The Sunday after I arrived in Australia, Kat from BookThingo hosted a tea, and while I was hoovering scones and tea sandwiches, I met Jodi McAlister, who is doing her PhD thesis (or dissertation, as we call them in the US) on romance.
Specifically on virgins in romance.
I KNOW. Can you IMAGINE? Such a rare, hard to find subject (heh). So I asked her if she'd be willing to do an interview with me (poor soul) and she agreed (oh, boy). This is a pretty lengthy discussion (heh) (no really, this entry is hella long) but there certainly is no shortage of ways to examine, analyze, or just plain count up the virgins in romance.
Sarah: Can you tell me about your project, how you landed on that idea (VIRGINS in ROMANCE? WHO would have THOUGHT?), and what books you're most interested in discussing? Anything that surprised you?
Jodi: Thanks so much for letting me ramble on about my PhD work at you. I can talk about my pet virgins and all their virgin-y ways for hours and hours when I get started and it's always so exciting when people are actually interested in what I'm talking about.
My PhD project is on the history of the virgin heroine in literature. Obviously, this is really broad and could cover a whole bunch of things – I spent many, many hours which I will never get back reading through lives of virgin saints, for example – so what I'm focusing on specifically is the virgin heroine in Western love stories. (That's Western as in occidental, not as in cowboy, though I'm sure there's a paper somewhere in my future on cowboys and virgins!) Virginity as a concept is already something that is a) not studied a whole lot, and b) fascinating. “Virginity” is the only word in the English language for something which is actually a not-thing: “virgin” is an identity based on NOT doing something, on not having an experience. It's an absence, and yet it's still figured so often as something transactional – something that can be given, taken, stolen, thrown away. (emphasis mine- S.) Virginity loss episodes are such a key point in so many romance novels, and I find them so interesting.
What I really want to do is work out how virginity functions as a narrative trope in romance, and how this is changed over time. You know those people that pull apart cars for fun to see how they work? I'm like that, but for stories. I guess I'm a narrative mechanic: I love pulling stories to bits to understand how/why/whether they work. I want to work out what function virginity serves as a literary device – how it drives plot, how it drives character, and why it pops up so often in romance in particular. To do this, I'm tracing the history of the virgin heroine in the romance plot – I take a bit of a tour through medieval romance, then through the rise of the novel and its shadowy twin the pornographic novel – before coming back to the modern romance. I'm really interested in what happened once virginity loss scenes started to be regularly represented on the page instead of behind closed doors, something that really kicks off once The Flame and the Flower ( A | BN | K | S | iB ) is published in the early 1970s. I'm looking at virginity loss scenes and comparing to them to autobiographical stories about virginity loss and seeing how they matched up, as well as trying to tie them back to a historical framework.
The short version of all this is that I'm charting the history of the virgin heroine, what role she plays in love stories, and how this changes over time. Exactly how I go about doing this will probably change as well – I still have a couple of years before I submit my thesis, and I'm sure I'll have several OMGIMUSTCHANGEEVERYTHINGANDDOITTHISWAY moments by then. (I have about three of these a day. I think this is pretty common with PhD candidates!)
I came at the idea for my project in a kind of roundabout way. The idea of writing about romance first came when I was an undergraduate. I was living on campus and my friends and I came across this hilariously awful romance novel. I will never forget it. It was a time travel romance a la Jude Deveraux's Knight in Shining Armour, ( A | BN | K | S | iB ) where the heroine travelled via magic mirror to Cromwellian England. The hero was this dispossessed royalist lord and they travelled all around England in this rickety wagon. He was being chased by the authorities and she was being chased by this evil witch who was trying to sacrifice her or something. There was one particularly hysterical scene where they had sex on a bearskin rug. It was one of those books which is full to the brim of crazysauce. We used to read it aloud to each other and then roll around on the floor laughing, because we were all terribly mature people. Anyway, it piqued my interest – mostly because I like hilarious things (I know, I'm a monster), and even then, I was firmly of the opinion that academia needs more jokes in it. I started reading more romance and vaguely considered something about it for my Honours thesis, but the English faculty at my university was small and there was no one who'd be able to supervise me, so I stuck with something more traditional and wrote about bad girls in the Renaissance theatre instead.This is where the interest in virgin heroines really kicked in. Renaissance bad girls are generally bad girls because they've lost their virginity: it's the old virgin/whore dichotomy that anyone who has ever read anything ever has probably encountered.
After my Honours year, I went out and got myself a proper grown up job in an office, and I hated it. I haaaaaaaaaated it. I was bored out of my brain. (To this day, I shudder when I hear someone use the word “action” as a verb. I can't handle it.) I figured I deserved some hilarity in my life, so I got back on the romance novel train. This time, it was Mills & Boon – they were light and I could carry them around them in my handbag. I spent more than a few lunchtimes (and, let's be honest, extended coffee breaks too) reading them. And when you're repeatedly reading books with names like The Italian Billionaire's Virgin Mistress and The Greek Tycoon's Virgin Bride, the virgins kind of jump out at you. I already knew I wanted to go back to uni and do my PhD – if my shortlived office career taught me anything, it's that I reeeeeeeeeally belong in a university – and the whole idea started to percolate in my mind. It didn't fully come together until I read a string of particularly irritating virgin heroines in a row – you know, the ones that are all, “OMG, anyone who has ever had sex ever is the worst person in the entire world! I am sparkly and innocent and pure!” They were all teamed with these especially douchey alphole heroes, and it made me really angry. Anger and laughter are my two biggest motivators, so from there, the plan started to take shape. I really started thinking about what I wanted to do (after I calmed down some) and looking around for a supervisor. I got super lucky and found a really awesome one, and here I am now.
I'm obviously nowhere near as angry about virgin heroines now, though there are definitely some tropes that raise my hackles: I hate, hate, hate books where the heroine has never, ever experienced any kind of desire ever until she meets the hero. I know that this is used a lot as a kind of shorthand to mark the hero as The Hero tm (particularly in category, where you have such a limited word count), but I still find it desperately irritating. I mean, was the heroine never a teenager? Has she no hormones? Of course, these are also books I like writing about a lot, because I have a lot to say.
