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As Heather Schell has noted,

Evolutionary psychology has popularized the notion that men’s everyday behavior can be better understood by comparison to the habits of large mammals—most especially the more aggressive of the primates—living in patriarchal, aggressive societies. [...] Our cultural fictions have embraced this narrative wholeheartedly but changed the comparison to more charismatic megafauna: dogs and wolves. (109-110)

Popular romance fiction has certainly "embraced this narrative wholeheartedly": the terms "alpha male" or "alpha" are frequently used to refer to the "tough, hard-edged, tormented heroes that are at the heart of the vast majority of bestselling romance novels" (Krentz 107). The term

“Alpha” was originally used in early twentieth-century studies of animal behavior to refer to the dominant individuals in rigidly hierarchical animal societies, such as some types of insects and, in later work, large mammals like primates and wolves. (Schell 113).

One should, however, tread extremely cautiously when comparing animals and humans, not least because "There is a long-standing debate within the field of sexual selection regarding the potential projection of stereotypical sex roles onto animals by researchers" (Dougherty et al 313). According to Dougherty et al,

The subjectivity provided by anthropomorphism (endowing nonhuman animals with human-like attributes), zoomorphism (the converse, endowing humans with nonhuman animal-like attributes), and the sociocultural surroundings researchers finds themselves in, can bias what research is done, how it is done and how the resulting data are interpreted. [...] Perhaps the clearest case in point concerns the study and interpretation of sexual behaviour in nonhuman animals. (313)

For example,

Karlsson Green & Madjidian (2011) showed in their survey of the most cited papers on sexual conflict that male traits were more likely to be described using ‘active’ words, whereas female traits were more likely to be described with ‘reactive’ words, that is, in terms of female traits being a response to male behaviours or male-imposed costs. They ascribed this difference (at least in part) to the anthropomorphic imposition of conventional sex roles on animals by researchers (caricatured as males active, females passive). (314)

However, not all stereotypes of women's sexuality cast us in a passive role and "a gender bias in the use of language may depend upon which particular sexual conflict is being studied" (315).

Dougherty et al studied the language used in scientific papers describing

pre- and postcopulatory cannibalism. In terms of the taxonomic coverage, 23 of the species were spiders (35 papers and two reviews), six were mantids (six papers) and one was an orthopteran (one paper, concerning the sagebrush cricket, Cyphoderris strepitans). (314)

They found that,

In terms of the words used to describe females, while sexual cannibalism is predicated on the fact that one of the pair ends up being the meal of the other, some of the words used to describe female behaviour are a long way short of being value free: for instance, females have been called ‘voracious’ or ‘rapacious’ more than once. Moreover, if we are concerned with either the causes or consequences of negative sexual stereotyping more generally, the use of such words suggests that there may be scant comfort in our findings here of the assignment of active agency to female animals in the context of sexual cannibalism. Not least this is because it is well-known across human culture that sexually aggressive or violent females are themselves a negative stereotype: from the Gorgons of Greek myth to the femme fatale, the ‘black widow’ or the ‘lethal seductress’ of today. (316)

Given that scientists describing animal behaviour can be influenced by stereotypes derived from human culture, interpreting human behaviour in the light of potentially-anthropomorphised accounts of animal behaviour is problematic. As Dougherty et al conclude,

scientists may bring preconceptions and oversimplifications from their sociocultural surroundings, with ‘general principles’ merely serving to validate those preconceptions. This will forever be an inescapable part of science, and something that we must always be aware of and try and guard against as much as we can. However, there is also the concern that scientific findings about sexual behaviour (or indeed anything else) may travel the other way and provide the basis for sociocultural norms that are chauvinistic, demeaning, or that justify oppression and violence towards some members of society (for instance women or in terms of sexual identity [...]).  [...] We suggest that the key message that we should put across is that there are no easy lessons about how we should live or love to be learned from nonhuman animals. (318)

Two of the three papers cited in this post are available online. See below for details.

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Dougherty, Liam R., Emily R. Burdfield-Steel and David M. Shuker. "Sexual Stereotypes: The Case of Sexual Cannibalism." Animal Behaviour 85.2 (2013): 313-322.

Krentz, Jayne Ann. "Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 107-114.

Schell, Heather. "The Big Bad Wolf: Masculinity and Genetics in Popular Culture." Literature and Medicine 26.1 (2007): 109-125.

Over at Dear Author Janet has been discussing captivity narratives and she states that,

Whether it’s sexual captivity (the forced seduction/rape fantasy), physical captivity (hostage/prisoner/protection), legal captivity (marriage of convenience, especially against the heroine’s will), meta captivity (BDSM play), or some other variation, the process by which one protagonist is often perceived to be held in captivity until she becomes captivated enough to fall in love with the captor-protagonist has become shorthand for drastically intensifying the emotional and physical power imbalances between the romantic protagonists and playing them out in a way that illustrates the tension between captivity and captivation, and the way love theoretically transforms the nature of the relationship to one based on free choice and mutual happiness.

Rape or near-rape of heroines by heroes may be less common in romance than it once was, but "power imbalances between the romantic protagonists" are still extremely common and Robin Harders argues that, "Of all the motifs in genre romance, captivity is one of the most ubiquitous and diverse" (Harders 133).

On the one hand, the popularity of this motif could be read as confirmation of the theory, outlined in Dee Graham's

1994 text Loving to Survive, [in which] Graham identifies Stockholm Syndrome as ‘a universal law of behaviour, which operates when a person existing under conditions of isolation and inescapable violence perceives some kindness on the part of the captor’ [...]. She proposes that at a societal level, women’s love for men emerges from women’s recognition of their subordinate position in patriarchal societies and thus as an effort to bond with the more powerful in society (men) as a means of surviving. [...] Through love, she explains, women not only seek to ‘recoup our losses’ by aligning with those more powerful in society, but ‘hope to persuade men to stop their violence against us’. (Quek 80)

On the other, Harders suggests that "the use of the captivity motif in concert with the happily ever after can provide a challenge to the domestication of love and desire" (146). According to Esther Perel, domestication tends to come into conflict with desire:

at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship, I think is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs. On the one hand, our need for security, for predictability, for safety, for dependability, for reliability, for permanence -- all these anchoring, grounding experiences of our lives that we call home. But we also have an equally strong need -- men and women -- for adventure, for novelty, for mystery, for risk, for danger, for the unknown, for the unexpected, surprise -- you get the gist -- for journey, for travel [...]. Now, in this paradox between love and desire, what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love -- mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other -- are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire. Because desire comes with a host of feelings that are not always such favorites of love: jealousy, possessiveness, aggression, power, dominance, naughtiness, mischief. Basically most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day. You know, the erotic mind is not very politically correct.

