Even in present day romances, the men are often lawyers, doctors, and businessmen who own the lien on Pa’s farm, or cowboys, artists, and gamblers—all professions that are thought to be either powerful or cool. However, contemporary romances seldom have the sparkle of their historical cousins. In our modern culture, men and women are basically equal, and there are very few taboos keeping them apart. When it comes to modern day, it is a dry desert out there for romance writers!
Behold the Super Girl!
Not all stories that serve the purpose of culture are bad. One of the tenets of our modern world is that women can excel at everything, and this concept can be great fun. What modern woman has not wished she had the power to kick butt like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or fly like Supergirl? Who has not wished to see a female character who overthrows the inequalities of the earlier ages?
As a child, I scoured the books available but could find few examples of competent women with punk—female characters who had it together, got stuff done, and were not intimidated by life. Lessa of Pern stands out as the single exception. Apparently, I was not alone in this desire, because today’s audiences have welcomed this golden age of butt-kicking heroines with great relish.
Anita Blake is exactly the kind of character I wished to read about when I was in high school. Particularly Anita as she appeared in the early books, when she was chaste and concerned with her integrity. I loved this! So few characters have integrity these days or refuse to sleep around. It was tremendously refreshing. However, like many modern women, Anita was a character who seemed too large—in the “larger than life” sense—for the men of her age. The ordinary humans she worked with were too weak, too slow to keep up with her.
And here finally, we have the fundamental conflict between modern culture and drama. Culture demanded a heroine who is fierce, powerful, and spunky, who lives in a world without taboos where she can do exactly as she pleases. But the needs of drama, the laws that govern what makes a story romantic, require something else entirely: a superior male who lives in a world where taboos separate the heroine from the object of her desire.
Enter The Monster
Enter the paranormal man. He is dark. He is powerful. He is sexy. And he has taboos galore! He is so powerful, he could kill you with a kiss—if he does not hold himself back. As to taboos … well, he is supernatural. This opens the way for the author to invent as many taboos as she pleases: he cannot face the sunlight, cannot come out on the full moon, cannot talk to mortals, cannot this, cannot that, and cannot the other!
A paranormal man, a creature with supernatural powers, is automatically the social superior of any ordinary human in the mind of the reader. True, vampires and werewolves are often outcasts in society, but the moment a superhuman is introduced in a story, fans begin to lose interest in the mundane. They want to find out what is going on in the elite supernatural community.
By turning the romantic hero into a supernatural being, one can have both the glories of a competent powerful heroine, and the taboos and inequalities necessary for a satisfying romance.
When paranormal romances first hit the bookshelves, they came in all flavors: Greek gods and robots wooed their maidens beside their darker counterparts. Now, only a few years later, the darker counterparts, the vampire and the werewolf, have proven to be the breakout stars. Every third book in the romance stacks seems to have blood dripping on its roses.
But why are monsters—vampires, werewolves, demons, and the like—so much more popular as romantic heroes than gods, fairies, and—okay, I can see why robots did not really take off—other less horrific creatures?
Because violence is masculine. The more violent the hero, and the more he is ravaged by desires he cannot control—the desire for blood, the uncontrollable compulsion to turn into a wolf under the full moon—the more excuse for the hero to allow his passions to run away with him, and the greater the heroine’s victory when she ultimately tames him!
Anita in Love
Which brings us back to Anita Blake and her many monster loves.
Nearly everyone I know who reads paranormal romances started with Anita Blake. Some of them read the early Anita books and now look elsewhere for stories that are more squarely in the romance genre. Others still enjoy Anita, but have also branched out, looking for similar types of titles in the romance and fantasy sections of their local bookstore.
In the early Anita books, the romance sizzles! All the elements are present for the ultimate feminine thrill: A chaste heroine. A powerful yet sensuous Master of men and monsters who will stop at nothing to get the girl. A gentler, more thoughtful man who has all the qualities a girl should desire and yet lacks the fascination and edge of the first man. And keeping them apart? Taboos galore!
Jean-Claude cannot come out during the day. He cannot be seen as weak in front of his people. Richard cannot let the general community know he is a werewolf if he wishes to keep his teaching job. Meanwhile, the other wolves want to force him to live up to their codes, which include yet more restrictions on how he should act and comport himself.
It’s ideal! Romantic heaven!
A brief word on the difference between the early and later Anita books: One important aspect of traditional romance is the illusion that the heroine has a true love, that she is planning to pick one of her suitors and give the rest of them the boot. Once the character relinquishes this goal and entertains the notion of keeping many men around on a permanent basis, the story becomes something other than a romance. (I’m not sure what that is, but the Japanese have a genre for stories where a guy lives with a huge group of pretty women whom he cannot seem to choose between. They call them “harem anime.”)
The Hero of Culture Vs. the Hero of Drama
The moment when Anita finally chooses one of the two suitors who have been wooing her for a number of books is one of the most satisfying scenes in romancedom. We readers had waited so long! Whether the guy Anita chose was the one we preferred or not, having her make her choice was like leaping into a cold, crashing wave after running along the beach for a long time on a very hot day.
