Archive for the 'Genre musings' category

Underreading and Overreading in Online Book Reviews

Jan 15 2012 Published by under Genre musings

I’ve been reading the Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, by  H. Porter Abbott, because I’m thinking about adopting it in the fall. I thought I’d summarize one bit, on overreading and underreading. This applies to any reader actually, not only those who write book reviews, let alone those who write online book reviews.

As avid readers, we know how vulnerable we are to the effect of novels.* Indeed, the pleasure of those effects is a major reason we seek them out. But as readers we, too, exercise a power over texts. One of the ways we do that is by underreading. As Frank Kermode once wrote,

It is not uncommon for large parts of the novel to go virtually unread; the less manifest portions of its text (its secrets) tend to remain secret, tend to resist all but abnormally attentive scrutiny, reading so minute, intense, and slow that it seems to run counter to one’s “natural” sense of hat a novel is (Art of Telling, 138, as quoted in Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, p. 86).

My own reviews, at least of genre fiction, tend to focus a lot of character and plot. Abbott’s long discussion of just two words in Madame Bovary (“elegeic epithelamium”) made me realize how much more focus I could place on specific words in the text. I recall hearing a paper by Eric Selinger on Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm, a book I love, and thought I had read carefully, that opened up the text in a mindblowing new way.  I had “missed” so much! I realize these are example of academic readings, which have a character and a vocabulary of their own, and I’m not suggesting I aspire to that with each book review here (in part because the audience and purpose are different), but thinking about underreading has made me wonder which parts of a novel I am more like to underread.

On Kermode’s view, we have to close the narrative to achieve interpretation, and we do so by exclusions. This is not just something a reader who is in a hurry, or uneducated does: even very sophisticated readings (the ones characterized by “abnormally attentive scrutiny”) have to posit an “embracing formulation” (in Abbott’s words) in order to move through the book.

One of the motives is to bring a text into line with our worldview, to make it more comfortable to engage with. Our own vested cultural or personal interests unconsciously influence this process. Abbott’s fictional example is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, a story in which an ancient winged man who arrives in the protagonists’ back yard is recast as something quite ordinary:

Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm.

Abbott quotes Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, which contends that narrative is inevitably underread, because we need a simple sequence of events in order to navigate “the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things” (Abbott, p. 88). And psychologists might point to “the primacy effect”, the tendency to let earlier interpretations dominate later ones. Abbott’s example is Wuthering Heights, a book many readers remember as the story of Cathy and Healthcliff, despite the fact that Catherine dies halfway through and the romance of Hereton Earnshaw and Catherine’s daughter is equally important.

I wonder how this point applies to our reviews. If the first few chapters of a book are problematic, do we let that unfairly influence our take on the book as a whole? And how about DNF “reviews”?

Then there’s overreading. This is finding things in narratives for which there is no direct evidence in the text. Again, we come to books with different backgrounds, experiences, and expectations, and these influence what we find in the text. Abbott’s example is of an ungainly, friendless girl with a beautiful but spoiled and ungrateful little sister reading Cinderella: she might see Cindy as a scheming hypocrite.

Abbott gives an example of “loading up a stranger with an unflattering moral character, cued only by the color of his skin” (p. 89), which is interesting. Is that overreading if the author him or herself was using that character as a shorthand for “bad”?

When I think of genre fiction, especially romance, I recognize certain signaling turns of phrase that help me identify in the first pages who the hero and heroine are, even when it’s not made explicit by the text. Is that overreading? Or experienced genre reading? I taught Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me in the fall, and after we read the first half of the book, one student opined that he wasn’t sure if Cal and Min would end up together, because they seemed to fight so often!

And every text has gaps. No character or setting is described in full, for example. I may get a sense of height, weight, hair color, eyes, or whatever else the author thinks is important, with the rest left to my own mind to fill in. In Asa Larsson’s Sweden-set mystery suspense Sun Storm, three pastors are interviewed by the police after a murder in the church. Rather than describing the men in detail, Larsson has the detective, Anna-Maria, take careful note of how they each shake hands (for example, “Gunnar Isaksson had nearly crushed her hand in his. And it wasn’t the unconscious strength you sometimes find in men. He’s just afraid of seeming weak, thought Anna-Maria.”). It’s very effective, but not exactly complete. My point is that what counts as “overreading” is going to be hard to determine.

On the other hand, what led me to write this post was finishing Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, and looking online for fellow reader opinion about some ambiguous parts of the text. The narrator remembers a weekend spent in Kent with his girlfriend Veronica’s family in college. He remembers them treating him as inferior. He remembers an oafish brother, a father who drank too much, a mother who inexplicably warned him not to let Veronica get away with anything. Tony speculates that Veronica was the victim of abuse — a leap I didn’t understand how he could make on the basis of such a small acquaintance with them, but this gets softened when he remembers his own mother saying everyone who survived childhood was abused in some way (this is kind of an echo of the point of this post.). At any rate, I did not think the abuse in Veronica’s family was that important.

But the readers on Amazon has spun tales of incest and violence in Veronica’s home that I found ridiculous. They took a line from the text: “gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house” and determined from that alone that the narrator had had sex with Veronica’s mother that weekend. I was outraged! Talk about willful overreading. I understand that nature abhors a vacuum, but let’s not ruin the book by turning it into a Lifetime movie!

Abbott says that one of the correctives to underreading and overreading is intentional interpretation in light of others’ readings. I think that’s what we do when we join book groups, Tweet about books, engage in discussions on Goodreads and on our blogs. Just yesterday on Twitter, I had my own view of a book by Adrienne Wilder revised by a fellow reader, Merrian, who suggested that what I found bizarre and offputting in some of the characters (“dragons”) was actually a welcome antidote to the safe, fake “otherness” (sparkly vampires, for example) we are presented with in most PNR. Although I don’t want to go far into the recent author meltdowns over critical reviews, to my mind, one of the more awful things about authors swooping in to shame and shut down critical readers is not just the effect it has on the reader (it doesn’t feel good to be called a “bitch” and mocked by a group of authors on Twitter as in this last kerfuffle), but on this wonderful process of filling in the gaps for each other and turning our solitary reading experience into a communal one.* [*Edited to add: I don't think it actually has this effect in most cases, but I think the attempt shows a real disregard, even disrespect, for the process of communal interpretation, a process I think is tremendously important.]

