For the last week or so, the world of Romance Scholarship has been thrashing out, yet again, whether Our Beloved Genre is or isn’t (or is only sometimes) “full of patriarchal propaganda.” Don’t stop reading! I’m headed in an entirely different, much happier direction. To follow me, though, a quick recap might be helpful.
The dust-up started here, in the British newspaper The Guardian. The editors asked Julie Bindel, a lesbian activist who “shuns heterosexuality,” to write about Mills & Boon romances. That’s a bit like asking my cousin the vegan to report on the menu at Fogo de Chao, the Brazillian steakhouse, but such is journalism. And, to be fair, the fracas prompted some thoughtful debate and some promising follow-up projects.
If you want to read the Bindel Brief, along with a paragraph by paragraph commentary, swing by Teach Me Tonight. The beat goes on this week at Access Romance, and will surface again in January’s Internet Event of Stupendous Proportions on Louise Allen’s Harlequin Historical, Virgin Slave, Barbarian King.
In this post, though, I want to think about something quite different, based on a minor aside in Bindel’s article.
Near the start of her piece, the columnist says this:
The hero is behaving in a way that, in real life, causes many women to develop low self-esteem, depression and self-harming behaviour – blowing hot and cold, and treating her like dirt. But all comes right in the end. After the heroine displays extraordinary vulnerability during a crisis, Mr Macho saves the day and shows her he cares.
In romance novels, the heroine doesn’t “develop low self-esteem, depression, and self-harming behavior”: or, if she does, she recovers. Does Mr. Macho get the credit? I think not.
Over and over in romance novels, the heroines don’t just get “saved.” They rebound, rebuild, and revise the stories they tell themselves about their lives. The past gets healed, or at least left behind; the present is transformed from a dull stretch of duties or forest of fears into something to savor; and the future? Even at the worst, it looks mighty promising.
Now, sometimes the heroine does get help from the hero as she moves from discouragement to hope. (I think here of Molly in Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ This Heart of Mine, which I finally read this week.) And, she in turn may help the hero go through similar changes. But with or without him, in a separate or an interwoven plot, romance novels are pervasively novels of resilience, and I suspect that the lessons they teach are often quite good ones, empirically so.
It’s a little bit early for New Year’s Resolutions, but here’s one of mine. While some of my fellow academics wrestle the politics of romance, I’m going to focus this year on two other core values of the genre: learned optimism, and authentic happiness. I get both terms from psychology professor Martin Seligman; they’re the titles of two of his books for a popular, non-academic audience, summarizing a decade of research into happiness, pleasure, gratification, strength of character, and so forth.
There seems to be a whole branch of psychological inquiry out there called Positive Psychology: not some fuzzy set of platitudes and bromides, but (in Seligman’s words) “a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called the ‘good life.’” My hunch, which I plan to test across the next few months, is that romance novels are often primers in positive psychology, in ways that measure up quite well against current research. Some romance authors clearly know about this work–Jennifer Crusie refers to “learned optimism” at a couple of crucial moments in Agnes and the Hitman–while for others the sources may lie elsewhere. In either case, I have some awfully gratifying work to do, and I’ll keep you posted here on how it’s going.
So tell me: what romance novels have you read that particularly picked up your mood? Are there books that you return again and again to for some sort of encouragement or “lift”? Any especially resilient or optimistic characters or authors I should investigate? Any tough sells or counter-examples I’d better consider if I want to keep this inquiry honest?
No related posts.
I read Robyn Carr’s Virgin River trilogy to renew my faith in the male gender. She writes such good, strong alpha males that are not jerks, which is how an alpha male should be. True alphas are not jerks, and they are good to their woman, always.
After the nasty, indecent, and ungentlemanly comments that Rush Limbaugh made yesterday claiming no one wants a female president because they don’t want to look at an aging female face for four years, I’m feeling the need to read a bit of Ms. Carr’s heroic and decent Jack Sheridan right now.
Also by Jenny Crusie, Welcome To Temptation is my all-time favorite pick-me-up read. It reaffirms my sense of Karmic justice and my belief that happiness is a choice you make every day.
Although it’s not a book, the chick flick Hope Floats hits on many of the same themes and includes several classic romance tropes. I recommend it for another example of characters practicing “learned optimism” in a romantic setting.
Just want to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas!!! Have fun today!
