class-capitalism

In my last post I quoted Porter and Hall's statement that "Work is beginning to appear on the fiction in women's magazines and the sexual messages it conveyed" (267). They refer to "Part Three: Realistic Fantasies: The World of the Story Papers" of Billie Melman's Woman and the Popular Imagination, Joseph McAleer's Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914-1950 and an article by Bridget Fowler. As the latter was the most readily accessible of the three, I promptly went and found myself a copy.

Fowler argues that "1930s popular stories can be seen [...] as legitimating the social order and thus indirectly providing social control" (95) though she cautions that the attitudes expressed in these stories may be only

partially shared by the readership. [...] It is very likely that the practical action of the readers emerges also from other cultural values - such as those of dissent and militancy - which are totally absent from the story universe, while the adherence to some story values may well be more at the level of the ideal or fantasy than concrete reality. (96)

One plot type she discusses which is, I think, rather less common nowadays, requires the

device [...] in which 'cryptoproletarian' characters are used. The heroine, in love with a doctor, may emerge ultimately to be not truly working-class but a foundling in some slum and brought up by working-class parents; a hero may be cut off by his father and family and forced to live a working-class mode of existence or an unexpected inheritance may alter the total dependence of the lower class heroine on the upper class hero. Thus, in social origin the hero and heroine may ultimately turn out to be alike although the bulk of the story has concerned the proving of their fitness to marry each other. It is tempting to align these stories with the earlier fairy story in which once the princess had brought herself to kiss the beast or marry the frog, he became a prince. The analogy makes the class insult even more apparent. (107)

The romances analysed by Kim Gallon were written at roughly the same time, and also appeared in magazines or newspapers but their context, and therefore their politics, are rather different. She recently posted at the Popular Romance Project about the romances to be found

in the pages of early 20th-century black magazines and newspapers. Mostly known for strident protests against racial discrimination, the black press in the 1920s and 1930s also published romance fiction, which offered African Americans an opportunity to escape into worlds filled with the heady ups and heartbreaking downs of romantic love. Scholars of the African American literary tradition and of popular romance have paid virtually no attention to romance found in the black press. On the romance side, the late 20th century has often been characterized as the starting point of black romance stories, with earlier short or serial stories, simply forgotten. [...]

Despite the seeming absence of political and racialized content in “The Dark Knight” and similar stories, black popular romance, as Conseula Francis has argued, is inherently political. Its existence automatically counters the insidious and negative stereotypes of criminality and hypersexuality historically ascribed to African Americans. In “The Dark Knight,” we see Rod and Lyla restrain themselves from engaging in a pre-marital sexual encounter, preserving, through their actions, the sanctity of marital sex and the domestic ideal. Just as significantly, “The Dark Knight” challenged the common idea that African Americans lacked the capacity for romantic love, a love that has been and continues to be integrally linked with a white, bourgeois value system.

William Gleason's article on story papers, published in 2011, does not explore the politics of their romance stories but he too suggests that romances published in magazines deserve further critical attention, not least because in his opinion

The mass marketing of modern romance fiction in North America began not with the emergence of Harlequin Books in the 1950s but during the dime novel and story paper boom of the 1860s and 1870s.

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Fowler, Bridget. "'True to Me Always': An Analysis of Women's Magazine Fiction." British Journal of Sociology 30.1 (1979): 91-119.

Gallon, Kim. "Romance in Black Papers." The Popular Romance Project. 10 January 2013.

Gleason, William. "Belles, Beaux, and Paratexts: American Story Papers and the Project of Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).

Porter, Roy & Lesley Hall. The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SurLaLune. "Annotations for Cinderella."

SurLaLune. "The Annotated Rapunzel."

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

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

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