Gaps are inevitable in any narrative, which is a good thing since, as Wolfgang Iser has written, “It is only through inevitable omissions that a story gains its dynamism” (as quoted in Abbott, p. 91). Our readings give narrative its power. Still, it can be interesting to think about underreading or overreading as we attempt to engage with the novels we love, and love to hate.

*This point can be made about texts in general, of course, but this is a book blog and I’m sticking with books.

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For Art or Money? Guest post by Laura Vivanco

Jan 06 2012 Published by under Genre musings

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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Thoughts on Teaching Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me

Dec 13 2011 Published by under Academia, Ethics, Genre musings

Last week, my Ethics and Fiction class (syllabus here) read Bet Me. I had prepared students the week before by assigning a chapter of Joanne Hollows (which I blogged about in 2009), and adding my own commentary and critique on the genre. I thought I’d share (with their permission) some of their reactions and some of my reactions to their reactions. Pardon me in advance for the scattershot nature of this post.

Long time readers might recall that the last time I taught this class, I attempted to teach Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and To Hold. It was a bit of a disaster. I wrote a post about it here.  This time around, I deliberately chose a novel that might prove less strange, thanks to its contemporary setting and the “romcom” feel, and also because it more obviously thwarts some of the stereotypes of romance novels featured in the Hollows reading.

The class is an advanced undergrad course, crosslisted in English and Philosophy. Almost everyone in it was either a philosophy major, English major or both. Most of the students are avid readers, and many are creative writers as well. I had six women, two of whom dropped the course midsemester, and about ten men. It was a terrific semester with this group, overall.

In terms of liking Bet Me, there was a clear gender correlation at the extremes, but not for the majority of the group. That is, the two who liked it the most, and plan to read more Crusie or more romance fiction, were women, and the two who really hated it were men. The rest were mixed.

Teaching romance fiction, especially when it is just one item on a syllabus of literary fiction, is like teaching uphill. It reminds me a little bit of teaching feminist theory as part of an ethics class as opposed to a course in feminist theory. That is, unlike virtually every other text we have read this semester, students have already passed negative judgment on the book prior to opening it, and may not be as open to seeing good writing, deft plotting, or compelling characterization when it’s there. Even when they do see something aesthetically worthwhile, it has to come up through the haze of criticism, as when one student said that “despite the romance novel’s strict guidelines, good writing can shine through.” Surprisingly, at least one student’s dislike of romance novels came directly from a rather intense dislike of romantic films.

This is a very smart group, and in most cases their criticisms were backed up with textual evidence, as in the criticism of Cynthie, the hero’s psychologist ex-girlfriend, and David, the heroine’s ex-boyfriend, as shallow characters. These two came in for almost universal condemnation in my class as cardboard plot-movers. On the other hand, a student noted both that Crusie did not seem to simply dismiss out of hand Cynthie’s “psychological” approach to love, since Cynthie functioned as a kind of Greek chorus for the development of Cal and Min’s relationship, and also that there is a long history in literature of “hilariously ineffectual” antagonists. Other students noted that Cynthie is a foil for Min: they both start out seeing relationships in terms of their respective professions, but Min grows out of that and Cynthie doesn’t.

At times, however, the criticism seemed more based on expectations than what was in the text. It also tended to be framed as a critique of the genre, despite the fact that the student would, at the same time, protest this was the first, last and only romance novel s/he would ever read. I tried to keep us textually based, and tried to contrast the ease with which some students critiqued the entire romance genre, with the reluctance with which they had criticized other novels earlier in the semester. It occurred to me that next time I might have students read two shorter romances, but completely different ones, to short circuit this tendency.

Several students lamented the lack of gravity in the novel. They felt, not that the novel had to end tragically, but that more had to be at stake, in order to make it a great novel. They noted that the one time David’s hijinks actually work to pry Min and Cal apart, after Min’s sister’s disaster of a non-wedding, Cal goes home and his next door neighbor, Shanna, explains to him (correctly) exactly what happened why it happened, and what he must do to fix it. Cal believes her almost instantaneously, so there is never any real danger to the relationship. To give another concrete example, one student a female, noted the discussion about “fairy tales” Min had with her best friend Bonnie after The Black Moment was “kind of lame… I mean, she wants to be a soccer mom.  You can have anything you want, and this is all you want?” Along these lines, one student lamented that “people would rather read a predictable ‘feel good’ story than a piece of writing that tries to say something new or expands on an idea.” Another referred to Bet Me in terms from an earlier essay, as an “emotional pep pill.”

Many students expressed dislike of the “lack of realism” in the novel. Looking back at my Gaffney post, I see this was a major issue for my students in 2009, and I hereby berate myself for not being more prepared for it. Among the unrealistic elements of the novel are (a) coincidences (too many to mention, but the one where Cal and Min end up together at the same late night showing of a film was singled out for special criticism, as well as Cal finding Min’s missing snow globe), (b) the feral cat that bonds to Min, attacks David, and bonds to Cal, while also knowing how to turn on the stereo and play Elvis tunes, (c) the sex (one set of fireworks was ok, but every single time they kiss? As one student put it, “no one’s success rate is that high.”)

One particular student happened to be wearing an Iron Man t-shirt as he criticized the lack of realism in the novel. I could not help but point this out. He, and some others, responded that (a) the Marvel universe is more realistic than a romance novel, especially the character interactions and dialogue, and (b) the stakes are so much higher in Marvel that the lack of realism is not as bad. I didn’t push them on it, but I was not convinced.