A vicarious experience of risk and danger may be provided by romance novels. In Joan Wolf's Affair of the Heart, for example, the hero becomes intensely jealous and the heroine finds herself feeling

sheer, primitive terror. [...] The wildness of her resistance had released all of his civilized brakes, and rape was looking at her out of those midnight-dark eyes. [...] She stared up at him, and slow tears formed in her dilated eyes and began to slip silently down her cheeks. She was trembling violently.

Though the haze of anger and lust that possessed him, Jay saw the tears. His hand stilled on his belt buckle [...]. For a brief moment he struggled to hold on to his anger. He wanted to hurt her, to force her to submit to him, to thrust his strength and his maleness on her whether she desired it or not. But the tears were too strong. (171-72)

The heroine does forgive this near-rape and continues to love him. When asked to explain why, she responds: "I'm a masochist, I suppose" (178). She may not mean this literally, but she evidently believes that true love contains an element of risk and danger. She asks the rhetorical question:

What kind of loving was worth anything if it was willing to share? The possessive ones were the passionate ones, the ones who could give completely, utterly, one thousand percent. Perhaps they weren’t always polite, always civilized. But they made the world around them flame with an intensity of feeling and living. (146-47)

She may yearn for this "intensity of feeling" and Perel may believe that humans have a "fundamental need" for danger, but I would question whether all humans have this "need." And if we do, do we need to find it in romantic relationships? There are, after all, some readers who prefer reading about "beta" heroes who would never dream of abducting anyone. Do the romances which feature them propose a different model of romantic love from those which are based around the "power imbalances between the romantic protagonists"?

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Harders, Robin. "Borderlands of Desire: Captivity, Romance, and the Revolutionary Power of Love." New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays. Ed. Sarah S. G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2012. 133-152.

Janet. "Gimme Shelter." Dear Author. 5 March 2013.

Perel, Esther. "The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship." TED. Feb. 2013.

Quek, Kaye. "Theorising Love in Forced/Arranged Marriages: A Case of Stockholm Syndrome." GEXcel Work in Progress Report Volume VIII: Proceedings from GEXcel Theme 10: Love in Our Time – A Question for Feminism Spring 2010. Ed. Sofia Strid and Anna G. Jónasdóttir. GEXcel, 2010. 75-84. [Whole issue available for download here.]

Wolf, Joan. Affair of the Heart. New York: Rapture Romance, 1984.

The photo, which I found at Flickr, was taken by Oliver Hammond (Olivander) and was made available for use under a Creative Commons license.

It's been years since I've come across comments about romance as scathing as Warren Motte's. In 2007 Julie Bindel stated that

My loathing of M&B novels has nothing to do with snobbery. I could not care less if the books are trashy, formulaic or pulp fiction [...]. But I do care about the type of propaganda perpetuated by M&B. I would go so far as to say it is misogynistic hate speech.

Unlike Bindel, it turns out that Motte cares extremely deeply about whether "the books are trashy, formulaic or pulp fiction" and, also unlike Bindel, Motte focuses all his attention on just one romance: Sharon Kendrick's The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable-Girl.

The fact that an entire 16 page-article in an academic journal has been dedicated to a discussion of just one Harlequin romance could, in theory, be taken as an indication that, at last, the "continuing assumption that popular romances neither invite nor repay the kind of focused, individual inquiry that academics bring to other texts" (Selinger and Frantz 10) is being rejected outside the field of romance scholarship. Unfortunately, in practice this would seem to be a case which demonstrates that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: there would seem to be more than a little sarcasm in Motte's statement that

The volume bears the distinctive imprint of Harlequin Books, a sure guarantor of quality, I had always been told. For I realized that I had never actually read a Harlequin novel, and I told myself that I must repair that yawning lacuna in my literary education. (120)

Not having read The Playboy Sheikh's Virgin Stable-Girl I can't comment on its merit as a work of literature. I have, however, written at length about Harlequin Mills & Boon romances and I can therefore state with confidence that anyone who chooses to judge all HM&Bs by their experience with just one is likely to end up with a very skewed view of them since one novel cannot be representative of the diversity in authorial talent as well as in literary "mode" and subject-matter to be found in HM&Bs. For the record, Smart Bitch Sarah, who has been known to recommend some Harlequin romances very highly, gave this one a D- and was of the opinion that "This book is high entertainment. It’s so ridiculous, you can’t put it down" (Wendell).

Motte's essay is, I suspect, intended to be entertaining but it itself ends up seeming rather ridiculous (and perhaps that's why I feel impelled to blog about it). Let's begin with his statement that,

Seizing upon any objective data that I could find then, I learned that Harlequin Books S.A. [...] had published The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable-Girl in August of 2009, as the second volume in a series entitled “The Royal House of Karedes,” a series that promises to bring to its readers one installment per month. That’s a heady rate, and one which puts even the most faithful reader to the test: sneeze, and you miss an installment. (120-21)

It must be an extraordinarily long sneeze: how many people take a whole month to read a book which is less than 200 pages long? Next Motte demonstrates an apparent inability to do simple research:

The author of The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable-Girl is a certain “Sharon Kendrick.” I don’ t know who that is, but she has a website, and that’s a strong claim to objective reality in our cynical age. The section entitled “About the Author” in the back matter of the novel mentions that she had qualified as a nurse and had driven an ambulance “across the Australian desert” before marrying her “dashing doctor” and settling down. And indeed the spelling in the novel obeys British norms, rather than American ones. But that could well be a ruse, of course.

