Beyond Heaving Bosoms

by Sarah Wendell

  First, there’s the fantasy element. Women are not dumb. We know we’re reading fiction, so the supposition that we’re not able to separate fantasy from reality and that we’d tolerate in reality what we enjoy in fantasy is somewhat insulting. There’s a certain amount of enticing power in the man so manly, his own shadow takes a dump in fear of him. Considering the multiple roles modern women can embrace in a given twenty-four-hour period—mother, wife, daughter, manager, administrator, chauffeur, employee, employer, lover, chef, parent, partner, volunteer, breadwinner, bread maker, bread toaster, bread eater—the fantasy of an overbearing hero can represent for some women devotion, attraction, and protection instead of bullying. As Lisa Kleypas remarked to us, there’s something incredibly seductive about a man saying, in all respects, from the management of the home to the management of her orgasm, “Don’t worry about a thing. I’m on it.”

  The Three Most Fucked-Up Things

  Heroes Have Done and Gotten Away With; or,

  You Think We’re Joking, But Holy Shit, We So Are Not

  It’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the hero and the villain in a romance novel. Near as we can tell, the most reliable indicator seems to be dental hygiene. (The motto of the International Coalition of Villains: Flossing Is for Pussies!) That, and the fact that the hero actually gets away with his stunts instead of being killed in some horrible fashion by the end of the book. Some romances push the envelope a lot harder than others, though, and here are three we’ve stumbled across in real novels that made our jaws drop:

  Deliberately seducing (or raping—hard to tell the difference sometimes) the heroine, marrying her, and then abandoning her, all because her father wronged the hero or the hero’s family in the past. (The only thing more fucked-up than this storyline is how popular they used to be—they popped up with strange regularity in old Harlequin novels.)

  Marrying the heroine to another man, only to dismiss the erstwhile groom on the wedding night so he could rape the heroine.

  Kidnapping the heroine on the day before her wedding to another man and raping her so that she’d have no choice but to marry him.

  The romance novel heroes’ attempts at control and domination, in Old Skool romances especially, usually result in antagonism, not happiness—at least, not until the end of the book. Part of the heroic association with control can be explained by the nature of storytelling. Conflict is by far more interesting to read and vicariously experience than quiet contentment. If the hero wrenched control from the heroine by, say, forcing her to sit and relax with a good book while he vacuumed and did the dishes, there wouldn’t be much of a story there, even if these sorts of partners are highly valued in real life.

  But the other part has its roots in the hypertrophied masculinity exhibited by many romance novel heroes. Romance novel heroes must have the Biggest and Best Schlong of All in both figurative and literal terms. In many ways, the violence and wrenching of power away from the heroine in Old Skool romance novels function not only to drive the conflict, but to pump up the cock. Once his cock is metaphorically big enough, we begin to see the restoration of power toward the heroine, and the subjugation and taming of the hero that, while complete, never hints at emasculation. Romance novel heroes often show how much they care in big, showy gestures, like saving the heroine from certain death; small domestic gestures that might come across as womanish, such as cleaning the house after she’s had a difficult day, will rarely show themselves.

  Additionally, power and an edge of danger are always sexy—but they’re especially sexy when attached to the security of a happy ending. The happy ending allows readers to relax fully into the story and to trust that no matter how badly things are going, events will eventually turn out for the best.

  Then there’s the theory first explained in detail by Laura Kinsale in “The Androgynous Reader: Point of View in the Romance,” collected in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, which posits that it’s not just the heroine whom the reader is interacting with, but the hero as well. It’s not a question of gender switching, in which the female reader envisions herself in the hero’s masterful, possibly lordly pants. It’s more a question of using the hero to embrace the more “masculine” elements of her own personality—the strength, domination, aggression, and power which identify the alpha hero, and which aren’t always so welcome in women. The reader can embrace and identify with the hero because she “can experience the sensation of living…with masculine power and grace…can explore anger and ruthlessness and passion and pride and honor and gentleness and vulnerability.”

