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!

Tags: Patricia Gaffney, to Have and to Hold