More on Memorable Romance Heroines

What is it about a romance that keeps people reading it generations after it was published? Even centuries? The three romances I talked about last time, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights, were all eventually enshrined as literature. But so were Pamela by Samuel Richardson (the first English novel and the first English romance, too), and Evelina (the first English novel by a woman) by Fanny Burney. Only English majors read them anymore, but most romance readers have read the other three. Why, despite the distance of time and the changes in social ways, and even the foreignness of reading about a woman from another country, why does the plight of Jane Eyre still burn in our imaginations? Why is it that the best selling romances of 100 years ago, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall by Charles Major (they did a Mary Pickford movie about it, that’s how popular that romance was), or Janice Meredith (did you know that its socialite author, Paul Leicester Ford, was murdered by his brother?), or To Have and To Hold (Mary Johnston’s finest story features a villain unselfconsciously named Lord Carnal) no longer capture the imagination? I recommend all three, but they aren’t likely to be found in every library, let alone in many bookstores. What about The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy? Or the even more swashbuckling romances of Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood and Scaramouche among them? All have been made into movies, so millions more people have been made aware of them. Have you read them? Actually, although I have read at least twenty obscure books by Sabatini (my library had a complete set), I never read Scaramouche. And nothing I have encountered as an adult has urged me to repair that omission. Romance readers and writers do not refer to it. Maybe because the point of view was male, not female? Two other books published during that same period, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, keep being referenced by romance readers and writers. These books are still being read, despite being 70 plus years old. Their heroines are still being talked about. In fact, in the romance world, Gone with the Wind is often looked upon as the classic. Personally, I tried to read it years ago and got turned off and I haven’t been back. But most romance writers have opinions about Scarlett O’Hara, a standout heroine if ever there was one. Even having never read the book or seen the movie, I know that she is a memorable combination of strengths and weaknesses. Sooner or later, I’m going to read that book, because people keep talking about her. Then we get Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, and a heroine of a different stripe. Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Cathy Earnshaw, and Scarlett O’Hara were strong women. In Rebecca, we get a protagonist who is such a total wuss that She Doesn’t Even Have a Name. The author cannot any more clearly tell the reader that this character, the second wife, is merely a conduit for the story and has no importance in it. And it’s so true. And so necessary, because who else but a naive stranger would think of Max de Winter as anything but a loser? His wife was screwing around on him with everybody, and he stood by and pretended that it wasn’t happening, secretly humiliated for years. And then he finally murdered her, only to discover that she even orchestrated this worm-turning action. Yep. A total loser. But the second wife doesn’t see him as that, which is why we need her as the narrator, to imbue with tale with some of the rosy hue of romance. The story really is about Rebecca, a larger-than-life personality whose hold on people even after her death is startling. Like Cathy from Wuthering Heights, Rebecca lives life on her own terms, refusing to behave the way society and morality dictate. She’s probably the first modern antiheroine. Still, following that old novelistic (and societal) standard that any woman who does not maintain sexual purity must be punished, this bad girl ends up with a medical death sentence that she turns into a convoluted husband-assisted suicide-as-murder. What so plainly characterizes both Scarlett and Rebecca is their determination to have life their way. They don’t quite achieve that goal, at least not permanently. But romance readers keep going back to them, because the sheer passion of such determination is heady. Written in an era during which explicit sexuality was not legal to describe, the burning selfishness at the core of these two heroines stands in for sexual expression, too. That’s probably another reason why they still stand out. There’s enough symbolism in Rebecca to keep a college English lit class talking at length. It remains to be seen if these two novels will become the staples of school reading lists (let me know if they’re on yours). But it’s a sure bet that women will continue reading them for a long time to come.