Just a comment about romance novels in general. Characters (both the hero and the heroine) grow and develop throughout the story, such that they are in a better place by the end than they were at the beginning, but one guarantee that romance novels provide is that Happy Ever After. Day to day life doesn’t always have a happy ending and I’ve received so many emails from readers who are either sick or have been going through a rough time in their lives where they talk about how the stories help them forget about their worries and let them fall into another world, one with a happy ending. I know there there are books where readers learn or gain something from the heroine’s “growth” that they can apply to their own lives (woohoo for that!), but I guess where I see romances having the most impact is in reaffirming the belief that good will triumph over evil and an HEA will happen, providing an uplifting feeling and a happier state of mind for the reader by time they finish the book.
Yes, that’s the beauty of romance novels, is that we know the heroine is going to triumph and get her happy ending. Most of the time she has a big part in making that happen, yee ha!
For movies, I love While You Were Sleeping and The Truth about Cats and Dogs (or is it Dogs and Cats?). It shows you the kind of reading I’ve been doing lately, as I can’t come up with a few titles of fiction. But speaking of Jennie Cruise, I loved Tell Me Lies.
For non-fiction, and for getting to that optimistic place, Lynn Grabhorn’s Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting is fantastic. Unlike The Secret, that makes you think you’re a complete moron because they’re all doing this stuff in, like, 3 DAYS, and you can’t, Lynn tells it like it is: the spiritual journey isn’t going to be easy, and sometimes you’re going to just stink at it, but hang in there…it will get better!
Have a fantastic Christmas, everyone!
Cheers,
Tina
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone!
I agree that the guaranteed HEA makes a big impact. I just read a “literary” novel that ended with the heroine being brutally murdered and then going to an afterlife that turned out (in the end) to be even more unsatisfying than her life had been. Gee, thanks. I got paid to read it, being an English professor, but if I hadn’t? And even then, it made me cringe. And this is a book that reviewers called “funny”!
Lone Chatelaine, your comment about “heroic and decent” heroes reminds me that romance fiction is a genre in which heroism and decency–and the ordinary heroism IN simple decency–are shown in action, over and over again. And acting like that really does seem to lead to deeper, more lasting happiness, at least according to Seligman’s research. When he’s looked into how people feel after pleasurable activities (going to the movies, eating ice cream) as opposed to after kind activities (using our personal strengths to help others), the results, he says, show pretty conclusively that “happiness comes from the exercise of kindness more readily than it does from having fun” (9).
That’s no surprise to many of us, but it isn’t, by any means, the lesson you’d learn from every book, every movie, every plot.
(BTW, I love “The Truth About Cats and Dogs,” but am I the only one who thinks that Jeanine Garofalo is much prettier than Uma Thurman?)
I clicked on the link to Teach Me Tonight and read the post, and several of the comments. The thing I kept going back to was “Fifteen years ago”. This person read 20 category romances fifteen YEARS ago!!! How is this relevant today?
Whenever I think my life is too difficult to manage, I re-read Linda Howard’s Cry No More. The heroine re-makes herself into someone fairly tough and competent to handle nightmarish situations, but can still laugh, enjoy life and maintain hope and optimism.
Plus, I love me an alpha hero, ’cause I spend a lot of time dealing with people who have trouble deciding which brand of ketchup to buy and for me they have to make life and death decisions. So decisive guys are my fantasy escape.
“… am I the only one who thinks that Jeanine Garofalo is much prettier than Uma Thurman?”
Ah, Eric, if you weren’t already spoken for…
The hero’s an ass for much of the book, but I find Kleypas’ “Devil In Winter” heart-warming. The way Sebastian becomes so attached to Evie makes me smile stupidly.
“The Secret” by Julie Garwood is another book that I read for a lift. The whole confusing scene of Judith’s wedding makes me laugh every time.
I’m not sure about a book, but the movie French Kiss, always always leaves me feeling all warm and fuzzy and full of smiles.
In that story the heroine goes on a crusade to win back her fiance that suddenly dumps her like a hot rock, and through that journey she has to face the very worst things that could happen to a very high strung character.
But through it, and because of the hero, she learns to let go, to trust without control, to give, and to believe in the value of herself.
But he is the one who has the really interesting character shift. You have to watch it to see it. Yes, it is a reformed scoundrel movie, but in the end I think he learns that things are better when you have to work and fight for them.