I find that I am reluctant, for some reason, to believe that “Sharon Kendrick” might be a garden-variety Australian hausfrau; thus, I shall continue to enclose her in those skeptical quotation marks. (121)

Kendrick lives in Winchester, in the UK, as is made clear on the Mills & Boon website (and she has an English accent). There's really a lot more information available about her than about "Shakespeare" or "Homer."

Motte finds the experience of reading The Playboy Sheikh's Virgin Stable-Girl "a harrowing one" (124) for he is "scandalized by this novel" (126) and feels that it has "insulted" (126) him with its "inanity" (127). He does, however, eventually note that there is

a nice metafictional touch to her novel: “The world’s media went crazy. THE PLAYBOY SHEIKH AND THE STABLE GIRL, screamed the tabloids” (176). The full-blown specularity of that moment comes as a welcome surprise to the reader diligent enough to have penetrated this far into The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable-Girl. (132)

A welcome bit of analysis for "the reader diligent enough to have penetrated this far into" Motte's essay.

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Bindel, Julie. "Detestable Trash." The Guardian. 5 Dec. 2007. [Some of the responses generated by the romance reading and writing community are listed here and here.]

Motte, Warren. "A Walk on the Sheikh Side." Formes Poétiques Contemporaines 9 (2012): 119-134. [The entire issue can be downloaded free here.]

Selinger, Eric Murphy and Sarah S. G. Frantz. "Introduction: New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction." New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays. Ed. Sarah S. G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2012. 1-19.

Wendell, Sarah. "The Playboy Sheikh's Virgin Stable Girl." 10 Sept. 2009.

In my last post I quoted Porter and Hall's statement that "Work is beginning to appear on the fiction in women's magazines and the sexual messages it conveyed" (267). They refer to "Part Three: Realistic Fantasies: The World of the Story Papers" of Billie Melman's Woman and the Popular Imagination, Joseph McAleer's Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914-1950 and an article by Bridget Fowler. As the latter was the most readily accessible of the three, I promptly went and found myself a copy.

Fowler argues that "1930s popular stories can be seen [...] as legitimating the social order and thus indirectly providing social control" (95) though she cautions that the attitudes expressed in these stories may be only

partially shared by the readership. [...] It is very likely that the practical action of the readers emerges also from other cultural values - such as those of dissent and militancy - which are totally absent from the story universe, while the adherence to some story values may well be more at the level of the ideal or fantasy than concrete reality. (96)

One plot type she discusses which is, I think, rather less common nowadays, requires the

device [...] in which 'cryptoproletarian' characters are used. The heroine, in love with a doctor, may emerge ultimately to be not truly working-class but a foundling in some slum and brought up by working-class parents; a hero may be cut off by his father and family and forced to live a working-class mode of existence or an unexpected inheritance may alter the total dependence of the lower class heroine on the upper class hero. Thus, in social origin the hero and heroine may ultimately turn out to be alike although the bulk of the story has concerned the proving of their fitness to marry each other. It is tempting to align these stories with the earlier fairy story in which once the princess had brought herself to kiss the beast or marry the frog, he became a prince. The analogy makes the class insult even more apparent. (107)

The romances analysed by Kim Gallon were written at roughly the same time, and also appeared in magazines or newspapers but their context, and therefore their politics, are rather different. She recently posted at the Popular Romance Project about the romances to be found

in the pages of early 20th-century black magazines and newspapers. Mostly known for strident protests against racial discrimination, the black press in the 1920s and 1930s also published romance fiction, which offered African Americans an opportunity to escape into worlds filled with the heady ups and heartbreaking downs of romantic love. Scholars of the African American literary tradition and of popular romance have paid virtually no attention to romance found in the black press. On the romance side, the late 20th century has often been characterized as the starting point of black romance stories, with earlier short or serial stories, simply forgotten. [...]

Despite the seeming absence of political and racialized content in “The Dark Knight” and similar stories, black popular romance, as Conseula Francis has argued, is inherently political. Its existence automatically counters the insidious and negative stereotypes of criminality and hypersexuality historically ascribed to African Americans. In “The Dark Knight,” we see Rod and Lyla restrain themselves from engaging in a pre-marital sexual encounter, preserving, through their actions, the sanctity of marital sex and the domestic ideal. Just as significantly, “The Dark Knight” challenged the common idea that African Americans lacked the capacity for romantic love, a love that has been and continues to be integrally linked with a white, bourgeois value system.

William Gleason's article on story papers, published in 2011, does not explore the politics of their romance stories but he too suggests that romances published in magazines deserve further critical attention, not least because in his opinion

The mass marketing of modern romance fiction in North America began not with the emergence of Harlequin Books in the 1950s but during the dime novel and story paper boom of the 1860s and 1870s.

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Fowler, Bridget. "'True to Me Always': An Analysis of Women's Magazine Fiction." British Journal of Sociology 30.1 (1979): 91-119.

Gallon, Kim. "Romance in Black Papers." The Popular Romance Project. 10 January 2013.

Gleason, William. "Belles, Beaux, and Paratexts: American Story Papers and the Project of Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).

Porter, Roy & Lesley Hall. The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.

Roy Porter and Lesley Hall's The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950, published in 1995, was apparently "the first scholarly survey of the rise of English-language treatises of sexual knowledge and guidance, and it closely scrutinizes teachings about sexual functions and disorders, physical and moral tenets about sexual activity, prescribed and proscribed coital positions, and views about sexual pleasures and proprieties" (3). As they point out, however,

We cannot blithely assume that readers took the advice the manuals gave [...]. Reading is not passive; people read actively and selectively, rejecting unwelcome advice and absorbing mainly what they believe already. Reading may confirm habits rather than change them. In any case, people do not always read the books they buy or are given. (6)

Nonetheless, the words used in the manuals are important because

sexuality could not exist in the culture without words, images, metaphors and symbols to represent it. Put more strongly, the sexual is such a  complex and contested domain, mightily charged with associations and emotions, norms and values, that the terms in which it is posited determine the entity itself.

