This story first appeared in Whole Earth Review, #78, Winter 1993. Copyright
is held by the author.
E-mail to
[email protected] for info
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Augusta Wynde is a part-time ski instructor who -discovered
romance novels when she was snowed in at a friend's cabin in
Vermont. She is an avid cyclist and a collector of old
postcards and turn-of-century bric-a-brac. She spends winters
in Aspen and summers in Mill Valley.
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LOVE'S QUIVERING ROSE
In Defense of Romance Novels;
by Augusta Wynde
Three years ago I was a bright and cocky college student who
had just gotten engaged. In this blissful state, I decided
that writing a romance novel would be an amusing and
lucrative project. How hard could it be? I'd read Barbara
Cartland novels by the cartload when I was twelve, and I
remembered them as engaging but simpleminded little formula
pieces. I was a good writer - all my professors said so. The
fact that I had never written so much as an adequate short
story didn�t slow me down for a minute; surely it would be no
trouble to throw together four hundred pages of purple prose
and heaving bodices. I gave myself six months.
Three years later, just as blissful but slightly less cocky,
I am married and have just finished the third or fourth
rewrite of that first romance novel. Along the way, I met
several hundred romance writers, ran thousands of pages past
my critique group, and discovered there was more to romance
than purple prose and heaving bodices.
The most common misperception about romance is that it's
about sex. What it's really about is conflict between the
hero and heroine. The conflict may be external (she's Norman,
he's Saxon), internal (he craves security, she risks her life
every fifty pages), or a mix of both. The hairier the
conflict, the more satisfying the bond between the lovers
once they finally work it out. Whether the romance is a
"short contemporary" (250-page novels set in the present) or
a longer historical (they can run to 400 pages or more), the
writer's goal is to make the reader feel, "If they could go
through that, they can survive anything."
Most romance writers pull this trick off without much formal
training. Although many have some college education, I've
never met a romance writer who had a degree in creative
writing, or who had spent much time receiving the wisdom of
literary elders at summer writing conferences. Romance
writers place stories in True Confessions, not in "little
magazines." Like most romance writers, I taught myself to
write fiction with the help of critique groups, a handful of
books on "how to write romance," and the monthly workshops or
lectures put on by my local chapter of the RWA (Romance
Writers of America).
The RWA has mounted a campaign against what I had found the
most embarrassing aspect of romance fiction: cliched, purple
or just plain leaden prose. RWA holds contests and workshops
to train writers to use modifiers sparingly, avoid the
passive voice, and banish the cliche. The quality of writing
in most romances now roughly equals that of commercial
fiction in general - which is to say it still needs work, but
it's come a long way. Most romance authors now write at least
as well as (and often considerably better than) Dean R.
Koontz, Tom Clancy, or David Brin.
Despite this improvement, romance is still the smutty joke of
the publishing industry, even when compared with other
genres. This fact makes most romance writers a little
defensive - there are only so many times you can hear what
you write described as "that crap" before getting testy about
it. Reading bad detective novels is considered mildly
eccentric; reading romance novels is evidence of irreversible
vapidity. The New York Times Book Review regularly reviews
mysteries, and occasionally reviews science fiction, but
never reviews romance; the very idea seems almost
embarrassing in its silliness. Many people I meet are
surprised that a "supposedly intelligent woman" could
consider writing romance.
There are several reasons romance is so widely and deeply
scorned. Sexism is an important one; the fact that romance is
read, written, and edited primarily by women makes it easier
for people to find the genre frivolous and unintellectual.
Romance is also denigrated for being unrealistic, formulaic,
morally simplistic, and sexist. None of these makes much
sense when examined carefully, because the real reason lies
in something far more fundamental: what romance is about in
the first place.
Romance shares its lack of realism and its moral simplicity
with all other genres. Spy novels and westerns typically show
far less moral ambiguity or respect for realism than romance
does. Romances are no more formulaic than most thrillers. And
the notion that romance is sexist, considering the
invisibility or flatness of women characters in much genre
fiction, is laughable.
The charge of sexism springs partly from the prevalence in
the 1970s of lurid historical romances "bodice-rippers"
in which a woman is raped by a hyper-dominant male, with whom
she then falls in love. Bodice-rippers marked the point at
which the sexual revolution hit the mainstream for women, and
they show the usual frenzy and distortion that come after the
lifting of long-term repression.
