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"The good people in this world are very far from being satisfied with each other and my arms are the best peacemaker" - Samuel Colt

It has been argued that novels "are stories, narratives of culture, history, and our collective dreams of the future" (Spurgeon 4) and

From the end of the seventeenth century when early tales of Indian wars and captivity were among the first best-sellers, through the nineteenth-century fascination with bloody sagas of the western frontier and gothic thrillers about the cities, down to the violent gunfighters, private eyes, gangsters and gangbusters of twentieth-century film and television, the American public has made its legends of violence a primary article of domestic consumption, and of export. So potent and pervasive have been these American images of violence that it is through them that Americans have been imaginatively known to much of the rest of the world.

One puzzling thing is that, in spite of this penchant for imagined violence, Americans have traditionally thought of themselves as a nonviolent law-abiding people. Our rhetoric of manifest destiny in the nineteenth century taught that America was the great redeemer nation bringing peace, democracy, and the rule of law to all the world. Though much of this rhetoric is obsolescent and even seems, to some, obscene, the basic belief in America's role as a peace-bringer still retains its hold. (Cawelti 524)

Cawelti concludes that "Americans have a deep belief in the moral necessity of violence and that this belief accounts for the paradox of an ostensibly peace-loving and lawful people being so obsessed with violence" (525).

In a cultural context in which a peace-bringing nation is expected to resort to moral violence, it is perhaps not so surprising that a "pacifist" may be defined not as "a person who believes that war and violence are unjustifiable" (Oxford Dictionaries) but as someone who believes that they are justifiable in certain circumstances. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that, "Oddly enough, the term pacifism has occasionally been used to describe a pragmatic commitment to using war to create peace" and this kind of pacifism is

known as contingent pacifism. While absolute pacifism admits no exceptions to the rejection of war and violence, contingent pacifism is usually understood as a principled rejection of a particular war. A different version of contingent pacifism can also be understood to hold that pacifism is only an obligation for a particular group of individuals and not for everyone. Contingent pacifism can also be a principled rejection of a particular military system or set of military policies. Contingent pacifists may accept the permissibility or even necessity of war in some circumstances and reject it in others, while absolute pacifists will always and everywhere reject war and violence. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy)

Suzanne Brockmann is a romance author who is well known for writing about heroes (and plenty of heroines too) who are trained in the use of violence and I therefore suspect that when she calls herself a "pacifist" she means that to indicate a commitment to contingent rather than absolute pacifism. She has said that

I've always been — starting from back around when, I guess I was around 11, I became a World War II history buff, and so I'm fascinated by military history. I have an incredible respect for the servicemen and women who serve our country. I knew the research was going to be fascinating, and it said in this article at the time there were something like 2,874 active duty Navy SEALs in the Navy today, and I thought, “And I'll write a book for every one of them.



As somebody who has an incredible respect for people who will not quit, for people who have that incredible drive and incredible motivation and incredible willpower, I really felt like it was a really good match for me as a writer. And I'm also a pacifist. And so you combine that with the idea that Navy SEALs are very often used in place of conventional warfare, it just really worked for me. (Popular Romance Project)

Romances which endorse absolute pacifism are extremely rare; it is not uncommon, however, for romances to show the toll which violence takes on soldiers, their families, and other civilians. In an essay about US romances "in which one or both protagonists are combatants in some form of military or political conflict" (153) Jayashree Kamble concludes that

In the symbolic act that is each romance text lie conflicting narratives: on the one side is a systemic conviction in America's mission to protect capitalist democracy, freedom, human rights, and so on, and on the other, the concern that this mission means using good men as cannon fodder and punishing innocents [...]. In other words, warrior romances often contain the awareness that the conflation of concepts such as patriotism toward a civilized nation and the ruthless methods used to display that patriotism is untenable. This awareness shows itself in the text as the threat of the breakdown of the sanity and moral framework of the individuals that make up the nation's army, and also in the devastation it wreaks on family and the alleged foe. The warrior romance thus contains an unmistakable trace of affirmative culture and government-inspired propaganda, such as in its endorsement of America's need to confront the shadowy enemies of abstract noble causes. But it also contains an undercurrent of doubt and despair at the seemingly endless conflict that this engenders. (162)

Perhaps it's because Nora Roberts' First Impressions (1984) isn't a "warrior romance," and because the war under discussion was an internal one which pitted American against American rather than against an external enemy that Shane, her heroine, is able to be quite explicit about a feeling which, in a "warrior romance," might remain only an "undercurrent":

Vance shot her a curious look. "War really fascinates you, doesn't it?"

