As regular readers know, I decided to teach a romance novel as part of my ethics and fiction class. This post is about that experience. I want to say that for this post, I am speaking in pretty general terms, and not about any particular student. Problems I had teaching this material were my own fault. Hopefully, I can do better in the future now that I know what to expect. This class is probably my favorite class in my rotation: my students never fail to be prepared and engaged, and this past week was no exception.
It would be too boring and complicated to go into all the meanings of “ethical criticism of fiction”, and all the possible views one might have about such an enterprise, but I can say that whether you are for it or agin’ it, when you say “fiction”, you generally mean “literature”, not genre fiction. Here’s a representative point of view from one of our readings:
Wayne Booth (The Company We Keep) has a tendency to list preferred kinds of fiction in descending order, so when Barbara Cartland ends up one step above Penthouse, you have a good idea of what he thinks of it.
In “Who Is Responsible in Ethical Criticism”, for example, he writes:
The simple and obvious question, for example, “Do you [the author] … wish me well, or will you be the only one to profit if I join you?” can make the implied creators of the Cartland romance and the Penthouse garbage writhe with embarrassment.
And again, this time in “Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be simple”, he moves through different kinds of literature, assessing them for how useful ethical criticism would be of them,
…we come to works that are designed to grip us as what Sacks called “actions”: novels like those of Jane Austen or Cormac McCarthy or, moving down the line in quality, Agatha Christie or Louis L’Amour…
Booth claims that every detail of these stories is designed to enhance the action, and that ethical assessments are moot. He imagines authors of such works saying “Consign the ethicists to hell, where they belong”.
Booth doesn’t agree with this. His own view — one I, and anyone who studies popular fiction with a straight face holds — is that “With a little effort, we can twist any literary experience into the service of improving thought, improving the world, or creating a new piece of beauty.”
Booth himself thinks the kind of works most amenable to ethical criticism are stories that “have no label” (an implicit yet blatant dig at genre fiction?). They engage us in serious thought about ethical matters combined with plots-of-conflict. The prime example, for Booth and for pretty much anyone writing about ethical criticism, pro or con, is Henry James.
You can close your eyes and stab the page and hit a Henry James reference in any book or article on ethical criticism.
So, I assigned the Gaffney because it provided us our first and only example of character and plot driven fiction. Unlike other, more clearly philosophical fiction we’ve read, I wanted to see what we could get out of this.
Most students told me they had never read a romance novel. They were surprised to find out that Twilight is YA romance and that Jane AUsten is romance simpliciter. The class is advanced undergraduates, with a 5:1 male to female ratio. The females were more consistently negative towards the book than the males: they had more to lose by being associated with it.
I chose To Have and To Hold by Patricia Gaffney for a few reasons. One is that it is well written, and wears its literary connections on its sleeve. My post of a few days ago was actually in preparation for the class. I knew my students assumed romance readers read only romance, so I wanted them to note that the many literary allusions, especially as we are introduced to Sebastian and Rachel, assume the reader has read the classics. I also pointed out the bits of French, the “SAT words”, like “desultory” and “scabrous”, and the knowledge of social and cultural history the author had to have had to be able to describe, to take just a few examples, the clothing furniture, food, and transportation of mid nineteenth century rural England. I think I made this point pretty well.
Another reason I chose it was that I thought it was well-written (you can read my review here), and would not reinforce stereotypes about the genre. I think most students agreed that if it wasn’t well-written, at least it wasn’t badly written, although most of them had major problems with it, the nature of which I am sure you can guess. I’ll get to those in a minute.
A third reason for my choice was the explicit sexual content, including the rape of Rachel by Sebastian in Chapter 8. I thought the fact that Rachel ends up in love with Sebastian would be a good way to discuss the different ways sexual content can function in a novel: not all of it is designed to titillate, and even when it is, it can do other things, like move a relationship forward. I also thought it would be good for highlighting some of the feminist concerns about romance we had discussed in the context of the Hollows article.
I knew I was running the risk of enforcing other stereotypes about romance by assigning this book: that it’s all sexually explicit (porn for women), that all the heroes are rapists, and that romance heroines are victims who are saved by the heroes. Unfortunately, I think a lot of my students came away from this experience thinking those things, no matter what I told them in lecture about chaste inspirational or regency romances, about kick-ass heroines, or about m/m romance, about the diversity of the genre. My choice of THATH spoke more directly to them than these other comments.
I found that very few, if any, of my students “bought” the HEA. They found it totally unbelievable that Rachel would be able to consent to sex with a man who had bought and raped her repeatedly. They also felt that she would never be able to recover from the sexual abuse of her first husband in the short amount of time that passes in the narrative. they felt that Sebastian’s character change was too abrupt, and also not believable. They did not buy the “HEA”.
I understand their concerns about the HEA, and about Rachel’s journey, but for my part, Sebastian’s characterization and his journey was really well done. They felt that his change took place after he was injured by Sully, while he was alone in his rooms. I disagreed with them: we see the change happening, we feel it with him at the dinner party. It’s what motivates him to confront Sully in the first place. the solitude in his rooms, was, to my mind, his period of coping with his new skin. He had killed his mirror image (figuratively), and needed to create a new one.
A few suggested we read The Unbearable Lightness of Being next time (a book and author I love, by the way, when I put aside his misogyny). “but doesn’t everybody die at the end?” I asked. “Yeah”, they said. “It’s way more realistic”.
I felt that the students were divided on the HEA. Some refused this HEA, because of the rape. Other refused the HEA in principle, as “not realistic”. I tried to get at why stopping the narrative at a high point of happiness was more suspect than stopping at a low one. Don’t we all have highs and lows in our lives? What about the HEA draws the suspicion. knocks them out of the narrative?
There was also a lot of concern about victims of sexual violence who may be influenced by this story to stay with their abusive partners. I pointed out — as did several students – that much of the fiction we have read this semester features drug abuse, murder, callous disregard, sociopathic lack of empathy, and none of them were worried about the effects on the reader in those cases. (I also have concerns about the way rape is portrayed which I discuss in general terms here).
