Beyond Heaving Bosoms

by Sarah Wendell

  The heroine, she is a tricky woman to be. Look at the plethora of women operating in isolation in historical romances. Look at the number of contemporary romance heroines who have a saucy sidekick best friend who is a foil or even a villainess in disguise more than an actual best friend. Kleypas agrees, especially regarding her Wallflower Quartet books, which featured interconnected stories of four heroines who were very close friends:

  The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that I could really do something with a female-based series. At that time, I had gotten involved with a group of writer friends who became a powerful force in my own life…. I adore each of them individually, but also the group dynamics were amazing. Women together as a group can be more than the sum of their parts—the creative energy, the humor, the personal and professional insights, were sort of stunning to me.

  And I realized as I considered the wallflower idea, that the heroine in historical romance novels is often remarkably isolated. Which was not true at all in real life…back then, women could not survive without each other, and women’s friendships were deep and lifelong and essential. So the idea of a romance novel heroine having a problem or question, taking it back to her friends, getting their take on it, or at least getting their emotional support, was very exciting. (And so natural!) My publisher expressed some doubt about the viability of a female-oriented series, but they did let me go through with it. And I think it surprised a lot of people that I would write something like this, because I’ve sort of become known for writing strong heroes.

  There’s no way of knowing for sure, but I think the wallflower readers really seemed to feel that these heroines were their friends, too, and they had the sense of familiarity and comfort of “visiting” with them. It made the placeholding “bigger” in each subsequent wallflower novel, because readers had the experience of living each heroine’s story and also experiencing her as a friend.

  The isolation of the heroine may contribute to the degree to which readers identify with her, but the clichéd degree of the heroine’s isolation is almost comical. The variations are numerous: she’s an iconoclastic bluestocking historical miss who wants autonomy in a world that won’t permit it. She’s miserable for personal/family reasons, regardless of time period. She’s a contemporary heroine who wants home and hearth when the urban pressure is to Be Something (not Someone) and Have a Career, etc. She’s a paranormal heroine who is Set Apart by Superpowers or an Insatiable Need to Get It On Till the Break of Dawn. Whatever the reason, heroines are often all by themselves.

  But then, consider the lukewarm twinkle of the average romance heroine. Kleypas calls her a “creature of moderation.” A romance heroine is like the ideal porridge for Goldilocks, if Goldilocks is a romance reader and the porridge is the heroine’s role as placeholder. Not too hot, not too cold, not too tall, not too fat, not too smart, certainly not stupid, not driven by greed, not driven by any historical accuracy as pertains to gender politics, not at all sexually aware, and a perfectly nice, vanilla creation of moderation and perfection that easily enables the reader, if the reader identifies with the heroine, to slip into her role and embark upon her own romance, again and again and again.

  Kleypas adds:

  I’ve heard some readers comment that they adore it when a heroine’s flaws match their own, but everyone seems to get a little “itchy,” so to speak, when we get a little too close to reality. The fairy tale, and therefore that necessary touch of idealization, can’t be threatened. Or else the whole point of the romance is lost. And then that leads to the question of how realistic you can be without breaking the spell. No one wants to read about a woman’s hairy legs, or morning breath, or what the Victorians politely called “bodily exhalations.” Sweat seems to be okay, but it is often described as “clean sweat.”

  What I do rather like is that when a modern woman reads a historical romance, she gives herself “permission” to experience being protected, pampered, even sexually dominated without any guilt. The historical context sort of lets us relax and enjoy the ride, correctness be damned. A historical heroine is never responsible for her own orgasm. That is truly nice, isn’t it?

  I don’t select my books based on placeholder heroines. I’m more likely to seek a dynamic interplay of theories of sexual agency, autonomy, and dichotomous evolution.”