Shane looked out over the field. "It's the only true obscenity. The only time killing's glorified rather than condemned. Men become statistics. I wonder if there's anything more dehumanizing." Her voice became more thoughtful. "Haven't you ever found it odd that to kill one to one is considered man's ultimate crime, but the more a man kills during war, the more he's honored? [...]" (118)

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Cawelti, John G. "Myths of Violence in American Popular Culture." Critical Inquiry 1.3 (1975): 521-541.

Kamble, Jayashree. "Patriotism, Passion, and PTSD: The Critique of War in Popular Romance Fiction." New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays. Ed. Sarah S. G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. 153-163.

Popular Romance Project. "Choosing SEALs." 18 December 2012.

Roberts, Nora. First Impressions. 1984. New York: Silhouette, 2008.

Spurgeon, Sara L. Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier. College Station: Texas A & M UP, 2005.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. "Pacifism."

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^{The image of the Colt "Peacemaker" came from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain.}

I've just updated my main page so that it mentions my latest research: I'm currently working on a series of essays about Americans’ beliefs and attitudes as expressed in US romance novels. The novels I'm planning to discuss include:

• Linnea Sinclair's Games of Command
• Rose Lerner's In for a Penny
• Jennifer Crusie's Fast Women
• Pamela Morsi's Simple Jess
• LaVyrle Spencer's Morning Glory
• Beverly Jenkins's Belle
• Karin Kallmaker's In Every Port

There will of course be some category romances in the mix too.

That's a long-term project; in the shorter term, the next issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies should include an essay I've written about Georgette Heyer. It probably contains more information than you ever wanted to know about early nineteenth-century Leeds (unless you're particularly interested in the history of Leeds) but the amount of detail demonstrates Heyer's commitment to historical accuracy when creating the settings of her novels. There's also a little bit in there about the history of jigsaw puzzles.

If you've ever wondered why so many romance heroines are (wrongly) identified as "gold-diggers," Stephen Sharot's "Wealth and/or Love: Class and Gender in the Cross-Class Romance Films of the Great Depression" may provide the answer:

the sexually empowered woman who manipulates men, who came to be known from about 1915 as a “gold digger,” appears frequently in the films of the early 1930s. The adoption of the term “gold digger,” which had replaced “vamp” as the most prominent type of femme fatale, was part of a broader shift in popular conceptions of women who had moved away from their families and lived alone or with other women. As the term indicates, the motivation of the gold digger is material benefit, whereas the motives of the vamp are often elusive and impenetrable: the vamp may simply take pleasure from the entrapment and destruction of men. Another difference between the vamp and the gold digger is that whereas the class origins of the vamp are unknown, ambiguous, or irrelevant, those of the gold digger are almost always lower or working class. (92-93)

There seem to be a number of points of connection between the films studied by Sharot and many modern popular romances. For one thing, a very high proportion of the former end in the same manner as the latter: "the romances in most cross-class films are successful: sixty-five films (76 percent) of the 1929–39 sample and 98 films (83 percent) of the 1915–28 sample" (92). For another, they seem to be aimed at a similar demographic: "during the 1930s the studios assumed that their audience was a predominantly female one, and the female-centered cross-class romance was clearly oriented toward that audience" (91).

Both can claim Samuel Richardson's Pamela as an ancestor:

Cross-class romances in popular culture, most of which are between wealthy men and poor women, can be found in what are regarded as the first modern novels, which included what were to become the major female types from the lower class: the virtuous heroine (Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, 1740) and the amoral social climber (Moll Flanders, 1722; Shamela, 1741). Films with the theme of cross-class romance, most with virtuous heroines, have been made throughout almost the entire history of the cinema [...] but the number of such films in recent years cannot compare with the 1920s and 1930s, when, on average, at least one cross-class romance film would appear every month. From the beginnings of the feature film around 1915 until 1938, cross-class romance films were far more numerous than they would be thereafter. (89)

Furthermore, in his abstract Sharot writes that "Gender distinctions are reinforced by narratives in which the wealthy male is redeemed by the poor female so that he can perform the appropriate male gender roles. When the female is wealthy, the poor male insists on her economic dependence on him." This is a pattern which, I think, can also be found in romance novels. In more recent times there has perhaps been an even higher proportion of wealthy heroes paired with poor heroines but I have come across rich heroines in earlier decades who are paired up with either a poor hero who then becomes rich or one who insists on the heroine accepting a living standard in line with his finances. In these latter cases the hero is usually not actually poor, just not rich. Again, this is a nuance present in the films analysed by Sharot:

in a number of the cross-class romance films with rich females their relationship is not with working-class men but with middle-class men, often reporters, and in these, mainly screwball comedies, the romance is almost inevitably successful. Where the male is wealthy, the female is almost invariably from the working or lower class in occupation, such as maid, salesgirl, stenographer, or chorus girl. (92)

Substitute a secretary, housekeeper, cleaner or nanny for the "maid, salesgirl, stenographer, or chorus girl" and you could be describing a lot of modern popular romances.

