Do you hate Valentine’s Day? Well here’s a little gem from back in 2010, when I was academically obliged to analyze a case study of a bunch of Harlequin Romance addicts from the 1970s. Part of the assignment was to read and respond to a romance novel myself, and compare my experience to that of the readers in Janice Radway’s study. I confess, I had a little fun…
Read any romance novel and comment on the experience. That’s what I was supposed to do.
“Ooh, a novel,” I thought, upon reading the Seminar 16 reading requirements for my English 5000 class. “Imagine that! Reading narrative instead of political philosophy for an English Literature degree! Finally!”
“Oh. A romance novel,” I thought grimly. For an English Literature degree?!”
Off I went to my well-laden bookshelves in search of an acceptable piece of writing. Poetry. Biography. Fantasy. Allegory. Science Fiction. Theology. Gardening. Cookbooks. Do-it-yourself Home Improvement manuals. Short stories. World literature. Music history books. Music theory books. Conducting books. Beethoven Sonatas. Chopin Etudes. 100-year-old hymnbooks. Art magazines. Education journals. Children’s books. Sign language books. Even some philosophy. Romance? Not a one.
“Okay, off to the library I go. There’s no way I’m spending even 69 cents at Value Village to purchase such a thing. No, wait. I’ll do the modern thing and download something from the Peterborough library website. That way I won’t even have to expend the energy to leave my house. My professor would be proud.
I scrolled. I clicked. I skimmed. All He Ever Wanted. All Night Long. The Ballroom on Magnolia Street. “No, no, no. None of these.”
More scrolling. “Ah! Finally! This I think I could handle: words strung together artistically enough that I can possibly stomach the relational nonsense they describe.” Click.
“Nooooo!” I cried. “Say it isn’t so!” Downloading rights were restricted, and I’d have to listen to the whole thing on my desktop computer. Not a chance.
So, off to the library I went. Audio books: that’s what I wanted. That way I could listen in my car. Hmmm. Look at these: “Playaway: Simple. Pre-loaded. Digital.” I wouldn’t even need a CD player. How very portable.
Historical fiction. . . paths crossing. . . drawn together. . . deep yearnings. . . no thanks!
Wait. Here’s one: The Big Love. “Dunn’s tale of love lost and sought is sweet and funny,” read the blurb.
“Funny is good. I like funny. Do you suppose it’s ‘sweet’ enough to qualify as a romance? Well, it does have ‘love’ in the title.”
“A fresh, funny, and sometimes moving tale of love and life at mid-thirty among young professionals in urban Philadelphia,” another reviewer had written.
“I’ll take it.”
Misgivings. Perhaps this was cheating. Perhaps we were supposed to find something we couldn’t stomach, just for the experience. I moved to the audio CD section. The Bride Quartet: Vision in White, Bed of Roses, Savor the Moment. . . Ick.
“Hmmm. How about this? The Middle East. The potential for a real plot. Journalism. News. And just enough female adoration to make it romantically passable. This will be my back-up.” It was 18 hours long. Maybe I would go on a very long trip. Maybe to the Middle East.
At home with my neon-covered gadget-book, I read the instructions on the box. “Batteries included, so you can listen right away,” it promised. No batteries. I located the MP3 player that I never use and scavanged the AAA battery for higher purposes. It ran out a few chapters into the book, shutting it down and requiring me to scan through the whole thing to find my spot once I had found a replacement.
Now here’s the thing about the book itself. I related to it from the start. That’s what romances are supposed to do, right? Allow you to identify with a triumphant heroine? But wait. She didn’t seem too triumphant. Her partner had left in the middle of a dinner party to buy mustard and not come back. He had run off with her arch-nemesis, Kate Pearce. Well, with that I could certainly identify. As Alison-the-heroine spat out sarcastic comments about betrayal, rejection, and self-loathing, I breathed deeply and thought, “Now this is my kind of romance.”
I continued to identify with the disillusioned and often stupid heroine, sometimes to the point where I was embarrassed and offended. It was almost creepy, the similarities between me and this over-traumatized and over-therapied individual. I almost relished it.
By this time I had started the Janice Radway readings, and had a growing suspicion that I was actually in great trouble, for it was quite possible that this was not a romance at all, but just a novel about love. The sarcasm was gripping. There was no tenderness, no longing. . . well, yes, there was longing. . . but not of the kind embodied by the Smithton romance readers of Radway’s 1979 study.
I resolved to give the 18-hour back-up novel a try. I was on my way to Oshawa for an eye appointment, and my mom was driving me and my dilated pupils around. The protagonist headed off to Afghanistan in search of adventure and love, and I fell immediately asleep. “How was it?” I asked my mom when we got to the clinic. “Well. . .” my mom answered. This is what my mom says when she doesn’t want to lie. We didn’t bother listening to disc two on the way home. It was back to The Big Love for me.
By this time I was growing desperate, and had a sudden, saving insight. The previous owners of my house had left me all their books. I pulled out “The Notebook,” by Nicholas Sparks.
“Hey, one of my classmates is bringing that! It must be a romance!” I flipped it open: “They gave in to everything they had fought the last fourteen years. Allie lifted her head off his shoulder, looked at him with hazy eyes, and Noah kissed her softly on the lips. . .”
The familiar pain resurfaced. I tossed it aside. “I am sorry, Professor, but I just can’t do it.” I looked some more. The Clearing, by John Craig: “a tender, but devastating love affair. . .” Devastating. That sounds promising. I crawled into bed and luxuriated in the anticipated sadness of it all.