I also talked about fantasy, and whether romance novels can function as a kind of fantasy. How is this different from men watching football games or Rambo movies? The answer? Men can tell the difference. They know they will never play for the Steelers or be like Rambo. In contrast, everyone falls in love and gets married. Romance novels take reality and turn it into fantasy, but somehow male fantasies don’t do that.
Some students worried that novels like this shore up pernicious beliefs that can lead women to accept unjust gender roles. I asked them why they don’t feel this way when they watch professional football, or professional cheerleaders. Luckily a few students pointed out that it was odd no one showed this concern when the male protagonist of a novel we read earlier in the term killed the female protagonist at the end.
We talked a bit about the difference between “genre constraints” and “formulaic”. To me, the former is not derogatory, but the latter is. The students were using those terms interchangeably.
I had a lot I wanted to say more about the writing, but there wasn’t time. I wanted to talk about the way the countryside symbolized rebirth and renewal and forgiveness of sin, while the city symbolized decay and depravity and instrumental human connections. I wanted to talk about how the saviour language was used by Sebastian to refer to Rachel in the first half of the book and then abruptly switches, with Rachel using it to refer to Sebastian in the second half. I wanted to talk about the theme of language, the importance of speech, silence, telling one’s own story, listening to others’ stories. But two things stopped me: I didn’t give us enough time, and I honestly didn’t know how to get around the fact that so few students bought the plot.
I do feel that ethical criticism of a character and plot driven novel, of genre fiction, is different form that of a novel that wears it’s philosophical heart on its sleeve. I think in the former case, the readers have to be better detectives in some ways. I am writing a paper on this question right now.
I think I will assign another romance novel next year, but I may choose one that thwarts student expectations more thoroughly than THATH.
It’s not easy to teach something new, and I never do that well at it the first time. you can never predict what students are going to do with it, which is great and terrifying at the same time. And a new batch of students might have a very different experience. And there are other variables: when in the semester you teach it, what they read just prior to reading it, etc. So expect a totally different post on the same topic in May 2011!
Fascinating!!! Thanks so much for this.
I am sorry to hear this, but not really shocked. This book is a hot potato even for readers who are familiar with the genre. I wonder if the reaction would be different even in a class that surveys the romance genre, like the one Eric Selinger teaches.
Were there any students in your class who found the HEA believable, Jessica?
Something like Gaffney’s To Love and to Cherish or Kinsale’s For My Lady’s Heart might work better in terms of well-written books that thwart people’s expectations of the genre. However I don’t know if you’d get at the same moral issues with those books.
Wow. What was most interesting to me about your summary of the classroom experience was how effective two underlying assumptions were on the students’ opinions. One, that happiness is somehow unrealistic (which is a particularly absurd statement coming from the upper-middle classes. “Like really?” I want to say to some of my friends. “You’ve got a kick-ass spouse, a good job and a solid future. WTF?”). And two, that somehow women are more susceptible to language than men (which, OMG, is a blog post in and of itself).
So have this theory about upper-level undergrads that I started formulating about the time I was an upper-level undergrad. It came to my attention that a certain friend of mine’s voice would perceptibly change tone and octave when she was wanting to sound “academic”. Then I began to notice how conservative my peers were when it came to approaches of the literary canon. Even for pleasure most of them would barely admit in private that they read certain books. Or the choice of books they read in public seemed to always suggest a recurrence of late-teen anxiety about appearing intellectually profound (like an 18 year old Goth boy reading “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” in the coffee shop). It was as if they were afraid that the academic police were going to come and arrest them for deviating their tastes from “real” literature. Since then I’ve continued to notice this limitation of taste in various classes and communities I’ve wandered through.
I don’t know if this is the case in your class but I do wonder if part of the antagonism to an ethically troubling genre novel was not at least in part a fear of appearing to like something that would undermine their intellectual cache. Or justifying something that was “unrealistic”. Interestingly enough, this has been critics response to the late Shakespearean plays (the romances). Apparently, nobody could believe that Shakespeare could write such naive works at the end of his career. Some have even suggested that he didn’t write them at all. When even Shakespeare’s romances can’t catch a break, you know you are in trouble.
I’m curious to know what you would do differently if you taught this exact same book again? Would you pair it with another romance novel that works against expectations? And also is the paper you are working on something that certain of us might be lucky enough to hear?
I dare you to teach them an m/m book
It will be interesting to follow this question of the HEA in our Sunday discussion.
I’m not surprised the students didn’t think an HEA was realistic – they’ve probably never been assigned a contemporary book in school that had one.
@Angela/Lazaraspaste:
This, this, a thousand times this. Exactly what I was thinking while reading this post and Angela says it way more eloquently than I could.
My gut reaction is that the rape is a major obstacle. I’ve been reading romance for 10 years, and pretty much missed out on the bodice ripping hey-day when heroes raped heroines until they fell in love (thank the good Lord). Still, this is a very common misconception of the genre that I continually run up against with some of my colleagues. Also the belief that all romance novels reinforce traditional female stereotypes. Do some romance novels? Sure. Do all romance novels? Um, no. Or else (believe you me) I would not be reading the genre.
Why not something like Morning Glory by LaVyrle Spencer? That certainly breaks the mold – two non powerful main characters. Or even Separate Beds which involves pregnancy outside of marriage, college age leads, etc.
Oh, I’m sad about this! I’ve never read the book, but I can very clearly picture the bewilderment of your students and their rejection of/antagonism toward the entire genre. It’s painful to imagine!! I struggled miserably in my short time as a teacher, and was an utter failure on many levels. I know how it feels to flounder, if that’s what happened.
I also remember quite clearly being a romance-reading college student (graduated late, 5 years ago) who admitted to reading romance in several job interviews, but would never have voiced my “shame” in the setting of a college classroom.
In some ways, romance is such an antithesis of the college experience. It’s just too…happy, and conventional, and straightforward. If you’d given them a book written BY a rapist (Soul on Ice), they’d probably have responded more positively.
Hugs and best wishes for next time. You are a brave, brave soul.