Sharot's speculations about the responses of the audiences of these films may also be of interest to scholars of popular romance novels:

The common solution, in which the poor protagonist is rewarded for her or his disinterested love by a successful union with the wealthy protagonist, might be termed “escapist,” but it was probably recognized and accepted by many in the audience as conforming to the rules of what had become a familiar formula. However, this particular “escape” may have been especially pleasurable to particular audiences (urban, female, with aspirations to mobility) because it was grounded in a reality of class and gender inequality, which, given the limited opportunities for women in the labor market, made the social mobility of women dependent on marriage. [...] Audiences [...] were unlikely to feel dejected by a comparison with their own situation because they had learnt to experience the formula as an entertainment without continually comparing it with their own experience. (105)

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Sharot, Stephen. "Wealth and/or Love: Class and Gender in the Cross-Class Romance Films of the Great Depression." Journal of American Studies 47.1 (2013): 89-108.

^{The image came from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain. It is a title frame from the trailer for Gold Diggers of 1933.}

The latest issue of the Journal of Popular Culture came out a few days ago and although none of the articles were directly about romance, quite a few of them have some relevance to it. For example, Kirk Combe begins his article about the "bourgeois rake" in rom-coms by stating that

The comedic character of the rake—fundamentally, a playboy—originates in seventeenth-century aristocratic drama. There, he tends to be a notoriously appealing figure. He is a patrician roué who wields tremendous social power, and he does so effortlessly, carelessly. The rake is a hard fellow to resist, either in the sense of to forbear or to foil. He represents the alpha male of his society. For an audience, the comic entertainment is wholly conditional on watching this man obtain whatever it is he wants, which is always a pretty young woman and heaps of money (though not necessarily in that order, and sometimes heaps of pretty young women are involved as well). In short, the rake is a blueblood libertine who specializes in fashionable imbibing and swiving, and his wages for these sins are nothing less than absolute success. By the end of the play, he has bagged the rich, beautiful, and (sometimes) clever heiress, all the while behaving completely selfishly and all the while remaining the apple of everyone’s eye. The audience should hate to love him. The rake is little more than a ruthless pleasure/power-seeker using his status and privilege to increase his status and privilege. (338)

He was replaced, for a time, by the "man of sentiment [who] represents everything that the satirical and egoistic aristocratic rake is not" (343). However,

audiences still enjoyed seeing élan and something of the romantic chase. Here is born the bourgeois rake. He will mix old-fashioned wit and sex appeal with new-fashioned sentimentality. Any trace of sexual predation and sardonic acumen in him will be tempered and, in the end, tamed by true love and marriage. In the bourgeois rake, the former aristocratic roué will metamorphose into a nimble young man with a proclivity for clever free enterprise. Like his predecessor, though, he will still domineer in matters of money, gender, and mental dexterity. (344)

By the "second half of the eighteenth century [...] the middle-class ideal of a financially secure marriage of true love has supplanted entirely the cynicism and sexual laxity of earlier aristocratic comedy" (345) and the bourgeois rake can, Combe argues, still be found in many modern rom-coms. He believes that

inspecting most what we are meant to think about least is a productive exercise. Whether produced on the early modern stage or in current-day film, comedy is a genre not only presenting the jollity of love, marriage, and, by extension, sexual reproduction, but also depicting the business of social reproduction. Power is always at issue in comedy, notwithstanding its being mixed with and obscured by the pleasures and hijinks of romance. (355)

Given that Pamela Regis has described popular romance as "a subgenre of comedy" (16) and that in historical romances the rake continues to survive as "a patrician roué who wields tremendous social power, and he does so effortlessly, carelessly," albeit one who, like the "bourgeois rake" will be "tamed by true love and marriage," this article also raises questions about power in romance novels.