I'm pretty fascinated by Fifty Shades of Grey at the moment and the way that virginity works in that book, because it's SO extreme: Anastasia is the virgin-iest virgin that ever virgin-ed. At the moment, I have this idea that you can locate virginity loss episodes in romance along a kind of spectrum: at one end, you have books where virginity loss is figured as this deeply transactional thing – the hero takes the heroine's virginity, and that means that she is His For All Time. At the other end, you have books where virginity loss scenes are kind of a way for both characters to say, “hey, I love you.”
Personally, as a reader, I tend to like the latter ones much more, because there's less emphasis on virginity as this object that has changed hands. The heroine is less defined by her virginity, and she tends to be a much more active participant in the whole experience – I'm thinking particularly of books like Lord of Scoundrels ( A | BN | K | S | iB ) and The Duke and I ( A | BN | K | S | iB ) here. What I think is really interesting – and something I was quite surprised by – is how much more often the really transactional narratives turn up in contemporaries. Virginity, I find, tends to be far less of a plot point in historicals: because of the setting, it's assumed, and I think in a lot of cases, that takes the emphasis off it. In contemporaries, though, if there is a virgin heroine, she usually has a reason why she's a virgin: it's something she has to justify, and this often turns into this idea of virginity-as-a-gift. I need to read a ton more single-title contemporaries with virgin heroines to see if this really does play out, but that's where my thinking is sitting at the moment. I also want to dive into the world of paranormal: it's not a genre I've read a whole lot of in the past, so I'm really eager to see the different ways virginity is dealt with in those books. Paranormal also often has that paradigm where transformation into whatever supernatural creature stands in for virginity, which I want to explore a lot more.
The thing that has surprised me the most – aside from a lot of historicals arguably being more progressive around virginity than contemporaries – is that virginity loss scenes in romance are not always good. I'm not even talking about the extremely traumatic rape-y ones from the 1970s and 1980s, but ones written more recently. Sure, the actual experience might be pretty good, with all the mind-shattering orgasms and whatnot, but heroines often beat themselves up a lot afterwards, and it's certainly not the end of all the problems for the hero and heroine. There's this tacit admission that sex doesn't solve problems, even if it's sex with your one true love. I think this happened when sex and virginity loss started being located within texts, rather than somewhere in the nebulous land of happily-ever-after. It's not something I'd really thought about much before I started pulling apart the romance plot to see how it works – I think there's this cultural notion that sex in romance is full of rainbows and unicorns and is giving women unrealistic expectations OMGPANIC, but in reality, it's a lot more nuanced than that.
Sarah: This is FASCINATING. When you pick apart stories to figure out how they work, why is it do you think that virginity “works?” Why is it a repeated figure? And what's your least favorite example, aside from Anastasia, the virgin-iest virgin who ever virgined? (HA)
Jodi: “This is FASCINATING” is pretty much the greatest thing I can hear as an academic! I can absolutely answer as many questions as you like. (If it's not completely obvious, I LOVE talking about my research.)
I think part of the reason virginity works is simply because it's part of a literary tradition. Romance obviously didn't spring fully formed from the minds of the early Mills & Boon authors and Kathleen Woodiwiss – it's part of a very, very long literary tradition. The tradition is so long and varied that there's no way I could possibly explore all of it in my thesis. A plot that is incredibly common in Western literature is about the menaced virgin – that is, a story where you have a virgin heroine, and circumstances or characters that endanger her virginity. As long as virginity has been valued (and, by extension, thought about as a tangible object rather than just the absence of sexual experience), then endangering that virginity has been a narrative driver. I think this really becomes interesting once you have the rise of the novel, which comes at about the same time as the rise of the idea of the self. For female characters, I think you can argue that this means their sexual status became inexorably tied to their selfhood: losing their virginity became one of the biggest, if not the biggest, decision they would ever make. Samuel Richardson's Pamela is probably the classic example of this – Pamela doesn't really have too many distinguishing features apart from her virginity, and her insistence on maintaining it until she is married despite all the incentives to sleep with Mr B is her defining characteristic.
(One thing I think is really interesting is that you'll often read that Samuel Richardson invented the novel when he wrote Pamela, or maybe Daniel Defoe, but this is doing a great disservice to the ladies who were writing it first: people like Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley, who has one of my favourite author names of all time. These authors – Manley in particular – implictly rejected the idea that if you lost your virginity in the wrong way, you were automatically a bad person. They're really fascinating works, and it bums me out that a bunch of dudes get the credit for inventing the novel when the ladies pretty clearly got there first.)
I think this idea that “virgin” is a key part of, if not your entire, identity is literary baggage that the romance genre has had to deal with. It's obviously not just a literary paradigm – it's a cultural one as well – and I definitely think you can see the effect of social views changing as the romance novel develops. What I find really interesting, though, are the romances where virginity loss occurs within the narrative, especially on the page. In a lot of older books, virginity loss occurs in this sort of nebulous happily-ever-after – the story might be full of sexual tension, but sex exists outside the confines of the story. The publication of The Flame and the Flower in 1972 really changed all that. Romance was already moving in a more explicit direction – the first not-exactly-behind-closed-doors sex scene in Mills & Boon happens in 1967 – but I think it really exploded once Woodiwiss's book came out. This is where virginity loss started to be located on the page and really started to drive the story. They're obviously not the first virginity loss scenes to ever be produced on the page ever, but the heritage of virginity loss scenes before this is mostly pornographic, intended largely to titillate a (presumably) male audience. This is really where virginity loss started to be used to drive the plot.