Interesting and thought provoking. Thank you.
@Angela/Lazaraspaste: NICE!
@Jessica:
For me this statement says a lot about the teacher. I was always more prepared when the teacher, topic and environment of the class engaged and challenged me. So Bravo, Jessica. Bravo!
I SOMETIMES think romance is porn for women not because of the sex or the emotional connectedness (sorry, can’t think of the proper term) but because the objective of certain stories seems to be about seeing how much the female lead can take just like the objective of porn can be to see how much the female star can take. Not a perfect comparison but I think it’s a tangent worthy of exploration although I hate to go there just because the porn for women comment is so prevalent.
Yeah, cuz so many people die in real life like they do in literature. Ya know for deeper meaning and symbolism. Just like everyday is filled with events that make sense to our personal narratives without any coincidences.
Sorry. I really don’t mind tragedy or less than optimistic endings and I have great appreciation for authors who can weave such narratives. Hell, I even enjoy them just like I enjoy other types of fiction. (My definition really is fiction not literature.)
What I do object to holding them up as a higher standard well just because. I find that position rather “elitist” and not the positive connotation of the word either. But that’s just me.
My take on the HEA or lack of one as a general principle as it applies to life: It’s much easier to die or live unhappily than it is to live and live well. It may not, however, make a better narrative although it’s possible that it could be judged as a better story. Criteria anyone?
If one can weave a thought-provoking narrative using a HEA as the vehicle to tell the story or get the a certain message across then that author is one hell of an author.
Personally I find comedy much more effective at holding cultural issues up to scrutiny. IMO, tragedy allows us to be further removed from looking at ourselves and our environment. It allows us distance and intellectual reflection rather than requiring that we actually doing something about what we discovered. Kind of like using the word “evil.” My experience with that word is that it is never used to identify our own personal actions and intents but those of others.
Kundera: I liked Immortality. Made for some great discussions among my circle of friends at the time. We had a great time asking the men of acquaintance and strangers too “if you are man and you have the option of sleeping with the most beautiful, smart, sought-after (whatever your “ideal” was) woman but could never tell anyone every or you would be like the mythological Sybil and no one would believe you, or you could have that ideal woman on your arm for all public/social events but never sleep with her what would you do? Interesting that I don’t think I ever asked that question of any gay males.
Would love to a have romance novel equivalent to this for the romance heroine.
Sorry. I digress.
Isn’t it also that one needs to be “trained” to look for certain things or to know that certain things are important and why. I’m looking back on certain Humanities classes I had and just reading the texts didn’t supply me with the knowledge to understand their significance someone had to give me that initial starting point to put them in the right context and establish what we were looking for and why. That didn’t mean that the starting point was the only context, rather it was the baseline from which everyone in the class would springboard off of. If you’ve never been taught to look at things from a certain viewpoint or been trained to think of something as important in the context of academic achievement? Inquiry? Not sure what word should be used here. Or even actively discouraged from exploring a tangent then one is much more likely to discard certain trains of thought as inconsequential or worthless. Or perhaps even suppress them.
(Sorry, old memories of my disagreements with a professor for my Age of Constantine class. His TA slapped me on the wrist for not exploring the religious topic deep enough while the professor accused me of yellow journalism because I dared to explore the possibility that Constantine wasn’t a true Christian believer based on the text we were given to study. They were probably both right but so was I.
My point: it all came down to viewpoint and the academic lens used.)
In conclusion: Jessica, should you ever have your classes available for download please please let us know. I, for one, would love to observe these conversations. Think MIT and YouTube.
PS. This is one time when it would’ve been very interesting to have two separate online book discussions going.
1. for the students;
2. for romance readers
Just to see what side pulls out and how they tackle the book discussion. Maybe a third for crossover to ask for classification or follow-up of points raised. Of course, after each side had had their discussions and had a chance to read the other side’s perspective.
Okay, maybe it’s just me who would have fun with this.
I have a theory about the emotional development of educated, socio-economically secure people. (My theory might apply to other groups, but I have to be honest and say I don’t know enough people in those other groups to be sure.) I think there’s a life-hump (like a speed bump: makes you slow down and pay attention) around age 30, when you suddenly “get it” that there’s no one between you and what you want but you.
In my theory, high school kids are pretty sheltered, but also peppered with both expectations and rewards. They’re denied a lot of freedoms and spared a lot of responsibilities. They don’t yet have to earn a living, secure housing, etc. At the same time, they have a pretty rigid schedule in school, and a pre-fab social system. In college, there are more freedoms — no one actually marks you truant & calls your parents if you skip class — and more self-determination, but you’re still not making a living to put food on the table.
When I was in law school, and in the first few years of associateship at a large law firm, I watched my traditional-age contemporaries kvetch that more things weren’t being supplied for them. The law school wasn’t finding them a job, for example, and the law firm wasn’t organizing their social lives.
Those twentysomethings lurched along, busy getting good grades and working towards their job goals, until their internal sense of discontent (“why doesn’t the firm/school/my partner/my friends do more for me?”) coalesces into enough maturity to produce the life hump. If they want something, they begin to see around age 30 that no outside agent is withholding that something — but it does have to be earned. And that’s when they start to grow up.
(You’ll see now why I specified educated and middle class — a lot of people start solving their own problems a lot earlier in life, or are just struggling with the basics of life that the concept of getting something more is anathema.)
Sorry to be long-winded, but all of this informs my personal take on your students’ reactions. They clearly have strong social consciences — which is great — but their preference for the nihilistic ending over the traditional romance novel HEA (have them read Jane Eyre next time: that’s got a hard-won HEA) strikes me as “emotional porn” for the 18-22 year old set. They think they already have all the elements of a traditional HEA because they assume those elements are waiting in the Henry Ford-style assembly line of their lives. But to risk dying for love — that must seem much more romantic!
I was deep into romances at their age but then I’d had a bad childhood, so my heart already craved the security of reading romances (a LOT of romances) where I knew no matter how bad things got, it all worked out in the end. And, I suspect, that security becomes a lot more appealing to some people after they’ve hit the life hump and realized they have to secure their own HEAs for themselves.