  This sort of escape is hardly unique to women-centered fiction. Readers engage in a similar species of escape when they pick up a military thriller, in which the grizzled hero performs physically impossible feats of badassery, totes around more firepower than all the countries ending instan put together, and gets a nubile young thing (or twenty) along the way. And yet women take all kinds of crap and heat, or heated crap, for the escapist elements of romance fiction, as if men reading military thrillers or folks reading mysteries don’t escape into a world where the bad guy gets it in the end, or in the head, or both, and the whodunnit becomes a matter of the butler doing it (not in the erotica sense, in the felonious sense).

  Discussions of romance reader identification become a minefield, simply because they open the door for people to discredit our intelligence, to accuse women of needing that emotional escape from their fiction because they have to be the heroine in order to merely enjoy the story. This ignores the different ways other readers respond to the texts, because while it seems clear that many readers do identify strongly with the heroine, some readers identify with the hero, while others identify with both while simultaneously remaining removed.

  However, examining how readers react to fiction is particularly prescient when examining romance simply because women buy millions of goddamn dollars’ worth of it, despite being denigrated for doing so, despite the accusations that it’s all the same pornography in the end, etc. Serious questions about what attraction romance holds for readers are as valid as any other examination, so onward we go.

  Nora Roberts discussed this in an interview with us.

  NORA ROBERTS: I really think it just depends on the reader. I’m trying to think if, as a reader, I identify more with either of the mains, and I don’t think I do. For me, it’s the couple and the relationship—so as a reader and a writer—I identify with both. Or don’t if the book doesn’t grab me.

  I think, if I had to do a sweeping generalization, I’d say most female readers ID with the heroine, but want to fall in love with—or at least feel attracted to—the hero. He is absolutely essential for the reader’s enjoyment and emotional investment of the book. She is essential as, I think, the reader must understand and respect her, even if they don’t identify with her.

  SARAH: But if the reader, in your sweepy generalization, identifies with the heroine but falls in love with the hero, that would make the heroine more of a placeholder for the reader, unless I’m reading you wrong.

  I’m a weird reader, I’ve decided. I don’t identify with the heroine much, though I empathize with her. Mostly I start rooting for the both of them, and look for that emotional pull (if the book has grabbed me) that makes me care and cheer on both of them. I hover over the action like a benevolent nosy ghost.

  NORA ROBERTS: Exactly how it is for me. I guess, in my sweeping generalization, “empathize” is a better word indeed than “identify.” I think as women, most will FEEL more what the writer causes the heroine to feel. Understand it more, maybe. I know, absolutely, some readers need to BE the heroine. I had a reader (who regularly wrote many of us the same thing) who asked, month after month for a “black-haired virgin heroine.” She preferred it when she was paired with a blond hero. And, of course, explained that she had black hair, had been a virgin on her wedding night, and her husband was blond.

  She took it way over the top.

  While Sarah “hovers like a benevolent ghost,” Candy dubs her particular reading style the Homunculus Theory of Reader Identification: she inhabits both the hero and heroine’s spaces while remaining somewhat separate from them. However, when reading Old Skool romances, this ceases to be true because
she identifies more with the heroine. As she was trying to figure out why—it’s not as if she likes these heroines very much, because she doesn’t—it hit her: it’s because the hero’s worldview is presented as the implicitly correct one, and the implicit worldview in Old Skool romances, especially as embodied by the hero, is one she finds repugnant.

  So who does she end up rooting for and identifying with? The character who’s struggling against the worldview, the one who’s actively trying to defy it: the heroine. Unfortunately, the heroine inevitably succumbs to the hero’s normative view, and it’s part of the reason why Old Skool romances, more than just about any other type of literature, infuriate Candy. The worldview she despises is affirmed as being dominant and right and just, over and over and over again—and not only that, but ideal and desirable as well. Her frustration with the characters goes beyond not liking them because they don’t behave in ways that she thinks a heroic character should—because she’s able to tolerate considerable variation in heroic behavior, running from genuinely sweet protagonists such as Christy Morrell from To Love and to Cherish or Sara Fielding from Dreaming of You to darker, more complicated characters like Sheridan Drake from Seize the Fire and Sebastian Verlaine from To Have and to Hold. Her rejection of the characters is rooted in her distaste for the fictional universe and the real-world values they represent.

