Romancing the Blog | Romance Authors and Readers Who Blog

Like my kids, I live by the academic clock. They’ve just wrapped up another year–”Hello, 4th grader!” “Hello, 7th grader!”–and I’m hip deep in final exams and term papers, every blessed one of them about love.

Every spring I try to teach my favorite pair of courses: a comp lit class on Love Poetry (Sappho to Surrealism), and either a survey or seminar on romance fiction. They suit the season; by the time we reach the Song of Songs, in the first, it’s warm enough to bring the class outdoors:

I am my lover’s,
he longs for me,
only for me.

Come, my beloved,
let us go out into the fields
and lie all night among the flowering henna.

Let us go early to the vineyards
to see if the vine has budded,
if the blossoms have opened
and the pomegranate is in flower.

There I will give you my love. (7: 11-13)

Under a tree, I teach them the four ways the Song was read in the Christian tradition: literally, allegorically (i.e., as typology, foreshadowing the gospel), morally (as life-instruction), and anagogically (as revealing “last things,” hints of heaven, the afterlife, and the workings of redemption). I hand out passages, and challenge them to come up with four readings of each. The moral ones–the way they’d teach this text at a marriage encounter or pre-Cana session, for example–always draw the best responses, clever, naughty, and sweet. They’re not just taking this course for credit. They’re taking it to heart.

Does my romance fiction class have the same effect? I’d like to think so; as I wrote in my last post, I think some romance novels teach awfully useful life-skills. But to be honest, they’re a harder sell. Most of the seniors in my capstone seminar held back for the first few weeks, keeping our first two novels (Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me and Welcome to Temptation) at a distance. Some were, or claimed to be, cynics; more were simply baffled, unsure how to talk about recent novels when all of their earlier training focused on reading books in their historical context. This year, there were men on the roster, and that too made things awkward. Women who chatted happily outside class clammed up in mixed company; guys who confessed in private to liking Crusie shrugged or fell silent in public. (Said one, on the way to class, “I read Bet Me all in one sitting last night, and I kind of liked it. I feel totally emasculated now.” He was joking, but not entirely, poor lad.)

If you’d asked me six weeks ago how the class was going, I’d have fretted or snarled, depending on my serum caffeine level. Somehow, though, it all worked out in the end. I gave the students plenty of rein–they were seniors, after all–and a tension-breaking visit from romance blogger Lizzie L. (of Reader, I Married Him) gave them the chance to pose tough questions about the genre to a peer who knew and loved it. The penultimate set of student-led discussions–of Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm, Linda Howard’s Mr. Perfect, Dark Lover, by J. R. Ward, and Mr. Impossible, by Loretta Chase–were thoughtful and thorough, and the closing presentation, on Joey W. Hill’s erotic romance, Natural Law, was a knock-out, charged with an almost evangelical fervor. (”Don’t get freaked out by the BDSM stuff,” one woman pleaded. “This is a love story.” “It felt more real,” another declared, “than anything we read all quarter.”) Whatever the life-skills they learned or missed, students came away with more respect for the genre, and most had at least one author, sub-genre, or series they planned to read after graduation.

This afternoon I’ll order the books for my next romance classes. Some new ones will join the mix: Gwyneth Bolton’s Sweet Sensation , Beth Pattillo’s Heavens to Betsy (my first in-class Inspy), and Devil’s Cub, by Georgette Heyer, comes back into print in August, just in time for the fall survey. While I get the next round of syllabi in order, you might have some fun with this: the optional final exam for my senior seminar. I gave it on Tuesday, and guess what? Nobody came! All too busy working on their papers, I guess. For your own amusement, then, I offer it here.

This final exam is meant to assess whether you read the student-taught novels and came to the presentations on them. If you didn’t read them, and didn’t come, don’t take it. If you did, please write a short response (2-3 thoughtful paragraphs) to each of the following questions.

1. Near the end of Mr. Perfect, Jaine kills Corin / Leah, saving herself and her sister before Sam can rescue her. Given everything we discussed about the novel—its themes, its ideas about gender, its recurrent motifs, its echoes from scene to scene—why was this the appropriate, logical climax for the book? Why would it have been “wrong” for Sam to rescue Jaine instead?

2. In Mr. Impossible we learn about four distinct stages in Daphne’s life. What stages were those, and what do we know about her in each of them? How do any of the stages relate to one another: that is, in what ways do any of the stages (or the people in them) compare or contrast to each other?

3. Near the end of Dark Lover, Wrath’s back is ritually inscribed with a word. What word is it, and what other themes, motifs, symbols, ideas about gender, or other material from the novel did we connect—or can you now connect—with this gruesome ritual of inscription?

4. Near the end of Flowers from the Storm we find the following exchange between Jervaulx and Maddy:

“Helpmeet!” he shouted at her, at the blank, weeping façade of her. “God…a charge…love! No rule but love! Duchess!”

Her lips moved. She moistened them.

“Think…not?” he demanded. “Think you’re a meek mild little Quaker?” His reckless laugh at that echoes to the rafters. “Stubborn…self-will…pride opinionated liar! Won’t curtsey to the king, damn you! Walk in madman’s cell—head up…no fear…I could have killed you, Maddy. Killed you a hundred times.”

“It was an Opening,” she whispered.

“It was…you,” he said. “Duchess. You…took me out of there. You married…duke. You said…no powder on the footmen.” He pointed to the floor. “You tell me now—go down on my knees, and I will do it. The Devil’s gift.” His mouth curled. “Not pearls, flowers…gowns. Something unholy in truth. I give you…selfish arrogant bastard…what I am, and all I can do. I give you…my daughter…because I’ll keep her…because I’ll ruin her name to please myself…because only you—only you, Duchess…understand why I do it. Because only you…can teach her courage enough…teacher her not to care…the scorn…what they say. Only you…can teach her to…be like you. A duchess.” He opened his hand and let the paper fall to the floor. “A duchess inside!”

What themes, motifs, symbols, ideas, or other material from the novel did we connect—or can you now connect—with this climactic exchange between the Duke and his wife? Please link your discussion to specific details from the paragraphs above.

5. At first glance, Natural Law seems quite different from the other romances we have read. None of the others was from a specialty “erotic romance” publisher; none of the others focused so extensively on BDSM; none of the others allowed us to leave such a memorable set of terms and diagrams on the chalkboard. But the final scenes of the novel—the last sex scene and the proposal that follows—turned out to be remarkably familiar, or at least to put new twists on familiar material. What in them was more familiar or traditional (not to say “conservative”) than earlier material in the book? What new twists does Hill put on them, so that the book does not betray its characters or utterly subvert itself in the closing pages?