This further raises questions of knowledge and power: who commands the idiom through which the sexual is defined and prescribed? Is the language of sex the idiom of common speech, the jargon of medicine or of moral philosophy, the prerogative of experts? Is talking sex expressing oneself, regulating others or engaging in shared exchanges? Not least [...] the discourse of sex conveys erotic pleasures that may be independent of the pleasures of coitus itself. (8)

I think these are questions which are of great relevance to popular romance, which uses words and metaphors to represent sex. Porter and Hall themselves mention that

Work is beginning to appear on the fiction in women's magazines and the sexual messages it conveyed. Billie Melman has investigated certain genres of the 1920s, and Joseph McAleer has analysed the 'story' magazines as well as popular romance literature. Little work has been done generally on changing messages about sexuality in fiction. The scientist Julian Huxley remarked in his unused deposition in defence of The Well of Loneliness: 'novels are the chief method for the average man and woman to get knowledge of life'. (267)

Do romance authors constitute themselves as "experts" in the realm of sexuality by virtue of writing about it? The fact that "the discourse of sex conveys erotic pleasures" has led some to denigrate romance as "pornography"; others, however, might argue that its fascination with female virgins and heterosexual penetrative sex has reinforced very conservative notions of "sex". Are romance authors expressing themselves, regulating others and/or engaging in shared exchanges?

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Porter, Roy & Lesley Hall. The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.

Like Aliette de Bodard, I have recently finished reading Rachel Hartman's Seraphina, a fantasy novel with romantic elements. Unlike her, I enjoyed it. Now that could be because, unlike her, I did not read it

mainly because it was recommended to me as a great portrayal of a mixed-race protagonist: its eponymous heroine is half-dragon, half-human in a world where a fragile peace reigns between the two species. Seraphina is the Music Mistress at the court of the human queen of Goredd, where she passes as human in order to avoid the deep-seated prejudice and fear engendered by dragons (who are able to take human form but are betrayed by their silver blood and their odd smell).

It’s an intriguing setup; but in the end, I’m sad to report I was somewhat disappointed by Seraphina and its portrayal of race relationships.

I wonder, though, if another reason I enjoyed it is that I'm a medievalist at heart despite my move into popular romance scholarship and the religious beliefs and race relations in Goredd seemed to me to resemble those I came across while studying medieval Castile.

For those who haven't read the novel, here's a quick summary taken from Janine's review at Dear Author: this

debut YA fantasy [...] set in a world based [on] Renaissance Europe, is both a coming of age story and a tale of a clash between two species. Sixteen year old Seraphina Dombegh, the heroine of the novel, is the child of a human father and a dragon mother. The secret of her maternity is one she must hide at all costs.

In this world, dragons are a logical, emotionless species, but they can take human shape and while doing so, experience human emotions – something they guard against vigilantly. A truce exists between the two species but there is also a lot of tension and bigotry. Most dragons in Goredd, Seraphina’s country, are required to wear a bell on their shoulder, although scholarly dragons are exempt.

From Seraphina’s narration, we learn that her father Claude had no idea his wife Linn was a dragon until Linn died giving birth to Seraphina. At first glance Seraphina appeared to be a normal human baby, and it was not until she was eleven that she discovered that she is not what she appears to be.

I'd have identified it as a fantasy version of the late Middle Ages, but that's probably because in the Castilian context the fifteenth century is considered medieval. Random House describe the novel as being set in "an alternative-medieval world" and, although I'm no expert on this, the buildings on the cover look Gothic or Tudor to me.

Whether alternative-medieval or alternative-Renaissance, the dating of the setting is, I think, rather important to the novel's depiction of the way the two species relate to one another. Aliette de Bodard has stated that

I guess that, insofar as you buy the setting, Seraphina and the other half-dragons are an accurate portrayal of what it’s like to be mixed-race in a world where race divisions are sharp and bitter, and half-dragons are viewed as abominations. What I take issue with is the whole setup: as a metaphor for race relationships (and, even if this wasn’t deliberate, the metaphor sort of naturally bubbles up when the book tackles subjects like interspecies breeding, interspecies prejudice and other related stuff), this is freaking old-fashioned. It might have been the case in my grandparents’ generation (and even then, did we genuinely have two races at each other’s throat in such a non-subtle way?); but it’s certainly never been my experience. In a similar way, prejudice here is outright ugly and blatant: people throw “abomination” very quickly at half-dragons (and at dragons), and Seraphina herself is very much aware of this–even doubting at times that she has a right to exist.

Firstly, in my grandparents' time we did indeed have "two races at each other's throat in such a non-subtle way": they lived through the Second World War, a time when the supposed differences between "Aryans" and Jews were elaborated in considerable detail. Secondly, if Seraphina is set in an alternative-medieval world then of course it may seem "freaking old-fashioned" but

In medieval parlance, the term ‘monster’ was [...] applied specifically to non-Christians, all of whom shared a common monstrous flaw: the failure to embrace the true Christian faith. So even though they possessed an extremely well-developed set of monotheistic beliefs which provided the infrastructure for Christianity itself, the Jews were viewed as idol-worshipping, demonic pagans, principally owing to the Christian conviction that they were responsible for the death of Christ.

The thirteenth-century Salvin Hours contains typically monstrous portrayals of Jews in a representation of Christ before Caiaphas, the high priest. The Jews are instantly recognisable from their grotesque physiognomy, featuring dark skin, hooked noses, and evil grimaces. (Strickland)

There was also a belief that "Jews had a characteristic strong body odor, the foetor Iudaicus. [...] Another such folkloristic feature of the Jewish body was a pair of horns" (Patai & Patai 13). It is perhaps not a coincidence that Hartman's dragons can be identified by their odor.