  Kinsale also theorizes that the happy ending is a fictional manifestation of the daily “integration of the inner self” that men and women go through as they reconcile their present lives with what might have been, and confront “turning away from adventure, from autonomy” and “mourn the loss” of that fantasy. She continues, “Romance novels aren’t the only manifestations of this fact. Pro football, male-buddy movies, and men’s genre fiction all exist for a reason.”

  Kinsale’s essay was penned over ten years ago, and when we asked her if her theory holds up today, she said:

  I’m not a big fan of the alpha terminology. When I wrote the essay, I asked myself why the reader might be so interested in getting inside the hero’s experience, and came up with my theory that it’s a way for women to explore the elements in themselves that are traditionally called “masculine” in our culture. I certainly believe any woman—and any heroine—can have courage, honor, pride and all those attributes that are typically considered masculine, and I’d like to think most of the heroines I’ve written exhibit all of them. Romance readers do seem to judge heroines by a more intense standard. But then, often that’s the way it is in real life—we see what we want to see regarding the opposite sex when we’re in love.

  What’s truly bodacious about Kinsale’s essay is that it identifies outright that for many romance readers, the romance novel itself hinges on the hero. As she says: “The man carries the book.” If the heroine is too stupid to live, disappointing, cardboard or otherwise objectionable, a great hero can keep the reader invested in the book. It’s quite a hefty responsibility, really, that whole damn book. Screw Atlas—romance heroes have it hard. Literally.

  Jungian analysis of romance novels supports the idea that the hero represents a self of the reader/female heroine—the Jungian shadow archetype, to be precise.* According to Amber Botts, who wrote “Cavewoman Impulses: The Jungian Shadow Archetype in Popular Romantic Fiction” for the anthology Romantic Conventions, Jung identified several specific “archetypes…common to all people,” and states that “for self-actualization, a person must integrate several archetypes, including the anima, the animus, and the shadow…[which] represents denied anger, greed, envy and sexual desire.” Consider the terminology associated with heroes: darkness, predatory animals, demons, devils, vampires, werewolves—plenty of anger, greed, envy, and sexuality there.

  In romance novels, the heroine heals, tames, or conquers the hero. As Botts writes, heroes “represent the shadow impulses which society frowns upon as inappropriate for women…[and] the integration of impulses for blatant sexuality, anger/aggression, and danger are represented by the shadow hero’s taming.” If the hero is the shadow self of the heroine, and the reader, then her conquest represents that same integration of selves, and that integration is what makes the hero so crucially important, and also what makes the happy ending so satisfying.

  So when we examine all the different types of heroes, and we try to identify and name their influences, we could be examining parts of ourselves. Whether the reader and the heroine alike fantasize about the male hero, or whether the reader partially identifies with him, the romance novel hero is a unique and colorful animal. And when it comes to heroes, two popular categories come up: alpha heroes and beta heroes. These categories are, in some ways, simplistic, because many heroes (especially in romances published in the 1990s and onward) display traits fro
m both, and some types of heroes, like the rogue, don’t fit into either comfortably. However, divvying up the hero pool into alpha, beta, and rogue* does provide a useful analysis tool for looking at the roles heroes play in romance novels.

  The problem with “alpha hero” as a term is that it is strongly associated with the cruel, brutal rapist heroes prevalent in Old Skool romances. At that point, “alpha” and “asshole” are merged and become “alphole.” He’s not merely strong and confident in his power, he’s brutal and cruel in his use of it. So let’s be clear—when we discuss “alpha hero,” we’re talking about strong, dominating, confident men, often isolated, who hold a tortured, tender element within themselves that they rarely let anyone see. We aren’t talking about the cruel duke who rapes the heroine because she flirted with him and therefore clearly asked for it. Alpha does not mean alphole. Alphole heroes are not even remotely to our tastes, and we’d like to toss pointy objects at their heads.

  But one woman’s alpha dreamboat is another woman’s alphole nightmare. Witness the alphole hero list we’ve compiled below. If any part of our book is sure to generate copious amounts of hate mail, we’re pretty sure this is going to be it, because the heroes named are some of the most beloved figures in romance.

