Yeah, that’s right. Rape. I can’t believe this blog has existed so long without us taking a long, hard (huh huh, long and hard) look at the presence of rape in romance.
First of all, I’d like to state
two
three things up front:
1. Rapist heroes are a big part of the reason why I disliked romance novels as long as I did. Heroes were rewarded for being assholes of the first order, and oftentimes their behavior to the heroine was completely indistinguishable from a villain’s, except romance novel villains tend to be jaw-droppingly ugly. From bad teeth to ugly noses to hunched backs, romance novel villains are dead easy to spot, which is in keeping with many fairy tale tropes that equate outer with inner beauty—but that’s an entirely different topic.
2. I still think romances with rapist heroes have a place in the genre. They’re not romantic to me, but legions of women found them romantic, and legions of women still do.
3. Rapist heroes are not nearly as common as they used to be. Between 1972 and about 1988, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a rapist hero in the face. Starting in about the mid-80s, though, the tides started turning, and by the mid-90s, rapist heroes were mostly a thing of the past, although forced seductions still popped their heads up here and there. (There are readers who maintain there’s no difference between forced seduction and rape, of course.) Despite the recent dearth of rapes in romance, some romances with rapist heroes are still considered classics of the genre, and seem to be experiencing healthy sales. For example, Whitney, My Love and The Flame and the Flower have been continuously in print since their first release (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, though) and are generally reviewed positively by genre romance critics.
Why is rape, one of the most profound and traumatic violations anyone can experience, so prevalent for the first several years in romance novels? And why was it presented as something heroes were allowed to do and get away with, oftentimes without so much as an apology?
Assorted explanations have been floated around. One of them deals with sexual mores. The Flame and the Flower, which kick-started the historical romance genre as we know it, was published in 1972, which in terms of sexual mores had more in common with 1952 than 1992. Several people have suggested that the fictional rape scenario allowed the heroines to enjoy sexual pleasure while still maintaining their moral purity. Nice girls don’t seek sexual pleasure. But if the sexual pleasure was forced on them…well, that’s a different matter, isn’t it?
There’s a kernel of truth in that, but I think there’s more to it.
There’s the fact that domination fantasies in general, and rape fantasies in particular, can be very potent, and these books seem to tap into something primal for a lot of women. Check out this post, for example. But keep in mind that not all women are as conflicted about their domination fantasies as this woman appears to be, and not all women with domination fantasies came from repressive or abusive households. The seeds of turn-ons, kinks and fetishes are oftentimes buried deeply, and the roots can be tangled.
So, OK, so this explanation could be classified as an instance of “This turns them on for whatever reason. More power to them. Fantasize away, just make sure to play safe.”
I still think there’s more to it than that. In my opinion, there are at least three other powerful fantasies at work here other than those of domination:
The first is the fantasy of taming the brutal man. On one hand, EWWWWW HE RAPED HER, how can she want him if she’s even close to being sane?
Darlings, this is fiction. In the fiction, the impossible happens. The classic heroic rapist, unlike a real-life rapist, is tamed by the love of a good woman, and is ecstatic at the very idea of spending forever with the heroine in happily-wedded bliss by the end of the book. He’s completely reformed, and even if most of the classic heroes don’t grovel, their asshole behavior is at least held in abeyance for the last five pages of the book as they explain in tiresome detail to the heroines what was really going through their minds at assorted points in the book and the exact moment they fell in love with them.
(By the way, it’s really important, the Exact Moment. If you don’t get to hear about it from the horse’s mouth, then you get to watch the Dawning of the Realization of Lurve. It’s one of those ridiculous romance novel things that you go along with.)
The temporary cessation of cockheaded behavior holds the promise of future behavior that, while not completely bereft of shitmonkey moments, is at least a reasonable approximation of what a decent human being should act like.
The heroic rapist also rapes for reasons entirely different from the usual real-life rapist, which brings me to the second fantasy: The heroine represents the ideal of the irresistible woman. Many of the rapist heroes in romance novels do what they do because they simply can’t help themselves, I mean, look, the heroine is sooooo beautiful and radiant and desirable and WHOOPS, impaled her unwilling body on his chubby pickle once again. Poor hero. His mind was addled by her blazing beauty.
OK, you can see that I’m less than enamored with this particular fantasy. Frankly, it’s far too similar to the “but she was asking for it, she was wearing a short skirt!” defense for my comfort. But regardless, I can see how this fantasy can hold powerful appeal. This woman, her love sauce is something powerful. Men want her, and women want to be her—that is, unless she’s the sexually-liberated former mistress of the hero, in which case it’s a good bet that she’ll give Courtney Love a run for the money in the “insane, homicidal crack whore” department.
In keeping with the irresistible woman fantasy, the rapist hero is often an obsessed hero. He can’t function with his formerly delicious mistress. No whore can do. He can slake his lust on one, and only one model of female pulchritude. And the most embarrassing thing is, she often makes him spooge prematurely, even though all she does is move her body with shy, clumsy inexperience in a dance as old as time. If she runs away, he will hunt her down to the ends of the earth. He becomes insanely and irrationally jealous when other men pay attention to her.
OK, I’ve just described just about every romance novel hero in existence. What makes the rapist hero different is how the very fact that she makes him lose control, he, a man who has bedded women without count, makes him lose control even more. He desires her, and hates her for desiring her, and he punishes her accordingly. By the end of the book, though, he has submitted to the fact that he doesn’t just want her, he needs her, the way Ozzy Osborne needs Vicodin and red wine.
The more unkind critic would note that his dick has made judgment, and his dick apparently knows better than any other organ of his when he’s found his soulmate.
The less unkind critic would point out that many women secretly want to drive a handsome man crazy for love of their irresistible little selves, even though such behavior in real life would probably result in panicked calls to the police and restraining orders.
