Reading Romance Literature

As an author, Georgette Heyer does not so much fit the genre of Romance Literature, as define it. If Austen holds the ultimate adulatory status, then Heyer comes a distinguished second. Perhaps, as I'm sure many self-proclaimed intellectuals would argue, that is not particularly notable in a field of literature which at its best is patronized by the public and its worse, relentlessly mocked. And, of course, there are some examples of execrable prose and plot among romance novels, the way there are many among any genre. However, romance novels are women's literature and thus inferior to any other form of textual production. In the literary climate of Modern America (as well as every other place/time), women can either write to be read by men or eschew all claims to "literary merit."

Heyer and Austen write for women (though Austen at least has now found a wide-spread, if unwilling, male readership in progressive high school classes). They write about the female experience in society, embracing female characters who seek to preserve their own identityand human integrity by actively pursuing (relatively) safe marriages based on affection and financial security. They write narratives whose trajectories end in happiness and are thus dismissed as "light" and unrealistic. However, in many ways, Heyer and Austen are the most "realistic" of novelists. In an age when Keith Gesson can publish a critically acclaimed book dealing with the ephemeral travails of being a young man in our society and be considered an intellectual writer, there should be no stigma assigned with Heyer or Austen or any other woman writing narratives of young women trying to find themselves. Yes, they associate finding their identities with finding men. However, few young men coming of age do so in a fictional world devoid of women. Perhaps, for male readers of such books (both the involuntary and the potentially nonexistent willing ones), the true unreality comes from these female authors' assertion that it is love for which their characters seek. Sex on the other hand, seems a much more realistic and laudatory goal.

Heyer and Austen write of women trapped in penury, legally owned by their fathers, forced to live lives constrained by the minutiae of social detail. And yet, they are transcendent characters, recasting the inevitable trajectory of their lives into a context of choice and will. Romance novels give both their characters and readers a vision of female intentionality and decision. Still, they never forget to also tender the reassurance that such "unfeminine" agency does not need inevitably to result in a context of loneliness and alienation. Heyer and Austen assert that there are lucky women who find exceptional men who allow them to maintain the integrity of their characters and their agency without sacrificing the love and companionship for which all people, both men and women, yearn. Is that unrealistic? Too idealistic to qualify as the focus of a serious genre of literature? Well maybe...but judging from the amount of readership which romance literature achieves, the intellectual community might eventually want to get around to examining, instead of merely denigrating, such "female" concerns in its literature and scholarship.

The Drama of Narrative and Life in "The Group"

When confronted by a book like Mary McCarthy's The Group, following the lives of eight Vassar graduates, it is perhaps a natural response for the reader to try to identify with individual characters. Perhaps one might see some of Libby in onself, or rather Lakey, or on the contrary, feel a revulsion towards Kay, or Priss or Norine. We see each woman through her own eyes for such a short time and then we are reduced to once again seeing her through the cloudy lens of others' opinion. We wish as readers to judge, to quantify, to feel as if we might sum up a character and shelve her; confronted by eight, perhaps this is the only way to procede. And yet, McCarthy seems to both intuit our impulse and to deny it. She leaves us with each woman's internal humanity, her fright and joy and the sheer drama which each person's life holds for themselves. And then, once we feel that we might just see the soul, the essence, the uniqueness of that woman, McCarthy again drops the curtain. Because of course, every person is the whole world in their own eyes...and something much less to even their friends and lovers, let alone to the general populace.

One might even say that it is to some extent those interactions with others, almost always men, which define these women's life moments as dramatic enough to witness. Thus, Dottie Renfrew is worth looking at while losing her virginity to a man all the readers know is bad news. She willingly forfeits her dramatic, narrative potential when deciding to marry that man Brook from Arizona. In a classic role reversal, Dottie's mother begs her to throw away security for "love," for the one moment of transgressive, rule-breaking passion of Dottie's life. She feels disappointed in Dottie when Dottie refuses, let down by Dottie's very practicality and sense (pg. 229). Dottie has thrown away her chance for drama and centrality in the narrative. She could have married the weak, immoral man and remained a central figure, like Kay. And yet, instead Dottie chooses to close that curtain of reader interest herself. She chooses happiness and security over passion. Perhaps a model person, but certainly not a model character, as McCarthy herself concludes by passing over her for the rest of her book. Apparently, there is no drama, and thus no rasion de lire once a Vassar girl goes to Arizona.

The truly dramatic women, with whom we are meant to emotionally connect, tend to be the ones who inhabit constantly emotionally-searing landscapes. In particular, I think Kay and Polly remain the most truly dramatic and ergo the most heavily developed characters of the novel. Kay, whose story bookends the entire novel, seems inevitably destined for despair. Polly in contrast, beginning in poverty seems designed for an equally inevitable, Horatio Alger-ish rise to happiness. These characters are created on a trajectory; it is unclear whether it is their lives that lend themselves to a dramatic narrative or vice versa, but either way, they lack the stagnant security which to McCarthy signals a life lacking in both conflict and significance. When wondering which characters to empathize with and focus on, the reader of The Group might keep in mind the narrative blandness of contentment and the lure of a falling/rising star.

When Will There Be Good News?

I'm somewhat biased, I suppose when it comes to Kate Atkinson's work. I've read and deeply enjoyed both her two previous Jackson Brodie mysteries, as well as her novel, Human Croquet. I came to her newest book, When Will There Be Good News?, with the highest of expectations, especially since I received the book itself as a much-anticipated, though easily predicted, birthday present. And, to a large extent, Atkinson's third mystery does not disappoint. The characterizations are as full and poignant as her previous works, the mystery as involved and intense as that of Case Histories. The return of Louise Munro is, while expected, nonetheless satisfying. In fact, Good News stands out from its predecessors in its sheer humor and in the narrative power of the sixteen year old protagonist which it introduces. Reggie's voice, particularly in the first half of the novel, creates, within the prose, moments of both surprising dignity and almost overwhelming tragedy.