The belief that Jews were physically different has persisted into modern times. Richard Jeffrey Newman, for example, recounts that,

In eleventh grade, my class went on a trip to somewhere that included a tour of a ship of historical importance. (I don’t remember which one.) We were standing on the deck, when a group of much younger kids, probably in elementary school, came on board. One of the girls asked one of the adults accompanying them why the boys in my group were wearing those “funny hats.” The adult explained that they were called yarmulkes and it meant we were Jewish. “Oh,” the kid said, a tone of wonder completely bereft of irony creeping into her voice. “Then where are their horns?”

If Jews were really readily identifiable by their physical appearance, however, it would presumably not have been deemed necessary to impose particular types of clothing which would act as visible markers of difference. As Hartman herself related in an essay written in 2001, in the Middle Ages it was frequently the case that

Local laws required Jews, "Saracens," and sometimes even Christian deviants to wear distinctive clothing, or markers on their clothing, so they could be readily identified. Again, the details varied from community to community. For Jews, the markers most often consisted of a round patch, usually yellow, about the size of a human palm, to be displayed prominently upon the front of the garment. They could sometimes get out of wearing it -- for a fee, of course. Muslims were marked with a yellow crescent. In fact, visible religious identification may have begun in Islamic countries as a means of identifying those who were exempt from heeding the call to prayer. In Christian Europe, however, lawmakers were more interested in segregation, in preventing intermarriage, and in increasing the revenues brought in by tolls and taxes levied exclusively on non-Christians.

The obligation to wear markers such as these was, of course, revived by the Nazis and, albeit in a much more benign form, concerns about Jews' ability to "pass" continue to be expressed. In 2008 "The Girl Detective" posted at Feministe that:

I’ve written before on how angry I was when fellow progressives began to inform me that while some Jews consider themselves white, it’s only because they’ve assimilated into white culture. They never explained what white-looking Jews actually are, if not white, but the message was always clear: if we Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews think we’re white, well, it’s just because we wanted some of that tasty privilege so badly that we suppressed our real identity to get it. [...]

Here’s what’s really toxic about the idea that an Ashkenazi like me isn’t what she says she is: it paints us as infiltrators or spies, sneaking into white society so that we can get our hands on what doesn’t belong to us. From a white point of view, this turns us into something threatening, a presence that has to be identified and dealt with. (I still remember the anecdote a Jewish boyfriend’s mother told me: when they moved, their new neighbor felt it necessary to warn them that the family down the block was Jewish. “Well, we’ll fit right in,” my boyfriend’s mother responded. The neighbor didn’t speak to them again.)

Aliette de Bodard points out that "Some of us (white/SE Asians mixed-race people, for instance) simply never have this option, and we live our entire lives with what we are writ clearly on our faces and bodies. This is, of course, true. But many Jews have had this "option" and, in the past, were set apart by methods akin to the bells worn by Hartman's dragons when they are in human form. What de Bodard's comments demonstrate, I think, is that there is no one experience of being "mixed race" but, by the same token, de Bodard's experience does not invalidate the experiences of those who, like Seraphina, are able to conceal their "otherness." In addition, the historical sources on which Hartman is drawing suggest to me that, if "Seraphina is [...] oddly obsessed with 'passing'" this is not, as de Bodard suspects, simply because "it’s a US book and this has always been a huge issue in the US."

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de Bodard, Aliette. "Seraphina, full-blood prejudice and pervasive racial passing." 14 February 2013.

Hartman, Rachel. "Sometimes a Codpiece is Just a Codpiece: The Meanings of Medieval Clothes." Strange Horizons. 22 October 2001.

Janine. "REVIEW: Seraphina by Rachel Hartman." Dear Author. 16 January 2013.

Newman, Richard Jeffrey. "What We Talk About (And Don't Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don't Talk About) antisemitism and Israel - 1." Alas A Blog. 19 January 2009.

Patai, Raphael and Jennifer Patai. 1975. The Myth of the Jewish Race. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989.

Strickland, Debra Higgs. "Monsters and Christian Enemies." History Today 50.2 (2000).

The Girl Detective. "On Being Jewish and White." Feministe. 7 July 2008.

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. I just thought these quotes were thought-provoking when juxtaposed.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (US Declaration of Independence, 1776)

pursuit of pleasure towards the goal of happiness became seen amongst Enlightenment writers as the behaviour dictated to man by Nature. 'Pleasure is now, and ought to be, your business,' Chesterfield told his son. The tendency to produce happiness was the only ultimate yardstick of right and wrong, good and evil.

If Nature was good, then erotic desire, far from being sinful, itself became desirable. And the sexual instincts were undoubtedly natural. Being pleasure-giving, such passions were thus to be approved. [...] These naturalistic and hedonistic assumptions - that Nature had made men to follow pleasure, that sex was pleasurable, and that it was natural to follow one's amorous urges - informed Enlightenment attitudes towards sexuality. (Parker and Hall, 19)

Although there is no consensus about the exact span of time that corresponds to the American Enlightenment, it is safe to say that it occurred during the eighteenth century among thinkers in British North America and the early United States and was inspired by the ideas of the British and French Enlightenments.  Based on the metaphor of bringing light to the Dark Age, the Age of the Enlightenment (Siècle des lumières in French and Aufklärung in German) shifted allegiances away from absolute authority, whether religious or political, to more skeptical and optimistic attitudes about human nature, religion and politics.  In the American context, thinkers such as Thomas Paine, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin invented and adopted revolutionary ideas about scientific rationality, religious toleration and experimental political organization—ideas that would have far-reaching effects on the development of the fledgling nation. (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, emphasis added)

 

Founding fathers (act. 1765–1836) [...] At a minimum the roster includes the seven figures identified in 1973 by Richard B. Morris, the eminent historian of the revolution: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, links and emphasis added)

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Porter, Roy & Lesley Hall. The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.

The image came from Amazon. The underpants are not currently available for sale.