The heroine being mistreated also taps into our martyr fantasies. You know: “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going to the garden to eat wormmmmms.” Self-pity feels good, y’all, and so is the knowledge that HA HA THEY’LL BE SO SORRY WHEN THEY FIND OUT HOW WRONGFULLY MISTREATED I’VE BEEN. The heroine is misunderstood and treated unjustly, sometimes to brutal extremes, but we, the readers, know that she’s pure and angelic and all that is wonderful about womanhood. She martyrs herself and either refuses to defend herself because dammit, her innocence and inherent goodness is evident to all, or she cocks up the explanation so badly that she creates another big old mess, which is good for at least another 150 pages of conflict in the book.
(That sort of heroine, more often than not, makes me want to hit somebody. Preferably the heroine. Or the hero. Or tie the both of them, dump ‘em in a sack and drown them like unwanted kittens—except I’d never drown kittens, but I feel no such restraint with annoying heroines.)
What gets to me is when the heroine is martyred over and over and over again, mistreated and abused by the hero, but there’s no pay-off. No grovel, no apology, no nothing. For many people, though, the hero finally sorting out the assorted misunderstandings is reward enough, even if he doesn’t fall down on his knees, sobbing out apologies incoherently while offering to castrate himself. At least he now realizes how totally awesome the heroine is and how many worms she’s had to eat: long slim slimy ones, short fat fuzzy ones, and yes, even the dreaded ooey gooey ooey ones.
And moving away from fantasy-land, there’s the fact that many women hold on to relatively rigid views of what should constitute ideal male and female behavior. I’ve read lamentations on assorted romance reading boards about how heroines nowadays are far too mannish, and how heroes are impotent weaklings. These readers invariably long for old-fashioned romances, when the men were men. This attitude was summed up by a reader on some board somewhere who pointed out that there’s no point to the rapist hero apologizing or groveling for his behavior—doing so would make him a pussy.
To be honest, this worldview is so different from mine that it irks me, because I think it takes a real pair of balls to look over bad behavior unflinchingly, apologize sincerely and hold fast to the resolution to not repeat the mistake. The assumption that the ability to apologize for mistakes = pussywhipped drives me nuts, as do assorted stereotypical views of what’s gender-appropriate. But I can definitely see how someone who takes the opposite view would eat rapist heroes up with a spoon.
Hey, want to know something scary? Despite how long this article already is (1,589 words and counting!), I’ve only covered rapist heroes. I haven’t even begun to dissect the implications of other types of rape in romance novels. As Robin said in an e-mail to me:
(…) [W]hat does it mean when the heroine is vulnerable to rape by someone other than the hero? What about a book like Brenda Joyce’s The Conqueror, where the hero (if he must be called that) marries the heroine off to another man and then comes and rapes her on her wedding night, after having sent the groom away? Or what about rapes that are really meant to be angry expressions of power, like what Geoffrey did to Anne in To Love and To Cherish (or even what Sebastien did to Rachel in [To Have and to Hold], although I think it was more complicated there). Like I said, I have NEVER seen so much rape as there is in Romance.
Yup. Damn straight. For a genre that’s supposedly escapist fiction by women for women—how often have you heard the refrain “If I wanted realism/blood/death/unhappiness, I’ll turn on the news, not read a romance novel”?—rape is writ large on the genre’s landscape.
What does that say about the books, and about us? Hell if I know. Feel free to hash it out in the comments.
“You might want to try Ain’t She Sweet, if you haven’t read it.”
Is that the one with the heroine who was a terror in high school? The one recently discussed on AAR (before Match Me If You Can)? I have that on my list. I loved Fancy Pants, and have been looking for another book like that one. It’s weird, too, because I’m sure I read SEP say that she considered FP a more traditional Romance than her later ones, but I think it’s entirely the other way around. There’s a moment in It Had to be You where the heroine “reclaims her femininity” when she has sex with the hero that almost had me throwing the book across the room. And don’t even get me started on Breathing Room.
“Not everything of hers works for me, but she’s written some books that I really enjoyed.”
Which ones, LFL. This is the only one I’ve attempted, and it was recommended to me b/c of the rape stuff.
“I love Sheridan too; such a wonderful, wonderful character. But I would love to have seen him with a less vulnerable heroine, because watching him do those terrible things to Olympia was so wrenching to me that I can’t bear to reread the book in its entirety. I have kept it, and read parts of it many times, like Olympia’s letter, and the ending, where she calls him “My terrible lonely wolf.†I really love those sections. I think Olympia reminds me of myself at a younger age, in the way she is so trusting. And so, seeing that trust get shattered is really painful.”
I also cannot re-read the book in it’s entirety for the exact same reason. BUT I think it’s absolutely necessary that Olympia be so naive for the book to work. I know this is going to sound sick, but I see her as the inverse of Rachel—both characters are blank slates, but in totally different ways. Rachel has completely shut down, so Sebastian’s need to open her up allows him to see himself more clearly in her humiliation. Olympia is a naive blank slate, and Sheridan’s need to hurt her, to teach her something about life and himself, also allows him to see himself more clearly in the wake of what he does to her and helps bring about in her life. But unlike Rachel, Olympia is also very ACTIVE in seeking her revolution which, IMO, goes a decent way toward setting up some of the trauma that occurs to her. So she’s not simply a device against which Sheridan heals or redeems himself. Also, while it was, perhaps, over the top, there’s a way in which I think Olympia needs to have her innocence lost, because although it threatens to ruin her, it also connects her to some extremely deep understandings, a wealth of true and complex emotions inside herself, some really powerful survival skills, and a depth of compassion that I don’t think she would have had otherwise. Given the fact that Kinsale dedicated the book to Vietnam vets, I can see how the parallel stories of Sheridan and Olympia’s lost innocence, the inevitability of that in the context of the book, and the way they each cross through the wilderness into at least some healing light at the end seems fitting. Because as hard as it is for me to read about all the suffering, and to think of its real implications, it’s even harder for me to imagine that one cannot come back from that kind of lost innocence, that it’s definitively and utterly destructive to mind, body, and spirit. And because Olympia’s love for Sheridan was so deep, even after all of his betrayals of her, I don’t think she would ever have gotten over him. She either would have been ruined by her sense of lost love or by the memories of the horror she witnessed, which would plague her because no one else could understand them. Iin order to find any happiness, she had to be able to reach Sheridan and to understand him, and unfortunately, I don’t think there was another way for that to happen than through her traumatic loss of innocence.