“After all, one must be realistic,” I thought. Even Janice Radway knows that. I couldn’t think of anything more self-defeating than devouring a romance novel, and I scorned the suckers in Smithton who had fallen prey to the “repetitive consumption” of smut that their culture had bred in them.
So far The Clearing had included only one love-related page, which was just fine with me. I began to wonder, however, if the promised tenderness and devastation would ever emerge. Why, oh why, was a “real,” but palatable romance so hard to find?
I considered the possibility that I may have to subject myself to a love story with a happy ending. I remembered listening to Northanger Abbey in my car last year (hoping against hope that a title with the word “Abbey” in it would allow me to reacquaint myself with Jane Austin without crying). I remembered how, for days, I had walked about, inwardly wailing, “Oh where, oh where are all the Mr. Tilneys in the world?” No more Jane Austin for me.
I remembered listening to The Scarlet Letter and the intensity with which I had wished that the priest and the adulteress would run off and have a hearth and a home, despite the illegitimacy of it all. No way. I was not going back there. The Big Love would have to do.
Finally, finally, finally I got to the bit about the triumphant heroine, and it went like this:
“And I started to get that feeling, that great feeling, where the world starts opening up again, where you notice a flier for Italian lessons stuck to a lamp-post, and you pull off the little tag with the phone number and slip it in your wallet, and when you come upon the tag again a week later you impulsively make the call, and you end up spending two hours every Wednesday night with six strangers in the back of a café being drilled by Alessandro, who wears leather pants and calls you Principessa when he talks to you after class. You know the feeling I’m talking about. Life, which had shrunk down to mundane and predictable proportions, suddenly exploded with, well, life. I bought lacy bras and hiking boots. I kept Keats on the back of the toilet and decided it was time to finally tackle Proust. I pored over the travel section of the Sunday Times with the intensity of a person who believes that anything, anywhere, is possible. I went to the opera and I took up yoga and I taught myself how to make a chocolate soufflé.”
Yes, yes, yes! With this, too, I could relate. I had picked up my life and spontaneously moved to Peterborough. I had signed up for art lessons and adult ballet classes. I had put on art shows and written books and learned how to use power tools. I had even, in a moment of unusual optimism, walked into Traill College and signed myself up for a master’s degree: a degree which now, ironically, was causing my psyche to regress into its less courageous past, through this cruel requirement that I read a romance novel.
It turned out that the heroine triumphed romantically after all, or at least intended to. Her former boss, Henry turned up in a bookstore one day and they ran off under the stars and the cherry blossoms and she lifted her face to the moon like a sunflower to the sun. But it was bearable. “Perhaps there is life after being loved and left,” I mused. It didn’t hurt to toy with the thought now and then, I conceded.
Then I began to reflect on the “emotional experience” of reading, or trying to read, a romance novel (in fact, several). I realized that I had expended more energy avoiding the experience than engaging in it, and that I had come no closer to understanding the throngs of people who had to return time and again to their dystopian lives after submerging themselves in the fictional worlds of lives well lived.
I returned to my anxiety about whether or not my Sarah Dunn novel would pass the romance test, and I looked again at the Smithton women’s stringent criteria. The heroine must be independent. Check. The heroine must be funny. Check. The heroine must be intelligent. Check. The heroine must be, incidentally, all the things the Smithton women are not, I observe. Interesting.
The reader must identify with the heroine. Check. And the story must have a happy ending, with the woman being loved as she ought to be loved. Questionable. Henry was promising, but not in an insightful, tender sort of way. But wait. The heroine had taken charge. She had rejected her rejecter, and that had to count for something:
“I want the big love. I opened my eyes and looked over at Tom. He was still busy with the napkin. And I am not going to find it here. I saw it with a shimmering clarity. It didn’t matter that I could finally see that there are worse things in life than having a person sleep with somebody else when they’re supposed to be sleeping with only you, there are worse things than not knowing, there are worse things than being humiliated. It didn’t matter that I was almost thirty-three, or that my eggs were curdling inside of me, or that there were no men left in Philadelphia, there were no men left anywhere, except maybe in Alaska, which meant I’d have to go to Alaska for a man and to China for a baby, which meant a lot of time on the Internet, and long-haul flights, neither of which I’m particularly fond of. None of it mattered. The only thing that mattered was that this wasn’t love. It wasn’t the big love. And I realized that I could spend the rest of my life trying to hold on to Tom. I could do my best to cement him in place. I could work hard to convince him that he couldn’t live without me. But I suddenly saw that I had another option. I could just let go. And, just like that, I could feel something shifting inside me, something that had been a certain way as long as I could remember.”
This isn’t 1979, ladies. This is the story of a woman who learns what isn’t love, and walks away. Sure, she walks away into the cherry blossoms, but that is not her triumph. Her triumph is in finding love on her own terms, and surely there’s a certain romanticism about that. Surely, three decades after Smithton, we can take something that isn’t just a “reasonable compensatory solution” for unsatisfying relationships and call it romance.
Alison wants the big love, and so do I, and she’s a little more optimistic than I am about the possibility that it’s out there, even in Alaska. But I’ve done my part. I’ve read a real, live romance novel for the modern woman, and I’ve done it without retching or weeping. Thank-you, Sarah Dunn.
Works Cited
Craig, John. The Clearing. Markham: Simon & Schuster, 1975.
Dunn, Sarah. The Big Love. Minneapolis: HighBridge Company, 2004.
Radway, Janice. “The Reader and Their Romances.” Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. [1984] U of North Carolina P 1991: 46-85.
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