Romance Heroines

We talk an awful lot about romantic heroes in romance blogs. But we don’t say a huge amount about the heroines, except maybe the ones who are Too Stupid to Live. Well, that’s another column. I got to thinking about romance heroines who made a big impression, and why. Of course what first came to mind were the classic 19th century romance novels, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights. Each established a memorable scenario that has been the basis for many romance novels since then. (I’m assuming you’ve read all of them, so I’ll be mentioning plot points that are spoilers.) In Pride and Prejudice, the heroine is intelligent, observant, and underneath much polite and humorous behavior, outraged by the maneuverings that other women perform or society forces them to perform in order to get husbands. Elizabeth Bennet is angry at seeing her best friend sell out by marrying a nincompoop. She’s even angrier that her sister suffers because of the machinations of her rivals for the hand of another, only slightly more bearable nincompoop (yes, Bingley is amiable, but he’s still notably light on brains). So when Darcy has the gall to act as if he is doing her a favor by confessing his love, Elizabeth lets him have it. And we all adore her for it, though eventually she and we realize that Darcy is actually ah heroic fellow and worthy of her love. Elizabeth Bennet may be a woman of her times, but her intelligence and honesty speak to all times. It’s a simple story, but by the end the reader is sure that the heroine has found her perfect man. This is the romance as comedy of manners with some high emotion thrown in. In Jane Eyre, Jane’s lonely and friendless state lures her into obsessing over her boss, who promptly tries to get her into a bigamous marriage. We all probably have had our experiences with hopeless crushes, emotionally unavailable boyfriends, married men at the office, and the like. But Jane’s romantic daydream comes true, only to turn into a nightmare. Author Charlotte Bronte warns the reader with plenty of negative imagery even before the famous “Stop the wedding!” scene. And what a melodrama that is. The priest asks if anyone knows of an impediment and a bride’s worst nightmare occurs: someone does, and it’s a doozy, the original Mad Wife in the Attic. Even a fantasizing governess can’t talk her way past her intended husband’s rank attempt at ignoring the law, so she flees. But then to show the reader how bloodless and unappealing the flip side of passion is, Charlotte Bronte has Jane find her cousins, among whom is a most handsome and godly fellow who wants to marry her. But he does not love her. He makes it clear that he has no passion for Jane, just for his religious missionary work. Signing on with him would be lifelong toil with no personal reward, and Jane very sensibly declines the honor. On the whole, she’d prefer the tormented scoundrel with the mad wife, a man who actually wanted Jane enough to defy morality to have her. (Taken that way, it’s a huge compliment, isn’t it?) Conveniently, by the time Jane returns to her beloved, his wife has died and he has suffered grievous bodily harm sufficient to punish him for his attempted sin. It’s not a perfect happy ending, because an attempted bigamist doesn’t deserve perfection. But it comes darn close. At the end she’s marrying the real man, not the moody, emotionally distant employer who fascinated her. One could call this the original Gothic romance. (Yes, there were previous Gothic novels, but this one caught the imagination of readers in its time and has held it for an astonishing 160 years.) And then there’s Wuthering Heights, the fan favorite of people who like lovers completely above moral law. Personally, I have never thought of Heathcliff and Cathy as heroes, and all those wild meetings on the moors did not catch my imagination. Except in the Laurence Olivier--Merle Oberon movie. The sheer beauty of these two actors and of the moor setting imbued the characters with a nobility that their author, Emily Bronte, did not. But back to the book, which is really all about cruelty and revenge, carried out into the third generation. Cathy is no angel, but she dies early on, and Healthcliff, previously the butt of other people’s cruelty—including hers—turns into a monster. So Cathy’s influence as a heroine is to incite Healthcliff to a soul-deep rage that nothing on earth can satisfy. Because Cathy is dead. Hmm...this book is actually weirder than I remembered. It’s a revenge tragedy. Like Hamlet. Unlike the movie’s dumbed-down plotline that’s all about marrying for money, the SparkNotes synopsis of Wuthering Heights reminds me that Heathcliff spends the years after Cathy’s death getting revenge on everyone who ever crossed him, and some who didn’t. His cruelty and his grasping for property and money turn him into a thorough villain, a villain whom the grown children finally outwit. That’s not how romance readers remember Heathcliff, though, is it? What I took away from Wuthering Heights on reading it as a teenager was that here were two very selfish people who wanted each other desperately but instead chose other people and then tormented them and each other. Yes, Heathcliff and Cathy may have fallen in love as teenagers, but each of them marries someone else of their own free will, yet as adults they keep right on having a version of their adolescent affair. I understand that They Are Rebels. They have feelings that their stultifying society does not want them to have. But their feelings do not ennoble them. Still, I’m guessing that their continued appeal lies in their rebelliousness, their refusal to conform not just physically but emotionally to their cutural norms. As for me, I always wanted Heathcliff’s poor downtrodden wife, Isabella, to outsmart him and turn his filthy bachelor dorm household and his equally unpleasant male companions into a model home with cleaned-up family members all being polite to each other at the dinner table. Now that’s a fantasy! Of these three historically important romance heroines, Elizabeth Bennet comes across as the most clear-eyed and rational, despite the pride and prejudice to which she eventually admits. (Okay, she admits to one of them. Prejudice, I think it was. But it could have been pride. If I dip into my copy of the book to check, I’ll be lost in Jane Austen’s world for the rest of the day. So just correct me if I have listed the wrong attribute.) Cathy is the most passionate and mercurial, but not a nice person at all, and she wouldn’t have your back, either. She represents sheer emotion unleavened by common decency or common sense. And Jane Eyre is something in between. She starts off naive and ruled by her emotions but she ends up knowing herself and others, too, while still believing in true love. Of course all three heroines share this belief, that true love exists, and that being with the right man will result in a lifetime—or maybe an eternity—of happiness. I guess what makes them so memorable is that all three were conjured up in a society that expected women to marry for a comfortable home, or for status, or just because some man picked them. So maybe even though we remember Heathcliff better than we remember Cathy, and even though I myself do not like her, the point is that the uncompromising nature of her wild emotions is an inspiration to believe in true love despite every daily message to the contrary, whether in the 19th century or in the 21st century.