Right, so what I think about “Rape is Not Romance” by Eileen Dreyer:
I agree with the last few bits of the article. Agree wholeheartedly, especially with the whole “rape is historically accurate” malarkey, which, as you know already, makes me bonkers.
But I strongly, strongly disagree with Dreyer about genre messages, and about excluding rapist heroes from romances. We’re adults. SANE adults. We know what’s real, and what’s fantasy. People who can be swayed so strongly by fiction that they don’t leave an abusive spouse solely because they read romance novels—OK, hang on, lots of different things I want to dissect here.
First of all, I doubt that women are willing to stay in abusive relationships because of the message romance novels send them. At best, romances are providing reinforcement (weak reinforcement, in my opinion) to something that is already a deeply-held belief, and this deeply-held belief won’t be swayed if romance novels suddenly stop featuring rapist heroes. Women have stayed with abusive men long before genre romances came on the scene; they will stay with abusive men even if there are no genre romances to read with rapist heroes.
It also oversimplifies why women stay with abusive men. Some women stay because they honestly think they deserve the pain and humilation, some stay because they literally can’t afford to leave, some stay because they have children and are standing fast by the idea that children need a mother and a father, some stay because they’re still in love with their abusers. Etc. And none of these reasons are mutually exclusive; abused women oftentimes have several different reasons for staying with their tormentor.
Second of all, I’m thinking Dreyer is overstating the influence of romance novels (and perhaps fiction in general) on our psyche. Her example of Tarantino movie clips in Sesame Street is telling. Sesame Street is a CHILDREN’S program. There’s a protective attitude that we take towards children’s entertainment that we shouldn’t (in my opinion) exert on entertainment meant for adults.
If I acted in a way consistent with the types of fiction I like to read, I’d be a lone-wolf gun-toting vigilante instead of a person with very strong pacifist and collectivist leanings who does not ever plan to buy a gun.
I get really uncomfortable when we start regulating what’s acceptable and what’s not in fiction meant for adults—and by regulating, I don’t mean government legislative actions per se, I mean something as simple as the RWA changing the definition of romance, or a dedicated group of people lobbying publishers to include or exclude elements considered offensive from books. The standards of what’s offensive and what’s not are so different, not to mention the varied ways authors handle assorted elements, that I’m not comfortable with something that lacks nuance like excluding all books that feature rapist heroes from romance.
And frankly, I’m not sure I buy into the whole “genre message” thing. The message varies from book to book, and are interpreted in different ways by readers. There are large, overarching themes in each genre—the “save the world” theme is prevalent in much of SF/F, and finding lasting romantic love is another overarching theme in romance, but to somehow making these messages normative is, I think, taking things a step too far.
Your point about the alpha hero is so interesting, because it makes me wonder whether it’s always the alphas who abuse in real life, or whether it’s sometimes those passive aggressive, appear to be beta types who take out their otherwise barely suppressed rage at the world on their partner. Any thoughts?
I’m not very knowledgeable about this, but I do remember reading somewhere that the rates of domestic abuse are much higher among police officers than in the general population. So very possibly alpha types are more likely to be abusive. However, that does not preclude the possibility that beta types might also sometimes take out their rage on their partners.
I don’t think we will be seeing a beta hero of this type in a romance though! Because in such a scenario it would not be possible to write off the hero’s abusiveness as something bad that comes along with the good alpha qualities.
As someone who has read Dreyer’s article, I think you did a great summary, Candy.
I am also ambivalent about her article, since although the rapist hero rarely works for me in a romantic sense, I think there’s a lot more going on in the use of rape in Romance than what Dreyer focuses on. But she’s a trauma room nurse, and she’s seen a lot of domestic abuse, so I think that informs her view a lot. I also think that discussions of how Romance may or may not influence women in society is a very different discussion than one that examines particular devices Romance utilizes. Sure there are some overlaps, but there are also significant points of divergence.
I thought it was really interesting, though, that an author was making these points, since I’d not really seen that before (of course I live in a cave so that might make me underinformed about these things).
One thing you said in your summary that triggered my memory, though, is the myth thing. I was thinking yesterday about how many myths incorporate rape into them, as well, and while I have nothing coherent to say on that subject, I think it’s worth looking at, especially since Romance does seem to recycle and comment on quite a number of classical myths.
>>She also asks us that if the rapist hero treated an animal the same way he treats the heroine, whether we’d regard the hero as worthy of love and adulation. <<
Good God, that’s an insightful and scary thought! Jay-sus. My mind has just been blown, and not in a good way.
Candy, I hate you. You just took everything I wanted to say about that article and put it into better words than I ever could. Dammit. *mutters jealous imprecations*
but seriously: Bravo! Well said!
>>If I acted in a way consistent with the types of fiction I like to read, I’d be a lone-wolf gun-toting vigilante instead of a person with very strong pacifist and collectivist leanings who does not ever plan to buy a gun.<<
Brava, Candy! I think we don’t give the readers enough credit in this genre for being intelligent and able to synthesize information and understand what the author is doing with her story. I am a lot less concerned about authors who write rape scenes than I am about those who insist they know what’s appropriate or inappropriate in a romance. Let the reader judge whether or not the story works, and whether or not she appreciates whatever elements the author brings to the story.
No, I believe the rape/forced seduction thing is more about buying into the fantasy of the heroine having the ability to alter the hero’s character, to redeem him from the beast he is in the beginning.
this is what I was trying to get at when I was talking about overt and covert power-flows much earlier. “He may be able to force my body with his brute strenght, but the Power of My Love will overcome his mind/emotions in the end!”