It is almost distressing to me as a parent and a human being that so many people see desperation and death as more normal than a HEA. Well we all die, you could argue, and I would agree. I wonder if all of the ‘realistic’ literature esposed isn’t just only so we can sound erudite, but just plain old grappling with death? I think of Moonstuck when Olympia Dukakis’s character Rose tells her cheating husband, “No matter what you’re gonna do you gonna die, just like everybody else!” So, let’s just get over it and get onto the living and make it as happy as we can, eh? :p (and perhaps the sex in romance-or romance itself could be seen as validation of life?)
Another idea for the stain of ‘formuliac’. Long ago I used to take art lessons from local artists and no mattter their diclipline I always ended up doing ‘studies’ on one certain theme. You would never accuse a pencil artist of being formulaic yet they’ve self constrained to a pencil and paper. People tend to look at constraints such as genre as binding, but in all actuality, they’re not. They give freedom to the artist (this is aside from being tired of the genre which is different). How? It forces you to be more creative. You can’t hit the obvious nortes so you have to come at it from another way. There was one craft book I read, I can’t remember which, but the author said you were in the best place you could be when you wrote yourself into a corner-because now you had to really use your creativity to get out. Genre is like writing yourself into that corner. Thankfully we have so many wonderful books within romance-and so many more to be written.
Yikes, sorry to think aloud on your comments.
Wow. Just fascinating. I’m wondering what kind of book WOULD be a good book to teach, for this class in particular. I’d love to see their reaction to Beecroft’s FALSE COLORS (no sex until very end), especially since it just has a HFN. There are some interesting discussions of the rightness/wrongness of homosexuality, but I wonder how that would get mixed up in modern arguments. I think FOR MY LADY’S HEART is just too much, what with the Middle English, and everything. But MORNING GLORY is an interesting suggestion (although I hate the character stereotypes, esp. the bad woman).
I’ve had nothing but luck and sunshine and bunnies teaching BET ME, but I was doing it from literary perspective, not ethical, although I think ethical perspective is probably still there.
Maybe Linda Howard’s AFTER THE NIGHT. Super-Alpha Male but strong female. Or Jayne Ann Krentz’s LADY’S CHOICE. That starts with a sex scene, but it’s amazing. And all about ethics of relationships. Or OMG, Penelope Williamson’s THE OUTSIDER, but I don’t know if that’s still in print.
Anyway, can’t wait to read next year’s version! Thanks so much, Jessica. God, I wish I could teach romance. I feel like I’m atrophying. My lit crit skills are disappearing because of my perception of my students’ skills–I’m trying to change that next semester, so we’ll see.
Oh, and just because it’s cool, I LOVE this little story: Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings.”
Sarah — that Atwood story is on tap for next week, our last reading of the semester. thought it would go well with romance!
I looked forward to reading your blog and the discussions like a kid longs for dessert — I was offline all day! I would concur with Magdalenb that they may be able to appreciate Jane Eyre slightly more … my suggestion, teach it in tandem with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Sargasso_Sea
A m/m? As a romance book — NOT saying it can’t be, just that if they’re having difficulties with THTH, that would probably fry their brains and presumably that’s not your intention.
It sounds like it would take an entire semester to get a lot of points across that you wanted to with just this one book.
“that would probably fry their brains”
At least a good one would have the virtue of them not seeing gender stereotypes all over the place.
I don’t get Booth’s argument. How does Pride and Prejudice, for instance, not “engage us in serious thought about ethical matters combined with plots-of-conflict”? The bits you’ve quoted make me wonder how gendered his view of ethics is (that is, does he not see love and relationships as realms in which ethical questions arise? not to mention pride, prejudice, what makes a lady or gentleman, what makes a good parent . . .). I started my term with “Happy Endings”–which will surely reinforce your students’ belief that HEAs are not realistic or literary. We’re ending with a series of variations on the detective story. It helps to have more than one example of a genre to get them to see genre as full of variations, for sure, though I can see you don’t easily have room for that in your course. The first time is always hard.
@Janine: I don;t think any of my students found the HEA believable.
Having read romance for a couple of years now, I am kind of inured to the common device of “speedy sexual abuse recovery, esp. through great sex.” I see the action as telescoped, not meant to be a realistic timeline of the years it would take an actual person to fully recover. I think if you are not used to this convention in the genre it would prevent you from thinking Rachel is anything but a victim of Stockholm syndrome.
It’s kind of like when Rambo gets shot in the chest and is running around a few minutes later — we make allowances.
@Angela/Lazaraspaste: Yes, I do think some of it is a desire to appear intellectual. This is an especially virulent problem in upper level philosophy classes. On the other hand, these are folks who watch Buffy and Angel, read Ender’s Game and Lord of the Rings, Twilight, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
I think I will teach a romance novel again, but not this one.
@Ann Somerville: I would consider an m/m absolutely!
@Jeanne: You make a good point about students not being used to reading books with an HEA. I wonder when that changes, because my 4th grader’s assignments all have them.
@Wendy: I agree, the rape was major. I felt in this book that the rape was portrayed in a very interesting way. To me, the scene did not read as a way to titillate, but as integral to both of their journeys. I think I would have done a better job with this if I had been able to introduce more historical context.
@Keira: Thanks for those suggestions. I am dying to read Morning Glory, actually!
@Jill Sorenson: Thanks for the support! You know, this is a funny comparison to make but it reminded me forcefully of teaching feminist movement and feminist theory, another subject close to my heart. When you teach feminist philosophy to a roomful of undergrads seeking gen ed or philosophy students seeking major credits, you expect everyone to reject it tout court, so you prepare properly. I wish I had put myself in that mindset, but I think I let my own love for the genre — and this book — cloud my expectations.
@AQ: Thanks for those thoughts. Maybe next year I’ll get permission to video them! Or maybe I’ll offer extra credit to participate in an online discussion. The only thing is, I kind of like having this blog NOT heavily trafficked by people who know me in RL. Maybe start a dummy blog to do it. Anyway, thanks for the ideas.