A couple of students deliberately read Bet Me through the lens of the fantasy genre. As one student put it, “Fantasy novels deal with our fantasies about adventure and magic, about slaying dragons and freeing kingdoms. Romance novels, from reading Bet Me, seem to deal with fantasies of the heart. They are almost as unrealistic, but also almost as harmless.” Another said, “The breakthrough for me was comparing it to the fantasy genre I love.”

Of the students who were complimentary, several said things along the lines of “this is not a romance novel.” Since I had given them three definitions of the romance novel the prior week (Cawelti, RWA, and Regis), any of which work for this novel, I found this type of comment surprising. What they were saying, I think, is that it was not what they expected. In particular, Min, being self-sufficient, smart, perhaps stronger than Cal, resistant (at first) to his charms, and determinedly child-free, surprised them.   They also expected a “hot girl falling for a hot babe” narrative. One student said that the novel is “teaching girls to be unique”, while another said Crusie’s target audience is “people who feel marginalized by social image of the ideal woman.”

One thing that really took me by surprise was how much the students enjoyed the scenes with Cal’s family, and even Min’s to some extent. I always learn from my students, and I learned this time that Cal’s relationship with Bink was very important as it provided a counter-narrative to Cynthie’s explanation of his tendency to serially date. Students also really enjoyed the dinner scene at Cal’s house. For my part, I tend to find the parental dinner scenes, in this book, and in other Crusie novels like Strange Bedpersons, completely “unrealistic” set pieces Designed to Do Something. But my students really preferred the second half of the novel, and the development of Cal’s character.

There was universal agreement that Cal grew as a person, but the class was more mixed about Min. One student felt that Min was objectified, and ended up objectifying herself, for example, wearing the red lace her mother bought her when she first kissed Cal. Rather than seeing Cal’s attraction to Min as a triumph, this (male) student felt that Cal was constantly objectifying Min, and teaching her to objectify herself, conforming to her mother’s expectation that she dress up more to attract a handsome man and get married. We had a good long discussion about this point. On the issue of Min’s weight, some students (female) strongly identified with it, while others (male and female) felt that Min’s fat was fetishized in a way that made them uncomfortable. The scene at the picnic when Min exchanges bites of a Krispy Kreme donut for Cal’s lips, saying “more”, was singled out in this context. Another student wondered whether Min’s character arc had to be shorter because Crusie didn’t want to conform to stereotypes of the genre and start with a weak heroine.

Several students noted the high level of genre savviness of the characters. They introduced me to a term, lampshading, defined here by Tv Tropes:

Lampshade Hanging is the writers’ trick of dealing with any element of the story that threatens the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief — whether a very implausible plot development, or a particularly blatant use of a trope — by calling attention to it… and then moving on. In simple terms – the author points out the improbable subject through some medium (character, passerby, narration, etc.) and says it exists regardless of logic. The reason for this counter-intuitive strategy is two-fold. First, it assures the audience that the author is aware of the implausible plot development that just happened, and that they aren’t trying to slip something past the audience. Second, it assures the audience that the world of the story is like Real Life: what’s implausible for you or me is just as implausible for these characters, and just as likely to provoke an incredulous response.

Min and Cal’s dialogue after the lights come up and they find themselves in the same theater, Cal finding Min’s missing snow globe, and in general secondary characters’ tendency to say exactly what the reader might be thinking about the improbable events unfolding, are examples. In other cases, we had Playing with Tropes, such as the Discussed Trope, as when the Cinderella story is discussed.

Overall, I was really delighted with our class discussions, and felt students had a lot of interesting things to say about Bet Me. Some things I haven’t even had time to mention are the ethics concerns over the bet, and over Cynthie’s determination to write about her relationship with Cal. I think this worked much better than the Gaffney and will likely use it again next year.

There’s lots more I could say, but this post is already too long. One last comment I wanted to make about the discussion, and the class in general, was the way Twilight, the books and films, hung over the course. At one point I jokingly banned Twilight references. I may have to assign that one next time, too, just to get it out of everyone’s system. I’m kidding. Sort of.

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What does a “zaftig” romance heroine look like? Models for Bet Me’s Min

Dec 06 2011 Published by under Feminist contentions, Genre musings

I’m rereading Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me for class this week. The heroine, Min, has — thanks to her mother, her ex-boyfriend, and Society — significant body image issues, which create a barrier to satisfying relationships with men in general, and Cal, the gorgeous hero, in particular. The following conversation takes place about a third of the way into the book. At this point, Min and Cal are attracted to one another, and are spending some time together, but are resolutely “not dating”:

“Yeah,” Min said dismissively. “So what am I supposed to do about my weight?”

Cal put his fork down. “All right. Here’s the truth. You’re never going to be thin. You’re a round woman. You have wide hips and a round stomach and full breasts. You’re . . .”

“Healthy,” Min said bitterly.

“Lush,” Cal said, watching the gentle rise and fall of her breasts under her sweatshirt.

“Generous,” Min snarled.

“Opulent,” Cal said, remembering the soft curve of her under his hand.

“Zaftig,” Min said.

“Soft and round and hot, and I’m turning myself on,” Cal said, starting to feel dizzy.

“Do you have anything on under that sweatshirt?”

“Of course,” Min said, taken aback.

“Oh,” Cal said, ditching that fantasy. “Good. We should be eating. What were we talking about?”

“My weight?” Min said.

“Right,” Cal said, picking up his fork again. “The reason you can’t lose weight is that you’re not supposed to lose weight, you’re not built that way, and if you did manage through some stupid diet to take the weight off, you’d be like that chicken mess you just made. Some things are supposed to be made with butter. You’re one of them.”