I Am Grateful Because...

There are other blogs. As I was making comments on a romance blog, Smart Bitches (there’s a link on our sidebar), I was thinking how wonderful it is that finally, finally, we who read romances and love romances have places where we can talk about romances. You might think that editorial meetings provide that place, but editorial discussions often center on what is wrong with a particular manuscript, not on what each of us has read and what we thought of it. And heck, not all romance readers are editors or are editing romances. Writers’ conferences don’t provide that place either. Writers talk about what’s hot and who’s accepting manuscripts, and about plot structure and building characters. At conferences (or at monthly RWA chapter meetings, for that matter) they very seldom talk about thematic issues within romances, either those they have read or those they have written. Another barren venue for discussing romance. At romance fan conventions (of which there are very few) the talk seems dominated by shallow chatter about what is liked, without any introspection or intellectualizing, or any attempt to understand what a romance is or means personally or in the larger culture. And then these cons are famous for various silly group entertainments like male model contests. Not a lot of thoughtful parsing of romances going on here. But on the Internet, the lovely Internet, there are websites devoted to talk about romance. Serious talk, frivolous talk, lusty talk, restrained talk. And there are many, many topics to which just about anyone can add her (or his) two cents worth. It’s a great feeling to be able to say things one has thought while reading a romance, things that one’s Significant Other, while a lovely fellow, just isn’t terribly interested in hearing or even in thinking about. It’s also encouraging to read intelligent, witty comments by other romance fans, and be reassured that unlike the media’s portrayal of us, we aren’t all brain dead women. (But we mostly are women, I’ll grant that.) Years ago, I read gothic novels and thought about their recurring themes and even wrote down many of my thoughts. But I had nowhere to go with either my thoughts or my essays. I did not know anyone who read gothics. (Or if I did, we kept our reading habits secret from each other.) There were no publications dedicated to romance. The occasional mention of romance in book reviews was pretty uniformly patronizing, too, which hardly encouraged me to mail in my Deep Thoughts about my despised genre. But today, I’m feeling pretty happy about the possibility of sharing some of my thoughts about gothic romances with you at some point in the future. Sure, Internet blogging can swallow up your day if you let it, just as merely visiting interesting sites can. But to know that at any time of day you can find a romance topic on some site, either a zine or a blog, and you can probably post your own comments—-well, I’m grateful.