Laura Vivanco, romance scholar, author of For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance, and web mistress of Teach Me Tonight, an academic blog devoted to the study of popular romance novels, is my guest today:
Harlequin Mills & Boon, which is known for its “formulaic” books, has often been praised for its innovative business approach. Its financial success, however, has been accompanied by a widespread perception that the novels it sells are entirely lacking in artistic merit. Jennifer Crusie has commented that
category publishers treat the form as if they were selling soup, and it’s hard to get respect for soup. Even so, the soup approach to romance is not intrinsically bad as long as it stays in marketing where it belongs. When a publisher does a good job of marketing, he sells a lot of books, and his writers make money, and everybody’s happy.
The impression that category romances are artistic failures is undoubtedly strengthened by deeply entrenched beliefs about culture, literature and entertainment. In her paper for the recent McDaniel College conference on romance, Jessica noted that
The Romantic era author gained cultural capital by disavowing capitalism (during a period in which the patron model gave way to a capitalist model of literary artistic production). He didn’t write for money and didn’t “work.” The “valueless value” of the literary work could only be produced by an “Author” who had no financial stake or interest.
This attitude towards money has continued to affect attitudes towards literature:
the art for art’s sake movement of the 1880s and 1890s [...] drew a clear distinction, one that Modernism inherited and reinforced, between the popular and the literary, a distinction that was often expressed as an opposition between the unique and the mass-produced: the genuine work of art is one of a kind, unique; a piece of popular fiction is virtually indistinguishable from others of its kind because it has been massproduced according to a formula (hence the pejorative term ‘formula fiction’). Popular writers (like Conan Doyle) wrote to entertain the masses or to make money for themselves, whereas literary artists (like Henry James) wrote for the sake of their Art. (Clausson 40)
and
[Pierre] Bourdieu [19302002] characterizes high or highbrow cultural production (works of visual art, opera, experimental media, art house cinema, all kinds of avant garde cultural production, etc.) as ‘autonomous’: indifferent to the buying and reading/viewing public, often openly contemptuous of the market-place and the demand for profit, underwritten by a sense of ‘creativity’ and ‘originality’, and using the language or discourse of ‘art’. High cultural producers are self-identified as ‘creative artists’; by doing so, however, they position themselves in what Bourdieu calls ‘the field of restricted production’, necessarily directing their work at small audiences, fellow-artists and like-minded or similarly trained social-cultural groups. (Gelder 13)
Given that, “From a business viewpoint, the romance is the ‘formula of formulas’, an invitingly stable product with low risk elements (Fowler 26), it is unsurprising that popular romance fiction has tended to be viewed as the antithesis of creative, original, highbrow, literary fiction.
The title of my For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance challenges this view, suggesting that those who write (for money) about love, may also write for the love of writing. To prove that there is such a thing as a literary art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon romance, I turned to some of the novels themselves. Their variety and complexity demonstrates that there is indeed a “literary art” to writing category romances.
I asked Laura a few follow up questions, and here are her answers:
1. In your book, did you take up at all the question of the motives of HM&B writers, especially their desire (and/or need) to “write for money”? If yes, can you share anything about your findings? If not, why not?
I didn’t interview authors because I wanted the novels to speak for themselves. In the chapter of my book which deals with metafiction I take a look at some of the ways in which HM&B romances have addressed the low status of popular culture in general, and romances in particular.
2. Do you think there is a relationship between the image of M&B writers as writing for money and the perception of the (low) literary value of the book themselves?
There certainly seems to be a perception that writing romances is, as Anne Gracie puts it, “money for jam.” For those who are “openly contemptuous of the marketplace,” HM&Bs will perhaps automatically fall into the category of sub-literature because HM&B as a company does very much care about the marketplace. On the other hand, those who believe that the market will decide the true value of products may also think that, because HM&Bs are not expensive books, they must be less valuable artistically.
3. What does it mean to you to view M&B novels as a “literary art”?
It means taking them seriously (i.e. not pre-judging them or making assumptions about their contents or merits) and analysing them in the same way that I would analyse any other literary text.