Srijani Ghosh draws parallels between chick lit and romance:

In her Reading the Romance (1984), an ethnographic study of female readers of romance novels, Janice Radway illustrates how women, mostly housewives, use romance reading to control their identities and pleasures within the limits of patriarchal society. She calls this “compensatory literature” (Radway 95) for the romance readers, and Colin Campbell refers to this vicarious pleasure as “a kind of emotional and imaginative decadence” (Campbell 176). The chick lit novel, the newest offshoot of the traditional romance novel and a genre aimed at young, urban, female professionals functions as a similar form of compensatory literature. The protected fictional world of the chick lit novel allows the readers to enjoy this “imaginative decadence,” and Confessions of a Shopaholic serves as a kind of necessary compensation because they know that at least their fictional alter ego might escape unscathed from any consumerist overindulgence which they would be penalized for in real life. (392)

And I'll close with a quote from Tison Pugh's article about mysteries which relates to all forms of "genre fiction":

As with many binary divisions, the privileging of literature over genre fiction reflects ideological biases rather than intrinsic truths. Contrary to its purportedly inferior status to literature, genre fiction is an exuberant field encompassing a diverse array of subgenres. Joyce Saricks taxonomizes genre fiction into four primary categories, each of which includes several subheadings: adrenaline genres (adventure, romantic suspense, suspense, thrillers), emotions genres (gentle reads, horror, romance, women’s lives, and relationships), intellect genres (literary fiction, mysteries, psychological suspense, science fiction), and landscape genres (fantasy, historical fiction, westerns) (vii). Saricks’s taxonomy is useful for considering how both genre fiction and literature resist efforts of categorization, as she upends the traditional binary of high and low culture by including literary fiction as a subcategory of genre fiction. (414-15)

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Combe, Kirk. "Bourgeois Rakes in Wedding Crashers: Feudal to Neo-Liberal Articulations in Modern Comedic Discourse." Journal of Popular Culture 46.2 (2013): 338–357. [Excerpt]

Ghosh, Srijani. "Res Emptito Ergo Sum: Fashion and Commodity Fetishism in Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic." Journal of Popular Culture 46.2 (2013): 378-393. [Excerpt]

Pugh, Tison. "Chaucer in Contemporary Mystery Novels: A Case Study in Genre Fiction, Low-Cultural Allusions, and the Pleasure of Derivative Forms." Journal of Popular Culture 46.2 (2013): 411–432. [Excerpt]

Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003.

Just via fiction though. In physical space I'll be heading off later today to speak at a conference on Greece and Britain in Women's Literary Imagination, 1913-2013 and the paper I'll be giving is about some long-running elements to be found in Harlequin Mills & Boon romances set in Greece. I'm a bit nervous: maybe I'll inadvertently convince some more people that HM&Bs "are clones of the same hive mind: a single story in multiple, infinite iterations, written by uncounted authors and their pseudonyms."

I'm not sure I've received my first bad review, exactly, but it's clear that Dr Kate Macdonald didn't come away from reading For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance with her view of romance novels changed for the better. Her review of it is up today and, if anything, it seems I've reinforced her belief that they're formulaic, which is quite the opposite of what I was trying to do. Kate, who reviews for Vulpes Libris and teaches at the University of Ghent, concludes that

Vivanco spends most of this book struggling to persuade us (me) that these novels sprout from a deep, rich bed of nutritious literary quality, and share a common standard of literariness. But it’s the formula that Vivanco is critiquing here, not the writing. Because these novels are so formulaic, they are policed rather than edited. Anything that transcends the formula will be edited out if the publisher thinks that The Reader or The Buyer (much more important) will not like it, so applying the principles of literary criticism to a formula seems a bit pointless. Also, I do think Vivanco reads too much into her subject.

I've read (and continue to read) a lot of Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances and, as I stated in For Love and Money, I believe that "many are well-written, skilfully crafted works which can and do engage the minds as well as the emotions of their readers, and a few are small masterpieces" (15). Kate, however,

could not see why anyone would want to read the writers whose works were quoted by Vivanco. I was more than disappointed by the quality of the writing in those quotations: I was appalled. [...] Vivanco quotes from many, many separate works, and the only way I could tell them apart was that the older texts, predating the 1950s, had a recognisable style, some sense of a person writing, rather than the formula. I could imagine someone speaking the dialogue in those quotations, and I felt interested in the stories, the characters, their voices. This was not the case with the extracts from the more recent novels, written, as Vivanco says in her title, for the money. I’m not at all surprised that wise novelists, some of whom are now famous, used pseudonyms when they wrote for this romance manufactory. But clearly there is a vast and satisfied readership out there who want to read novels written like this: they choose to buy these books, and that’s the problem.

And if someone's not convinced that the novels have any literary merit, it's not surprising that they're going to want to see them studied them from a different angle:

The romance genre is notorious for not normally being considered worthy of literary criticism, so Vivanco’s study is a good addition to the new romance studies.