On a basic level, the literary and cultural baggage of virginity means it functions as a very effective form of shorthand: if you've got the virginity, you've got the girl. I think this happens a lot in category in particular: where you have a virgin heroine, her decision to sleep with the hero makes their happily-ever-after inevitable. What makes virginity work is obviously different from book to book – romance as a genre is so massive, and generalising is always a bit of a dangerous practice. I think, however, that power has a lot to do with it: on-the-page virginity loss episodes are real key tipping points in the power dynamics of the romance novel. I think it's safe to say that if you think of a romance as a contest, the heroine wins: she gets love and monogamous commitment, and the hero is often kind of surprised into discovering he wants this too (with her). There's a great line in Daphne Clair's piece in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women where she writes that, “A smoking .45 and six corpses at his feet is a male fantasy. A woman will settle for one live hero at hers. And if she places a dainty foot upon his neck, it is only to invite him to kiss it.” The virginity loss episode in romance is often a point where the hero seems to be totally in control: sex is his sphere, he knows what he's doing, and she is hopelessly inexperienced and seemingly powerless. (Of course, in some of the rape-y romances of the 1970s and 1980s, she literally is powerless: she has no say in the matter.) Power often seems so unequal in virginity loss episodes – the hero often functions as a kind of teacher. And yet here, at the apex of his power, this is when he begins to lose it. Because he that gets the virginity gets the girl, the virginity loss episode is where they become inexorably tied together. For the hero, there is no escaping the heroine after he's taken her virginity. There's no turning back. Far from getting her out of his system (which is obviously not always the motivation for a sex scene, but it's relatively common), the heroine almost infects the hero. He catches love, monogamy – feelings. It might not manifest immediately, but the textual symbol of virginity creates an unbreakable bond between the two characters. It's the beginning of the happy end. The heroine makes him lose control not only sexually, but more broadly. He forgets how to live without her.
I think virginity often functions as a shorthand to mark the heroine as a good person, though I think this is starting to backfire: virgin heroines who are all like, “I am a virgin because casual sex is disgusting, you filthy sluts” are incredibly annoying, and I think readers are more likely to code them as “unlikeable” than “moral and virtuous person I can root for”. For this reason, I think the virginity = morality thing is becoming a lot more implicit, and the focus has shifted largely to the heroine's sexual awakening. Again, virginity becomes a kind of textual shorthand: the virgin's desire for the hero, when she has never, ever desired anyone ever, is what alerts the reader to the fact that he is the hero. Romance relies on the love story between the hero and heroine being sort of transcendent: they have to be the great loves of each others' lives. If your heroine is a practically asexual virgin, then establishing this on her side becomes easy: she has nothing to compare it to.
Basically, I think virginity works as a trope a) because of its literary heritage, and b) because it's a really convenient piece of textual shorthand. It's rare that you'll see a really detailed explanation into why a heroine is a virgin: in historicals, you don't really have to, but in contemporaries, often you'll get a throwaway one-liner. I have a half-baked theory that there are five different reasons used for why virgin heroines are still virgins, but they're rarely explored in much depth. Then you have the bizarre twists and turns that some authors go through to establish that their five-times-married duchesses who spent time employed as a courtesan are still virgins. Obviously this differs from book to book, but I think it's less about virginity itself than what virginity represents. For the heroine, her virginity loss marks the man she loses it to as her One True Love (even if she doesn't know it at the time, or, as in the case of sweet savage old skool books, she has no choice in the matter). For the hero, it marks the beginning of his surrender to the heroine, and the transfer of power.
As for my least favourite virgin ever… wow. That's hard. There are a lot in categories in particular that annoy the shit out of me: usually the ones that have reached the age of 25 or whatever without ever once experiencing the least flutter of sexual desire. It's not so much because I find them unbelievable as immature – are they really in a position to engage in this intense committed long term relationship? This isn't always the case and sometimes the awakening story is done very well, but it sure as hell isn't my favourite trope. Probably the most WTFy virgin heroine book I've come across is Johanna Lindsey's Prisoner of My Desire, which… yeah, I still haven't recovered. It's scarred me permanently. The heroine's wicked stepbrother has taken her mother prisoner in order to ensure her compliance. First, he forces her to marry this grotesque old man. Said grotesque old man drops dead on their wedding night, though (while chasing the heroine around the room attempting to rape her), and so the wicked stepbrother has to make a new plan. He needs the heroine to get pregnant with a child that looks like it might be the child of the grotesque old man, who once upon a time had blonde hair and blue eyes, so he goes down to the local village and kidnaps the first dude with eyes of blue and locks of gold that he finds. He chains this dude to a bed and forces the heroine to rape him. Of course, the heroine is so sexually naive that she doesn't understand how a penis works and has to get talked through the whole process by her maid and by this time my eyes were the size of saucers because I couldn't quite believe what I was reading. She eventually succeeds and proceeds to apologetically rape him for three days, but then he escapes and comes back with an army, because OF COURSE he is the wicked stepbrother's warlord nemesis whom selfsame wicked stepbrother kidnapped by accident because he doesn't know what he looks like, despite them being nemeses. (The wicked stepbrother is kind of a dumbass.) So the enraged warlord nemesis (who is, of course, the hero) takes the heroine back to his castle, rapes her for three days, and then… somehow they end up together. I can't quite remember how. I blocked it out. It's obviously an interesting book for me to write about, because the virgin heroine as rapist is really not something that turns up very often. But OMG MY EYES BLED.
Sarah: Which romances have been invaluable as you've been researching?
Jodi: The Flame and the Flower is a big one. While it is very far from being one of my favourite books ever, I think you can make a case that it's the most important book most people have never heard of. It revolutionised romance as a genre. It's also such a classic menaced virgin story that it is so easy for me to write about (even if all I ever write about is the first chapter, aka The Most Rapetastic Chapter In The World, Ever). It's a good example of how power operates: Heather is powerless when Brandon rapes her, while Brandon is at his most powerful. This serves to tie them together, a bond that Brandon cannot break, even if he wanted to. When he takes her virginity, he realises that he figuratively owns her, and offers to set her up as his mistress. She refuses and escapes, but even that escape cannot rid him of her: when she's pregnant, her rich family friends force him to marry her. Brandon gradually loses power as the book goes on, while Heather gains it – it's only once they've achieved a happy level of egalitarianism that they can live happily ever after. It's a really easy book to discuss, because the operations of power are so clear.
I also really like talking about Lord of Scoundrels and The Duke and I, because they demonstrate how the genre has changed and grown. Jessica and Daphne are more enfranchised as characters, and their virginity less objectified – virginity loss is a step in their relationships, but it isn't imbued with so much pseudo-mystical significance. And then there's a TON of categories, far too many to name: Diana Hamilton is one author I end up writing about a lot, but there are seriously sooooo many. I'm trying to discuss as many books as I can – because I'm working on a sort of widescale historical narrative analysis, I don't want to end up being one of those people who makes sweeping generalisations about romance based on, like, seven books. (I don't really want to make sweeping generalisations at all, because that is a dangerous critical practice, but I do have to generalise a bit.) However, academic romance criticism is definitely moving towards a more book-focused, rather than genre-focused, approach, which I think is really exciting. (Eric Selinger and Sarah Frantz make this point in the intro to New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction, and they are 100% right.) I'm really looking forward to taking some specific texts and looking specifically at how virginity operates as a trope within them. I've got some work planned on Twilight and Fifty Shades in this regard, but there are SO many romances out there that I want to do this for (and I'm always happy to take suggestions for more!)