This (absent the rape theme) kind of power flow is explored in depth in the early Miles Vorkosigan (Lois McMaster Bujold) books, where Miles constantly has to out-think and out-manoever his stronger, taller, bigger adversaries. It’s also a theme in the life of Milton Erickson, who developed non-direct forms of manipulation that evolved into a very subtle form of hypnotherapy, due to his childhood when he was bedridden for … over a year comes to mind, although it’s been years since I studied Ericksonian hypnosis.
Robin,
Oddly enough, I am reading “This Heart of Mine” by SEP right now, and this is the one that features the children’s book author raping the professional football player. *snort*
There’s a super funny scene later in the book, where the heroine is very consciously telling herself that she has no choice but to have sex with the man. “She knew it was a lousy relfection on her personal maturity that she needed to believe that the decision had been taken out of her hands. . . By the time she was thirty, she was absolutely certain she would have taken charge of her own sexuality.” She then proceeds to weave a hilarious fantasy that she is terrified slave girl and the hero her ruthless owner. Of course, the hero has no idea he’s supposed to be being ruthless. Classic stuff.
The issue that raises my shackles is the way violence towards women is described in romance—sometimes.
I think the phrase you intended was ‘raises my hackles’ although I rather like the image of ‘raising one’s *shackles.*
I’ve found that author’s efforts at psychological insight and characterization and the subtlety of the interactions they portray really, really affect how acceptable the scenes are to me.
That is a big factor for me too, Sherry, at least these days. But when I started reading romances in my early teens, I was able to accept the archetypes. When I started finding books with more efforts at psychological insights and characterization, I really appreciated the improvement. I love Gaffney, Ivory and Kinsale (I have a friend who jokingly refers to them as “The Holy Trinity”), but I can also think of a handful of books by other authors that feature rapes, forced seductions, or otherwise abusive heroes, in situations that are psychologically interesting to me.
I would love to hear if any of you guys have read the following, and if so, what you thought of them:
Only With Your Love by Lisa Kleypas:
In this book the heroine and her husband, who are newly wed, are on ship that’s attacked by pirates. The husband is killed before the marriage has been consummated. The heroine is taken captive and brought to an island that is a pirate hangout. There, the hero, who is nother pirate, fights the one who captured her and frees her from him. He takes her through the bayou to her husband’s family in New Orleans, but on the way there, he forcibly seduces her. Now here’s the twist that makes this story so interesting to me: The heroine thinks there’s something familiar to her about the hero, but, because he has a beard, it is not until he brings her to her husband’s family (after the forced seduction) that she recognizes that he is her dead husband’s identical twin.
That twist makes it possible for me to believe that she subliminally did recognize him, and in some part of her, wanted to be with him because she was grief-stricken, and he looked so much like her husband. By the same token, I can also believe that she feels horrible for having sex with someone else so soon after her husband’s death. This sets up a great internal conflict for the heroine vis-à -vis the hero.
The Price of Innocence by Susan Sizemore:
This book is interesting because it’s a kind of homage to the captive-captor stories of the seventies and early eighties, and at the same time an attempt to update it and tell a late nineties type story. The main romance takes place nine years after the hero and heroine first met. Nine years earlier, he was a pirate on the China seas who freed her from other pirates who killed her family, only to turn around and blackmail her into being his mistress for a hundred days (is there a theme emerging here?). That relationship ended and nine years later they meet again, neither having been able to forget the other. The heroine is now a strong, independent woman, the hero is trying to be a better person. But their obsession with one another thwarts both of them at first. The story of how they met is told in flashbacks that are interspersed with the main narrative.
The Price of Innocence is written in heightened, dramatic language and though its subject matter is quite dark, the characters always seem to be having fun. It feels a little bit like the author is winking at the audience or spoofing the captive-captor story a little bit. I don’t think it’s a story that would work for everyone, but I really enjoyed it.
Uncommon Vows by Mary Jo Putney
This is my favorite of these three, partly because it takes a clear stance that the hero mistreating the heroine is not okay. There’s no actual rape or forced seduction in this book, but the heroine does come close to being raped a couple of times, once by the hero (which, though he stops himself in time, still leads to terrible consequences) and once by the villain. Uncommon Vows is more of a captive-captor story, with the obsessed hero taking the heroine captive. But rather than fall in love with him, she is repelled by his actions, and only grows more and more determined not to give in to his demands that she become his mistress.
I really love this book not just for the strong-minded heroine, but also for the fact that Putney does spend reams and reams of pages showing the hero’s remorse and his attempts to make it up to the heroine.
As I said, I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on these books.
I was thinking today about the whole “It’s ok if she’s a tavern wench but if she’s a lady I have to marry her” issue, and one of my favorite books that deals with this is THE DUKE’S WAGER by Edith Layton. One character makes it clear from the outset that he considers the heroine his natural prey (I believe he even uses that phrase), an unprotected woman who has no economic or familial resources to resist his efforts to make her his mistress. He arranges for her to be literally thrown out onto the street so that she has to come to him.
But she has an ace up her sleeve, another nobleman who owes her family a favor and she turns to him for help.
By the end of the book I was completely blown away by Layton’s skill at making you see the characters in a whole new light. It’s a Regency era historical that was just re-released as a Signet double, and I highly recommend it to folks who want to see how this plot device is handled with compassion and talent.
The holy trinity. Haaa. Replace Ivory with Loretta Chase, and you’d have MY holy trinity right there. Wait, I need to squeeze Jennifer Crusie in there somehow.
Curses. Holy Quaternary doesn’t have quite the same ring.
And you’ve just named two of my favorite romance novels of all time, LFL. Woohoo.
Only With Your Love and why the forced seduction works for me:
1. There’s guilt, but there’s also desire, and the sense of violation Celia feels is not quite as intense as other romance heroines feel after. Interesting point re: subliminal recognition of the twin, by the way.
2. They’ve both just gone through a pretty traumatic fight, which can sometimes lead to people humping someone they might not have.
3. Justin’s motivation for seducing her, which seemed to be a sort of twisted competition with his brother, was pretty convincing for me. Yeah, it’s fucked up, but I love this book because it’s so fucked up.
