More summaries from the April 2009 Pop Culture Association Conference, this time a romance panel featuring some of the bloggers at Teach me Tonight! As usual with these posts, keep the possibility of human error (mine) in mind.

“Me, Myself, and I: Love As the Integration of selves in the romance fiction of Nora Roberts”, An Goris, doctoral candidate, U. of Louvain, Belgium

NR always engages with basic narrative conventions of romance genre, but also marred by numerous forms of diversity. Goris focuses on 8 books, out of NR’s 200. Love is presented as a complex, multifaceted, ambiguous emotions. Love as both huge and scary, disruptive, but also simple, basic, real – life’s basis. H/H experience love first as one, then as the other. Calls process the “integration of selves”. Can see this in NR’s writing in her representation of body, mind, and relationships.

Conceptual dichotomy, mind v. body, rational v. irrational, artificial v. natural. Body as vessel of emotional truth. Ex. Characters go pale when shocked, prior to even realizing cognitively they are shocked. Ex. Characters need to touch each other prior to recognition of feelings. H/H emotional journey from conflict to harmony b/t mind and body.

Basic steps: First meeting establishes duality Ex. Suzanna’s Surrender (1991). Usually dislike. Extreme bodily reaction in conflict with mind. Mind rejects body as vessel of emotional truth. Love is unwanted and unwelcome. Love is unwanted. Catches them violently off guard. The fact that these feelings are totally unlike any other feeling they have had for another contribute to h/h’s reluctance to give in to them.

Characters avoid word “love”, use ambiguous terms like “something” or “it.” Love utterance is an almost magical speech act. Signaled by body – “his eyes changed”.

Past couples reenter into the story. Love is still overwhelming for them. But the overwhelming aspect of their love has been accepted and domesticated. It has been fully rationally grasped, boxed in.

Concluding remarks: NR has unique way of using conventions. Namely, love as integration of selves.

[My note: I loved Goris's analysis, and as a philosopher I can see places where she could really push it. For example, for Descartes (whom she mentions) the separation of mind and body is necessary for knowledge. What does it mean, metaphysically, for NR to put the body forward as a site of knowledge? And how can this be connected to the historical association of woman with one side of those binary oppositions? Also, I confess I am not clear here on how NR is unique here. To me, Goris's analysis is wonderfully applicable to many romances I have read. I also loved Goris's proffered explanation for the function of the returning couple form a previous book. ]

2. A Gothic Scheherazade: The Heroine As Story Teller, Angela Toscano [Angela, who has an MLS, is enrolling in the M.A. program in English at Utah in the fall]

[This was a great paper, but I confess I could not follow it that well. I really felt my lack of training in literary analysis. I am sure this summary does not do it justice. Angela -- if you are reading this, please feel free to let me know where I went wrong!]

An analysis of Mary Stewart, Nine Coaches Waiting.

Text possesses meta-awareness of its predecessors and heirs. Why does Stewart use epigraphs? Encounter with the uncanny. Moments of déjà vu, unsettling, fundamental property of the gothic.

[Lots of textual support here.]

Character of Linda grafts allusion, poetics and metaphor onto persons, events in text. She has an inheritance of language, of story, which allows her the consciousness to see and hear what is happening around her. Her romantic imagination allows her to see wider range of possibilities of action than society affords her. She is a captive, domestic imprisonment Makes this a gothic heroine.

Her only escape is her distillation of emotion an event into a told tale. Compare to Scheherezade. Binds Sultan to her solely with her voice. Forces Sultan to be a different person.

Heroic act is like Penelope. Not Hercules in doing, in action, but in weaving stories. Heroism of creation. Power of language is power of creation. Shift from imagination to reality. Because Linda can tell her own story she is able to take charge of her destiny through words. Like God, power of birth and death, justice and mercy. All this is possible despite the horror that haunts the familial ideal, the private and sacred places of the tribe. Naming and defaming skeletons in the closet at the same time.