Since the concern of commercial media is to exploit as wide an audience as possible, their repertoire of genres in any period tends to be broad and various, covering a wide (though not all-inclusive) range of themes, subjects, and public concerns. Within the structured marketplace of myths, the continuity and persistence of particular genres may be seen as keys to identifying the culture's deepest and most persistent concerns. (Slotkin 8)

Some fictions make their views of these concerns rather more explicit than others. Thomas Dixon Jr.'s The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1904) are extreme examples. In the former

Dixon sought, in part, to correct what he perceived as gross misrepresentations of the South in literary works, primarily in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which even fifty years after its publication was still widely read. In his fictional portrayal of the beginning of the Klan, Dixon argues the group began as a defensive organization—to protect white womanhood from black male sexual aggression and to protect government from corruption. Dixon seamlessly weaves his racist rhetoric into sentimental love plots, priming readers to feel sympathy for white supremacist leaders.  ("Controversial")

One of these is

Dixon's hero, Gaston [...]. Although Gaston's cause is originally southern, [...] Gaston's revenge produces a movement that finally awakens northerners to the Black menace: "You cannot build in a Democracy a nation inside a nation of two antagonistic races. The future American must be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto." (Slotkin 187)

It seems a particularly gratifying context in which to recall the identity of the current president of the US, and to remember that

Children from racial and ethnic minorities now account for more than half the births in the US, according to estimates of the latest US census data.

Black, Hispanic, Asian and mixed-race births made up 50.4% of new arrivals in the year ending in July 2011.

It puts non-Hispanic white births in the minority for the first time. (BBC)

I'm certain these facts would not please Dixon. What I want to highlight here, though, is the fact that Dixon used "sentimental love plots" to express his beliefs. This is true not just of The Leopard's Spots but also of The Clansman, in which:

The southern male hero is more virile and attractive than his northern counterparts, and the northern heroine (Elsie Stoneman) is wooed from her infatuation with the unnatural doctrines of racial equality (espoused by her father) by her desire to love and be loved by the manly southerner. Elsie's father, the leader of the Radicals, is physically deformed, with "explains" his hatred of the healthy southern male and his desire to cripple and deform the southern race through miscegenation. (Slotkin 188)

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Meljean Brook's Riveted is a direct response from the romance genre to Dixon, but in her acknowledgments Brook pays tribute to

Monica Jackson, who fought to turn the world around: You flipped some of us. I truly believe that everyone else will follow, someday. I just wish that you were here to see it.

Monica, who died in May 2012, was outspoken about the racism in romance:

I've written many words on why black racial separation is so prevalent in romance. My favorite theory is that it's the nature of the romance genre. Romance is fantasy-based. Readers are notoriously picky about their settings and having sympathetic characters that they can relate to them. Also, majority romance readers have plenty of romance novels to choose. There's no shortage of books, so why should a reader take the trouble to venture outside their comfort zone and spend money on something that may not appeal? No black romance author gets major buzz in the majority romance community compared with the buzz, awards and recognition white authors receive, so where do they start?

These are a few of the reasons, but figuring out how to address the issue of segregation in romance and thinking about how to go about changing it, is a daunting task. Race is an uncomfortable and taboo subject to discuss on nearly any level by almost anybody, black or white. Desegregating any institution in this country has always been a monumental struggle. (All About Romance)

I think Brook's Riveted can be read as her small contribution to that struggle, and one which she extends so that it also challenges discrimination on the basis of gender, disability and sexual orientation. The novel suggests that it is because of prejudice that "it is not usually what we think of ourselves that makes our lives harder or easier; too often, it is what others think of you" (267).

Jackie C. Horne has argued that the novel "proves not to be a meditation on gender roles, for Brook takes for granted the equality of the sexes that Gilman and feminists in the 1960s and 70s could only imagine." This is largely true, because the heroine of the novel comes from an all-female society and works as an engineer on an airship captained by a woman. However, the "New World" is rife with sexism: in Manhattan City, for example, "exposing a bare ankle or elbow earned a rebuke and a trip in a paddy wagon back to the port's gates, where her salacious behavior was reported to Captain Vashon and the airship threatened with docking sanctions" (4). There:

without a man's name behind hers, a woman had very little. Even many of the female scientists [...] had to secure the approval of their husbands or fathers before pursuing their chosen field, and were sometimes forced to abandon that pursuit when other demands were made of them. There were exceptions, of course - there were always exceptions - but it was a sobering realization. (276)

One could make the case that, to an even greater extent, Riveted "proves not to be a meditation on race." Certainly Annika, the heroine, is "marked [...] by the darkness of her skin" (13) and although she doesn't know who her biological parents were, it's possible that she is "a descendant of the Africans who'd fled across the ocean to escape the Horde" (55). David, the hero, is half "native" (154):

Many of my father's people were among those who converted when the Europeans first came. My name - Kentewess - identifies me as one. When I was a boy living in the east, reclaiming of the old ways had just begun, so I didn't think of it much. But when we moved to the mountain builders' city [...], many of those around us took great pride in never having converted, never having lost history to Europeans. And when I was with the other boys, I would do everything I could to avoid mentioning my name, and gave them instead the name of an ancestor. I'd ask my father for legends, for tales - not even to truly honor them, but because knowing them make it easier to not feel ... European. (155)

Racial differences are noted, then, and do have an impact on how the characters are perceived, but what more often seems to set Annika apart are her colourful clothes and her "lack of proper sensibilities" (61). With David what mostly sets him apart are his prosthetics. He has a prosthetic hand "grafted on so that the steel contraption had become a working part of his body" (11), "mechanical legs" (23) and "Pale scars raked the left side of his face, with several wide, ragged stripes running diagonally from forehead to cheek [...] And [...] some sort of optical contraption [...] had been embedded into his temple, which shielded his left eye with a dark, reflective lens" (12). It sets him apart from others and at eighteen he'd "confused loving [...] with being grateful that someone would touch him without disgust" (121-22), only to discover that "she'd loved him for what he couldn't do, not what he could" (122). Years later, David knows that

There would always be the Emilys who kissed him out of pity, the women who flinched away in disgust. There would always be those with good intentions. It made David more grateful for rare men like Dooley, who took him as he was - and for women like Annika, who seemed to. (122)

Another possible response to disability, and the one expressed by the villain of the novel, is to use the disabled as an inspiration:

"Men like him [i.e. David] have had to fight harder than all of us, every day [...] It should be a lesson to the rest of us, to remember how our lives could be much more difficult. We need to be thankful for what we have [...]."