  Sebastian from To Have and to Hold, in particular, illustrates how a rapist hero can eventually be redeemed. When Sebastian forces Rachel to have sex with him, he’s dissolute and bored, but his conscience already bothers him somewhat. The cognitive dissonance eventually becomes too loud to ignore when he sees one of his friends treating her the way he has, and he genuinely reforms his attitude and behavior toward Rachel. In To Have and to Hold, while the hero still holds considerably more power than the heroine, his actions are not implicitly endorsed by the worldview presented in the book.

  In Old Skool romances and people who love Old Skool romances, the readers may not necessarily be identifying with the hero, thereby making his actions palatable; the readers may be buying into the idea that his worldview is correct, and therefore assuring themselves that everything will turn out for the best even when he treats the heroine with brutality. The power of the Happily Ever After allows readers to put up with a lot of bad behavior because it’s ultimately all for a good cause. The readers, from their superior vantage point, can interpret the hero’s actions as evidence of his love/attraction for the heroine, even when the heroine, from her limited point of view, misinterprets the signals egregiously and acts accordingly. These readers may identify with the heroine, but they are at the same time separate from her by virtue of their superior knowledge.

  All this talk of reader identification has to separate Old Skool romances from the newer forms, however, because the heroines and the range of acceptable behavior are so different. Identification with the Old Skool heroine is, in some ways, easier, because she’s often quite clearly set up as the more vulnerable party, and it’s often easier to identify with the victims than with predators or people in positions of power. Perhaps part of the reason why the heroines are so tooth-hurtingly feisty in the Old Skool novels is to lessen the victim dynamic somewhat, to make it seem as if they’re giving as good as they get, and that the hero’s acts in taming and dominating her are justified. This dynamic—whether consciously created or not—comes across especially strongly in books like Island Flame by Karen Robards, in which the heroine is extremely combative and shrill.

  But then Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s “The Romance and the Empowerment of Women” in Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women demonstrates just how very subjective the reader experience can be. Phillips argues that Old Skool romance novels portray the heroines giving as good as they get; Candy views their struggles as futile because in most of the ways that matter, the hero gets to win after a token resistance from the heroine. Phillips sees the Old Skool romances as empowering; Candy sees them as reinforcing the old order. And there’s plenty of room for both interpretations in the text.

  Chapter Codpiece

  THE ROMANCE HERO

  It’s not easy, being a romance novel hero. An ever-changing multi-faceted depiction of manhood, the hero is a male specimen designed to ignite the fantasies and flame the undying passions of all females within his vicinity. Heroes have a hard row to hoe (if you know what we mean, and we think you do), and that’s before they get around to tackling the heroine, both literally and figuratively. All that, and they have to get the readers’ motors running.

  Our Top Favorite Heroes

  SARAH:

  Lyon, The Lion’s Lady, Julie Garwood. Julie Garwood’s older historicals give me the happy shivers. I love them like I love icing on cupcakes. Lyon in particular is tormented, and has been betrayed deeply by his first wife. And when the heroine, Christina, starts lying left and right to him and he knows it, he doesn’t immediately cast her in the exact same mold as his first wife (thus giving himself an excuse to be a complete douche bag). He’s driven to understand why she won’t trust him and, in doing so, earns her trust while giving her his own.

  Grayson Thane, Born in Ice, Nora Roberts. Misanthrope ahoy! Grayson Thane is a curmudgeonly and very successful mystery writer who, when in the throes of a really solid story idea, hides away in his room and growls and throws things at anyone who dares interrupt him. Intelligent intensity = hawwt.

  Ethan Quinn, Rising Tides, Nora Roberts. Another Roberts hero. I love them. A quiet yet deeply intense man who hides turbulent and overwhelming emotions, Ethan is ferocious about a very specific group: those people whom he considers his family. Again, that intensity, plus healing and recovery from deep emotional harm, creates a deeply memorable hero.