[My note: she mentions Cixous approvingly, and I would have liked to see more directly the claim that what we are seeing in this character is écriture feminine. That is, if that's the claim Angela was making.]

3. “Milton, Emerson, Kinsale, Cavell: Thinking Through Flowers from the Storm”, Eric Selinger, DePaul University

[This paper pretty much rocked my world.]

Eric introduces himself and says, puzzlingly, “You can call me Daddy”.

Romance aims to engage emotion, Dickson [Help. I need a citation here!] says. To understand a romance novel may not be to understand it at all, since analytical part of brain must be switched off. Writing is instinctive and reading is nonintellectual. Dickson’s argument continues, the good thing is that this puts romance “Safely beyond the reach of stern canonical judgment” Compare haute couture with off the rack retail clothes. Must accept romance genre on its own terms, by its own criteria. Dickson’s claims are based on her experience both as a romance reader and as an editor working with authors at Mills & Boon.

Eric: My experience has been that the experience of the work is profoundly intellectual and playful, asking to be read along with literary canon using tools of literary criticism. Eric uses Flowers From the Storm, by Laura Kinsale. Stands in long tradition of historical, erotically charged books form Avon, which had begun 20 years prior to Kinsale’s texts.

[Eric calls us youngins to task for using “tropes” when we mean “topoi”. Sarah and I roll eyes at each other.]

Ok,  I may be laughing too hard to continue this. Eric hands out the original Fabio cover of FFTS [Fabio as Jervaulx??!!! This is a bit of knowledge about this book I could have done without], and then announces that despite his “pirate mouth” (Eric stops to ask if anyone knows what a pirate mouth in fact looks like) and opening scene in which he is in bed with his mistress, Jervaulx has invented noneuclidian geometry and plans to present his results at the Mathematical Society in a few weeks hence.

Many scenes in FFTS have become so well known for their emotional power, the kind of reading Dickson recommends. But there is so much more.

Ex. Motif of noneuclidean geometry pervades the book, patterns of repetition and variation. Eric notes that Kinsale gets the math right, having had a career as a geologist prior to writing romance.

Patterns of chiasmas, crossings, that link Maddie, with Christian, madness and Christianity. He is a soul trapped in a body, she is a body trapped within a soul.

Also, repeated motif of publishing or shared knowledge. Things cannot be known privately but only as they are copied and shared. Maddie can only see her likeness to her own mother when Jervaulx describes it. Jervaulx can only see errors in copy, not in original. Even Maddie’s marriage to Duke requires public reading of letter of condemnation and his public response. Deep aversion to the idea of consciousness or knowledge as private.

Milton’s Paradise Lost is everywhere in this book. Milton’s cottage and Milton himself enter text. Novel makes fetish of Maddie’s long hair, her only vanity. Temple of her hair in first love scene in virginal and seductive. That’s Eve’s hair from Book 4 in Paradise Lost. Maddie’s curiosity, repeated association with gardens, and the painting of Eve in Jervaulx’s chamber underscore this association. Etc.

But Jervaulx is not Adam, but Satan. Christian’s dog is named Devil, Maddie repeatedly calls him Devil. Lots of other examples, some quite pointed and specific. Maddie says “I’m glad thou fell and I can hold thee in thy hands”. Satan and Eve as central couple.

Kinsale says this novel “wrote itself”. And “sometimes the muse rocks.”

Eric doesn’t care whether Kinsale knew or planned this. We would assume she did if this were poetry and the fact that we do not says more about what we expect of romance novels than anything about the novels themselves.

4. Romance Through Faith: The Enduring Stories of Grace Livingston Hill, Darcy Martin, Southern Tennessee State University

“The romance genre owes everything to a minster’s daughter”.

Born with pen in one hand and bible in other. Widow at 34 with two small children. Martin cites bloggers such as Marcheletti and Potter in defining inspirational romance. Every one of Hill’s books meets these standards.

Martin notes many women she knows in Tennessee grew up reading Hill

She notes there are problems: character development in 3 or 4 words. Other problems as well, but still very important texts in romance tradition.

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