However, I have caveats. I don’t think Vivanco has studied these generic, formulaic novels in the most interesting way. I have worked on very similar fiction, mass-market novelettes published in the 1890s. I got nothing of interest by looking at their literary quality, but found vast amounts to write about when looking at them as book history. Thinking about these novels as part of daily reading, and looking at their context is fascinating for understanding their readers’ reading tastes, and how much they would pay for it. Janice Radway did this in 1984 (Reading the Romance) for the American romance market. Looking at how Harlequin Mills & Boon romances are marketed, and what exactly their formula is, and why it works so well, would be valuable socio-literary book-history.

In "Gender Role Models in Fictional Novels for Emerging Adult Lesbians" Cook, Rostosky and Riggle state that

emerging adult lesbian role models in contemporary novels portray some behaviors and emotions that resist traditional gender stereotypes as well as other behaviors and emotions that reinforce them. (160)

As the authors themselves acknowledge (163), these findings are based on a very small sample: "This study focused on 16 lesbian protagonists identified in 11 young adult novels that received 2011 Lambda Literary Award nominations" (150) and of these only 5 were romances: Always Faithful, From a Distance, Nightshade, Nigredo, Midnight Hunt. Nonetheless, their findings are interesting and others might wish to see if the trends they identify are replicated in a larger sample. I'm going to focus on the negatives here because they seem to have been particularly noticeable in the romances, but the article as a whole tried to keep things more balanced by also stressing positive aspects of these novels.

One of the ways in which the romances in particular reinforced "traditional gender stereotypes" was by depicting

one partner [...]  as more masculine and one [...] as more feminine. These expressions of masculinity were illustrated primarily with hyperaggression and hypersexualization.

All [...] characters exhibited signs of hyperaggression through displays of fighting, violent bursts of anger, and/or the rejection of any female roles or feminine presentation. (159)

It was often "the masculine character who initiated sexual contact with the more passive feminine character, mimicking traditional heterosexual relationship scripts" (160) and another feature familiar to readers of m/f romance was that "These masculine characters generally must be 'tamed' or calmed by the feminine characters. However, the taming is typically focused on calming the masculine character’s temper and aggression, not their sexual desires" (160).

Cook, Rostosky and Riggle conclude that

Depictions of masculinity and traditional gender-role scripts were present in almost every novel in the romance genre. The same traditional gender roles that may be problematic in heterosexual relationships appear to be grafted into many lesbian romance novels, thereby foregoing an important opportunity to provide emerging adult lesbians with a unique perspective on same-sex romance and models for how to express a range of gender and sexual identities within same-sex relationships.

Instead, the traditional gender and sexual scripts serve to maintain heteronormativity in romantic relationships (Clawson, 2005) and fail to recognize the range of scripts that lesbians actually enact. Rose and Zand (2002) found that the most commonly used romance script involved developing a friendship before developing a romance. Thus, the focus on sexually-based romance scripts and the absence of friendship-based romance in these texts fail to build on a strength that lesbians commonly bring to their intimate relationships. (161)

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Cook, Jennifer R., Sharon S. Rostosky and Ellen D. B. Riggle. "Gender Role Models in Fictional Novels for Emerging Adult Lesbians." Journal of Lesbian Studies, 17:2 (2013): 150-166. [Abstract]

Marriage: noun

There were those who said that the luster went from a marriage before one year was over and that all but the legal and ecclesiastical bonds were dead within seven years. (Balogh 362)

A romance heroine, on the other hand, will muse after seven years of marriage that

She did not suppose it was possible that she was more in love [...] now than she had been seven years ago [...]. That would be to insult what they had felt for each other when they married. But it was certainly true that she was as much in love. It was also true that the quality of her love had deepened. She knew him now in almost every way one human being could know another. Almost every way. No one could ever know absolutely everything there was to know about another, of course, and if it were possible it would not be desirable, because there should always be more to discover, always something new to surprise and delight. (Balogh 362-63)

Rake: noun

I believe the word rake needs to be defined [...] Or at least it needs to be established what a rake is not. As I understand it [...] the hero of Pamela is not a rake at all, for it seems he tried on a number of occasions to take Pamela's virtue by force and quite against her will. That man is an out-and-out villain, who ought not to be dignified with the name of rake. A rake, though capable of all sorts of wild, debauched, silly behavior, is still first and foremost a gentleman. And a gentleman never ever deprives a woman - and I speak not just of ladies - of her virtue against her will. [...] A rake may never be reformed [...] for most men believe it is a manly thing to be and something to which their gender entitles them. But they are not villainous for all that. Or, if they are, then they have put themselves beyond the pale of mere rakishness. (Balogh 297-98)

Seven-year-itch: noun. See Marriage.