It would be hard to overstate the significance of Min’s feelings about her body to this book. She doesn’t just have them, she talks about them, in every single scene with Cal, and in most other scenes. Even the very last page of the book has a reference to carbs. The repetition of themes or symbols (Krispy Creme Donuts, chicken marsala, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella etc.) throughout the novel is signature Crusie, of course. Some readers find that Min’s focus on her appearance makes her unlikeable. Others object to it on more literary grounds: that it’s not quite believable, yet is forced on readers for plot purposes (got to have a reason Min and Cal can’t be together). Still others find it wholly believable and delight in a truly large heroine coming to terms with her size.

What do you picture when you picture Min, based on the above dialogue? I’ve gathered some photos, deliberately choosing ones in which the subjects are public figures posing for the press, and in general, looking fantastic (That is, no “shaming” pics of Kristie Alley in her bathrobe and bedhead grabbing her morning paper on her doorstep).

Kirstie Alley after weight loss

Actor Nikki Blonksy

Actor Melissa McCarthy

Min is described as having “smooth milky skin, wide-set dark eyes, a blob of a nose, and that lush, soft, full, rosy mouth.” Here’s how I picture Min:

Model Crystal Renn

Renn is model who suffered from anorexia, recovered, gained a lot of weight, wrote a book, had great success as a larger model, then lost all the weight, and has been criticized for it. (Renn also got in trouble in September 2011 for allowing her eyes to be “stretched” with tape  for a Japanese Vogue shoot). In 2010, at a Glamour event, former Sports Illustrated cover model Paulina Porizkova stood next to Renn, noting that although they were the same size (Paulina hasn’t gained weight in 20 years, I guess), today Renn is considered a plus sized model.

Conceptions of what is “zaftig”, “overweight”, “lush”, not only change over time, as the exchange between Paulina and Crustal indicates, but differ from person to person. As Renn has said, of reading blog comments,

one person will say, ‘Wow, she’s so fat. Look at her. She’s so obese.’ And then right underneath, someone else will say, ‘Look how emaciated she is. She’s so anorexic.’ Fat is relative. One person’s thin is someone else’s so-called fat.

Whenever we read, we have to fill in details about the physical appearance of the characters. As I was rereading Bet Me this time around, I realized that it mattered to me just how big Min was, that I was really trying to nail it down. I’ve even written a blog post about it! I’m guessing that’s partly the result of the fact that my attention was drawn over and over to the issue by the text, but that’s not all of it. There’s also my own complicity: my own anxiety and heightened interest in size due to being a woman living in a culture that is keenly interested in this question, and sharing that concern myself. Read this way, this whole post is just an exercise in further “policing” Min.

This is one of the things we’ll talk about in class today.

 

 

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Guest post and giveaway: Jessica Scott on It’s Just a Romance Novel

Nov 20 2011 Published by under Genre musings

I’m delighted to welcome romance writer Jessica Scott, whose debut  Because of You was just released this month from Loveswept. Jessica is a career soldier with 16 years in the Army, who blogged for PBS Point of View from Afghanistan and Iraq. Jessica is now a company commander in charge of 130 soldiers, and a mom to two, whose husband continues to serve in Iraq. Jessica also hails from Maine!

 

Here’s the blurb:

Keeping his men alive is all that matters to Sergeant First Class Shane Garrison. But meeting Jen St. James the night before his latest deployment makes Shane wonder if there’s more to life than war. He leaves for Iraq remembering a single kiss with a woman he’ll never see again- until a near fatal attack lands him back at home and in her care.  Jen has survived her own brush with death and endured its scars. And yet there’s a fire in Shane that makes Jen forget all about her past. He may be her patient, but when this warrior looks her in the eyes, she feels – for the first time in a long time – like a woman. Shane is too proud to ask for help, but for Jen, caring for him is more than a duty -it’s a need. And as Jen guides Shane through the fires of healing, she finds something she never expected – her deepest desire.

Because of You is getting great reviews. Here’s Mandy Schreiner at USA Today:

Because of You is full of angst and traumatic moments, suspenseful situations and a few steamy romance scenes. I’m really starting to get into military romances, and I think Jessica Scott has done a great job balancing everything in this book. It is heart-wrenching as you watch not only the hero and heroine struggle, but all of the supporting characters as well. But it also makes you smile as you see them triumph. I can’t wait for her next book!

***

And the Bookpushers:

Ms Scott surpassed my expectations regarding the inclusion of military culture and she provided me with a touching, entertaining read. I was fully invested in her characters and a certain sequence of events about broke my heart. When I reached the last page I kept trying to move to the next page because I wanted to see what happens next. I am eagerly awaiting the next installment in her trilogy. I give Because of You an A.

***

And Dear Author

The two wounded souls seeking comfort and peace will be appealing to many readers and the fast paced non stop drama adds a different flavor to this military romance. The war scenes were highly charged and I appreciate the unflinching look at how awful it must be over in Iraq and Afghanistan.

***

I have always loved romance novels. Since I was a kid and my grandmother first got me hooked on them starting out with Danielle Steel. Something happened in my twenties and I stopped reading them. Nora Roberts’ Dance Upon Air brought me back to the romance fold and I’ve happily been back ever since. But it was only around 2007 that I started wanting to write a book and it turned into, well, a romance novel.

Just a romance novel.

Look I get it. Romance writers are never going to be the cool kids winning literary awards and getting lots of respect. In my home chapter of Austin RWA, we’re talking about needing a new location because our current location a) doesn’t sell our books and b) looks down on us like we’re somehow beneath them. And yet, the Austin RWA is the most amazing chapter that spend so much time and effort mentoring up and coming authors. No question is ever ignored, no matter how many times it’s been heard. Time is spent on critique sessions and work groups and retreats, all to build the next generation of writers.

A lot of folks have asked me if the guys I work with know I’ve written and sold a romance novel. Yeah, a few of them do. And you know what? They’re pretty cool about it. Of course, I liven it up with a few jokes about the dick jokes in there but am I really just bending to the tacit disapproval on their faces? For example, the other day at Barnes and Noble Café this happened:

 

Café Guy: Whoa that’s a lot of money for chocolate

Me: I’m celebrating. My book came out today (shows him picture of USA Today review)

Café Guy: Oh it’s one of those. What did it ship?