4. What was one (or two) of the most surprising things you discovered in your research for your book?
I found out that right whales are the only whales which have callosities on their heads. I also came across Samuel van Hoogstraten’s “Peepshow with Views of the Interior of a Dutch House” and its exterior is really quite in keeping with the subject of this post:
Hoogstraten’s box is [...] decorated on the exterior with allegorical paintings [...]. The long side illustrates love of wealth as a motivation for the artist, who appears with a putto holding a cornucopia. Love of art and of fame are the subjects of the paintings on the short sides, while the top is decorated with an allegory of physical love, representing Venus and Cupid in bed, painted in anamorphic (distorted perspective) projection.
Thanks Laura! I already own the very nice looking Kindle edition of FLOM and can’t wait to read it!
Notes:
● Clausson, Nils. “Literary Art in an Age of Formula Fiction and Mass Consumption: Double Coding in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Blue Carbuncle’.” Studies in Popular Culture 31.1 (2008): 3954.
● Crusie, Jennifer. “So, Bill, I Hear You Write Those Little Poems: A Plea for Category Romance.”
● Fowler, Bridget. The Alienated Reader: Women and Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
● Gelder, Ken. Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2004.
The top photo is of the “Royal Scottish Academy column[s] decorated with Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup Can[s]” and was taken by SixSigma who made it available at Wikimedia Commons under a creative commons license. For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance is available in pdf, Kindle and paper editions.
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Interesting post! I just wanted to say, as someone who considers herself a soup-maker extraordinaire, despite the fact soup gets little culinary respect, it is an art to make it right! There’s no such thing as a soup recipe, it’s all in the sense, getting the delicate balances right can’t be taught or boiled down to a formula. Sure you start with a good base, but where you go from there is pure instinct and talent. While I’ve only read a handful of categories, I think it’s the same thing. Even if the plots follow a predictable rhythm and pattern, you can’t fake chemistry or interesting characters. It’s pretty ridiculous how much people need to put down others to reassure themselves.
I was just reading about how Jane Austen became a renowned writer after her death. The emergence of circulating libraries and the railways with book stalls on the platforms and later troops reading her in the trenches of WW1 came before academic recognition. It was ordinary, everyday people who valued JA’s books, even if it was only to pass the time on a journey and in doing so exposed them to the literary world and the academy who then claimed them. I think there is something similar here with H/M&B and the romance genre in general.
I have your book in my TBR, Laura and am looking forward to reading it.
Elsewhere in the article by Crusie she mentions “cans of soup” so I suspect she was thinking of soup which is produced the way Campbell’s tomato soup is produced. I assume that Campbell do have a very specific recipe/formula for that, to ensure that each tin of soup tastes exactly the same. I think her point was that commercially produced soup appears in cans with particular branding for each product-line and the contents of each individual can in a line is the same; category romances also appear in branded lines, but the contents of each “can” are not exactly the same.
Of course, there may well have been considerable skill involved in creating the formula used in any given line of soup. Also, science and artistic flair can be combined to produce food (I’m thinking about molecular gastronomy), but I’m not very knowlegeable about that at all.
I have the impression that even though, during her lifetime, she had nothing like the fame of Sir Walter Scott (“the first English-language author to achieve truly international fame in his lifetime”), she “had a modest and growing success in her lifetime and by the end of her life her identity as the author of the novels was known to some.” I hope you’re right that “there is something similar here with H/M&B and the romance genre in general.” I also very much hope you enjoy reading For Love and Money.
One thing I can attest to, as a long-time Harlequin/Mills & Boon writer and someone who has also written “serious” stuff – theatre plays, is that the process is exactly the same. I’ve been on the receiving end, many times, of assumptions that it’s different – that genre fiction writers somehow operate on a lesser creative level than do literary writers or other writers of more worthy material (e.g. highbrow film scripts) but every discussion I’ve ever had with other romance writers, or with “serious” writers, suggests that all the highs of insight and creation and problem solving and the lows of writing block or characters who won’t gel or holes in story are identical.
So even if we are “writing for money” it doesn’t change how the writing gets done.
It’s really good to hear this directly from someone who’s been on both sides of the high/low divide. I have come across some (though not very many) romance authors who insist that what they are writing is “only” entertainment and not literature. I wonder if that has anything to do with perceptions about what constitutes literary fiction. Or perhaps it’s modesty, because the authors are comparing themselves to writers like Shakespeare and Austen?
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