4. Justin pretty much treats Celia like a queen once he makes peace with how he feels about his brother and realizes he loves her. Kleypas does a wonderful job of showing how very essential Celia is to Justin.
I love Uncommon Vows for a few big reasons:
1. Adrian is obsessed, and he knows his obsession is unhealthy—in other words, his behavior is at odd with his morals, which makes his behavior change convincing.
2. Meriel resists, and resists consistently and convincingly. I liked that about her; she doesn’t swoon into her captor’s arms at the first punishing kiss or any of that nonsense.
3. The reason why Adrian changes his behavior is huge and very believable. Also, mucho excellent grovelling.
“She then proceeds to weave a hilarious fantasy that she is terrified slave girl and the hero her ruthless owner. Of course, the hero has no idea he’s supposed to be being ruthless. Classic stuff.”
These are the moments in SEP that suck me in. Then there are the ones like that scene in IHTBY that spit me back out, bruised and angry. I seem to keep coming back for more, though.
“Second of all, I’m thinking Dreyer is overstating the influence of romance novels (and perhaps fiction in general) on our psyche. Her example of Tarantino movie clips in Sesame Street is telling. Sesame Street is a CHILDREN’S program. There’s a protective attitude that we take towards children’s entertainment that we shouldn’t (in my opinion) exert on entertainment meant for adults.”
Exactly. Especially since it’s women writing these books for other women. If, for example, men were exclusively writing Romance novels and all the women in these books were being raped by the heroes, and only women were reading them, I’d be more likely to look at the relationship between book and reader. And what about all the other forms of media that are using various tropes and themes and devices? I absolutely believe that certain values are transmitted and perpetuated almost unconsciously along and across cultural currents, but I don’t buy into the one-to-one book-to-reader equation of influence.
Do I wish Romance authors would be more AWARE of the tropes they use and what purpose they serve in their books? Hell, yes, but mostly because I think it makes the genre less likely to be dismissed as trash or porn and because I like well-crafted and thoughtful books, even if I’m uncomfortable with the subject matter. But at it’s very worst, IMO, Romance just participates in a much larger cultural regurgitation of some atittudes and tropes and themes that make up our social discourse on gender and sexuality, from academic treatises, to literary and popular fiction, to films, to dating shows, to playground talk during recess.
I don’t think that lets us off the hook from talking about it, but it should definitely make us think twice about blaming Romance for domestic violence or other degredations of women.
Off topic:
Robin, I haven’t read IHTBY. I just discovered SEP at the Reno conference and I’m having a great time so far. The characters are so different.
The helpless slave girl thing was just so unexpected and so fucking funny! My dh did a valiant job of ignoring my hysterics. He knows that if he meets my eye or acknowledges my laughter that I will read him the “funny” parts. He is a smart man, even if his sense of humor isn’t as well developed as mine. (More discriminating, he says. Ha! He doesn’t even laugh at the lonely hearts ads!)
Speaking of. . . Is it Friday???
Wow – I’m almost embarrassed to post after all these amazing comments! I just wanted to answer Candy’s question to the best of my ability. I read a lot of Louis L’Amour westerns and Robert Ludlum novels around the same time I read my copy of The Flame and The Flower into the ground. None of them featured rape fantasies. I think the Conan series got pretty close (or all the way) IIRC, but I’m not convinced those were intended for a strictly male audience.
To the extent that the by-and-for men novels I read (the “male romances”, as Elaine Viets called them on The Lipstick Chronicles) had sex, they were of the “he’s the best lover in the universe” type, often with the “able to awaken the ice maiden’s hot core of passion” thrown in.
But don’t ask me to quote anything.
Vis-a-vis The Flame and The Flower—I believe I’m remembering correctly that Brandon (wasn’t that his name?) was not only not repentant about the initial rape, he was perfectly willing to resort to marital rape to regain his conjugal privileges. Am I getting that right?
OT post:
“You might want to try Ain’t She Sweet, if you haven’t read it.”
Is that the one with the heroine who was a terror in high school? The one recently discussed on AAR (before Match Me If You Can)?
Yes.
I have that on my list. I loved Fancy Pants, and have been looking for another book like that one. It’s weird, too, because I’m sure I read SEP say that she considered FP a more traditional Romance than her later ones, but I think it’s entirely the other way around.
I liked Fancy Pants very much also. It’s probably my second favorite SEP after Ain’t She Sweet, of the ones I’ve read. I haven’t read It Had to be You or Breathing Room.
Re. Sandra Brown,
“Not everything of hers works for me, but she’s written some books that I really enjoyed.”
Which ones, LFL. This is the only one I’ve attempted, and it was recommended to me b/c of the rape stuff.
I have a lot of fondness for Mirror Image and Best Kept Secrets, both romantic suspense books.
Mirror Image is one where the heroine survives a plane crash and is injured beyond recognition. She is mistaken by everyone for the hero’s wife (who sat next to her on the plane and died in the crash), and can’t speak and correct the assumption. Plastic surgeons reconstruct the dead wife’s face on her. Before she recovers her ability to speak, someone comes to her at ICU and tries to conspire with her to kill the hero, who is running for the senate. Therefore she doesn’t dare reveal who she really is even when she can speak again. The hero and his wife (who was quite a villainess) were estranged, but the heroine falls in love with him and gradually wins his trust again, even though he thinks she is the wife. She also comes to love the hero’s little girl, and becomes a mother to her. Of course, eventually her true identity comes out.
In Best Kept Secrets the heroine, an attorney with the DA’s office whose mother was murdered in her late teens, goes back to the town where her mother died to reopen her mother’s murder case. She’s convinced that the man who went to prison did not commit the crime. The town is filled with people who hated her mother and a few who loved her. The heroine gets to know the two men who, as boys, hung out with her mother and were in love with her. Both of them become romantically interested in the heroine as well. One of them is the hero, who was treated as a sort of “bad seed” by the whole town but grew up to be the sheriff. He does not like the reopening of the murder case, however. There’s an 18-year age difference between the hero and heroine, but even though that kind of thing often bothers me, it didn’t in this book.