Smell-that-is-uniquely-his: noun

Perhaps it was sweat, but who would have thought that sweat could smell so gloriously enticing? (Balogh 317)

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Balogh, Mary. The Secret Mistress. London: Piatkus, 2011.

_{The image of dictionary indents was created by Minh Nguyễn and made available at Wikimedia Commons for use under the terms of a GNU Free Documentation License.}

It was reported today that "an unpublished author recently brought a case against [...] Harlequin claiming that they had used her contest entry." The case was brought before the District Court for the Southern District of Texas (Houston Division) and can be summarised as follows:

In 2011, Harlequin Enterprises, LTD. published a romance novel, The Proud Wife. The protagonists are a green-eyed, red-haired beauty and a tall, dark, handsome, wealthy man. After overcoming a series of obstacles to love, the couple rediscovers their passionate romance. Kelly Rucker alleges that this Harlequin novel infringes a copyright she holds for a romance story that she titled How to Love a Billionaire. Her book also features a green-eyed, red-haired beauty and a tall, dark, and handsome wealthy man. The book also describes how the couple overcomes a series of obstacles to their love that the ends with the couple . . . the sentence need not be completed. (1)

The reason "the sentence need not be completed" is that everyone knows how a romance ends. And if a romance ends happily, that's not proof that it's plagiarising another romance novel: it's proof that they're both working within well-known generic constraints. Similarly, there are

generic elements — features, plots, characters, and elements found in many romance novels. A theme or trope that has long existed is not “expression” that the Copyright Act protects. [...] “Material or themes commonly repeated in a certain genre are not protectable by copyright,” nor are “so-called scenes à faire.” [...] Scenes à faire generally involve “incidents, characteristics or settings which are as a practical matter indispensable, or at least standard, in the treatment of a given topic, what flows naturally from these basic plot premises.” [...] These elements are not protected because they are strongly affiliated or connected with a common theme and thus not creative.(12-13)

There are lots of romance novels in which

A beautiful woman and a handsome, wealthy man fall in love, become estranged, find themselves alone together in close quarters, have a passionate reunion, rediscover their love and commitment, and begin a new life together. These are familiar plot elements in the romance genre. Many of the similarities accompanying these tropes in the works are scenes à faire. They describe similarly choreographed scenes of love, estrangement, rediscovered passion, and recommitted love. The details of these scenes are similar not because of infringement, but because they flow logically from the plot elements. (14)

And just in case that's not clear enough, the Court explains further:

The similarities between the characters in Rucker’s work and in the Harlequin work are not legally protectable. Both male protagonists are black-haired, blue-eyed, “tall, dark, and handsome” figures. They are wealthy and powerful. The men sweep the female protagonists off their feet, into a luxurious life. The women are beautiful, with red hair and green eyes. They are slender, curvaceous, and young. Their personalities are strong-willed and passionate. These descriptions suffice to make it clear that these are generic characters in romance novels. (14-15)

One would hope, though, that a good romance author would attempt some characterisation which went beyond this and that, therefore, as in this case, it would be possible to conclude that a bare outline such as the one above does not "convey the 'total concept and feel of the works.'" (17). As Michelle Styles commented: "It is how you express a trope that makes it yours just as once you live in a house and furnish it, it becomes a home. It is about letting the author's voice shine through."

The case was dismissed and the Court's full decision is available here.

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Rosenthal, Lee H. "Rucker v. Harlequin Enterprises, Limited: MEMORANDUM AND OPINION entered GRANTING 7 MOTION TO DISMISS FOR FAILURE TO STATE A CLAIM." 26 February 2013.

Styles, Michelle. "Writer's Wednesday: A Troupe of Tropes." The Pink Heart Society. 27 March 2013.

The image of Justice, created by Edward Onslow Ford is in the public domain and was obtained from Wikimedia Commons.

I'm really pleased that I've finally been able to get hold of Mairead Owen's Women's Reading of Popular Romantic Fiction: A Case Study in the Mass Media, A Key to the Ideology of Women (1990). Given that Owen prefaces her analysis with the statement that

It seems essential to add to the literary critic's close reading of the text and to psychoanalytic theories, actual empirical data. It is not enough to speculate that women read to compensate for maternal deprivation or as part of rape fantasies or revenge fantasies. It is necessary, as in any science, to see if these theories really are operating. (20)

I think it can be seen as a British response to Janice A. Radway's much more well-known Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (1984) and Tania Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (1982) and it is, I think, in response to their psychoanalytic analyses of readers that Owen states that, "To offer explanations couched only in psychoanalytic terms, is not only intellectually inconsistent, but also can perpetuate the disadvantaged situation of women and perhaps thereby we become 'the servants of power' " (337).