@Magdalen: I think your theory may well still apply at elite colleges, but I have seen huge changes since I was a student at an expensive private college in the late 1980s. Today, at my public university in a poor rural state, most of my undergrads work 40+ hours a week, and many have children or other dependents. Many are veterans, most of whom fought in Iraq, and many have learning disabilities or mental health issues. In other words, although some of my students are definitely privileged, this is no cocoon we are in.
Whew, these are a lot of thoughtful helpful comments. Will catch the second batch later. thanks!
OMG, just had a thought. Matthew Haldeman-Time’s OFF THE RECORD is fraught with ethical tensions and it’s one of the few books I’ve read in which one character does something wrong and it’s not excused, justified, or explained away. The other character has to get mad, feel betrayed, come to understand, and actually forgive, and the one who did wrong has to actually learn to be a better person. And it’s brilliantly written. But it’s also a very erotic m/m. Not BDSM erotic. Just lots of hot hot sexual tension and then some hot hot sex. One of the characters is actually a virgin, playing with the romantic convention of that! And…something else that’s gone in the lack of caffeine this morning. Sigh.
I must have misunderstood – when you referred to “students” what did you mean?
Sorry, I was distracted and not really paying attention before I clicked submit. Tried to immediately delete the comment because it was a WTF moment.
But since I’ve stuck my foot in it. The entire discussion could be held elsewhere. We, the non-students, know where this blog is and we know how to click on links to go other places. Your students don’t need to come here at all not even to read our take.
Also you might want to host the romance readers first to see if we come up with any unexpected insights which could help better prepare you for student reactions, even if our reactions falls more in line with expectations. Maybe even frame or nudge our discussion to look into the avenue of inquiries your class is exploring. Just like any good book club facilitator does.
And if wishes were horses (what does this mean???) I really wish there was a good way to do an online video type roundtable to mimic a “feisty” coffeeshop book discussion but I haven’t found one. Or we could all videotape a book discussion or just record it and send it in. Yeah, I’m all about the silly. Silly because the amount of coordination something like that would take would be massive. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be an interesting experiment.
Sorry, for the slip click of the mouse.
Oh, thanks for this! Really fascinating. I loved reading about this, and boy do I wish I’d read this book! What a cool experiment in teaching. College is supposed to open people’s minds, and you’re on a somewhat new frontier of that with a class like this.
That certainly rings true. Gosh, the peer pressure to find fault with romance is so intense, as is the mockery of romance readers in our culture, I have to kind of think that the stuff you brought out will more sink in in retrospect than in the sphere of the classroom.
Jessica,
How do you frame reading a romance novel to one who never has?
I’m thinking about some of the comments you made
which put me into what about the rituals of courtship as it applies to the romance novel. The subtle cues such as body language and physical contact or choices of clothing styles and colors. We may know some of these things on the basic of levels but we as readers may not know that we are consuming them. Since trust and intimacy are such core elements of a romance novel is it necessary to point this out to someone prior to introducing them to the genre as part of a college course.
12 stages of intimacy (sorry, I don’t remember where I got the original)
1. Eye to body
2. Eye to eye
3. Voice to voice
4. Hand to hand
5. Arm to shoulder
6. Arm to waist
7. Mouth to mouth
8. Hand to head
9. Hand to torso
10. Mouth to torso
11. Hand to genitals
12. Genitals to genitals
Or how clothing a woman wears indicates which stages of intimacy the woman will allow. Colors also make a difference. All of these things are used by subconscious. Maybe not the same way for everyone but it’s a part of a romance novel that someone reading one for the first time probably wouldn’t even see, especially as it pertains to sexual contact. I ultimately think that romance is about TRUST not love. So the lens I look through are subtle body language, action and verbal cues that support the “we are in love or falling in love” premise of the individuals engaged in the relationship plot (love you, BevBB). I may not consciously realize that what’s I’ve done but when I look back for what did or didn’t work, I can sometimes find it.
Obviously that’s only a small piece of what goes into a romance novel but I do think it’s an example of something that should or could be framed before embarking on the maiden voyage.
ETA *** And the hero actions how many romance readers will forgive a hero for his words because his actions speak louder than the words. Also what happens when the man or woman tries to skip the rules as they pertain to the stages of intimacy.
I’m so glad to hear about romance novels being taught at the college level now! I love this Gaffney book, but I can see where the rape issue would make it a difficult sell for some readers. I agree with the Morning Glory suggestion, though. There’s a lot of fascinating material in that book. I think some of Carla Kelly’s books would make for interesting discussion, too, as they focus on non-aristocratic characters much of the time and there’s a definite lack of stereotypical rapist heroes and bodice-ripping in there.
I also have to say that whenever someone says happy endings aren’t realistic, I always want to ask them how closely their own lives resemble Shakespearean tragedy (or whatever other “profound” work they happen to be reading).
I’m not sure, though, that all romance readers feel the same way. From what other people have said, it seems that this was a book which has caused controversy within the romance community, so presumably many people who are used to the romance conventions still weren’t convinced by the ending.
I haven’t read this book, so I don’t know what I’d think about it. I avoid romances dealing with sexual or other abuse. It seems to me that it’s difficult for a novel to be long enough for me as the reader both to learn the details of the abuse and then to recover from the effects of reading about it, particularly if the issue is dealt with at some length. I tend to read quite fast, so although by the end of the novel the characters are enjoying their happy ending, I’m still likely to be troubled and upset by what I’ve read. That means I’m not going to be in a state of mind that’s particularly receptive to believing in the HEA.
A very interesting post, Jessica, and one that raises a number of thoughts.
1. romance generally
My feeling is that one of the issues people have with romance is that they see it as basically infantile. It’s that thing various commenters have already touched upon about the resistance to HEAs etc. And perhaps the fact that the last time we are exposed to a preponderance of HEAs is when we children.
2. your class – what was it all about?