Sarah: You said “On a basic level, the literary and cultural baggage of virginity means it functions as a very effective form of shorthand: if you've got the virginity, you've got the girl. “
So what types of things take the place of virginity when the heroine isn't a virgin? What are some virgin substitues – virgin margarine? Virgin Equal? Virgin Egg Beaters? VIRGIN SPAM?!
Jodi: Often, even when your heroine isn't a virgin, she has a sort of fetishised innocence about her – some kind of naivete or inexperience. I think you put it really well in the Bosoms, actually, when you talk about the curse of Bad Wang – heroines who have had a previously fulfilling sexual relationship are rare. (And if they have, their partner is dead. A legitimate rival to the hero who is actually alive is really hard to find.)
I think Nora Roberts' Montana Sky ( A | BN | K | S | iB ), with its three heroines, is an interesting example of this. One of the heroines, Willa, is actually a virgin. The pattern her romance with her hero Ben follows is a fairly standard one. Another heroine, Lily, has just come out of an abusive relationship and learns how to really open up and love in her relationship with her hero Adam – love for her is healing, and enables her to find herself. The other heroine, Tess, is a very cynical Hollywood type who has to learn to let her walls down and let someone in: to learn how to love. She doesn't have the innocence about her that Lily has, and she certainly doesn't have sexual hangups, but she doesn't really know how to love, what love means, or what love might look like. This idea of a barrier between the heroine and her ultimate self-actualisation and fulfilment is part of the very basic stuff that makes romance, I think. The hero helps her grow, helps her learn, and eventually enables her to become her best self. She, of course, does the same for him (Lynne Pearce expresses this as a formula in her book Romance Writing – if the heroine is x and the hero is y, then in the romance, x + y –> x' + y').
In the virgin heroine romance, this barrier is amusingly literalised in the anatomically incorrect iron hymen, but I think it's a hallmark of all romance: the hero introducing the heroine to exciting new experiences, sexual or not, is a key part (and one of the best parts!) of the romantic plot.
Sarah: In The Duke and I, there's a scene with Daphne that didn't trouble me at all when I first read it and swooned everywhere, but when I read it again recently, I was really shocked that I didn't remember that scene – and a little horrified at myself for loving the book so much. The scene in which Daphne is the sexual aggressor really bothers me. But as I've thought about it, it seems almost transactional: “you got my virginity, I want a baby.” Is that a trade that you've noticed at all in other books?
Jodi: That scene in The Duke and I is definitely bothersome: Daphne knows Simon doesn't want a baby, but once she figures out how sex works, she just goes ahead and essentially takes one. It's a totally douchey move, and one I wish she had grovelled for a bit better in the text – I don't know if it's ever really resolved satisfactorily. (That said, I do love that book very deeply!) It's not really a trade I've noticed a lot, certainly not in contemporaries, where pregnancies either happen beyond the happily-ever-after in the epilogue, or they're accidental in the text and drive a lot of the conflict. (Oh, and secret babies, of course, a whole other animal.)
Virgin heroines do tend to end up pregnant a lot – if nothing else, romance really busts that notion that you can't get pregnant the first time wiiiiiiide open. I haven't really noticed a lot of aggressive desire for children in virgin heroine books – I mean, it exists, but I don't think it's a big thing. I'd guess this is probably because the heroines are frequently so sexually repressed that the idea of making children exists in some nebulous impossibility for them. Daphne is a bit different because she's a sexually curious virgin heroine (part of what makes her interesting!), and her desire for children is an integral part of her character. Because her virginity isn't really fetishised in that book and she doesn't really envision it as a sacrifice – she really, really wants to sleep with Simon – I'm not sure how directly transactional the virginity/baby thing is. Maybe reputation/baby is more accurate? It's an interesting case, that book.
Sarah: So where are you in your work? Writing? Reading? Researching? Are you planning to publish any of your work, or hoping to?
Jodi: I am ABSOLUTELY planning to publish some of my work. 2013 is hopefully going to be the big year of publication for me. I think I've reached a stage where I'm confident enough in my positions and my arguments to start putting my stuff out there, so next year I'm really going to go after publication with both hands. I'm planning to go to as many conferences as I can as well (travel funding pending, of course – it costs about a million billion dollars to get from Australia to anywhere). I've had a paper on the Fifty Shades trilogy accepted to PCA in Washington in March next year, which I'm totally excited about – I've never been to the States before! I'm also hoping I can make a trip to the IASPR conference in San Francisco happen in September, as well as taking in the inaugural Elizabeth Jolley conference on romance in Fremantle in August. (I was so excited when I heard there was going to be a romance conference in Australia that I literally fell out of my chair. Like, actually.) I've also got a piece coming up next week-ish on the Popular Romance Project blog, and I'm definitely hoping to write a few more pieces for them!
I'm about eighteen months into my PhD, and I'm pretty happy with my progress. Of course, I'm totally blessed to have this incredibly interesting subject material to work with: I am so, so glad that this is what I chose to write about. I've got a rough draft of probably about three quarters of my thesis. It's going to need a hell of a lot of editing and rewriting and knocking into shape, but the basic bones are there, which is terribly exciting. I'm always reading – at any given time, there are probably about three romance novels in my handbag (and a bazillion more on my Kindle!) – and I often find myself researching these odd little nooks and crannies of literature and culture that I never imagined I would. But it's mostly writing at the moment: once I have a complete draft, which I'm hoping will happen in the next couple of months, I'll be able to stand back, really evaluate where my argument needs shoring up, and begin a new round of research from there. There is so much stuff that I want to talk about that I don't think it's even vaguely within the realms of possibility that I'll fit it all in: I've got enough stuff to keep me busy for quite a while post-doc!
Sarah: What romances do you recommend to those who are curious about the genre, and why?