I love that movie.
Nope! You are not alone in that thought. My friends and I are in complete agreement.
Well, as to the “comfort” reads, that would be pretty much anything by Jo Goodman, Laura Kinsale, Judith Ivory, or Tom and Sharon Curtis (Laura London). Loretta Chase’s Mr. Impossible is good, too, as is Shana Abe’s The Smoke Thief, or Patricia Gaffney’s To Love and To Cherish. Actually, any well-written, well-layered, powerfully emotional Romance will do.
But with or without him, in a separate or an interwoven plot, romance novels are pervasively novels of resilience, and I suspect that the lessons they teach are often quite good ones, empirically so.
I would agree with this as a general statement, Eric, but underneath it are still, IMO, issues related to a) how the heroine survives and whether the hero does “save” her, and b) whether it’s life or the genre that forces the heroine to be resilient.
As for the first, I don’t think Romance universally empowers its heroines from within themselves. Many books do, but not all, and out of the 400-500 books published A MONTH in the genre, I wonder how many of them do.
As for the second issue I mentioned, I have read more than a few Romance novels that seem themselves to belittle the heroine — where so much crap is loaded onto the heroine that I’m not at all convinced that by the end she’s anywhere near out of danger. I’ve made the comparison elsewhere to Hardy’s Tess, where I think he crossed a line from wanting to use Tess as a symbol of how much a hypocritical masculine society can victimize a woman like Tess to victimizing her himself, as well, by so thoroughly disempowering her in his narrative. It’s a knife edge, to be sure, but I think individual Romances can slice either direction.
You’re right, Robin: I’ve forgotten William Blake’s advice that “to generalize is to be an idiot.” What I need to do is talk about particular plots and particular books, rather than “the genre” as a whole.
To me, the question isn’t so much (at this point) whether it’s life or the genre who forces the heroine to be resilient. I’m more interested in the strategies of resilience we do see, and whether they correspond with the sorts of strategies Seligman discusses.
I like the comparison with Tess. Just finished reading Cynthia Ozick’s “Puttermesser Papers,” where a woman suffers to prove the author’s satirical point. Not a strategy I enjoy, as a rule–although I think I’m hypersensitive to it now that I’ve been reading nothing but romance novels for a while. (The folks at the library discussion group last night were much less upset by the novel than I was.)
I’m more interested in the strategies of resilience we do see, and whether they correspond with the sorts of strategies Seligman discusses.
I find that some romances don’t encourage me to feel either resilient, optimistic or authentically happy, though perhaps other people would be inspired to try harder, or be motivated to triumph over adversity, by the same novels which have a neutral or negative effect on me. If the heroine is very good, very beautiful, very talented, and a great mother, I just end up feeling inadequate compared to her and/or I feel that I’m being encouraged to conform to certain social norms. At times this can make me want to throw the book at the wall.
So yes, the HEA guarantee is a partial safety net, but within that there are still some romances which are more likely to make me feel happy than others. I don’t think it disproves your theory, I’m just suggesting that in order for the romances they read to have a positive effect on their moods, readers may well be selecting within the genre in order to find the romances which have the most enjoyable effects. So if you’re prescribing romances as a cure for unhappiness, you’d have to make sure you got the right type of medication for each patient.
Eric, I’m not familiar with the names you cite, but doesn’t this all go back to Abraham Maslow, who was big back when I was young (in the Late Crustacean Era)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow
As for authors, I highly recommend the standalone, non-category novels of Jayne Ann Krentz/Jayne Castle/Amanda Quick for strong heroines who can stand up FOR themselves without help, and TO strong heroes. For instance, in All Night Long, at the age of sixteen the heroine found her parents shot to death in their kitchen, and couldn’t convince anyone it wasn’t a murder-suicide. She’s become an investigative reporter and winds up trying to prove another suicide is murder, in the course of which she solves her parents’ murder as well. Even her Regency heroines are adventurous. I also recommend White Lies
(the heroine is a human lie detector) and the Whispering Springs duology (Light and Shadow, Truth or Dare)–can a bankrupt and thrice-divorced private eye find happiness with an escapee from a mental hospital? You betcha!