I do think that THATH was always going to be hard sell to anyone coming new to the genre. But were you trying to sell it? Presumably that’s not the purpose of the class? Of course your students don’t have to like the material you select for your classes, but it seems from reading your post that you were disappointed by their reactions.
I for one would love to know more about the objective of the class was and, indeed, what ‘ethical criticism’ is. You said you chose THATH because it was well-written and because of the rape issue. I presumed you would primarily be looking at the ethical issues it raised rather than the literary merit. But perhaps you look at both? Have you considered the literary merit of your other assigned works? Were your students’ criticisms focussed on the writer’s technical skills or on the story/message?
3. THATH and ethical issues
Assuming you were looking at THATH purely from an ethical perspective, I’ve tried to think about what my take would have been coming to it as a new reader and being asked to read it for a class which will focus ethical issues.
Looking at it from that perspective, I’m not sure I’d have taken a different view from your students (and this is coming from someone who loves THATH deeply). And from that perspective, perhaps I’m not surprised that the female students were more hostile to it.
I love THATH for many reasons – the writer’s craft, the power play between the H/H and the powerfully realised redemption. As a romance, it delivers hugely for me. If I read it from a different perspective, I might find it troubling for all the reasons your students expressed.
And how do I explain that discrepancy between reading as a romance reader and reading from a primarily ethical perspective? Well, in my view, essentially, a romance is *about* the central love story in the sense of everything else being setting. So, in THATH, those ethical issues, for me, are an interesting bit of setting – but they don’t dwarf or overset the romance.
Now at the risk of generalising hugely (and I do appreciate just how gargantuan a simplicfication this is) my feeling is that a lot of literary fiction is *basically* about ethics. What happens to the characters is incidental in a way that simply isn’t the case in a romance. And if that means that HEAs are rare, then that is just as justifiable as the preponderance of HEAs are in romance.
4. Barbara Cartland
I would rate her below Penthouse.
@Tumperkin:
I’m reading along, getting into your points and then bam:
I don’t know why but it almost made me fall off the couch with laughter.
Thanks!
Great post and comments! Got me thinking a lot about Romance, about teaching the genre, and about students as readers outside the classroom.
First I have to say I agree with Jessica that we’re no longer exclusively dealing with the “traditional” college student (18-24, single, no other responsibilities), but more and more with the student who is often married and/or working at least part-time. This trend is of great worry to many of us in higher education, but that’s a topic for another day.
In any case, I think the current undergraduate population, in aggregate, is very diverse, at all tier levels.
Okay, so on to the book. As someone who did not start reading Romance in my teens or twenties, I had a distinct conversion experience into the genre, and it took me a while to adjust. For example, the first time I read Kinsale’s The Shadow and the Star, I felt that Leda was the “typical” (read: anti-feminist) example of how I was conditioned to see Romance heroines (naive, innocent, “pure,” traditionally dependent on the hero, etc.). It wasn’t until I adjusted to the coding in the genre that I could re-read the book and see her differently. So I firmly believe that the genre requires indoctrination into the coding and that genre readers, even when we disagree about specific books, understand the *language* of the genre in a different way from those who do not read in the genre.
Add to that a book that is incredibly provocative, even to those who read and love the genre, I can see how students would, at first, reject the book, either feeling that it was unreasonable for Rachel to fall in love with Sebastian, or even that the end was “unrealistic.” And I’d love to know what the students mean in that. Like do they mean it was unrealistic for Sebastian to change and for he and Rachel to be happy and healthy together? I think you might be able to mount an argument along those lines (although I adore THATH and buy into the ending totally). Do they mean that the Romance HEA is unrealistic, in which case I don’t know if it’s fair to compare that to literary fiction at all, because I think context makes a big difference.
For example, we know fairy tales have HEA’s, but ppl tend to see them as fantasy. Again, Romance readers have a way of coding “fantasy” in the Romance genre in a different, I would argue, unique way, one that isn’t precisely the same as a Disney movie or a romantic comedy movie or even an action flick like Die Hard where the good guy prevails and saves the day (and the innocent). And frankly, when statistically more than half of these kids likely come from divorced families, I can see the cynicism toward a romantic happy ending, *especially* one where the guy initially purchases and rapes the woman. Not to mention the power issues in the book that relate to class, to political power, and to social capital. And I don’t think it shows any hypocrisy that these students might buy into happy endings in any other genre, media, or type of story. And the overall low social standing of Romance has got to figure in here somewhere, too, I think.
But by comparison, look at how often literary fiction is enthusiastically and unselfconsciously bashed in various parts of the Romance community — obviously there’s a certain level of stereotyping that has comes from the tendency we all have to generalize our limited experiences, and more specifically to undertake this in a way that’s commensurate with some larger value we assign to those things we’re pitting against each other (i.e. high or low value to Romance v. high or low value to lit fic).
Back to the student issue, though, I wonder if creating a literary context for Romance would make a difference — that is, talking about the literary heritage of the genre (and I’m not just talking about Pride and Prejudice, but about how the genre evolved from the novels of sentiment and sensation of the 18th and 19th centuries (even books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, not to mention Moll Flanders, Pamela, and the like), and how they represented a very important step forward in characterizing love as primary to making a good marriage (and this ties into the genre’s foundations in Classical Comedy, which traditionally ended in marriage as a way to celebrate a more progressive younger generation as triumphant over a reactionary older generation), in giving women choices in who they married, in challenging social boundaries to marriage, in reinforcing the ideal of the nuclear family as the political and economic unit of society, etc. One of the problems inherent in teaching genre Romance, I think, especially when it’s not taught as a class on Romance, per se, is that it’s been so thoroughly disconnected from its literary ancestry that many students don’t understand how to think about it as a literary form — they see it as a cultural object, and not a very important one, at that.
I had some other things I was pondering, but can’t recall them now, so I’ll just stop here (I always write what I think is a relatively short comment that looks like a novella once I submit it, lol).
Oh, I forgot to add a link to this gem. Whether or not you find West’s philosophical persona compelling, I think it’s fascinating that he’s internalized the language and even the logic of so much romantic fiction.