Jodi: When someone asks me what I study and I tell them I work on romance novels, there are two typical reactions I get. The first one is awesome, and it's my favourite – it usually goes along the lines of, “Wow! That's so interesting! How did you get into that?”. The second is less awesome – it goes something like, “But you're so smart! Why would you study those stupid books?” This one often comes with a side of, “But all romances are the same, so that must be so easy,” like any PhD in the world ever is easy. This one can turn very sexist very quickly – I've delivered more than a few lectures to dudes who told me I was doing a “chick PhD”, mansplained what “romance” is to me, and told me “you should read Jane Austen instead – she's kind of like romance fiction, except she's actually good”.
In both cases, I have a couple of books that I recommend (forcefully, in the latter case). My two go-to recommendations are Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase and Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie ( A | BN | K | S | iB ). For people who are genuinely interested in the work I do, I think these offer a really awesome intro to the genre. And for people who think romance is stupid and formulaic? I defy you to read either of these two books and still come out thinking that.
There is a third question I get asked sometimes, usually from people who are romance readers. They ask me what the most bizarrely, cracktastically hilarious romance I've ever read is. I have a bunch of categories that I point them towards. There's this one series in the Sweet line about a magical fairy princess who is cursed by her wicked stepmother to live as a crone unless she gets 21 couples together before her 30th birthday which is HILARIOUS – she takes a job as a concierge in this fancy resort on some island, and she's lurking in the background of all the books manipulating things so the central couple gets together. (And of course she's part of Couple #21, the one that breaks the curse.) But if they want single-title, then I always point them to the very first romance I ever read, the time-travelling one set in Cromwellian England with the witches and the magic mirror and the rug sex: A Love Beyond Forever by Diana Haviland. (Check out the cover. How could you not love this book?)
Thanks so much for interviewing me, Sarah! It's been BIG fun. And now I have a couple of things for you:
1) A review recommendation – I know you probably have a bazillion to get to, but if are looking for stuff, a friend of mine is a YA author, and her book Burnt Snow is BAD.ASS. It's YA paranormal set in a small town on the NSW South Coast (it's actually based on the town I grew up in, so I'm biased). It's got a really strong heroine, a great hero, and I think you'd really enjoy it. The sequel is also coming out soon-ish. (I've had some trouble finding available buy links but here is AMZ | Galaxy Bookshop (AU) | Booktopia | Book Depository.)
2) I think I might have found the most hilarious romance blurb of all time, so I immediately thought of you. I've attached a picture of it, but in case you can't read it, the especially hilarious bit reads:
“Zenobia – a secret metropolis nestled safely in the fertile crescent of the western desert of Glendarra – lay, like its ruler's only daughter Chrysana, untouched by foreign hands.
One thrust was all it would take…”
Gold.
And if you want to read the book that blurb is from, and OF COURSE YOU DO, that's from The Crystal City, by Janice Tarantino, published in 1996.
Thank you to Jodi McAlister for answering all my nosy questions. I realize this is a REALLY LONG OMG interview, but I'm fascinated and very curious about the different things that people see in the standard tropes of romance. And hey, virgins in romance are everywhere. I love that Jodi's looking at why and how that is. Good luck on your thesis, Jodi!
@Nali What you’re talking about is fascinating, not just from a purely interested-in-romance position but from a broader does-life-inform-art-or-does-art-inform-life one. I think you’re right that readers don’t necessarily need (or want) the paternalistic hero any more, and if we’re making predictions, I think he’ll gradually fall out of fashion. But he’s a familiar archetype, and familiarity is automatically comforting. The romance is a safe zone because you know how it’s going to turn out in the end: you’ve got a sort of textual guarantee that this is a moral world, where the good guys are rewarded and the bad guys are punished and everyone else lives happily ever after. The paternalistic hero could arguably be read as a manifestation of that paradigm within the text (she says, making this up as she goes along). I don’t think there can be enough emphasis placed on the role of ‘comfort’ in the romance novel. In the 1940s, Mills & Boon were granted a special paper ration during WWII so they could keep publishing their books, on the grounds that they kept morale up. WWII books hardly ever even mention the war: they interact with it in a really bleak way. Someone who knows what you need without you even having to bother to say it? I can definitely see how that’s comforting!
@hapax Your thesis sounds really interesting! No offence intended to your virgin saints – hagiography isn’t my thing personally (I’m more interested in stories about virginity lost than virginity maintained, and all the Agneses and Agathas and Katherines started blurring together for me after a while), but I have no doubt that there are fascinating nuggets of knowledge within them. The development of virginity/chastity as an ideal sounds very intriguing: I’d love to hear more!
@Phaenarete Thanks for the recs! I’ll definitely check them out. They sound like really interesting treatments of virginity.
@Ros Clarke 1) You should totally write and submit that paper, because I would read the hell out of it.
2) I’ve got a few Lynne Grahams in my bibliography, and I will totally seek out more!
3) Re discourse around “she’s so tight”: this is an interesting one. I have a theory (a little half-baked, but getting there) that this kind of thing relates to ideas of the virgin as enclosed or surrounded by a wall. There’s a well-known passage in a medieval romance called The Romance of the Rose which is an allegory for virginity loss: the Lover talks about fighting his way down a tight little passage to pluck a rose. There’s this notion that virginity loss has an element of surrender (for a woman, anyway – you’d have to talk to Jonathan Allan to see if this happens for men too!), much in the same way that one might surrender a castle or a fort. It’s a literal invasion. I think the anatomically incorrect hymens you see all the time are a manifestation of this idea – they’re kind of the last bulwark before the invaders are complete. Where the heroine is not a virgin but has “closed up”, I imagine that it’s still playing on this kind of discourse – this idea of surrender and benevolent invasion. Does that make sense?
@Marianne McA Mills & Boon books from the 1920s are surprisingly explicit, even though you won’t get sex scenes on the page. You could probably argue that some of this is the influence of EM Hull’s The Sheik, but they really dealt with some hard-hitting stuff. (jay Dixon talks about this at length in her wonderful book The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1990s, which I highly recommend). The books gradually got more ‘wholesome’ for a few reasons. M&B couldn’t afford to lose the Irish market, who were hyper-conservative. They also started up a reprint deal with Harlequin, and Mary Bonnycastle, who was basically in charge, was very firm that the books shouldn’t be dirty – I think she said something like “they shouldn’t bring a blush to the cheek”. And in the 1950s M&B also had a serialisation deal with women’s magazines. The editors were generally very conservative, and because the magazines brought in the big bucks, M&B had to kowtow a bit. It wasn’t until the late 1960s and 1970s that the books started getting sexier, largely because they had to compete with a) TV and b) the erotic historical genre kicked off by The Flame and the Flower.
