It’s another case of the hero raping the heroine, though his motivation is not sadism. The author treats it more realistically than many of her peers. She never explores the darker side of human nature as it sounds like Gaffney does in this book, but you do get the impression that the hero is desperate in resorting to such measures and he has little hope himself that he can win the heroine; it seems like a last, failing effort. The question is if the author can bring an HEA from this. Certainly we can’t imagine a real couple enacting these stories, but the emotions they invoke are something else, the depths of human nature plumbed. Isn’t this why we love art and drama? I recommend you read it, if only out of curiosity. (Her next books involve no rape, fear not.)

I was traumatized by Tess of the d’Urbervilles too. Yech. I didn’t even want it on my shelf.

Like Janine, I see To Have and To Hold as an anti-Tess. However, I feel that way for different reasons than what Janine expressed above (and following your post on rape).

Janine: That Gaffney was able to begin the reader’s journey in such a dark place and then bring us out into the light is a lot of what makes the books so uplifting to me as well as so incredibly romantic. … and

the core message I feel the book has… is that making the moral choice over the selfish one is not only possible no matter how selfish we’ve been in the past

I don’t see it as uplifting; I simply don’t think of it in such big-picture terms. To me, the power of the writing is that it’s NOT “about” rape per se, nor “about” triumphing over selfishness. This is one of the rare books I would say transcends genre (if I knew exactly what that meant), because I see it as not about the genre’s usual axes to grind but about two specific, highly individual characters and the way *they* grind against each other’s weak spots. They both prove strong enough characters (and the moment is right for each) to face those weaknesses and change their trajectories.

I also don’t see the darkness-to-light aspect as romantic. That sounds like a savior story. What I like in TH&TH‘s romance is that the hero/ine are different in precisely the right ways to be complementary; to my mind, that serendipity makes the relationship special–not any moral dimension, and not even the happy ending.

The characters are in such sharp focus that they cancel my usual romance-conditioned expectations for the story. And because the characters are so specific, the rape story doesn’t seem to me to hit either extreme: it doesn’t come across as didactic, but it doesn’t unreflectedly torture the heroine for drama. I also don’t see it as dehumanizing Rachel; if anything, she spends much of the book finding herself again. In contrast, I felt that Tess dehumanized Tess over the course of the book and I definitely read Tess as a lesson. That didactic message was a large part of what upset me, particularly being young when I read it.

Janine and Laura – Actually, the big impediment will likely be getting enough copies!

even if I don’t teach it, I can do a “Women’s Studies Luncheon Series” talk at my uni on it, and bring the discussion to a fairly wide audience (we get faculty, students, and staff). Either way, I’m definitely interested in working through the issues more.

Hardy’s Tess also raises a lot of the issues about the difference between seduction and sexual assault that THATH got me thinking about, and I’m pretty sure it’s not out of print…

Gosh, even my colleagues aren’t this helpful with syllabi! Thank you for the suggestions!

My suggestions were actually directed at Laura, should she ever want to try Gaffney again. Not that I think any of Gaffney’s other works are as great as THATH, but Gaffney does have a few books that might fit what Laura enjoys reading.

Yes, I was thinking of THTH in terms of gender issues. When you teach women’s studies or fem theory you are talking about power, oppression, gender, sexuality — things everyone has a stake in and feels passionately about, and also, concrete issues like rape, pornography, sexual harassment, work and family, etc. So those (upper level, WST majors) students are used to it.

Jessica, though I hope you will stick with THATH, if you’re looking for other Gaffney suggestions for your syllabi, I would say that on the gender issue the Wyckerley trilogy is probably most interesting. To Love and to Cherish is a very good book and has some interesting takes on gender, in that it flips genre stereotypes in some ways (the heroine is the cynical one, while the hero is trusting) but not in others (arguably, the heroine is raped, but not by the hero, and it’s not a controversial book like THATH). Forever and Ever isn’t as strong, IMO, as the other two, but it’s also interesting from a gender perspective. The heroine is a mine owner and the hero is an activist who wants better conditions for the miners.

The other course I was thinking of was an ethics in/of/and fiction course which I teach every other year or so, where students are not necessarily expecting difficult material, but where I have taught material with tough subject matter in the past.

For that I really can’t think of another book in the romance genre that you could have as interesting a discussion of morality and fiction around. Its morality still gets argued on romance boards semi-regularly 13 years after its publication.

This latest wave of scholarship on the genre is still very, very new, so I think it’s a bit early to talk about any particular books/authors being “overlooked.” For all we know, someone may already be working on Gaffney, or may be thinking about it.

At the moment what constitutes “academia” as far as romance scholarship is concerned is really still very small (though growing), and the genre is a huge one, so each of us has to be selective. This is likely to mean that each of us will choose to work in areas of the genre that interest us and/or on books that appeal to/interest each of us personally (apart from the people teaching survey courses about the genre, who might teach books that are important in the genre and/or provide lots of material for discussion/study with students, but aren’t their personal favourites).

The original disciplines/subject areas from which academics studying romance come varies greatly. The particular subject area a scholar is coming from may well affect the romance novels they’d find it interesting to study, as well as the approach they might take to them. For example, the forthcoming conference to be held at Princeton is being sponsored by the “Department of English, the Program in American Studies, The Center for African American Studies, the Program in the Study of Women and Gender and the Center for the Study of Religion.”

Yes, I was thinking of THTH in terms of gender issues. When you teach women’s studies or fem theory you are talking about power, oppression, gender, sexuality — things everyone has a stake in and feels passionately about, and also, concrete issues like rape, pornography, sexual harassment, work and family, etc. So those (upper level, WST majors) students are used to it.

The other course I was thinking of was an ethics in/of/and fiction course which I teach every other year or so, where students are not necessarily expecting difficult material, but where I have taught material with tough subject matter in the past.

I think you both make great points: This book raises loads of important question about gender and the ethics of fiction, (I have at least two other drafts of posts on it), but it may also be too much for some students, so I would want think a lot about how and when it is introduced, and to whom.