Then there’s Sullivan’s need to call bullshit. Is that because of the imagery, per se, or the implication that West is intellectually and emotionally superior in his own romantic ideals and alleged emotional fearlessness? Is there a sense that West is co-opting a feminine subject here to assert his romantic idealism? Or is it something else (like the fact that he wants a relationship like the violent, self-destructive, sexually neurotic mess Catherine and Heathcliff enact in WH)?
It’s ironic, because Sullivan’s suggestion isn’t that West is culturally slumming in his invocation of this romantic persona, even though romantic idealism is often derided as feminine and therefore intellectually inferior.
@AQ: oh, no worries. I appreciate your contributions. I’m a little terrified of being captured on video. there is a very long and very embarrassing video of me online delivering a paper. I vowed it would be the last one.
I like the way you framed the question — how do you introduce a romance novel to new readers. This is all important, and the area where I need the most help and improvement.
@Lynn Spencer: I think the trend of teaching romance is growing. I could never teach a whole class on it in my home department, but I am happy to help by integrating romance where appropriate in my courses.
And I agree with you that it’s odd to find tragedy more realistic than romance when neither characterizes most average human lives.
@Laura Vivanco: I didn’t mean to imply that all romance readers accept it. I know that’s not true. But it is very common in the genre.
@Tumperkin: you raise a lot of important questions. In my opinion, several students felt more comfortable criticizing this work on literary grounds than others we have studied. For example, a claim was made that Gaffney was not consistent in characterizing the accents of the lower classes. I asked for a textual example, and am still waiting. the claim was also made that significant gaps were left in the story, namely relating to Rachels’ recovery, and this was a literary failing on her part.
Students waffled and differed on the question of whether the failing was in the genre restriction per se or in this realization of it, but whether the literary failing should be located in the genre or the text, it’s still a literary failing in their eyes.
One of the things I would do next time is connect up this claim more forcefully with their own admission that no HEA would work for them because it’s inherently not believable. What author’s skills could possibly overcome such bias?
No, I don’t require my students to like or even appreciate all of the fiction I assigned. But I admit I was especially on guard for specious unfounded criticism of this one. I was invested in a unique way. I had to decide how much I wanted to reveal about my commitment to the genre. Saying I love it might dampen discussion. So I stayed more or less neutral, although I had to do the lion’s share of defending it since no one else wanted to. they all wrote a reflection on it for me, and I can say with authority that no would be champions of romance were silenced by the group dynamic.
The question of ethical criticism is complex. On the one hand, it might mean evaluating the characters’s actions or moral characters. This can be done in a few ways. One might be to place those actions within the moral universe created by the author (some fictitious version of rural England in 1856). A second might be to evaluate their actions from our own point of view, our own moral world/s. On the other hand, ethical criticism might mean focusing on the practice of reading, and talking about the effect that reader interaction with a text has on the reader and on others with whom the reader comes into contact. We talked about both kinds in class all semester. (we also covered briefly the ethics of fiction writing as a practice).
@Robin: @Robin: I hope I didn’t imply that I thought my students were hypocrites. I did find interesting tensions between what some of them were allowing as fantasy and what they weren’t. I think it’s true that romance readers are hip to certain codes, and read differently than nonromance readers. I also think there is a gendered variable to to this particular fantasy — of course there is when it’s women who write it and women who read it — that I did not leave enough time to explore.
Your point about reconnecting romance to literature is excellent. It goes to AQ’a point about how it is framed. I did not help matters by introducing romance as pop culture with the Hollows article. Next time I will absolutely look for a short piece forging those connections and that history before I have them read the novel.
The West quote is a gem. I don’t find his examples resemble his wish list.
First off, I want to say that my falling off the couch comment above wasn’t meant as commentary on Cartland. I realize how insulting my reply sounded. I haven’t read Cartland’s works. Know little about them. It’s just the manner in which I was reading Tumperkin’s thoughts and hearing them in my own head…well, the transition seemed so deadpan that it struck me as hilarious.
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On to video: I have to admit that I hate to be videotaped as well. It’s just that having online discussion, wonderful though they are, requires more interpretation and structure on the part of the participants. You lose fluidity and the ability to get those body language and tonal cues. And it’s not easy to take a tangent and just run with it in a back and forth tit-for-tat manner.
Honestly, I love the written commentary but sometimes I can spend a lot of time trying to hone a particular thought whereas in person I’d just throw it out there to see where it goes.
I’m much more conscious that in writing you must choose your words carefully because what they mean to you isn’t necessarily what they mean to others. Or the thought/idea you were trying to spotlight isn’t what’s received by the recipients. With no visual cues the sender isn’t necessarily able to determine where the disconnect is: word choice or the premise of the argument or some comment made 5 minutes ago / 3 days ago.
I was only wishing that there was a way to more closely replicate the in person discussion group as it pertains to a book discussion. Maybe webcams during the discussion but only audio for the final post?
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Tragedy: I’ve been thinking about this one and trying to pull books out of my memory just within genre fiction. The difference: The first thing I think of are the details of either specific resonating scenes or the arguments made.
Science fiction:
Donaldson’s Gap series (love an ethical study of this one!!!). The scene where Hashi realizes that he was intellectually caught with his metaphorical pants down. (I remember other scenes). The deep deep characterization that I thought went into the series even though guilt and shame seemed to be the primary emotions of many of the characters, especially at the end. It’s a five book series and I can pull some many scenes out of those books.
Herbert’s Dune series: There are no innocents. (I know only one in about a million arguments Herbert makes. I do NOT exaggerate at all. Never. LOL) In the Dune series, it’s not the scenes that matter to me but the arguments made. Messy emotions have their place but the characters and the narrator camera are much more removed. The story appeals on a very intellectual level. The resonance has to do with how the characters relate to the arguments made or the premises presented.
Fantasy:
Urban Fantasy: Harry Dresden or Rachel Morgan. I remember the fun I had on the ride first. Then the worldbuilding and the lead’s inner-circle characters.