However, my one critique of Atkinson's novel, comes in fact from the sheer accumulation of that tragedy. Death, of course, seems not out of place in a mystery novel. It has been a significant figure in each of the Atkinson novels I have read, both the context and the catalyst for the plot. However, in Good News, Death is not just a frequent visitor, it is an omnipresent shroud encasing not only the characters whom the reader meets, but also those shadowy figures, the unnamed populace who inhabit Atkinson's fictional Britain. Without giving anything away, I think it is safe to say that people die. Lots and lots of people die. In fact, Death is so ubiquitous throughout the novel, one rather wants to applaud the survivors; the everyday, non-protagonist characters whom, in an act of seeming authorial mercy, Atkinson does not kill off.

Such an onslaught of fatality inevitably has a calculated effect on the reader. We too feel as if we are adrift in the world of Louise, Reggie, Jackson, Joanna, etc., in which Death is an element of both unpredictability and an unfortunate statistical probability. There is no order to this world, no guarantees or safeguards, anything can happen to anyone; the shock of that reality permeates the novel. The reader finds herself echoing the title, begging the author for any happiness or crumbs of joy capable of existing, even fleetingly, within such an environment. We connect to this world, or at least I did, for the majority of the book, caught in a fictional nightmare from which we at least have the ability to awaken, grab some food or conversation, and then willingly re-immerse ourselves. The characters do not have the same option to raise their heads from the horrifying world around them.

However, there was a moment near the end of the book in which this engrossing, oppressive formula failed for me. An elderly parent loses an adult child in a horribly unfair way and then commits suicide. Perhaps it is only in context with the rest of the novel, but this moment felt horribly gratuitous to me. In Case Histories, something very similar happens to a father and a teenage child, but in that case, the parent goes on living, is forced to struggle through life for another thirty years or more. That fight, that imposition of continued life upon a character stripped of his human raison d'etre, was for me the most powerful part of Case Histories. Here Atkinson attempts to invoke pathos with the parent's suicide, but, to me, at least, this moment just felt gratuitous and an easy choice for the novelist.

After all, the greater emotional opportunity for the author to explore seems to be in characters living after tragedy, something frequently evoked within the mystery novels of P.D. James and Elizabeth George. James and George never seem to be writing so much about Death, but rather about what happens to the living after loss. Atkinson is as concerned as either with demonstrating the effects which death have on the survivors, but the load she piles on both her characters and readers seems eventually so overwhelming that the novel itself ultimately seems to lose a little of its grasp on reality. In Kate Atkinson's authorial attempts to play God and pass judgment on so very many mortal lives, she seems to miss some of the opportunities to explore the genuine persevering strength of humanity.

Fictional Fertility

I recently finished reading James Morrow’s The Last Witchfinder and Dave Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife, and I was struck by the many parallels between the stories. Both are narratives containing a woman at their heart, Jennet Stearne and Ann Eliza Young respectively. Each of these female characters in turn devote their lives to the elimination of an “evil” borne of an overly religious society, an immoral reality conjured up as the inevitable double of the human striving for holiness. Finally, each woman ultimately depends on a system of legal justice to defend their own bodily integrity and identification, as well as to further their all-consuming missions. In a more modern context, I was fascinated by the implications which these two women’s disparate, yet uncannily linked, crusades have for our own society's conceptions and understandings of women, both in fiction and society.


It is perplexing that both authors chose a woman as their heroine and moral warrior. David Ebershoff, of course, was dealing with a true historical figure, one whose gender was established by God and biology rather than authorial intent. And yet, the role seems a uniquely feminine one. Perhaps this is merely a result of the coloring of our modern minds by echoes of Harriet Beecher Stowe (herself in later life an outspoken opponent of the same plural marriage which Ann Eliza Young combated), Margaret Sanger, or any of a number of Suffragettes from the early part of the twentieth century. Perhaps, it would be more accurate to label this a Joan of Arc complex in our brains: the young woman standing against the oppressing forces of a far more powerful enemy. Having a woman as hero enhances the David and Goliath effect of the combat; after all, the only thing more fragile to our minds than a child is a young woman.
And so, we are given Jennet and Ann Eliza as heroines, each willing and destined to give their lives’ purpose to an external cause. This is particularly effective for the reader since it marks a level of sacrifice which in a man, lacking both the biological investment and the social impetus to reproduce, would, however unjustly, be modified. Women’s lives are seen as rampant with maternal potential, a potential which both Ann Eliza and Jennet only imperfectly achieve, discarding their children for the higher good, with regret but also firm decision. To the reader, here is true sacrifice, the loss of fecundity, or as in the case of Joan of Arc, the tragic inability to realize reproductive capacity.



For these women, public good becomes their offspring, literally in both cases culminating with a book. Women produce literature instead of children; they succeed in their crusades by transforming their minds into substitute ovaries. There is a sterility embedded in the idea of in a determined, single-minded woman, from which only a birth, no matter if of flesh or paper, can preserve her a gendered integrity. Thus book-pregnant women are the ultimate heroines for authors, they allow a continuation of the birthing process of ideas into a tangible form. Our modern writers see demonstrable progress in human rights through history and they wish to detail the conception of individual triumphs for “morality” within human minds. It only makes sense to transplant that process into a female womb, so often considered to be synonymous with a female mind; it is through women that we can most directly see the process of humanity from generation to generation. No wonder, that in fiction, we look to women as well for the conception and reproduction of our basic ideals.