Following are some of my fallible, incomplete, impressionistic notes from a Romance Area panel session at the PCA conference in St. Louis. These are notes on works in progress,and do not purport to be complete records of the papers presented. Please follow up with individual presenters for full copies of their papers or to have specific questions about their work addressed.
Romance IX: So Classy!: High/Low/Middle Class/Culture
Session Chair: Sarah S. G. Frantz, Fayetteville State University
“Something New: Resisting the Coupling Convention in Contemporary Black Romantic Film”‖ Consuela Francis, College of Charleston
She began this project in part because she had been thinking about ways to critique slash fiction without demeaning women’s reading and writing processes.
Discussion of African American literary critical history, which often links literary value with racial uplift
Critics’ idea is that these books are interventions in oppressive racial ideologies: not just love stories
Such readings are not unconvincing, as much as unsatisfying, incomplete.
Lit critic Collins refers to “The uncommon pleasure [for black women] of knowing it is ‘all about you’” (Collins)
But contemporary AA romance and erotica provides such a space, in which it is not all that uncommon at all, in which it is all about black women’s pleasure, beauty and desire.
Long quote from Audre Lorde’s The Uses of the Erotic on what the erotic is.
Lorde’s definition refers to sexual pleasure but also to desire and pleasure of any sort that moves us closer to our truer selves and away from negation, closer to a true assessment of our lives
Need to pay more attention to the pleasure black women derive from reading romance
Black women are taught to desire anything but what they might desire on their own.
But in black romance, this is not true. It is a literary space built on narrative insufficiency of black respectability as measure of black female desire.
Something New, Brown Sugar are the two films she discusses in detail.
Today we are in a new ideological and cultural space, with our 20th and 21st century AA romance novels.
For example, maybe some black women feel good by loving white men (as in the film). Black women do this in real life. They write it. And they enjoy reading it. Let’s not lose this basic element of analysis – the pleasure of this.
Not denying there is pleasure in reading Toni Morrison novels, which she reads and enjoys, but this it is a different literary tradition and different pleasure. It doesn’t come from the uplift of the race but something else.
These are built on assumption of black freedom. It says, black women are able to love because they are already free.
“She quoted Shakespeare!: The inclusion of highbrow literature in popular romance novels”‖
Tamara Whyte, University of Alabama
Hands out a list of relevant quotations from Victoria Alexander’s Secrets of a Proper Lady. Handout also references a list of books published in 2009 which reference highbrow literature.
Includes Liz Carlyle, Jane Feather, Suzanne Enoch, Julia Quinn, Eloisa James, Stephanie Laurens, Olivia Drake, Melody Thomas, Jillian Hunter
She has counted 400 references to Shakespeare alone in romance novels
Some say this is just an attempt to elevate a popular genre.
She argues it demonstrates the amount of literary education the author has, and what she can presume of her audience.
It suggests a postmodern blurring of high and low culture forms.
Cites an article that suggests a preponderance of Shakespeare references in Regencies in 1980, in order to invoke Shakespeare’s cultural capital, and to set out Regency as a higher culture version of romance.
TW rejects this as a good explanation. Thinks it has more to do with acknowledging intelligence of audience.
Notes Eloisa James’s website invites readers to find literary allusions in her work, which are abundant. Clearly James thinks her readers will not only get them, but appreciate them.
Hawkins cited: it is academic tradition not literary tradition which erects boundaries between high and low.
Enriches reading experiences of both Shakespeare and romance novels.
“Neither True Nor Fair: An Exploration of Female Heroism in Popular Romance”‖
Angela Toscano, University of Utah
“Neither True nor Fair”, John Donne
Eventually she would like to ask whether we can have a antiheroine, but first need to figure out what a heroine is.
What is heroine’s narrative function within literature as whole? They lack definition.
She is not simply a female hero. She has different attributes and function.
Heroines obey secret rules.
Regis outlines rules of genre, but we also have expectations of the characters themselves
Heroine: Always beautiful and chaste
AT knows that you can find counterexamples – that’s not the point. She is trying to formulate classic understanding.
So what are beauty and chastity?
Notes tensions b/t beauty (excess) and chastity (restraint) – yet also akin. Both supposed to be pure, for example.
Explores complicated relationship between beauty and chastity.
Ex. Windflower.
So what is an antiheroine? Someone who is neither beautiful nor chaste.
This is not about taste, but about deviation of form.
Is the romance love narrative dependent on the heroine holding or acquiring beauty and chastity?
Focuses on An Unwilling Bride by Jo Beverly [I have GOT to read this!!! Like immediately. Where's my damn Kindle?]
Adheres to genres expectations and also plays with these questions.
She concludes that no, we can’t have an antiheroine.
Have to go outside genre to find antiheroine. Lucy Snow, heroine of Bronte’s Villette is antiheroine.
[Someone suggests as antiheroine: Mary Balogh A Precious Jewel – heroine is neither chaste nor beautiful. pother remark that the hero in APJ is kind of a second tier hero, almost as if the heroine has been punished.]
[Sela Carson, who is funny as all get out, announces that there is a whole paper to be written on hooker heroines. Also suggests, more seriously, that heroine in Covet may be a counterexample.]