Owen "felt [...] that in Britain I had the ideal, and obvious, setting in which to encounter readers - the public libraries" (37) and she chose "libraries set in areas of varying social class, areas of prosperity and poverty, new estates and established centres" (37). The "main survey was done by putting questionnaires into [...] ten libraries over two weeks in October, 1987" (41-42).

As for her most important term of reference:

The definition of 'romantic fiction' I deliberately left to the librarians who, interestingly, considered it unproblematic. Romantic fiction consisted of those books shelved under romantic fiction or sent by the publishers or the library wholesalers as romantic fiction. There were occasional divergences of opinion as can be readily understood. Indeed Catherine Cookson (1988), one of the most widely-read authors and the author put at the top of the list of their most favourite authors of romantic fiction by my readers, wrote to me, 'You see, I do not consider myself to be a romantic writer in the sense in which the word is used today. It is only since Granada Television filmed The Mallens that this word was applied to my writing; and the paperback firm, solely for the purpose of appealing to the public, continued it from there.' (42)

"Romantic fiction" is a much broader category than "romance" since it includes novels in which the romantic element may not be as central to the plot as in a "romance". In addition, happy endings are not guaranteed. Nonetheless, Owen concludes that "The publishers are right to insist on the happy ending as far as my sample were concerned. It was mentioned again and again for the ideal romantic novel" (184).

In addition to depending on the judgement and cooperation of librarians, Owen spoke to and/or corresponded with authors, readers and publishers of romantic fiction.

AUTHORS: Owen gathered  "information from fifteen authors through the survey, plus information from [...] four interviews" (89) with a further four authors. With regards to feminism, "Many of the authors who answered the questionnaire subscribed to feminist views[...] and felt that these could be incorporated in the romance formula. [...] On the other hand, some of the authors specifically rejected the values of feminism" (306).

She notes that

seventeen of my respondents were married at the time and the other two had been widowed. So much for the stereotype of frustrated spinsters creating their compensatory fantasies. They were also untypical of the general population, where one marriage in three ends in divorce, in that most marriages were, or had been, unusually stable and long lasting. Divorces were unusual in the sample. The question on marital staus [sic] asked about present status and not about any previous divorces but from correspondence and publicity material and interviews it seemed that only three or four had been involved in divorce. (90)

One author told Owen that "'Romantic fiction can play out a drama for the reader without the necessity of risk, can teach emotional truths without hurt" (108) and "distancing from the 'ideal of true love', was rare in the authors" (109). I wonder if a group who've mostly found their "happy ever after" are more likely than the general population to feel that although the characters in romance are often richer, more beautiful etc than most people, romances contain "emotional truths."

On a related note, Owen herself questions the perception that romantic fiction is "escapist":

In one sense there is escape in romantic fiction, though I would suggest only to the extent that to partake in any fictional entertainment, to read any novel, to watch any play or television or film, is to enter another world. However, I would query how real this aspect of escape is in the sense that people are leaving their own world behind. It is the only popular genre where people try to escape from their own lives into more of the same. Women turn from problems involving male partners or the desire to gain a male partner into books which deal with just that sphere of life. (127)

READERS: "One hundred and thirty-seven completed surveys were returned" (156) to Owen by readers and she notes that  although "The stereotype of the reader of romantic fiction rarely includes any high estimate of their intelligence [...] my sample both from the surveys and the interviews gave a picture of very lively and intelligent women" (165). Although they all read romantic fiction

The readers did not read romantic fiction only. Ninety-six per cent of the respondents read other sorts of books as well. The range of interest was extremely wide. Some of it was genre reading. Detective fiction was particular popular [...]. Non-fiction played a great part and the range of interests represented was staggering - archaeology, religion, travel, biography, local history, politics, art. [...] Respected contemporary writers such as Margaret Drabble and Iris Murdoch, Allan Sillitoe, Joseph Heller, were accompanied by Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen, Steinbeck. (171-72)

In their reading of romantic fiction

Catherine Cookson [...]  headed the list of favourite authors, [...] followed by Danielle Steel. Following these two were Penny Jordan, Janet Dailey, Anne Mather and Jilly Cooper, Barbara Taylor Bradord, Jean Plaidy, as well as her alter ego, Victoria Holt, Georgette Heyer, Ann Hampson, Betty Neels, (who writes doctor/nurse romances and was also mentioned as an author who is least liked), Jessica Steele, Charlotte Lamb. (176)