@Cleo The fake non-virgin thing is definitely something that’s popping up more. Laura Carpenter, in her book Virginity Lost, argues that people generally see virginity in one of three ways: as a gift, as a stigma, or as a step in a process. The gift metaphor has probably been the biggest one in romance for a long time now, but the stigma metaphor is definitely starting to gain traction.
@kkw Am going to comb through Delphine now – I haven’t come across that story before! Very interesting.
@keri Isn’t Haywood wonderful? It makes me SO SAD that there were these badass lady authors writing all this awesome stuff, and so many people are like, “first novel? Pamela. No, wait, Robinson Crusoe.” The way the Fair Triumvirate of Wit respected the female reader was awesome – Delarivier Manley in particular was a champion of the idea that female readers would want to see women like themselves on the page instead of cardboard cutout “ideal women”. I wish more people knew about them.
My own doctoral work was in Romances, but in the late medieval period. As a scholar of Middle English romance and an avid romance novel reader, I must say what I find most intriguing about the male/female virgin divide that is that, with female virgins in modern novels, the purity remains paramount – such to the extent that in many older romances (of say the 80s & 90s), the heroine barely knows what a penis looks like and has no conception of sex as she has been kept so very removed from that until she can be appropriately married off. This trope holds even in time periods where the world was exclusively agrarian and believe me when I say animals do not care whose untried eyes are watching while they Do It. In a world wherein female value – that is her currency in the marriage market – is figured in terms of her physical purity, the perception of her virginity is important. Regardless, medieval women (or women before or after) were not so completely ignorant as many romances with virginal heroines make them out to be. Thus, the encounter with the hero and the loss of virginity does, indeed, become transactional, but it is also didactic. The hero has a skill that he is then going to teach this oh-so-very-innocent young woman, and this gives him another level of power over her – at least until they are able to go at it like rabid monkeys, and she can work her way up to his level of experience with every sexual encounter they have.
On the other hand, what male virgins seem to lack in experience they make up for in prowess nonetheless. A male virgin is able to maintain his masculinity by still being a tiger in the sack with amazing longevity, even if he has never been inside of any WooHoo, much less a magic one. I’ve honestly never read about any hero, much less a virginal one, prematurely ejaculating, or not fulfilling all of the heroine’s sexual desires by making her scream her orgasm to the rafters – often TWICE (or more) – before having an orgasm of his own. Thus, in contrast to the innocent/ignorant virginal heroine, the virginal hero possesses experienced sexual abilities, even though he has never actually had sex. In this manner, even the virginal hero never breaks the cardinal rule of sex with the heroine in romance, namely that he cannot leave her sexual unsatisfied. Ever. This means that, even if he is a virgin, he must fulfill this Prime Directive, which does not make logical sense to anyone who has any real sexual experience. It’s an intriguing paradox, and I hope you publish soon – I can’t wait to read more about it!
It’s rough that the women almost invariably died in the end, yes, but having them be sympathetic protagonists at all caused a public outcry. It was a huge step at the time, and the authors who risked their reputations to draw attention to the bullshit double standards and the general paucity of options for women deserve credit for it (even Richardson, I suppose).
Yeah, but that alone is enough to make me say Hardy *doesn’t* deserve that much credit. Mary Hays, Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins all did it before he did—and Collins even gave her a happy ending. Jane Austen almost never kills off her fallen women (the original Eliza in Sense & Sensibility is the only one who does die, and she dies before the book begins), though they admittedly aren’t her protagonists. If you factor in poetry, Augusta Webster, Amy Levy, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and John Keats (to name just a handful of the top of my head after only one cup of coffee) all did (with women as protagonists or co-protagonists) before Hardy did it.
Bonnie Dee’s “The Countess Takes a Lover,” has a virgin hero who must be taught the ways of love.
Oh, but come on, Snarkhunter, Austen’s not in the business of killing off anyone. She wrote happy endings. Hardy didn’t. And I would have thought that England had more repressive strictures on women at the end of Victoria’s reign than just before it, so the social climates they were each mocking were pretty different, and the negative fallout they’d garner was different.
And it’s not like we’re sympathetic to Lydia, for example. There’s much more a sense that she deserves to end up with evil Wickham, and that she wouldn’t even have it so good, except that Lizzie doesn’t deserve to be stuck with shameful relatives.
Hardy isn’t saying that Tess should die and Angel should thrive because that’s how a good story ends, with everyone getting what they deserve. He’s railing against the injustice, I think he *wanted* people to be angry about it. He was making the point that the world sucks – in large part because of the way it treats women (and children, and animals, and the uneducated, and the poor, and the sensitive, and the outsiders, and…). He’s not killing her to condemn her, he’s condemning the world that kills her. Gaskell seems to me to be more in the business of morality plays, when she kills off Ruth, it felt like even the most oppressive saintliness can’t redeem her.
I haven’t read Opie or Hays, but I will grant all props to Collins. He pulled off some impressive stuff, but I don’t see that detracting from Hardy.
Also, Jodi, if you haven’t read Delphine, it’s…uh, well, it’s worth reading, but it isn’t…well…you might like it. It’s not what I’d call well written (but translation, so maybe not as bad as I think), and it’s kind of painfully earnest and lacking in self-awareness, but it remains deeply fascinating. Kind of like a train wreck. I’m going to see if I can narrow down your search for you….
SUPER awesome interview and discussion! I second (or third or fourth) the suggestion to interview Jodi for the podcast!
I think sexual knowledge and skill may be the broader categories in which virginity is situated. The hero is very often the one who educates the heroine, whether it’s done paternalistically or not. If she has some sexual knowledge/skill, he has more. (I’m sure there are some, but off the top of my head I’m having trouble thinking of a romance example where the heroine has MORE sexual knowledge/skill than the hero. They are generally at least equal in that regard.) I suppose it’s another expression of power and of the woman’s goodness and the rightness of their love. We all know those stories where a woman has had actual intercourse but is still rather ignorant about it all works. In historicals, that might mean she never had an orgasm, oral sex, etc. In contemporaries it might be about orgasms or oral sex, or it might be more explicit—the hero introduces her to BDSM, anal sex, etc. So while not technically a virgin, she is sort of re-virginized so that the hero can still be the “first.”