  Alphole Heroes We’d Like to Slap Around Some

  Clayton Westmoreland, from Whitney, My Love, by Judith

  McNaught

  Anthony Welles, from Devil’s Embrace, by Catherine Coulter Severin of Langthorne, from Rosehaven, by Catherine Coulter Brandon Birmingham, from The Flame and the Flower, by

  Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

  Jonathan Hale, from Island Flame and Sea Fire, by Karen

  Robards

  Steve Morgan, from Sweet Savage Love, by Rosemary Rogers

  Rome Matthews, from Sarah’s Child, by Linda Howard

  Rhydon Baines, from An Independent Wife, by Linda Howard

  Heathcliff, from Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë (in many

  ways the model of many romance-novel heroes)

  Alpha heroes who aren’t assholes, or who start out assholes and reform before it’s too late or don’t cross into utterly unredeemable territory, or who are sufficiently explained that we can at least understand his assholishness:

  Devon Crandall, from The Windflower, by Laura London

  (Sharon and Tom Curtis)

  Sebastian Ballister, from Lord of Scoundrels, by Loretta Chase

  Derek Craven, from Dreaming of You, by Lisa Kleypas

  Justin Vallerand, from Only with Your Love, by Lisa Kleypas

  The evolution of the hero

  In contrast with the alpha hero, the beta hero is the buddy hero, the best friend, the kindlier, mellower guy. He’s a dude. A nice dude. Witness the pop-culture beta heroes: Chandler Bing from Friends, for example—or just about any young, attractive male protagonist from just about any modern sitcom. And every character ever played by Bill Pullman, ever. Let us not forget the number of beta heroes who ultimately have a more alpha secret side—just about every superhero follows this model, including Spider-Man/Peter Parker and Superman/Clark Kent. The alpha hidden within the beta isn’t so much a separate side of his personality as it is the physical manifestation of what makes the beta hero so great: an unshakable core of pure and stalwart good, so constant and abiding it’s damn near alpha in its strength.

  The problem with beta heroes is that people frequently confuse them with being pussies—or pussy whipped. Concessions of power are often viewed as emasculating. A lack of desire to take power and dominate at every opportunity is also viewed as proof that the wang is neither as heroic or as mighty. Rather tellingly, we’ve read online conversations in which readers argued that scenes showing the hero begging for forgiveness after mistreating the heroic were defeating the point of creating a strong hero in the first place. To these readers, never giving up ground is an important indicator of strength and potency. Our view on this is a bit different: it takes real balls to own your mistake, apologize for the shitty behavior, and make amends. A person who refuses to relinquish one iota of power is too brittle and inflexible to wield true control.

  And then there are the rogue heroes. They’re not commanding and in charge the way the alphas are, and they’re not friendly and effortlessly nurturing the way the betas are. Rogues are usually happy to fade into the background, largely because their activities are more than a little shady and too much scrutiny could make things uncomfortable. Because they’ve had to deal with the darker side of human nature—both theirs and other people’s—they’re often too cynical and self-centered to make good betas. Rogue heroes, even more often than alphas, require healing and redemption—perhaps with copious quantities of seduced Magic Hoo Hoo. When written well, they’re often iconic figures. Han Solo, for example, is a classic rogue, as are many of Anne Stuart’s heroes.

  Romance heroes embody and combine all the different character archetypes, from the action hero to the swashbuckling pirate hero to the ever-popular rake hero, and each hero evolves from the heroes who came before him.*

  Even as that shirt remains unbuttoned but tucked in, the hero, he evolves. We’ve talked a bit…. okay, a lot, about Old Skool romance and New Skool romance and the Very Important differences between them, most notably that people who sling the slurs at the romance are usually basing their presumptions upon their knowledge of Old Skool romance. The same is true of the hero: most of the negative dismissals of the hero come from the poor reputation of the alphole heroes, as that reputation has exceeded their actual life span in the genre. Sure you’ll meet an alphole every now and again, but rarely are there brutally awful heroes such as the early Woodiwiss and Rogers variety.