Me: (smiling politely) well don’t knock it, you know? Still took almost five years to write and sell.

Café Guy: Oh wait you wrote it? High five.

 

Now he was nice enough once he realized I had written it and he did make my latte extra yum. But still. When I was in Iraq, Karin Tabke posted over on MurderSheWrites about a woman who suffered from FGM (female genital mutilation) who said that reading one of Karin’s novels inspired her to believe she could heal and love again. That is amazing. To be able to give that kind of hope to someone? And yet, Café Guy and far too many others look down on it as unworthy. You know what he and every other person out there will never get to see? They never get to see this:

The author is career military herself, and the story is really touching

about a soldier who was injured in Iraq and a woman who nursed him when he

got back to the states. Both of them have scars, his from his wounds and

her’s from a recent mastectomy.

 

Probably because I’ve also had breast cancer and disfiguring surgery, I

can identify with her, but I was really impressed with the sensitivity the

author displayed in dealing with the situation.

 

I’m only half way thru – but I’d highly recommend it!

 

I’ve written a lot. I blogged from Iraq. But this was quite possibly one of the nicest things anyone could have said about my “trashy” romance novel.

That’s pretty powerful stuff folks. People who want to knock down romance as a genre may get to feel better because they don’t read those books. I have books on my shelf that I have had for over 20 YEARS. That’s powerful. When a book sticks with you, no matter what the genre, no matter who the author, that’s powerful.

Romance is powerful. It’s powerful enough to show women that hey, all guys aren’t immature pricks who can’t hold a full conversation. Places like Jack’s Bar on Robyn Carr’s website are a place where romance readers can get together virtually and connect. You have no idea what’s going on in someone’s life. That may be their only outlet into something positive. And it started with a book.

I don’t mean to go on a rant but as a brand new author, I’m seeing something completely unexpected. As a reader, I’ve known that author’s books impacted me.

I just never expected to have that same impact and it is an honor and a privilege to have just one person tell me that my book, my trashy novel with a half naked man on the cover that got banned by facebook ads, touched their lives.

That one email made the last four plus years journey worth while.

***

Thanks, Jessica! I’d like to offer a copy of Because of You to one commenter from your e-tailer of choice. US only (sorry!). Comment by Tuesday midnight EST for a chance to win.

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Eloisa James’ Keynote for the McDaniel Popular Romance Conference

Nov 19 2011 Published by under Academia, Genre musings

The keynote address for the conference Popular Romance in the New Millennium was given by Mary Bly, English Professor at Fordham University, whose research focuses on early modern drama. Bly is better known in the romance community as Eloisa James, NYT bestselling author.

The first night of the conference began with champagne and french fries. Pam Regis, conference host, told everyone that the fries were in honor of Nora Roberts, whose donation to McDaniel College made the conference possible. Roberts once said that “a day without french fries is like a day without an orgasm”, which explains the name of one of Roberts’ online fan communities, ADWOFF.

What follows are my notes, which are not complete. It’s impossible to convey things like transitions and a sense of the whole via hastily scribbled notes. I’ve tried to convey not just the words, but the sense of the words, and I made sure my summary meshed with Tweets from others who were there, but I’m fallible, so any corrections from folks who were there are appreciated. You can check out the hashtag on Twitter, #mcdromance, and read Smart Bitch Sarah Wendell’s reflections on the conference, here.

James began with the point that things are in flux, in scholarship, the genre, and in publishing. She noted that she chaired the committee for the RWA academic research grant for several years, and has seen the growth of romance scholarship across the globe. The genre is so mutable it is hard to write about. (later in the talk she name checked Suzanne Brockmann for doing interesting things with the novel.)

At the same time, book stores are disappearing. She heard that Sams/Walmart plans to cut romance entirely in the next year. Erotica and romance are now published under same imprint with same covers, making it hard to tell the difference. When the RWA President was on the TV program Cake Boss Food Network Challenge (Season 12, Episode 5), she insisted that a romance novel can’t have a married couple on the cover, which shows how fast the genre changes.

[Edited to add. I've just watched the episode.

Bearing in mind that reality TV heavily edits everyone, here is what RWA President Dorien Kelly actually said about the cake with a married couple: "You have a couple who are married as the story progresses. That's unusual in romance novels these days, because the happily ever after is perceived as that moment, not necessarily where they're married, but you know it's all going to wrap up happily ever after." Contestant's response: "Gimme a break."]

James said that squabbling over boundaries is a waste of time.  The genre is about the secret architecture of life. At the heart of this maze is love.

James emphasized the importance of being precise in our scholarship. She gave an example of an essay on vampire romance published this year which uses examples willy nilly as if the vampire genre has not changed since 2000. Even within one series, such as Christine Feehan’s or Thea Harrison’s the rules change. She recommends tying our analyses to a decade or a five year span.

[These comments made me glad I decided to stick to one subgenre and one decade for my own paper!]

The same is true of “patriarchy.” It’s important to recognize that “the patriarchy” is different from place to place, time to time. Must be precise, study the parts, not the parameters and the whole. We have moved beyond that. We can’t miss the trees for the forest.

The same is true of historical narratives: if they are not accurate, we must ask how not and why not. Bodice rippers were fun to read in the eighties. Leg warmers were fun to wear. We need to be aware of culture and history of sex. Yet the sex she writes is not “historically accurate” — it is for today’s readers. We write sex from the point of view of our contemporary mores and attitudes.

So we must keep two viewpoints: one is the author, the other is specific cultural moment in which book was written.