I’ve noticed that the trajectory o (almost?) all of the heroines of SEP’s books is that they learn through their interactions with the heroes that they can live without them and be whole and complete people. They would be sad, sure, but they’d be fine in the long run. It’s the heroes who learn that they canNOT live without the heroines. Heaven, Texas is the best example of this, IMO. Gracie learns that even though she loves Bobby Tom, she can live without him, that she doesn’t need him. He learns that he does need her. A fascinating combination of educational trajectories, considering our recent conversations about power dynamics.
Hey Eric, it’s the same Lindsay who studied romance in grad school from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. First, sure I would share my thesis and thoughts on the genre, is there any way to PM you or get a hold of you personally on Teach Me Tonight or should I just comment on a post?
Second, here are my thoughts on this particular post. First, while I do like The Truth About Cats and Dogs, I love French Kiss. And The American President makes my all happy, too. But on to books.
I tend towards angsty books as I like the emotion. But the two books that always put my in a rather giddy mood are Kurland’s This is All I Ask and Garwood’s Castles (although the latter has a little to do with the fact that this was one of the first romances I read so it retains some positive associations from that experience). I also continually go back to James’ The Perfect Hero, Hunter’s The Romantic, and Kleypas’ Dreaming of You. These don’t make me as giddy so much as they take me away.
I absolutely would agree with you that all romances are positive primers. That’s the primary benefit of this particular form of escapism.
Hi, Lindsay! Easiest way to reach me is just to email me at work: eselinge at (you use the character, natch) depaul dot edu. (Like that will really fool the spambots? Worth a try!) –EMS
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Hi Eric – it’s funny that you should post this because I was thinking only last night about an article I read a few months ago in which someone (can’t remember who) had suggested that romance was bad for women because it gave them unrealistic expectations to which their real lives/ husbands/ partners could not measure up. I was pondering (in my usual vague-total-absence-of-any-empirical-evidence way) about how much I disagreed with that. And all I really have to go on to support my disagreement is:-
- me. Happily married
- the fact that so many romance-reader bloggers seem to talk about their happy relationships
- the fact that so many romance authors mention their wonderful spouses in blurbs etc.
Ha – highly scientific non? BTW, I am not suggesting FOR A SECOND, that there is anything intrinsically better about being part of couple or any such thing, just trying to make the point that I emphatically DON’T agree that being a romance reader makes you feel dissatisfied with your lot.
Which brings me to your post. I suppose what I’m throwing into the pot is the question of whether a certain type of person is attracted to romance books? Whether people of a certain nature find it easier to believe in a HEA and indeed find satisfaction in that outcome?
A
AAArrrgh – submitted too soon by mistake (and without reading back – hope the last post makes sense).
As for your actual question, I have lots of books that give me a lift, and actually, some of them come from the angsty rather than the lighthearted end of the spectrum. Like To Have and To Hold. I love to see the heroine of that novel change from a frightened wraith into a warm flesh-and-blood woman.
I also adore:-
- Wild At Heart by Gaffney because the hero is so kind and good and non-macho
- Slightly Dangerous by Mary Balogh because I love the way the uptight, unhappy hero eventually embraces life
- Simply Love by Mary Balogh because two wounded souls come together and heal each other (there are a few other Baloghs but I won’t mention them all)
- Pride and Prejudice – I re-read that second proposal time and time again
I’m another Welcome to Temptation, or SEP’s Ain’t She Sweet fan, for a pick me up. Kinsale’s FFtS, too or not shelved in romance, Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee, and The Bronze Horseman by Paulina Simons.
About the other posts commenting about the Guardian’s article: I think after reading many of them what upset me was that people fail to remember that a romance is about love between two people. And how I perceived many of the comments was that (and yes, this is fiction, but storytelling is so much more?) two people’s quest to find love was invalidated for whatever reason-she worked, she didn’t work, she wanted babies, she didn’t want babies, she loved alphas, aphas are jackasses (and I have a christan slanted theory about that) she wanted to be taken care of, she had a rape fantasy, whathaveyou, the list was way too long. But it all-to me- amounted to judging a person’s choice in who, and why, to love.
One of my favorite love stories to read and write are stories of redemption. How two beat up, used, and spit out people find eachother and heal through love. How love and it’s power trancends character and circumtance. Maybe some stories don’t hit all the right notes, but to find the genre as a whole flawed because of that? Not quite.