Frankly, virgin heroines usually annoy me. In historicals, I can’t stop thinking about how screwed (heh) the heroine would be if the hero decided to just take off after sleeping with her. WE know it’s not going to happen, but SHE doesn’t know that! In contemporaries, it often feels like the virginity is some sort of artificial “big deal,” and as a method for identifying the man as The Hero I think it’s weak and boring. Plus, it’s hard to maintain suspension of disbelief during a de-virginizing scene. I’m super interested in your idea of contrasting scenes in books with real life accounts, because I have never talked to ANY woman who had multiple orgasms on her first time or who was pretty much a sexual goddess right off the bat. Maybe it happens, but I don’t think it’s the norm. When I encounter a virgin heroine, especially in a contemporary, I’m usually rolling my eyes.
Please come back and talk more, Jodi! 🙂
Actually, things were less restrictive by Hardy’s time than they were at the beginning of Victoria’s reign, though, yes, much less permissive than they were during the Regency. However, even in Austen’s time fallen women were supposed to penitent die in narrative (and in real life—see the fallout from Godwin’s biography of Mary Wollstonecraft), and Austen was writing social commentary. It’s incredibly unusual that the fallen women are not more roundly punished (and Lydia is not the only or even the most dramatic example of fallenness in Austen).
All I’m saying is that Hardy is not exactly revolutionary in his treatment of fallen women. He is part of an important tradition in 19C literature—and he is coming at the tail end of it. His fatalism is unusual, but his treatment of Tess is very much in line with sympathetic portrayals of fallen women throughout the 19C. This does not detract from his work, but as someone whose work is primarily focused on writers who have not been as canonically celebrated as Hardy, I tend to be suspicious of claims that set up canonical writers as radical originals when they are clearly taking part in an established tradition.
That should be “die penitent in narrative.”
THIS IS MY NEW OUTRAGED INSULT ON THE INTERNET.
DIE PENITENT IN A NARRATIVE!
Day: made.
LOLOLOL. It looks SO MUCH better in caps!
@Joanna Your doctoral work sounds fascinating! I start my literary history with the rise of the novel, but I do go back and play a little with medieval romance (and always worry that someone will notice I don’t really know what I’m talking about!). What you say about purity is really interesting. It’s definitely something I’ve noticed, but I have a notion that this is changing: there’s a shift away from the fetishisation of “purity” to the fetishisation of “innocence”, which is similar, but not quite the same. I need to think more about why this is, but it’s definitely intriguing.
@snarkhunter, @kkw I’d be pretty leery of labelling Hardy a revolutionary original. I think he’s certainly using the accepted narrative form (you get deflowered in the ‘wrong’ way, you die) to highlight injustice – I mean, he was a Victorian realist, so that was the kind of thing that he did. But is he railing for change? I don’t think so. It’s more of, “oh look, everything is shit”. I think there are a lot of arguments to be made and that the text can sustain multiple readings, but I don’t know how much ground Hardy actually broke. (To be fair, I am not a Hardy scholar – I only really talk about his work tangentially. Adding this discussion to the ‘think about more’ pile.)
@claritygolden I think the teacher/student dynamic is definitely one you see a lot in romance – there’s a sort of fetishisation of inequality. (Arguably, this goes both ways – in some books, you get a very straightforward he-teaches-her-about-sex-she-teaches-him-about-love pattern.) It’s especially interesting when you consider it next to real-life virginity loss stories, because this narrative, which I’ve termed the lesson narrative, is by far the least common. And yes, in real life virginity loss narratives, multiple mutual screaming orgasms are spectacularly rare. I’ve come across a couple which were like, “it was great! I came!” but the majority are like, “wow… this was not really what I expected.” (I have a paper coming out on these real-life virginity loss stories sometime next year – they’re totally fascinating.)
And as for talking more? MY PLEASURE.
@SB Sarah, @snarkhunter Totally adding DIE PENITENT IN A NARRATIVE to my rota of insults. I needed a new one…
@ snarkhunter DIE PENITENT IN NARRATIVE is so happy making, I’m going to be laughing for days.
OK, I’m going to stop defending him any second now, but seriously, it’s not Hardy’s fault that critics eventually deemed him Good and Gaskell Minor, if indeed that’s the line critics are taking. Do critics say that, and if they do does anyone care? Very disheartening. I don’t know, I just read all this stuff on my own, and I can’t find people who want to talk to me about any of it. Which on the bright side spares me canonical preaching. For example, the origin of the novel is not a subject that comes up frequently enough for my taste, but at least I’ve never heard anyone claim that Richardson or Defoe was anything but an early adopter. I’m just saying, when something is over-hyped it can be hard not to find it disappointing, but just because others did more than they’re credited with doesn’t mean Hardy did less.
Also, Jodi, the woman I’m thinking of is in fact Juliette Recamier. I can’t find any of my de Stael books (could I have lent them, given them away, alphabetized them under something other than S or d?) but I have a biography of her that mentions Recamier, nee Bernard. Unfortunately, she apparently appears in both Delphine and Corinne. The rumour that she was incapable of losing her virginity seems to have been spread by Merimee, along with the theory that she didn’t sleep with her husband because he was actually her natural father.
Jodi—I remember my (male) philosophy professors always p-shaw-ing me about this—but it strikes me that an anthropological anaylsis of sex roles in the time periods you’re covering might make an interesting addition to the art-imitating-life vs. life-imitating-art discussion? I mean, I’m sure you have tons of historial data on these authors, but I’m always fascinated by how anthropology cuts through specific traditions in the performance of sex roles by explaining their reinforcement of larger normative cultural values—which seems simplistic, but isn’t always.
It’s almost like what you’re doing comes close to cultural anthropology, through a literary analysis—because many other forms of literary analyses could be limited to just the literary world, but Romance? It’s too visceral, too literal an expression of concurrent human value systems and experiences. Which is what makes it such an important genre! Great discussion everyone!
“It’s almost like what you’re doing comes close to cultural anthropology, through a literary analysis”
That’s pretty much what Kyra Kramer and I did in our essay on bodies in romance. She provided the anthropological framework, which I found fascinating.