James was amazed to see her books cited by scholars who didn’t bother to visit her website or shoot her a question via email. She says the part of writing that risks getting lost in scholarship is the writer.She cites Salman Rushdie, and I am not 100% sure this passage from Is Nothing Sacred? is what she means, but I think it conveys the gist:

What draws us to an author is his or her “unlikeliness,” even if the apparatus of literary criticism then sets to work to demonstrate that he or she is really no more than an accumulation of influences. Unlikeness, the thing that makes it impossible for a writer to stand in any regimented line, is a quality novelists share with the Caped Crusaders of the comics, though they are only rarely capable of leaping tall buildings in a single stride.

What is more, the writer is there, in all his work, in the reader’s hands, utterly exposed, utterly defenseless, entirely without the benefit of an alter ego to hide behind. What is forged, in the secret act of reading, is a different kind of identity, as the reader and writer merge, through the medium of the text, to become a collective being that both writes as it reads and reads as it writes, and creates, jointly, that unique work, “their” novel. This “secret identity” of writer and reader is the novel form’s greatest and most subversive gift.

[in the Q&A, when Sarah Frantz suggested that knowing that Suzanne Brockmann has a gay son and is an advocate for GLBTQ rights makes it easier to understand some themes in her work, James clarified that she is not advocating biographical criticism.]

James goes on to discuss reader response to her books. She says that when she writes about events that have occurred in her own life: a difficult pregnancy, a spouse’s cardiac event — there is a “bedrock of truth” that readers, especially readers who have experienced similar events (or at least the same emotions), find “raw and real and moving.” Romance novels live or die on strong emotions.

Yet books that seem fascinatingly similar are also deeply different. She doesn’t believe genre parameters are in themselves limiting to an author. Read in terms of genre, Hamlet, for example, is a thriller, a series of questions. And readers create their own novels, or rewrite the novels, by reading them.

Another change in the industry is that authors are now the brand that matters, not the publisher or the line. Increasingly, social media seems to drive sales. She has noticed how important her number of Facebook and Twitter followers is to publishers. But where publishers see dollars, writers see exhaustion.

James also said the genre is only, at one level, individual books. She drew on both popular culture and poetry as inspiration for the protagonists When Beauty Tamed the Beast. House, M.D. inspired aspects of the heroine’s character, and Eliot’s Prufrock inspired aspects of the hero’s.

 

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Reflections on the McDaniel Popular Romance Conference: My Paper (part 2)

Nov 15 2011 Published by under Genre musings

In this post, I’m going to talk about my own paper. I presented on authorship with a colleague. We have project going that traces a Romantic conception of authorship in women’s writing about authorship from the Minerva Press era (late 18th-early 19th century) through today’s popular romances. Actually, it traces resistance to that authorial mode. I am sorry to say that although we offered to take only one slot, and were very game to do it this way, we underestimated the impact of the time constraints (10 minutes each) and weren’t able to even mention connections and disconnections between the two eras our work. In the future, I would either ask for double time or not present. Lesson learned.

There were three papers presented in my session. The first was by McDaniel alumna and romance/women’s fiction writer Lisa Dale. Since I was going to speak after Lisa, I did not take notes, but I can tell you she shared a wonderful meditation on responsibility and authorship. I became intrigued by her books, and have since read her most recent, Slow Dancing on Price’s Pier. I really liked it, and hope to review it later this week or next. The third paper was by Angela Toscano, and, as usual, she offered a highly original and thought provoking take on an aspect of popular romance, this time the cliche.  A line (or idea) from that paper, “‘I love you’ is our amen” became  the most widely retweeted of my conference tweets.

My colleague Elizabeth went first, talking about Minerva Press writers and models of authorship in two of Minerva Press novels.

Here’s my paper, presented in outline form:

I. Romantic conception of authorship. In general, it is important to note that there are many tensions and outright contradictions within the Romantic conception of authorship. It was never hegemonic, it never captured the complexity of what Romantic era authors were doing, and it often lied outright about it. The story we tell ourselves today about the Romantic conception of authorship makes a lot more sense (is more coherent and rational) than it was at the time, or ever has been. So, recognizing this is a story we tell ourselves, here are some salient themes in the Romantic era conception of authorship, themes (or clusters of ideas) which still influence us today:

a. Purity: 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. Terry Eagleton has said that this disavowing of commerce was a  “spiritual compensation” for the humiliation a writer might feel at writing for money.

b. Independence: Just as the “self” in general (in philosophy, politics, economic, religion) was newly developed and empowered in the 18th century, the “authorial self” was increasingly aligned with self-creation and autonomy — independence from commerce, from other authors, from his readers, from his own life, and personal interests.

c. Originality/Genius: The author doesn’t mirror the world as in classical mimesis, but “half-creates” it (as Wordsworth’s formulation). The idea here is the author as “ahead of his time” who can’t possibly be writing for an audience, as he must “create the taste by which he is enjoyed”.  This genius is fundamentally mysterious, supernatural. There is no “reason” why genius is able to create art, no clear cause and effect.

d. Self-transcendence: One of many paradoxes within Romantic era conception of authorship is the emphasis at the same time on the author, and on the effacement of the author. So, the essence of genius is to self-transcend. One way this gets ashed out is in the admonition to never put personal life into work. Consider Joyce’s famous formulation in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the author “like the God of creation remains within or behind or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

II. Romantic era conception of authorship continues to exert significant pull. In this section, which I’ll skip, I talk about Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (2004) and some contemporary authors.

III. What conception of contemporary authorship emerges from romance novels? I focused on one subgenre, contemporary romance, and one decade (the aughts), and on books in which the heroine is a writer, especially of romance novels.