  Hawk, Midsummer Magic, Catherine Coulter. It’s not just that this is the first romance I ever read, though that nostalgia is part of the allure. Hawk is autocratic, somewhat cruel to his new bride, and I won’t mention the cream factor, but Coulter involves the reader in Hawk’s backstory enough that the reader sees he’s trying his best to live up to expectations, and at heart is a noble, caring person who doesn’t want to love his wife but ends up doing so. I’m a total sucker for the “I don’t wanna love you. I don’t wanna like you. I can’t stop thinking about your hair, dammit!” storyline.

  CANDY:

  Christy, To Love and to Cherish, Patricia Gaffney. Christy is incredibly sexy because he’s that rarest of creatures in modern fiction: a hero who’s good-hearted to the core while never being preachy, boring, or a paragon of every holy virtue envisioned in the fevered dreams of Christian saints. He’s sincere, he’s funny, he writes the most hilariously atrocious love poetry to show his devotion to Anne, and he looks like an angel. How can I not love him? Plus, there’s that edge of “Woo, forbidden sex with the pastor.”

  Michael, Wild at Heart, Patricia Gaffney. Part of the reason Michael is on this list is because he fulfills all of my “I want to marry Mowgli when I grow up” fantasies. Part of it’s also because I have a hard-on the size of Alpha Centauri for virgin heroes. But if I had to give the core reason why Michael appeals to me that much, it’s because nobody knows how to combine sweet and sexy the way Gaffney can; Michael’s sweetness is tempered by his wildness, and Gaffney makes it clear that he can be dangerous—he just chooses, almost every time, not to be.

  Justin, Only with Your Love, Lisa Kleypas. Justin is my favorite guilty pleasure. He’s an Old Skool hero, except he’s also written by Lisa Kleypas, which means all his infuriating, rapey, alpha bits are more than compensated for by his angsty, sensitive, nurturing side. He’s my ultimate fantasy hero, and by that, I mean he’s someone I desire strictly as a fantasy. If I met him in real life, I’d be running for a restraining order. If he were a contemporary hero, he’d probably be a rock star, fucking groupies, guzzling red wine and Vicodin, and trashing hotel rooms. Instead, he’s a Louisiana pirate with a tormented soul, which is miles more appealing to read about.

  Sheridan, Seize the Fire, Laura
Kinsale. Sheridan Drake is the perfect example of a hero I enjoy reading about, and whom I find completely compelling, but whom I don’t desire in the least—he’s the only hero on this list I don’t have a bit of a crush on. He’s extremely damaged, what with his awful father and his experiences in the Navy, and God knows nobody writes appealing damaged protagonists better than Laura Kinsale, but more than that, he’s incredibly self-aware, and his deeply (and I mean deeply) buried gallant streak shows up at just the right times.

  Alex, Anyone But You, Jennifer Crusie. Alex seems to be, at first blush, a fairly typical contemporary hero specimen: he’s good-looking, he’s a doctor, he’s crazy about the heroine. What makes him stand out, however, is his lack of ambition to be the Most Bad-Ass Surgeon Ever in Some Impossibly Difficult and High-Demand Specialty. He’s an ER doctor, he’s really good at it, and he’s happy and satisfied with that. After an overdose of angsty heroes who have to dominate in every way and in every aspect of their lives, Alex is a startling (and really sexy) breath of fresh air. And he loves Mystery Science Theater 3000. For that alone, he deserves a spot on the list.

  The romance novel hero is subject to many conflicted interpretations and misunderstandings more than other types of genre heroes because not only is he rewarded with the girl, he’s often held up as the ideal man for a romantic relationship as if the fiction were a template for reality. For example: the über-alpha hero, who is so alpha it’s a wonder he doesn’t gnaw on parked cars. Why is it that romance readers can tolerate any number of crazed behaviors from a romance hero, whereas if a real-life dude did one-tenth of a hero’s dastardly deeds, not the least of which is raping the heroine, she’d be calling 911 faster than you can say “restraining order”? What is it about the hero who fascinates us enough that we’ll forgive him anything?