Owen spoke in depth to a smaller number of readers: "Forty seemed to me a number large enough to throw up patterns of behaviour and ideas" (206). She found that although the widely held "view of the audience is of people who are not active, not in control, with no feeling that they could control or change their circumstances" (214-15), all but two of her

interviewees, while showing varying degrees of interest in formal politics, were confident that they could and would act to effect change in society. This might involve just writing letters, organising petitions or the like. Their interests ranged far and wide. (216)

As for the texts themselves, Owen felt that

because the texts are simple, the readers can project on to them, like Rorsach ink blots, the shapes that they desire and that arise out of their own feelings and needs. This leads to intriguing contradictions, where readers draw messages and pleasures from the texts which are diametrically opposed to those that other readers draw. The texts can be all things to all women. (217)

Also,

Readers developed in their reading as they got older. At school age they were using the books to explore ideas about marriage, love, sexuality, men. [...] The nineteen to twenty-four-year-olds also were thinking themselves forward into possible scenarios that might happen though predictably as their experience of the real world increased, the detachment and the wry amusement at the books and themselves grew. (220)

Readers varied in how they perceived the novels:

Many readers saw the books as echoing real life and also, more importantly, holding out lessons for real life. 'Because they can be so true to real life.' 'Typical of real life situations.' 'They can relate to own life.' On the other hand, 'A fantasy world, away from reality.' (182)

And so while "Perhaps it will surprise the cynical that many of the older readers said they enjoyed the books because they told a story of which they had once been the heroine" (181), "True to the romance's function as being all things to all women, the opposite view also came across equally, 'It's the only romance I get.' " (181).

Owen summarises her conclusions as follows:

It is rather daunting to sum up all the hours of talk and all the shades of opinion in a sentence but, except for a very small minority, neither in their homes nor in the wider society did my readers experience a really equal society. And in this [...] I think they were representative of women generally. In reading the books they take the reality of their life chances and refashion them into a possible answer. (337)

This refashioning involves

taking the circumstances of their lives and [...] shaking up the kaleidoscope into a pattern which pleases them [...]. By separating themselves from those lives rather than meeting the difficulties head on they are ironic, distanced, living in the interstices. It may be that it is something of a suspicion of this practice which leads the men in their lives and indeed the wider society to be so dismissive of the books on the one hand, so suspicious and uneasy on the other. Every aspect of their reading, from the act itself which leads them to withdraw from their supportive, attentive role to the type of fiction they read, takes the lives which society prescribes and turns them to a sort of benefit. (339)

PUBLISHERS: Owen "drew on information from seven different publishers of romantic fiction" (34). She observed that

The men who publish the books, especially the soft romances, I did feel, in spite of denials, had a patronising attitude to their readers. They are women's books and I felt that it was merely a marketing exercise indeed analogous to the selling of soap [...]. It is only a subjective impression but I did gather a feeling of giving a not very highly rated consumer what she wanted.

Editors were leading relatively 'feminist' lives, with independent and well-paid work and in their replies, they disassociated themselves from the readers while at the same time defending the readers' right to read what they wished. But they did not see the readers as women like themselves. 'I do occasionally think of people, like, I don't know, the average reader and I do bear them in mind. My mother or something. And I just talk to as many people as I can.' (305)

LIBRARIANS: Apparently

The majority of the librarians did seem to share an assumption that romances come at the bottom of a hierarchy of 'good' writing. [...] Starting from this basic assumption, the attitude of the librarians to the huge poplarity [sic] of romantic fiction seemed to split into two very distinct categories. Some librarians had a 'Reithian' attitude to romance. In earlier days of the BBC, broadcasters felt that their mission was to educate and inform as well as to entertain, that it was their duty to lead their listeners and viewers to an appreciation of all that was best in our culture. Similarly some of the librarians felt that it was their duty to lead their readers to good literature. On the other hand the 'libertarian' attitude suggested that borrowers had a right to read what they wished and it was the duty of the library to provide. (79-80)

She adds that "It is significant that the librarians did not, on the whole, read romance themselves" (81). One

librarian talked to me about the way in which readers would come to her desk with ten or more romances to take out. 'I don't know why they bother,' she said. 'They're only like the stories you tell yourself at bedtime to make you fall off to sleep.' (310)

You can download your own copy of Owen's thesis free of charge by creating an account with EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) at the British Library. Here's the page from which the thesis can be obtained.

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Owen, Mairead. Women's Reading of Popular Romantic Fiction: A Case Study in the Mass Media, A Key to the Ideology of Women. PhD Thesis. University of Liverpool. 1990.