What I like about both these books is the psychological complexity of the heroine’s situation. In both books she is essentially recast in the role of a dead woman, becoming personally involved with those who knew her and putting together the pieces of the puzzle in that process. One thing that is problematic for me in Brown’s books is that the villains and some of the side characters don’t have as much depth as I would like, but the main characters in these books really held my attention. There’s no rape in these books, BTW.
Re. Seize the Fire, I am not convinced that Sheridan could only recover through shattering the trust of someone as naïve as Olympia. I do think that with a different heroine it would be a completely different book, though.
In order to find any happiness, she had to be able to reach Sheridan and to understand him, and unfortunately, I don’t think there was another way for that to happen than through her traumatic loss of innocence.
Do you feel that she finds happiness at the end, though? She seemed so broken to me. I’m sure that Sheridan’s being there for her at the end and opening up did help her to heal, but I also felt that she would need years of therapy to become a happy person.
I think that Seize the Fire is a very brave book in that it’s really willing to take a long, hard look at the dark side of the human condition. One of my favorite lines in the book comes at the end, when Sheridan tells Olympia that he loves her regardless of her role in the revolution. Olympia says that she doesn’t deserve it, and Sheridan says, “Oh Jesus… If we all only got what we deserved… Pray God to spare me that.” I think it takes special courage to say something like that in a romance, and not in the middle but in the end. To show that a character has that dark a world view, and that it could be valid. I just admire Laura Kinsale so much for that (and for her writing in genral). My hat is truly off to her for writing Seize the Fire, even though it’s not a book I can reread all the way through.
This has reminded me of a passage in a book (by a very well-know writer, but my brain’s like a sieve and I don’t want to offend by getting the name wrong) where the heroine, who writes romance, comments that in the 80s an author couldn’t get a romance published without it having a rape scene, or something to that effect. I’d be really interested to hear anyone’s perspective on this.
As for the vampire/werewolf issue, LFL, that raises some interesting points. I think that it’s telling that most frequently a paranormal hero either helps the heroine achieve power with his bite/blood, or confers it on her with same. But then she frequently ends up as powerful as him. And the converse does also happen. There’s a lot more going on with the paranormal trend, I think, but most of my ideas on it are pretty vague and floaty.
“I think the genre of Romance is served in the worst way by the MINDLESS REPETITION of plot devices, stereotypes, unexamined assumptions about sexuality and gender, and indiscriminate images of violence.” Thank you, thank you, Robin. You’ve summed up how I feel perfectly.
…and finally, on the suckling thing. I remember that SB book, and still wonder how I managed to even make it through to that particular scene. It scarred me for life, it’s so eeeewwwwww… and I don’t care how many classical/mythological precedents there are for this particular device.
And you’ve just named two of my favorite romance novels of all time, LFL. Woohoo.
Oh cool!
Only With Your Love and why the forced seduction works for me:
1. There’s guilt, but there’s also desire, and the sense of violation Celia feels is not quite as intense as other romance heroines feel after. Interesting point re: subliminal recognition of the twin, by the way.
Good point.
2. They’ve both just gone through a pretty traumatic fight, which can sometimes lead to people humping someone they might not have.
Another good point; I hadn’t thought of that. I think the trauma of her husband’s death is also part of it. It’s strange, probably even twisted, but when it comes to fiction, I can often buy more into a forced seduction if the heroine is in need of comfort, because sex can provide that.
3. Justin’s motivation for seducing her, which seemed to be a sort of twisted competition with his brother, was pretty convincing for me. Yeah, it’s fucked up, but I love this book because it’s so fucked up.
Yes! I loved this aspect of the story too – Justiin’s relationship with his brother and the way Celia was caught up in the middle of that. I agree it’s f**ked up, and that that’s part of the appeal of the book. Which brings me back again to the fact that dysfunctional relationships can make for compelling reading material.
4. Justin pretty much treats Celia like a queen once he makes peace with how he feels about his brother and realizes he loves her.
That’s true too. Apropos of nothing, one of the scenes that stand out in my mind in this book is the one where Celia sees Justin without his beard for the first time. Even though by then she knows he and Philippe are twins, it’s still a shock to her to see it.
It’s interesting that Only With Your Love is out of print. I wonder if Kleypas prefers it that way, or if it’s just coincidental.
I love Uncommon Vows for a few big reasons:
1. Adrian is obsessed, and he knows his obsession is unhealthy—in other words, his behavior is at odd with his morals, which makes his behavior change convincing.
I think so too. In this way he reminds me of Sebastian in Gaffney’s To Have and to Hold. though the two of them are very different in other ways. I also liked how Putney introduced Adrian’s character in the beginning of the book. He was in a monastery preparing to take vows when the death of his family forced him to take on the role of earl instead. It was from that that he had a very strong moral compass.
2. Meriel resists, and resists consistently and convincingly. I liked that about her; she doesn’t swoon into her captor’s arms at the first punishing kiss or any of that nonsense.
Me too. I remember reading this book at around age twenty and being thrilled by the strenght of Meriel’s resolve.
3. The reason why Adrian changes his behavior is huge and very believable. Also, mucho excellent grovelling.
Agree with that too. Adrian spent half the book trying to atone for his sins. I really love this book too. Before I discovered Kinsale and Gaffney, Uncommon Vows was my favorite romance for a few years there.
“I’m with you on this most of the way stef2, and certainly wouldn’t want to denigrate many of my favorite writers as well. So apologies if I offended you or anyone else.”
No need for any apology, Auntie. I didn’t think you were saying anything negative. Just making an observation, which is all anyone here has done. Frankly, I think you’re succinct and on point.
Not as good as Robin – but who is? Ha!
WHY do heroes behaving badly have to rape?