And yet, the question arises, did Anita make the right choice? Could she have chosen the other man? And how do the needs of culture and drama figure into her decision?
Jean-Claude is a perfect example of the dramatic romantic hero. He is the Master of the City, with all manner of minions at his beck and call, deadly as sin, and so sexy that grown women lean languidly against walls and sigh whenever his name is mentioned. (My husband can vouch for having seen the mere mention of Jean-Claude have this effect on any number of women.)
Jean-Claude is the ultimate playboy. He glides through life with his shirt open, surrounded by an aura of sensuality, using everything around him for his own pleasure and being touched by nothing. His status is increased by the fact that he is desired by everything that moves: men, women, dogs (well, wolves). Tricycles would lust after Jean-Claude if they could move of their own accord. And he is monstrous. He is callous. He kills. He drinks blood. He does not obey the dictates of society nor care for the opinions of others.
Nor is he thoroughly immoral—for that would not be romantic. He has his own code he struggles to live up to, related to his position and his responsibility to the people under his protection. This tension between his wickedness and his decent streak makes him all the more appealing.
Richard is a different kind of hero. He epitomizes modern culture’s notion of the ideal man: good-looking, understanding, a good listener. But of course Richard isn’t without an edge, and that’s part of his appeal. He turns into a wolf once a month and pushes other wolf-boys around. That, and the fact that the local wolf pack thinks he belongs to them, creates all kinds of havoc with his dating life.
What more could a girl desire?
Face it, if Anita were our girlfriend in real life, we all know which guy we would be rooting for—the kind, thoughtful, easy-going man who loves children! He is every parent’s dream—well, except for th
e werewolf thing, but we can see past that. He is the kind of man you want your friend to marry. Someone who will make her happy, and in Anita’s case, keep her human. Sure, he loses it when the moon is full, but hey, in a few years he’ll be able to take something for that, and his furry problem will be a thing of the past.
But Anita does not live in the real world. She lives in the realm of entertainment, and there, the laws of drama rule. The choice that serves the needs of drama is the one that pushes the envelope, that drives the heroine beyond her comfort zone, that requires more of her—mind, body, and soul—if she is to survive and if love is to triumph. So, with apologies to my dear friend who thinks that the junior high teacher with the silky chestnut hair is the hottest number out there:
Richard Zeeman never had a chance.
Beauty and The Beast Revisited
Romance is, fundamentally, the story of Beauty and the Beast, told and retold a hundred thousand ways. Beauty’s love allows her to see through the Beast’s rough exterior and to transform him into the man he is meant to be. In the past, the hero’s beast-like qualities manifested in his behavior. Modern heroes are no different; they have just shed their semblance of humanity and now appear as the untamed beasts they really are—sharp fangs, furry backsides, and all. The result, however, is still the same. By the end of the story, love has turned them into a prince, and they live happily ever after.
And Anita Blake? The romantics among her fans are still holding out for a happy ending: that, when all is said and done, love will conquer, and Anita will get her man. True, she may chose to permanently walk another path. Her happy ending may not include just one true love—but hey … a girl can hope!
L. Jagi Lamplighter is the author of the Prospero’s Daughter series, the first book of which, Prospero Lost, is available. She is also an assistant editor on the Bad Ass Faeries Anthology series. When not writing, she switches to her secret identity as wife and stay-home mom in Centreville, Virginia, where she lives with her dashing husband, author John C. Wright, and their four darling children, Orville, Roland Wilbur, Justinian Oberon, and Pingping.
She can be found blogging at http://arhyalon.livejournal.com.
Marella is a member of my writing group, so she knows that in the early days of writing the Anita Blake series I was adamant that Anita would never have sex on paper, and she certainly wouldn’t have sex with Jean-Claude. I believed what I wrote, that you didn’t have sex with dead guys. I mean, a girl’s got to have standards. Lack of pulse should take someone off your list.
Jean-Claude tried to take over my series, and by book three, Circus of the Damned, I’d decided to kill him off to keep him from doing it. When Anita and I couldn’t do the deed I brought on Richard Zeeman, werewolf, junior high science teacher, and good guy, to date and marry Anita. If I couldn’t kill the vampire off, I’d take him out of the game with monogamy. From the moment I tried to push Anita to go with Richard I lost control of the series. The harder I pushed the more the characters pushed back and it just didn’t work out the way I’d planned.
My plan had been to make every caress, every kiss, so amazing we’d never have to have sex on paper. What I ended up doing was writing myself into a corner. When in book six, The Killing Dance, we finally crossed that barrier, I wanted to do that 1940s pan to the sky. I so did not want to show the dirty deed on paper. But for five books I had been unflinching in showing violence on paper. Now, I’d done it because the book plots usually revolved around a murder and that’s usually violent. I showed the level of violence that was necessary to tell the story. The fact that the violence hadn’t bothered me, but the sex did, made me question my priorities. Sex between two people who cared for each other, and had waited books to have sex, made me squirm. What did that say about me as a person? Well, actually, that I was very American. But the moment I realized it bothered me I had to overcome it. I had to push myself to do the best scene I could do. For Anita, for Jean-Claude, for my readers, for myself, it had to kick major ass.