Books (primary set)
Brazen and Burning, Julie Elizabeth Leto (2003) [Harlequin Temptation]
Improper English, Katie MacAlister (2003) [Dorchester’s Love Spell]
My Hero, Marianna Jameson (2005) [Signet Eclipse]
I’m In No Mood for Love, Rachel Gibson (2006) [Avon]
Talk Me Down, Victoria Dahl (2009) [HQN]

Others (not romance writers):
*The other books in Gibson’s “author friends” quartet: Sex Lies and Online Dating (mystery, Lucy and Quinn 2006), Tangled Up In You (Maddie –true crime, and Mick, 2007); Not Another Bad Date (Adele, SFF, and Zach, 2008);
*See Jane Score, Rachel Gibson (2003) (heroine writes “Life of Honey Pie”, a pornographic serial for a men’s magazine)
*Welcome to Temptation, Jennifer Crusie (2000) (heroine is filming a porn movie)
*This Heart of Mine, Susan Elizabeth Phillips (heroine writes children’s books) (2002)

Themes that emerge (match to Romantic author themes above):

a. Capitalism: That they are producing a product to be sold is always salient. Money always a concern for these self-supporting single women. They all, to some extent, write for money. Even where the heroine is wealthy, as in Julie Leto’s Brazen and Burning, or Rachel Gibson’s I’m In No Mood for Love, getting paid for writing is significant to the heroine’s independence, sense of self-worth, and social status.

b. Collaboration — not radical autonomy – is key, in several ways:

(1) Collaboration with friends, especially author friends, with editors, critique groups, etc. For example, Rachel Gibson’s Idaho series features four writer friends – mystery, romance, true crime, and science fiction –who frequently meet up to discuss their writing process. In Marianna Jameson’s My Hero, Miranda Lane works closely with her agent, Amy, to craft a novel that will satisfy her publisher.

(2) Relationships with readers. Readers are very present and important. Author often shown at booksignings, reading reader email, participating in online chats with readers.

Ex. 1 In Talk Me Down, Molly says “Most [reader] emails were kind and generous, the type of mail that kept her writing.” (loc 3833)

Relationships with readers are not presented uniformly, and are not idealized. They often provide an opportunity to highlight the heroine’s grasp of and emphasis on the distinction between fantasy and reality.

Ex. 1 In Gibson’s Sex, Lies, and Online Dating, a crazed man-hating fan commits murders Lucy writes about, saying “You told me to kill those men.” She also takes the liberty of stealing Lucy’s rough draft and critiquing it. (!) “My books are fiction, Lucy said. “They aren’t How to Manuals.” (p. 335)

Ex. 2 Talk Me Down: Brenda, Ben’s secretary and receptionist says “She is not good enough for you. She’s a liar and a pornographer. Do you know how she earns her filthy money?” Brenda assumes the heroine is a “slut” because she writes erotic romance.

In both cases, these readers failed to recognize boundaries between real life and fiction.

(c) Collaboration through formula. They are all explicitly writing in within a literary genre, attuned to expectations of genre, as parlayed via editors, publishers, agents, and audience. Although inspiration is vitally important, as is originality (“formulaic” is referred to as an “f word” in the Jameson), there is little focus on radical originality or supernatural genius. In contrast to Romantic conceptions of a mystifying process of producing an utterly unique novel, these authors heroines share a self-conception as romance authors. The practical process of writing is also made transparent, including research, editing, rewrites.

Ex. When Miranda, in My Hero is told by her publisher to write an “alpha male” hero, she “skimmed the entire Stephanie Plum series, an every Suzanne Brockmann book she could find, and every Linda Howard, just to study their alpha-to-the-max heroes.” (p. 45)

That said, there is usually a threat to the status of the heroine writer. Someone disapproves, a mother, a former lover, a stranger writing hate mail. So there is usually good opportunity for both a recognition of the existence of literary hierarchies, and for a defense of the genre

Ex 1. In Dahl’s Talk Me Down, the heroine, keeps her career as an erotic romance author a secret from pretty much everyone.  Talk Me Down, Ben says, “How the hell could you justify climbing into my fucking bed without mentioning that you’d been writing smut about me? “It’s not smut” she muttered. “Oh, I’m sorry. You prefer the word porn? Or trash? Or perverted fantasy?” “Screw you.” …”It’s not smut, she said again. “ I understand why you’d say that, but if you’d just read my work—“

Ex 2. In My Hero, Miranda’s best friend, while admitting, about romance that “everyone reads them”, still says, it has always struck me that you should be writing something else. I don’t know, something bigger. And don’t start in about making the New York Times list. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

Ex. 3 In My Hero, Miranda pleads “I am a southern writer” when her editor asks for a Northern set novel. The response? “Eudora Welty was a southern writer. Harper Lee is a southern writer. [You] are a romance writer. [You’re] generic. Plug and Play.” Later this attitude is explained thusly, “Look, she’s adjusting to the genre. She came from a literary imprint.”

Ex. 4 In I’m Rachel Gibson’s I’m in No Mood For Love, romance writer Clare had always known how her mother felt about her writing, but Joyce had always ignored her career, pretending instead that she wrote ‘women’s fiction’. [Clare’s mother] pretended that Clare’s career choice was a passing phase, and that once she got over her fascination with ‘trash, she’d write ‘real books. … Literature worthy of the [home] library.”

Sometimes, the author heroines evince a kind of distancing of their own professional attitude from “dabblers”, subverting the idea of women writers as “scribbler”:

Ex. In Gibson’s Sex, Lies and Online Dating, Lucy, a true crime writer, in referring to other women says, “I don’t know how serious either woman is about her writing or whether they’re just dabblers. … a person who talks about writing but never actually finishes more than a few chapters” (p. 255)

d. Self-transcendence: Although these author heroines tend to agree with the Romantic era admonishment against self-insertion (they are emphatically not writing their own stories), their subtle and deep understanding of the interrelationship of their work and personal lives results in a set of ongoing and complex negotiations. In each of these novels, boundary issues between writing life and real life are salient. The author heroines acknowledge the connections between their work and their lives, but reject the implied notion that somehow the writing flows without imagination, effort, or craft from their daily experiences.