Sadly, that has been the line critics took for most of the 20th century. The rise of feminist criticism has helped change that, but there are still plenty of people who see Hardy as an Artiste and Gaskell as a soppy sentimentalist. Since I am, in my day job, a professor of nineteenth-century literature and a literary critic, I spend a lot of time and energy trying to counteract a century’s worth of “look how revolutionary and amazing this penis-having person was,” not b/c said person isn’t a great writer, but because said person usually is not particularly revolutionary. Wordsworth was not responsible for the sonnet revival in England (Charlotte Smith was). Robert Browning did not originate the dramatic monologue (though he did take it to interesting new places). And for the love of God and Darwin and all that is holy in this universe, D. H. Lawrence WAS NOT THE FIRST PERSON TO WRITE MODERNIST POETRY IN NEW MEXICO. (Um…I may be a touch bitter about that particular issue. And I’ve probably just identified myself to anyone who’s ever heard me talk in real life.)
Of course, rant aside, other than their treatment of fallen women, comparing Hardy and Gaskell is kind of silly. They’re completely different people doing completely different things for different reasons. I might hate Tess of the D’Urbervilles with a fiery passion, but it doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s not a good book. Rather the contrary. I think it’s a very good book. That I happen to hate. I think Hardy was quite brilliant. And inhumanly depressing. (Personally, I prefer his poetry. And I’m fascinated by someone who is entirely a 19th-century novelist and a 20th-century poet.)
Gaaah. I swear, I am really interested in the virginity topic. Somehow I’ve talked more about Thomas Hardy here than I have about him since…well, the last time I taught Tess.
It’s interesting that you’re looking at Twilight, because in it it is Edward who gets the ‘so virginal, they never thought about sex until The One comes along’ characterisation. I wonder what that says? (along with the million other strange things that come out of that series)
@kkw Adding Juliette Recamier to my “things to look into” pile – thanks for looking that up for me! Sounds like an entertaining story, if nothing else. 🙂
@phaenarete I’m trying to keep on the historical straight-and-narrow with my thesis. I think there’s definite scope for cultural anthropology in this area, but I have absolutely no anthropological training, so it’s not something I want to attempt (not now, anyway – maybe when I’m post-doc, I’ll do what Laura did and team up with an anthropologist to do a bit of research). I don’t want to do what Janice Radway did when she wrote Reading The Romance: it’s an ethnographical study, and she has pretty much no training in ethnography. There should definitely be anthropological work done on romance, but I’m not the person for it – not yet, anyway! (All this said, I skate very close to the edge of the discipline of sociology quite often, despite having as much training in that as I do in anthropology. I’m already an interdisciplinary PhD candidate – it really shows that the boundaries between the different branches of the arts are very blurry!)
@snarkhunter “I might hate Tess of the D’Urbervilles with a fiery passion, but it doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s not a good book. Rather the contrary. I think it’s a very good book. That I happen to hate. I think Hardy was quite brilliant. And inhumanly depressing.” That’s pretty much exactly how I feel about Tess and the broader Hardy oeuvre. It’s obviously a great book, but Hardy is SO not my cup of tea.
@KH_Tas The fact that Edward’s virginity is fetishised in Twilight is one of the things I find most interesting about it (and also one of the complexities that I think a lot of cultural commentators miss). I’m looking at it alongside Fifty Shades of Grey, operating on the premise that Christian is a revised version of Edward. I haven’t thought too much about this (I haven’t written this chapter yet!), but I think you can argue that they’re both coded as sexually damaged – Christian because his emotional fucked-up-edness has led him into BDSM, which Anastasia must ‘cure’ him of; and Edward because he’s almost frigid (sexually and literally!). I suppose you could argue that Bella ‘cures’ Edward of virginity much like Anastasia cures Christian of BDSM: she puts him back on the straight and narrow path of acceptable narrative alpha masculinity. This is obviously very simplistic and I need to think about it more, but that’s one of my jumping-off points when it comes to discussing virginity and Twilight.
I’m glad that you were able to write this thoughtful piece without bashing virgins. This is touchy subject for me because I’m a modern, 23-year old virgin who is saving herself for twu wuv, but so often people see romance authors fetishizing virgins and they assume we WANT to be fetishized. Which is not true. Or they assume we are saving our virginity as a gift to our husbands. Which is also not true. Virginity is a gift to myself, because I want to fall in love only once and I can only enjoy sex if it’s with my true love…the man’s approval of my virginity is irrelevant to me.
Sorry for the spiel…this is something that gets me going because I often think modern romance authors take SUCH a wrong approach to virginity. They seem to assume that it gives the girl certain character traits, or that it is magical, or that losing it is the Ultimate Experience We Have Been Waiting For. And don’t even get me started on the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. Nothing could be more offensive!
Speaking of male virginity in romance, there is an overwrought, cheesy, melodramatic fantasy called The Black Jewels Trilogy, in which the main heroine is this prophesied queen of the jewel-wearing witches and warlocks and her mate is this 2000-year old immortal hottie named Daemon (yes…really) who has stayed maidenly and pure for 2000+ years because he was waiting for the prophesied queen, who is his soulmate…and yes, it is melodramatic to the point of being unreadable. Pretty much Edward from Twilight in terms of bad writing and fantasy-cheese-romance.
But it was nice to see the “man who saves himself for the heroine” for a change.
“overwrought, cheesy, melodramatic fantasy”
How bad is it that the worse you made it sound, the more I thought I might need to get my hot little hands on it at least long enough to make a LOT of fun?
I… might need a new hobby.
…and who is a child when they meet…
Regarding male virgins, you mind find an example in the speculative fiction Ritual of Proof by Dara Joy. I have two words for you …MALE HYMEN o_0
Male virgin Jamie Fraser did NOT give Claire the Big O during Round One of the Wedding Night, or, if memory serves, even during Round Two. Being young and healthy, he manned up for Round Three and learned that female orgasm was not a myth.
Claire tried not to be all teachy during their honeymoon, but Jamie freely acknowledged her greater experience, although he said he would ask for guidance if he felt the need. Outlander was written in 1991, and I think it was pretty rare to have an older woman marry a younger male virgin.
Jamie had refrained from sex because he saw the effects of disease and decided to play it safe until he met someone special.