  But in the current definition of romance, especially the newer historicals, paranormals, and contemporary romances of the past ten to fifteen years, the hero, he has his own journey to fulfill. He better get on it, too. Pamela Regis acknowledges the new role of the hero in A Natural History of the Romance Novel by examining older courtship-centered romances alongside the romance novels of the modern era. When examining the plot elements that make up the romance, she realized that the twentieth-century romance-novel hero has a much greater role to play because, unlike earlier romance novels, the heroines are already “in command of their lives” and as such the novel does not have to focus on the heroines’ journey to maturity:

  When a novel does not have to follow the heroine…to trace her assumption of affective individualism, her acquisition of property or of the partner she chooses, the hero can (and does) step to the fore to assume a much larger place in the narrative…. The hero is much more in evidence, much more a part of the action.

  We take that involvement one step further: whether you agree with the idea of the Jungian shadow self and the integration of selves that is replete with happy endingness, or whether you think that’s complete malarkey and like reading about heroes and heroines in stories of courtship and marriage because it makes you as a reader happy, the fact remains that the modern hero has to earn his happy ending as well, and he has to earn it by growing with the heroine, and adapting and sharing her worldview. Ever hear the old joke about how the responsibility of the wedding is on the bride, and all the groom has to do is show up? Used to be that was the hero’s role—he’d show up. Either he was a catalyst meant to cause the heroine to achieve the main chemical reaction, or he was the standard to which the heroine had to conform in order to fulfill her own happy ending. Now, the hero must face at the very least some kind of journey and resolution alongside the heroine, and thus demonstrate his own worth. Romance readers expect for the most part a hero who will earn his own happy ending.

  So how do heroes earn that happy ending? Taming, or overcoming. Pick one.

  The hero to be tamed or humbled—the Pride and Prejudice model, if you will—is an enticing storyline that reveals itself in so many romance novels, regardless of subgenre. The vampire who must acknowledge the worth of humanity or his own humanity. The Scottish laird who ha
s never had to listen to anyone question his judgment, who must now compromise, even though saying the word leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. The ruthless businessman who decides to forgo a hostile takeover and instead save the company he was about to swallow whole. As soon as the hero gets over himself and recognizes his own false pride and personal flaws, he can achieve his happy ending. The heroine’s role in the taming is often one of strength and self-assurance—“You can try that crap with anyone else, but it is not going to fly with me.”

  A twist on the taming or humbling is the reformation of the hero. Most often, the hero who is tamed or reformed is a rake who will humperate anything with two tits, a hole, and a heartbeat, and is known throughout the land as a profligate slut. But, alas, he’s tormented, the poor rake, by some flaw. Whatever it is that tortures the hero, the heroine is key to his understanding and overcoming that flaw, as he must choose between life as it was, or a chance at a better life with her. Behold, ye, the power of the Magic Hoo Hoo.

  Then there’s the trauma to be overcome—healing, instead of taming or reforming. It’s a subtle but important difference, centered on a situation that is somewhat outside of the hero’s control, and for which he doesn’t have the tools to appropriately conquer. Sometimes the flaw from which the hero must heal is deadly, such as alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, or a paralyzing fear of bees, heights, disorganization, or death. Other plots involve heroes who must grow up in excruciatingly cruel circumstances to become normal functional adults in whatever time period they happen to inhabit. Laura Kinsale, for example, is a master of that particular plot, most notably in The Shadow and the Star, where the hero, who was sold into sexual slavery as a child, grows up and acquires that most valuable of commodities, happiness.

  THE HERO’S WANG OF MIGHTY LOVIN’

  While this is all very maudlin and important, there’s one element that the hero gets right every time. And really, no examination of the hero would be complete without an up-close and personal handshake-and-howdy-doo with the hero’s Mighty Mighty Thunderstick. The role of the Heroic Wang of Mighty Lovin’ is a crucial one in romance novels. The entire fate of the relationship, the heroine’s future as a sexually awakened being, and possibly the future of mankind all hang on the turgid strength of the hero’s man root. He may be suffering quietly through any number of personal or physical afflictions, but damned if he can’t mount up and ride off in a moment’s notice.