, you can’t put it down" (Wendell).

Motte's essay is, I suspect, intended to be entertaining but it itself ends up seeming rather ridiculous (and perhaps that's why I feel impelled to blog about it). Let's begin with his statement that,

Seizing upon any objective data that I could find then, I learned that Harlequin Books S.A. [...] had published The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable-Girl in August of 2009, as the second volume in a series entitled “The Royal House of Karedes,” a series that promises to bring to its readers one installment per month. That’s a heady rate, and one which puts even the most faithful reader to the test: sneeze, and you miss an installment. (120-21)

It must be an extraordinarily long sneeze: how many people take a whole month to read a book which is less than 200 pages long? Next Motte demonstrates an apparent inability to do simple research:

The author of The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable-Girl is a certain “Sharon Kendrick.” I don’ t know who that is, but she has a website, and that’s a strong claim to objective reality in our cynical age. The section entitled “About the Author” in the back matter of the novel mentions that she had qualified as a nurse and had driven an ambulance “across the Australian desert” before marrying her “dashing doctor” and settling down. And indeed the spelling in the novel obeys British norms, rather than American ones. But that could well be a ruse, of course.

I find that I am reluctant, for some reason, to believe that “Sharon Kendrick” might be a garden-variety Australian hausfrau; thus, I shall continue to enclose her in those skeptical quotation marks. (121)

Kendrick lives in Winchester, in the UK, as is made clear on the Mills & Boon website (and she has an English accent). There's really a lot more information available about her than about "Shakespeare" or "Homer."

Motte finds the experience of reading The Playboy Sheikh's Virgin Stable-Girl "a harrowing one" (124) for he is "scandalized by this novel" (126) and feels that it has "insulted" (126) him with its "inanity" (127). He does, however, eventually note that there is

a nice metafictional touch to her novel: “The world’s media went crazy. THE PLAYBOY SHEIKH AND THE STABLE GIRL, screamed the tabloids” (176). The full-blown specularity of that moment comes as a welcome surprise to the reader diligent enough to have penetrated this far into The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable-Girl. (132)

A welcome bit of analysis for "the reader diligent enough to have penetrated this far into" Motte's essay.

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Bindel, Julie. "Detestable Trash." The Guardian. 5 Dec. 2007. [Some of the responses generated by the romance reading and writing community are listed here and here.]

Motte, Warren. "A Walk on the Sheikh Side." Formes Poétiques Contemporaines 9 (2012): 119-134. [The entire issue can be downloaded free here.]

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.

Wendell, Sarah. "The Playboy Sheikh's Virgin Stable Girl." 10 Sept. 2009.

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.

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.