Historical novels of the nineties treat violence against
women very differently. (Sexual violence is virtually taboo
in the short contemporary, although it can occasionally be
included, always offstage, in what's known as a "social
problem" book.) We still write about a few testosterone-
addled heroes, and occasionally, especially in a novel set in
a particularly violent period, they do rape our heroines.
When they do so, they are typically driven by cultural and
historical context. Invading conquerors rape; it is part of
the job description, and such a fictional hero will usually
find the matter distasteful but necessary. It's not
politically correct, but it's not historically inaccurate,
either. Whatever the plotline, rape in romance novels is not
romantic; it is part of the seemingly irresolvable conflict.
Romances that include rape form a small fraction (my guess
would be well under 10 percent) of the total number of
romances now published. The "bodice-ripper" still exists, and
a few of them are quite popular, but they are no longer
typical. In fact, a few romances have begun to treat sexual
violence with something like the full weight it deserves, and
the genre has seen both heroines and heroes who have been
victims of sexual abuse.
Romance's quest for respect has spurred a recent publicity
campaign mounted by Romantic Times, or RT as it is usually
called. RT is both a significant trade journal for writers
and the most important fan magazine for romance readers. Its
editors often take the position - to my mind a doomed and
foolish one - that romance is "just as good" as "literary"
fiction, and that Johanna Lindsay and Nora Roberts are the
natural successors to Jane Austen and the Bront�s. (I'd
prefer to see romance considered an acceptable option for
light reading, as is the rest of genre fiction, rather than
as incontrovertible evidence of the reader's brainlessness.)
As might be expected from a magazine that considers Wuthering
Heights equivalent to Sweet Savage Lies, RT suffers from a
lack of taste. They can be, in fact, downright tacky. They
conduct an annual "writers' conference" (actually a kind of
carnival for writers and fans, something like a science-
fiction convention) at which authors dress like Scarlett
O'Hara, or fleshier versions of Joan Collins. Male cover
models smile obligingly and pose for hundreds of photos,
often cuddling (or in a clinch with) fans and writers.
Despite RT's misinformed literary pretensions, it does have a
certain trailer-park charm. But that pink-flamingo
sensibility triggers an intense class bias in the very people
RT is trying, with a strange reverse success, to reach.
Flaunting a male cover model named Fabio as their poster boy,
RT has given interviews not just to People but also to Forbes
and The Wall Street Journal. Predictably enough, these
middlebrow publications, anxious not to be seen empathizing
with such proletarian types, sneer at romance with
considerable vigor. These articles, rooted in disdain and
class insecurity, don't understand what romance is about and
can't explain why it's important.
But a single tacky PR campaign doesn't explain why romance is
undeniably less respectable even than horror or science
fiction, its most-disdained cousins. The chief reason lies, I
think, at the heart of the genre. All genre fiction focuses
on larger-than-life situations, but romance uses heightened
emotion-al intensity, not action, to grip the reader. Quotes
pulled out of context from romances (Forbes used: "I'm hungry
. . but not for food") strike the casual reader as being
luridly overheated. And yet "I'm hungry but not for food" is
exactly the sort of banal thing people say to one another
while courting. Reading a romance quote out of context is
like seeing a naked person on the subway - an awkward and
inappropriate intimacy with a stranger. If the naked person
has some cellulite and a few blemishes (as does most of the
prose in genre fiction), the experience is that much more
embarrassing.
This intimacy and emotional intensity make romance
fundamentally different from other genres. Romance as a rule
pays better attention to character development than any other
genre - you need to know a character pretty well before
you'll accept "I'm hungry but not for food." It's true that a
great deal of romance is sentimental in the worst sense � it
uses cheap, unfair tactics to wring emotional involvement
from the reader. But a few writers go deeply and honestly
enough into their characters to create a genuine spark of
empathy. Romance is often described by readers as addictive;
I think it's the potential for this powerful tug of empathy
that forms the addictive core of romance.
Genre fiction is something you "get" or you don't. But
romantic fiction plays a major and satisfying role in the
lives of millions of working women. Before you write these
women off as shallow consumerists or victims of Cheez Whiz
Culture, I hope you'll remember your brainy ex-girlfriend who
devours true crime novels, or your brother who loves
Dostoevsky and Stephen King, or even that slightly lumpy
naked lady on the subway.
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