[...] David didn't want to be a hero, or a lesson. Just a goddamn man. People treating him like less or more than one made his life more difficult than losing his legs ever had. (145)

David's mother came from Hannasvick, a secret Islandic village populated only by women but since a

community couldn't continue without children, [...] some women left to lie with men, and returned with a girl - or empty-handed, if the baby had been a boy that they left with his father. Some of the women remained away, choosing to stay with their sons. Others, like Annika's mother, took in a child stolen from Horde territories or the New World. (97)

This, however, is not the reason why Annika believes that the village must remain a secret, even from David:

Annika had seen what would happen to her people if the New World descended on them. She'd seen men hanged for less than what the women had done for years. She would never expose them to the ugliest part of the New World, the part that transformed love into sickness and sin.

Not everyone in the New World believed the same; perhaps David Kentewess wouldn't, either. If she told him about the love shared between her mother and his aunt, about so many of the others who'd made their lives together in her village, maybe he wouldn't show the same disgust. But Annika couldn't know how he would react. (101-102)

It is, however, someone else who states that "Something is wrong in them, Annika, and what you see isn't love. It's just lust" (175). Annika argues with this individual but since Annika herself has never found "a woman who stirred her passion [...] - and she hadn't met any men to do it, either. Until David" (163), in our world she would probably be classified as an "ally" of lesbian, gay and bisexual people rather than as someone who was herself lesbian or bisexual. Annika herself wonders about the extent to which she is committed to being an "ally" for although she believes she would be willing to defend her lesbian or bisexual friends and relatives if their lives were at risk, she is less sure she would risk her own life

"[...] For something [...] I think it's harder to die for something you believe in. To stand up and to say that something else is wrong. I said it to my friend, but would I shout it aboard this ship? I don't know. I'd be too afraid of what would happen to me, because so many think as she does. I hate myself for this."

"When you're surrounded by stupidity, self-preservation isn't a sin."

"Refusing to challenge that stupidity and letting it continue might end up hurting someone you love, later. I'd die to protect them, but not to tell people that I've kissed a woman, too?"

Alarmed, David shook his head. Though he agreed with her in principle, he'd be the first to knock her off the pulpit if she intended to shout it from the deck. If she intended to risk herself, to stand for her people, he'd be there with her - but there had to be better ways of going about it. (180-81)

The question of how to "go about it" is raised again, this time in the context of poverty, and David argues that

"If you broke every stupid rule in the New World simply because it was stupid, you'd never have time for anything else."

"I should choose one or two that matter, then." Though she wore a faint smile, her gaze remained serious. "If I had been caught [giving money to the starving so that they could buy some food], died for it - perhaps someone would realize how stupid it is to die for a few coins. If enough people recognized it, they could make a change. But I didn't risk anything. And when I was stopped by the port officer, I thought, Who would come help me? I wouldn't even risk giving money to the hungry. [...]" (182)

Later in the novel Annika does take a risk to free others, and it does indeed "make a change." Her question, "Who would come help me?" reminds me of pastor Martin Niemöller's statement which exists in various versions: he "may have thought first of the Communists, then the disabled, then Jews, and finally countries conquered by Germany" (Marcuse) but the version which, according to Wikipedia, is most commonly cited in the US, is:

First they came for the socialists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak for me. (Wikipedia)

Riveted may speak out more loudly on some issues than on others, but it seems to imply that all of us need to speak out against prejudice. Firstly, because it's the right thing to do, but also because all of us may one day face prejudice: as Annika suggests, "I suppose there is always something to make us different. I wonder if anyone at all ever feels at home" (314). As Annika and her mother acknowledge:

"It won't be easy, rabbit."

"No. It will take a long time, I think. But we can start small, here. And never back down." (388)

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BBC. "Non-Hispanic US White Births Now the Minority in US." 17 May 2012.

Brook, Meljean. Riveted. London: Penguin, 2012.

"Controversial History: Thomas Dixon and the Klan Trilogy." Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004.

Horne, Jackie C. "Lesbiian Allies, Heterosexual Romance: Meljean Brook's Riveted." Romance Novels for Feminists. 20 Nov. 2012.

Jackson, Monica. "What It's Like." Section of "Racism in Romance?" ed. Laurie Gold. All About Romance. 15 Oct. 2005.

Marcuse, Harold. "Martin Niemöller's famous quotation: 'First they came for the Communists ...' What did Niemoeller himself say? Which groups did he name? In what order?" Webpage created 12 Sept. 2000 and last updated 24 Feb 2012.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. 1992. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.

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The cover image on the left (showing David as well as Annika) is the US version. The one on the right is of the UK cover. Brook has written that:

Cover art matching the contents is always iffy, unfortunately. And I think the girl on the cover [of the US edition] is darker, but the lighting/ice ends up washing her out. I saw some of the original stills from the photo shoot, and she was more obviously not-white, which was pretty awesomely thrilling. So I think the model was good. Then desaturation and lighting was added to make it look like they were on location, and then end result was all-over lighter. The UK cover ends up being closer in that respect.