There are SO many old movies with “bad boy” heroes who are confident, strong, cocky, arrogant, etc. etc. and yet not exceptionally violent or cruel or brooding. Modern romance writers sometimes seem to take the lazy way out by equating “manly” with angry.
it’s just as historically accurate for a hero to NOT rape, as it is for a hero to rape.
I would go even further and say it’s MORE historically accurate for a hero not to rape. There may(?) have been more rapes in the past because it was easier in some circumstances to get away with it, but surely it wasn’t seen as heroic behavior at a time when pregnancy could very well mean a woman’s death.
(And, well, a group of Vikings raping and pillaging their way through a town might be historically accurate, but a Viking who decides not to join in, who remembers his sisters at home and decides to save a girl instead of raping her, is equally plausible in context of a romance novel, and a lot more heroic.)
This has reminded me of a passage in a book (by a very well-know writer, but my brain’s like a sieve and I don’t want to offend by getting the name wrong) where the heroine, who writes romance, comments that in the 80s an author couldn’t get a romance published without it having a rape scene, or something to that effect. I’d be really interested to hear anyone’s perspective on this.
I read something similar in an interview with Jude Deveraux. She said something to the effect that when she began writing romances, editors insisted that the hero rape the heroine in her books. I think she wrote one or two books where that happened, but then she put her foot down and said that she wouldn’t do that anymore. She was something of a pioneer in that as early as 1981 she was writing historical romances with sex scenes in them that did not contain rape.
I just found this comment buried in an Amazon review of The Black Lyon (a Deveraux book I haven’t read, but one that does contain rape): “Do remember that this was Jude’s second book, and her first historical. It’s my understanding that an editor basically required changes in the book that Jude didn’t want to make (the rape/abuse, for example; note that after this book, Jude changed publishers).”
As for the vampire/werewolf issue, LFL, that raises some interesting points. I think that it’s telling that most frequently a paranormal hero either helps the heroine achieve power with his bite/blood, or confers it on her with same. But then she frequently ends up as powerful as him. And the converse does also happen. There’s a lot more going on with the paranormal trend, I think, but most of my ideas on it are pretty vague and floaty.
I am really looking forward to Susan Squires’ upcoming regency era vampire book, The Hunger, which is a prequel to The Companion, partly because in this one the heroine is a centuries-old vampire and the hero is the mortal. Also, based on the heroine’s appearance in The Companion she seems to be a confident and maybe even jaded character. It will be interesting to see what Squires (a talented author IMO) makes of this role reversal.
“Re. Seize the Fire, I am not convinced that Sheridan could only recover through shattering the trust of someone as naïve as Olympia. I do think that with a different heroine it would be a completely different book, though.
Do you feel that she finds happiness at the end, though? She seemed so broken to me. I’m sure that Sheridan’s being there for her at the end and opening up did help her to heal, but I also felt that she would need years of therapy to become a happy person.”
I agree that Kinsale could have taken Sheridan’s story in another direction with another heroine, but I think in the context of this particular book—which is one of my top 3 Kinsales—that a big part of what makes this book so powerful is Olympia’s crushing loss of innocence. Is there a part of the tremendous pain she suffered that seems senseless? Of course, in the same way that the terrible life Sheridan had seems senseless. That’s what makes it so painful to read and so tragic for us. But given the world of the book, a world constructed with wars and revolutions and political intrigues, with capricious fathers and their jealous and amibitious mistresses (the entire world outside their island, which could support them emotionally but not physically for very long), the fact that Sheridan and Olympia have a chance at making sense of their own lives amidst that mess, of ultimately charting a different course for themselves, I feel that at least the senseless horror and violence doesn’t triumph.
So despite her appearance of being “broken” at the end, I think she has such a foundation of stability, and of friendship and love from Fish, that I think she’ll ultimately be able to re-connect to that part of herself. That’s the part that was able to bring Sheridan’s more tender feelings out of hiding, so it’s really quite powerful, IMO. Sheridan, on the other hand, who had the rug pulled out from under him SO early, seems to have found a strength in his need to comfort Olympia that I believe will continue to grow after the book ends. I definitely see their happiness as a ways off, but I see them as having much more of a shot at happiness once Sheridan could feel he actually had something to give to Olympia and she had lost her heroic illusions and gained true knowledge and understanding of who he was. I wonder if he would ever have felt worthy of her if she had come to him at the end, if her breakdown had not triggered his, and if she didn’t truy know what he had suffered. It’s terribly sad, IMO, that she finally learns the lessons of human depravity that Sheridan tries so hard to teach her, but the fact that she does seems to be the only thing that wakes Sheridan up finally.
Oh, and thanks for the Brown recs, LFL—I’ll give them a shot. Right now I’m trying to finish Lisa Valdez’ Passion, which I started quite a while ago but put down once school started.
Update, for the love of God, update! I’m going into serious SmartBitch withdrawals here!
Before you do update, I just wanted to say thanks again to Sarah and Candy for giving such free reign to those of us who have wanted to talk so actively about this topic. This was seriously one of the best on-line experiences I have ever had, in part because it reminded me of all the reasons I went to grad school and all the best things about having intellectual discussions and sharing diverse, even divergent opinions. And FWIW, I think there’s enough here in everyone’s comments for a couple of books, for articles and essays, for conference papers, and for many incredible conversations about some of the most contentious issues in Romance. In other words, it was, by far, the most sophisticated and articulate conversation I’ve ever seen, online or off, about this topic. I know I learned a lot from it and thought a lot about some things in a different way. So thanks, to Candy and Sarah and everyone else who gave me such good stuff to think about.
A question: Has anyone read White Palace? Although I’ve not read the book, I have seen the movie starring Susan Sarandon and James Spader. Anyway, there is a particular scene that always irks me to the point I have to turn the channel then I turn back, it makes me just that uncomfortable. It’s the scene where Susan’s character forces herself on a drunk, grieving WASP played by Spader. The way she forcibly holds him down while she gives him the blow job, and the fact he is drunk is unsettling…esp. if you were to reverse the gender roles. Eventually, he gives in to the “forced seduction”. But how would that not have been rape if he had fought her through the entire act?