I don’t know if I’ve ever rewritten a single scene so many times. My friend and artist Paty Cockrun was the person I sent it to for the firstreading. She’s been a huge Jean-Claude fan through all the books. She always hated Richard. She made me rewrite the scene with Jean-Claude and Anita in the bathtub two more times.
But when I sent it to her the next time, she pronounced it good. I have since signed copies of Killing Dance on the pages where the sex takes place. Fans have their favorite parts and some even have me sign in between the lines of their favorite moment.
Since that first sex scene I have written a lot more of them. Whatever hesitation or squeamishness I had in the beginning is pretty much gone. I’ve read the scenes in public, and there’s no embarrassment on my end. Sex between consenting adults who care for each other is never a bad thing.
Marella makes one other very good point. The English language sucks on vocabulary for sex. We have no good words. My favorite word for describing a sex act isn’t one that normally gets used about heterosexual intercourse. Want to hear it? My favorite word for a sexual act in the English language is: sodomy. There is no word as pretty to describe anything a heterosexual couple would do. (Of course, by some definitions sodomy can happen between heterosexual couples. It’s still the same definition, isn’t it? Well, yes, I think so.) I have been trying to find a pretty word for heterosexual intercourse for years, but, alas, there is nothing half so lyrical in English.
—Laurell
Bon Rapports
Marella Sands
It’s an old and well-used maxim that you gotta start with a joke. With that in mind, I’d like to tell you about the time Ms. Hamilton announced that she would never, ever write a sex scene. It was an ironclad rule: No Sex On Stage.
That’s right. No sex for Anita. Ever. At least, not in front of her readers.
Stop laughing. I can hear you from here, you know. Honest, she really said that. And with a long tradition of sexy but not sexual vampires in the literature, there was no reason to suspect at the time that Anita would ever be sleeping with the undead, except possibly in a purely literal fashion.
Sure, the phrase sleep with to mean sexual intercourse has been servicing the law, and authors, since at least the tenth century. But as late as the nineteenth century, while everyone and his dog were probably humping everything in sight (though, we hope, not each other), no one was going to talk about it. Even though humping as an alternative to sleep withhad evolved by the late 1700s (servicing was even older than that) and was clearly available, titillating readers rather than thrusting sex in their faces was the order of the day.
Call it the age of coyness, at least ideally. John Polidori, the first to mingle vampires and noblemen, wrote that his vampire, Lord Ruthven, in the story “The Vampyre: A Tale,” seduced women so that they were “hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation.” In fact, so sullied were they, that they became wantons who cared nothing for their reputations or those of their families. They “had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity of their vices to the public gaze.” One suspects that Polidori, if not familiar with much sexual licentiousness before meeting his employer, Lord Byron, was much more educated afterward, and yet, his prose remained proper. Despite the swath Lord Ruthven cut through the unsullied young women of Europe, the author’s eyes remained politely averted while all of this degradation was actually taking place.
Well! Long gone are the days when phrases like “hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue” could make a reader hot and bothered. Anita, of course, has no patience for such long-windedness, and anyone who’s managed to get to the end of Polidori’s story might be forgiven for wanting to hire Anita to stake him simply for his run-on sentences. (One hopes he was a better doctor than he was a writer.) By concentrating on heiresses hurled from pinnacles rather than depicting characters putting the sour cream in the burrito, Polidori had successfully stormed the pearly gates with the English of
his time. But we’ve come a long way since then, haven’t we?
Literature no longer requires coy phrases like “hurled to the lowest abyss of degradation.” And yet, even so, for the modern author, English still sucks donkey balls sometimes. Not when it comes to cutesy semi-crude phrases like sucks donkey balls. No, then English is your whore. When Hamilton wants Anita to date worm food, watch the idiot box, and eat shit on a shingle, she’s got it made. But sex? Then English isn’t so helpful.
Onward, chers lecteurs… .
The most famous vampire of all, Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, followed in Lord Ruthven’s tracks. He was a blue blood. He was cultured, had good manners, and conducted the proper sorts of gentlemanly business, like purchasing parcels of land that used to belong to the Church. He, too, was handsome and fascinating (although with “massive eyebrows”) and traveled in high society. However, society—and language—had moved on a bit. Well, a tiny bit.
Though residing still in the land of skirted tables and chicken bearing “dark” and “white” meat instead of “legs” and “breasts,” Dracula and his pursuers had at least moved up the symbolism scale from just teeth to other things, like needles. Tres kinky! No longer were characters penetrating the flesh of women with mere teeth! Science, in the person of Abraham Van Helsing, allowed them to do so with hollow metal tubes. And even though Stoker wrote his work in a preFreudian age, the symbolism is all too clear. Not even the thesaurus I consulted on the topic was fooled, as, in place of needle, it offered up prick. No subtlety there.
As Mina finds Lucy Westenra in a strange sleeping stupor in a cemetery, she reports that Lucy breathes in “long, heavy gasps” and she shudders and moans. Although a modern reader used to plain speaking might pass over this, no Victorian reader would be fooled. Dracula has, ah, gone like a rat up a drainpipe, as it were.
Ardeur: 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series Page 6