In "The Empire of Romance: Love in a Postcolonial Climate" (in End of Empire and the English novel since 1945) Deborah Philips writes that,

For Mills & Boon writers and readers of the 1950s, South Africa was not the country of apartheid, but rather [...] 'the colourful, romantic background of South Africa'. South Africa may have been presented as exotically 'colourful' to British readers of Mills & Boon, yet the writers were notably reticent on the subject of colour. Mills & Boon had a large market in South Africa, and the editors were careful of white South African sensibilities. A mixed race romance could not be countenanced in novels set in South Africa nor, indeed, anywhere else in the Mills & Boon world. [...] The heroes and heroines of these novels were uncompromisingly white, as was their social world. Alan Paton's excoriating account of life in South Africa, Cry the Beloved Country, which had been published in 1948 (and filmed in 1951), made the iniquities of apartheid starkly apparent to a wide readership. Even so, the political context of contemporary South Africa was firmly positioned beyond the boundaries of what the romantic novel in the postwar world could discuss. (Philips 118)

That this was a deliberate decision on the part of Mills & Boon is made clear by the fact that "One Mills & Boon author, Alex Stuart, was taken to task for writing a sympathetic anti-apartheid character" (Philips 120). The episode is described in some detail by Joseph McAleer:

In 1964 [Alan] Boon asked Alex Stuart for major changes to her latest manuscript, entitled The Scottish Soldier. In her submission letter, Stuart realized that there might be problems with this novel. 'Please understand that I want Mills & Boon to publish this one very much but I know your reputation for publishing "pleasant books" is of great value to you and, of course, wouldn't want to damage this,' she told Boon. The problem concerned Stuart's insistence that the heroine's father act as a crusader in race relations in Lehar, a fictional African nation. He publishes a book demanding equal rights for black people, and targets South Africa and its apartheid laws. This was hardly the stuff of a Mills & Boon novel, Stuart admitted, and at first she did offer a change in background:

[...] I could (with difficulty) make the father an American who got involved in the Colour Question in one of the Southern States - do we care about American sales? Personally, I think that having the book banned in S. Africa because it was anti-apartheid ought to increase its sales elsewhere but this is your province, not mine. ... This is the sort of 'romantic' novel I am now hoping to be able to write (Occasionally, not all the time) as I believe it to be the kind which must come in the future, if the romantic novel is to hold its new, young readers and go forward, rather than backward. (169)

In the end Stuart was unwilling to make the major changes Boon required and "decided to speed up work on her next Mills & Boon novel" which she described as "a safe Mills & Boon straight-jacketed [sic] novel" (McAleer 270).

Kathryn Blair's The House at Tegwani (1950) was one of the books set in Africa which was approved by Boon. Deborah Philips notes that in it "The few black characters whom Sandra [the heroine] does encounter are all servants, and these are, without exception, described as 'cheerful' and loyal to their white employers" (119) and

The 'abodes' of the black South Africans themseves, their 'native dwellings', are kept remote and at a safe distance from Sandra and from the small white settler town of Pietsburg. This geographical distance would conform to the segregated racial areas which had become ever more rigid after the 1948 election, although these developments are never mentioned. The 'native shacks' instead become picturesque elements in an exoticised and distant South African landscape:

Shrub-crusted veld, with here and there a few cattle gathered at a waterhole or a huddle of native shacks in the midst of which a fire burned and a hanging pot boiled, so that steam merged with the twig smoke and rose into the richly coloured evening sky.

Here, the 'natives' are rendered invisible, their own domestic lives literally turned into smoke. (120)

However, what seems "pleasant" in one era, and to one group of readers, may not seem quite so pleasant at another time or to other groups of readers and so, although

the South Africa of the early 1950s could be presented as reassuringly white [...] by the 1960s it had become a more uneasy setting for a British heroine. [...] Alan Boon [...] described a concern among editors of women's magazines of the period - Mills & Boon novels were often sold as magazine serialisations - that politics might intrude upon the romance:

I find there is a certain nervousness in some serial quarters about using the African background. I think some of the editors may be worried that there might be political trouble just as they are running the serial. In my view, it would not matter if that did occur. (Philips 122)

Of course, one might well retort that apartheid constituted "political trouble" which was already occurring. Boon may have been prepared to overlook that, but presumably the financial power of the magazine editors did have some effect: he advised at least one of his authors "to set her novels somewhere other than South Africa. She cheerfully moved her locations to other African settings, interchangeable in their exoticism and foreignness" (122).

Next week I'll be taking a look at Meljean Brook's Riveted (2012) which one could perhaps describe as a romance of "the kind which must come in the future, if the romantic novel is to hold its new, young readers and go forward, rather than backward."

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McAleer, Joseph. Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Philips, Deborah. “The Empire of Romance: Love in a Postcolonial Climate.” End of Empire and the English Novel Since 1945. Ed. Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011. 114-133.

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The image of the Mills & Boon reader comes from the inner back cover flap of one of my Mills & Boons. It was published in 1961, and I've included it because it makes it clear what Alex Stuart was alluding to when she referred to "your reputation for publishing 'pleasant books'."

I've not had a particularly productive week, and that goes as much for writing blog posts as it does for doing research. I have, though, been commenting at length on a thread at Dear Author about defining "romance." There may possibly be some correlation between those two statements, but it probably has more to do with being the sole adult in the house for three days this week, with sole responsibility for ensuring that my offspring was suitably fed, clothed, delivered to school on time, etc. That may not make up a large part of the "happy ever after" for Regency Dukes and Duchesses, or for billionaire tycoons and their spouses, but it's probably part of the daily routine of family life for a lot of romance readers.

It's generally agreed that part of the definition of a romance is that it must include a happy ending. Readers are supposed to believe that the protagonists will remain sentient and in love with each other for the forseeable future. Given that children are sometimes secondary characters, and authors often provide baby-filled epilogues, it seems that many of those happy endings will involve the formation of happy families. And so I suspect that a lot of romance authors would probably disagree that

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)

Of course a happy family wouldn't cause the suffering which seems a prerequisite for the creation of tormented heroes and martyred heroines (there don't seem to be so many martyred heroes and tormented heroines) so perhaps it could be argued that a lot of romance authors do think that happy families are alike, inasmuch as they don't provide a lot of material for a plot?  On the other hand, other authors seem to have found that (relatively) happy families provide plenty of fodder for sequels. They can be ideal in a light-hearted, humorous romance (or series of romances), although possibly not if Mary Burchell is right in thinking that

"the kind of good-humoured nonsense which is peculiar to every happy family [...] [is]  almost entirely incomprehensible to all others" (Mary Burchell, The Other Linding Girl)

It's not going to do an author much good if her happy family's dialogue is incomprehensible to readers.

So what do you think? Are happy families less interesting and/or do they lend themselves to lighter, more humorous romances?

The image came from PDK Board Games and I hope they won't mind given that I'm linking back to them.