George RR Martin: Ice & Fire series so far: I remember the grayness of the characters and the chessboard which is the plot first. Again the characters are seem so very human even though I find them extraordinary rather than ordinary.
Stephen King: The thing that pops to mind in the books I read of his are the ordinary people put into extraordinary circumstance and not really liking what I’m forced to see. This is another along for the ride story but it’s very different from the urban fantasy books.
Romance (Yes, see the above paragraphs really do apply to the romance novels):
When I look at my romance shelf the first that comes immediately to mind is how I felt about the book, the emotions I personally experienced while reading it. Then after I pick the book up from the shelf and decide to re-read it, only then do the individual scenes come forward. It’s a very different experience more any of the others I listed above. Not better or worse. Different. And much more personal.
Then throw in Kundera, Tom Robbins, Mary Russell Doria, etc., etc. and the experiences are all over the board. The one consistency is that with romance I always remember how I felt while reading the book before anything else.
Oh, I want to take this thought thread further but I can’t quite pull it out. I’m not even sure where I’m starting is where I think I might end. So take it for what it’s worth.
*** Edited to add: That doesn’t mean that the feeling the particular romance novel engenders in me is positive. I don’t always have warm fuzzies from reading romance. ****
One more thing to add: With romance, my feeling surrounding the book presumes that I actually remember the book. Sometimes I have to read the blurb, look at the cover and re-start the book before I remember it. That rarely happens to the same degree with any other type of book I read.
Well, I think it’s great that you at least attempted to expand your students horizons even though the end result and experience might not have been what you had expected or hoped for. At least you have exposed them to it and maybe at least got them thinking. You should definitely keep introducing romance into your classes. Changing a person’s preconceived notions about romance won’t be easy, but at least there is the possibility of it. Doing nothing will get you exactly that – nothing.
@Jessica: I hope I didn’t imply that I thought my students were hypocrites.
No, you didn’t. I sometimes see the logic of hypocrisy invoked, though, when the HEA issue is discussed.
I can’t remember if in my comment I said anything about different types of fantasy, but this discussion got me thinking more about that, too (I’ve already talked a little about my views on the different definitions of the word we sometimes blend together when talking about Romance fiction, so won’t reproduce that here), and how those differences — i.e. rape fantasy as opposed to fairy tale as opposed to the ‘fantastic’ as opposed to escapism — shape the way any of us reacts to a book like THATH.
For example, the reader who does not find the rape fantasy sexy or appropriate or convincing cannot necessarily experience the “escapist” aspect of the book. Of course I tend to be wary of talking about Romance as “fantasy,” anyway, because I think that tends to blur the differences between, for example, a sexual fantasy and the nuances of a reader’s buy-in to a story. But that comes down to what people mean when they say something like ‘it’s just a fantasy’ — like does that mean it does not require internal logic to be valid or that it’s a mere sexual fantasy or that it’s escapist. Although even if escapism is the synonym, I don’t know how that aligns with the way different readers find believability in a text. In other words, I think it’s an extremely complex interplay of factors that subsidize the uses and meanings of “fantasy” in genre Romance.
Jessica, I wonder if one way to frame Romance for your students would be to read the Atwood story, “Happy Endings,” first. That might allow you to historicize the notion that happy endings are not “realistic” or “literary” (and it seems to me students are prone to conflating the two, to some extent).
First, this isn’t a recent story. You might ask them why a feminist woman writer, in early/mid career, would be eager to challenge the notion that a story where men and women played conventional roles and where marriage was the happy ending was interesting or worth telling. Then there’s the fact that Atwood’s most recent novels are speculative/science fiction. As she’s gained stature, does she feel freer to play with(in) genre conventions? She’s written historical fiction, too.
Second, that story seems to me to be arguing against the importance/interest of plot as much as anything else (plot is just a what, all plots end in death, now try how and why). While I can think of some counter-evidence (Trollope arguing for character-driven over plot-driven novels, e.g.), the idea that STORY is not important or valuable in fiction, not what we should be reading for, strikes me as more or less a Modernist idea. If your students are like mine, they haven’t read much, but they’ve probably been exposed to at least a couple of 19th-century novels. Even the heavy-hitters of the era (George Eliot, say) were not afraid of plot devices like coincidence, illegitimate children, blackmail. Moreover, in most Victorian novels I can think of, at least one plot strand is a romance; the HEA is one way of resolving social problems raised in the novel (North and South is an example).
Historically, realism hasn’t been a particularly high literary value, I don’t think (what about Medieval Romance? epic?). Even realistic fiction relies on highly formalized, unrealistic conventions to achieve its effects (e.g. the omniscient narrator. Who the heck is that person who can read everyone’s minds?).
I was going to say, again, how gendered this whole issue is. Of course students felt freer to question the literary value of a contemporary romance by a woman than of famous works by dead white guys. Gaffney doesn’t have the “Literary Canon Book Club” sticker that prevents readers from questioning your skill an genius. But it’s more complex than that, maybe. Romance novels are, among other things, trying to do something fairly obvious to readers–work on our emotions–and I think because student readers can recognize what they’re up to, they feel freer to judge and question. Maybe.
In the end, no matter what, it is very very hard to get students to question any assumptions they come in with. I bet it went better than you think.
Very interesting post.
I was curious as to how the rape of the heroine in THAH was going to go over with your students, and I’m honestly not surprised by their reactions. Personally, I could never buy an HEA that includes a woman falling in love with her rapist, no matter how well-written. It is just one of those mental blocks I can’t get past. But in general I think any rape-romance is going to be a tough sell to the non-romance reading crowd — especially since rape-romances are often a tough sell to fans of the genre.
It is disheartening to hear is that so many students think happiness is unrealistic. And as other commenters have pointed out, the belief that profoundly meaningful tragedy is more “realistic” is itself quite unrealistic.
I agree with so many of the comments above, especially Angela’s about students believing that liking romance will undermine their intellectual cache. I’m a bit ashamed to say that back when I was in college I never admitted that I loved romances because I knew that I would be mocked and looked down on for it. It goes back to the popular myth that smart women, let alone men, don’t read romance.
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