Ex. In Gibson’s I’m In No Mood For Love, Clare deliberately teases the Sebastian with the thought that she has to personally research her own sex scenes. Afterwards, she thinks, “It was called romantic fiction for a reason, but if she were given a dollar for each time she was asked where she got her ideas for the love scenes she wrote, she could supplement her income quite nicely.” (loc 906). Clare’s teasing retort to Sebastian is contrasted in the text with examples of the actual historical research she performs, for example about pirates, a book on peerage (“she had to make sure she knew the correct titles of the Italian aristocracy” loc 2705).

Interestingly, a common relationship obstacle is the way the heroine has incorporated information about the hero, especially sexual situations, into her book. In both Dahl’s Talk Me Down and in Jameson’s My Hero (as well as Gibson’s See Jane Score, Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation, and, to a lesser extent conflict-wise, SEP’s This Heart of Mine) a major conflict arises when the hero discovers the heroine’s writing is loosely based on him. An entire project could be framed around this last point.

And finally, social punishment for writing “sexy” stories reveals a way in which the female writer’s authorial persona and daily life intermesh without her consent. In some cases, as in Talk Me Down, the use of pen names and secrecy reveals a version of self-effacement deployed as a strategy for negotiating with misogynistic attitudes of a culture with a repressive sexual ethic, not as an aesthetic choice.

For each of the items above, I could have offered half dozen of more examples, but time was short. I do want to give a fun shout out to Leto’s Brazen and Burning, in which the heroine’s attitude to everything is basically, “I’m a New York Times best selling romance novelist. I know how to do this”, where “this” is anything from curing a man of amnesia, having mindblowing sex, investing in the stock market, or foiling a plot to steal sensitive architectural plans. I loved her.

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The Gaze: A Guest Post by Joanna Chambers

Nov 14 2011 Published by under Feminist contentions, Genre musings

I’m delighted to welcome Joanna Chambers, aka Tumperkin, whose debut romance was just published by Carina Press. The Lady’s Secret, which I’ve read and loved, is set in London in 1810. Here’s the blurb:

Former actress Georgiana Knight always believed she and her brother were illegitimate—until they learn their parents were married, making them heirs to a great estate. To prove their claim, Georgy needs to find evidence of their union by infiltrating a ton house party as valet to Lord Nathaniel Harland. Though masquerading as a boy is a challenge, it pales in comparison to sharing such intimate quarters with the handsome, beguiling nobleman.

Nathan is also unsettled by Georgy’s presence. First intrigued by his unusual valet, he’s even more captivated when he discovers Georgy’s charade. The desire the marriage-shy earl feels for his enigmatic employee has him hoping for much more than a master-servant relationship…

But will Nathan still want Georgy when he learns who she truly is? Or will their future be destroyed by someone who would do anything to prevent Georgy from uncovering the truth?

***

One of the ideas that I was preoccupied with when I wrote The Lady’s Secret was Gaze.

The “male gaze” (a notion influenced particularly by film theory) is that in the mainstream media, consumers are generally invited to view the film/book/whatever it might be through the eyes of a heterosexual male.  However, whilst that is the norm, that norm can be subverted, and a “female gaze” substituted – something we (happily!) see a great deal of in romance novels.

In The Lady’s Secret, my heroine, Georgy, masquerades as a male valet, taking a position in the household of the hero, Nathan.  This conceit enabled me to play a little bit with the notion of male and female gaze.  While acting the role of a male servant puts Georgy in a subservient position, it also—paradoxically—gives her power she doesn’t otherwise have, in particular, the opportunity to gaze at a man she finds desirable.  By contrast, Georgy is somewhat masked from Nathan’s gaze.  Firstly, because she is in disguise and he is not seeing the real her, and secondly, because of their roles.  As a manservant, Georgy is always looking at Nathan—shaving him, dressing him etc.—whilst Nathan has no such reason to look at Georgy and indeed, feels the need to hide his interest in her.

I wanted to show Georgy seeing Nathan as a sexually desirable—well, object I suppose!  I wanted her to see his pure physical appeal in that way—and the reader to see his appeal too, through her eyes.  I wanted Georgy’s male disguise to let her *be* like a man in this way, at a time when women’s roles were narrowly drawn and female desire was unspeakable in the literal sense.

We are so used, as media consumers, to the norm of the male gaze, that women often see themselves primarily as the object of gaze rather than the gazer.  Many women find themselves being reactive romantically i.e. responding to the attention of men attracted to them, rather than looking for men they find attractive.  Of course, that might be put down to biology, genes etc.

Let me just say this: I am thirty eight years old.  I count myself a feminist, and always have – before I knew what the word meant.  I have made active choices all my life.  I am educated, a professional.

But.

It is only very recently that I have felt that my own gaze has “turned outward”, as it were.  And why should that be?

Well, it could be any one of a number of things.  Or a combination of them.  I am older and wiser.   I have had two children and don’t want any more.  I am happily married and am not looking for a romantic relationship.

But here’s a thing: I started reading romance again about 5 or 6 years ago after a 15 year hiatus, and that timeframe feels broadly contemporary with this change in me.  Might it therefore have something to do romance novels?

Romance novels are remarkable for having a primarily female gaze.  They invite us to *look* at the male protagonists and to do so intensely.  They linger over lengthy, rich descriptions of men’s physical appearance.  They use words and invoke images that appeal strongly to their readers.  And if you’re a romance reader you cannot help but have noticed the proliferation of male torsos on romance novel covers.

Romance readers are remarkable too, for being prolific readers—this is certainly true of me.  Could the immersion in a medium with a female gaze change the way readers view themselves and the world around them?

If so, this is empowerment.  This is permission.  This says – yes, look.  Feel desire.  Own it.

I think I’m seeing those mantitty covers in a whole new light…

***

Thanks, Jo!

You can also find Joanna on Facebook and Twitter (@ChambersJoanna).

The Lady’s Secret, a digital book, can be purchased directly from Carina Press, or from e-book retailers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

15 responses so far

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