Monica recently blogged about a man who was raped at gunpoint by four women and someone commented how she thought that a man had to be aroused for the act to be completed and therefore his arousal ratified the initial rape. But someone pointed out there as they did here, that a body may have an unconscious reaction that in no way indicates the forced party’s willingness.
My question after this long spiel is did the book indicate this forced seduction in White Palace or was that a dramatic interpretation on the part of screenwriter/director?
Yes, it was a wonderful discussion, thoughtful and articulate. Thank you for that, and for the warm welcome. I’m really glad I delurked, and grateful to everyone who participated for giving me so much food for thought, and to Candy and Sarah especially, for providing this great environment.
Sharon, I read Glenn Savan’s WHITE PALACE a while ago, but although I remember quite a bit about this book, I don’t remember that scene. I haven’t seen the film but the way you described the scene fits the style of this book.
WP was a very depressing read, IIRC. In fact I’d go as far to say Hubert Selby’s LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN is a lot more cheerful. Or is it the other way round? Either way, both left me feeling like a duck without its beak.
Thanks Faux Jay. Well, if the scene was added to the screenplay for effect, it got the wrong one from me b/c this last time I remoted from the scene and didn’t come back to the movie at all. Especially given the discussion here, b/c any “forced seduction” scene, no matter the gender pairing leaves me feeling like you said, “like a duck without its beak.”
I was chatting with a regular SBTB reader last night and re-reading these comments, when I saw this question by Lilith that I’m not sure was ever addressed:
A question just occurred to me as I was typing this rather windy comment: if we “demonize†the rape fantasy and call it bad, is that a demonization of an aspect of feminine sexuality?
The reader brought up the very same question last night, and said this conversation has (unintentionally) denigrated a large chunk of readers who read and love books with rapist heroes by denigrating these heroes.
At first, I wanted to say “But I’m NOT trying to demonize the rape fantasy. I just want to analyze it.” Then I realized that because I don’t like it, and because a lot of our commenters don’t like it, these fantasies have been presented in an overwhelmingly negative light.
The reader furthermore pointed out that by calling it a rape fantasy and the heroes rapist heroes/heroic rapists, that we’re already polarizing the argument, by associating the fantasy with something so overwhelmingly negative.
This was an interesting point, and one I hadn’t even thought about. She has a point. Rapist heroes in romance novels and what they do bear about as much of a resemblance to real-life sexual assault as the shenanigans in a Tom and Jerry cartoon do to real-life violence, and a lot of us made that clear during out comments, but during the conversation, we talked a lot about real-life rape, too.
The reader pointed out that a lot of people who enjoy books with rapist heroes don’t even think of what they do as rape. And she’s right. Just check out the review by Creekergirl on Amazon.com for Karen Robards’ Island Flame. In fact, read the positive reviews. Some of them call what the hero does to the heroine rape, but many of them don’t, using words like “hard,” “rough” and “brutal” instead—words that have negative connotations, but not as knee-jerk negative as “rape.”
I know many of you are probably suffering from rape discussion fatigue, but anyone have any further thoughts on this?
I just want to make it really clear that although I don’t enjoy the rape fantasy (I don’t know what else to call it, dammit) and think that some of the reasons used to justify its inclusion in romance novels are fallacious, if not downright silly, I don’t think that rape fantasies are eeeeville. If it turns someone on, then hey, it turns her on. More power to her.
“The reader brought up the very same question last night, and said this conversation has (unintentionally) denigrated a large chunk of readers who read and love books with rapist heroes by denigrating these heroes.
At first, I wanted to say “But I’m NOT trying to demonize the rape fantasy. I just want to analyze it.†Then I realized that because I don’t like it, and because a lot of our commenters don’t like it, these fantasies have been presented in an overwhelmingly negative light.
The reader furthermore pointed out that by calling it a rape fantasy and the heroes rapist heroes/heroic rapists, that we’re already polarizing the argument, by associating the fantasy with something so overwhelmingly negative.”
Okay, I’ll warn you that I’m a little sensitive to this topic, because I’ve been told on other forums, very forcefully, that any desire to analytically approach the rape fantasy—and even people like Nancy Friday who are writing in completely accepting and positive terms about this call it a rape fantasy—is a means to denigrate women who enjoy the fantasy. I wish this person had expressed this point more emphatically on the board, because I would love to understand this point better. Especially since I think there’s a big difference from the rape fantasy as a sexual fantasy and the myriad of ways rape is portrayed in Romance.
Now, I personally disagree with the proposition that this dicussion has cast the rape fantasy in a negative light. I, for example, don’t enjoy it, but I do see it as aimed at female empowerment. Many other commentators have commented on the differences between violent rape and rape fantasies, and many have expressed the fact that they either aren’t bothered by these scenes or that they do enjoy them. I think this forum would have been very open to more people expressing why they appreciate the fantasy and what it offers them as a reader.
One of the things I was immediately struck by in this discussion was the way in which people DIDN’T seem to be demonizing Romance rape/FS or the rape fantasy—it’s the first discussion about this topic I’ve seen or participated in that didn’t degenerate into a screaming match between people who felt rape in Romance was destroying women and those who felt it was perfectly healthy and anyone who didn’t was hung up somehow.
One thing I do think, though, is that there is still a lot of shame associated with the rape fantasy, and those who do enjoy it might feel somewhat guilty or at least unresolves about that. And so they might be as sensitive to others talking about it “analytically” as I am about people telling me that’s a slap against the fantasy. If someone feels strongly that this discussion denigrated those who embrace the rape fantasy, I think those points should be introduced into the discussion, and, as a I said, I think this forum is quite friendly to that point of view. BECAUSE the sheer weight of anxiety attached to the fantasy (even the anxiety over calling it a rape fantasy) means, IMO, that we need to freakin’ talk about it more, to liberate women to accept their sexuality, to make it okay for women to express their sexuality in both the dominant and submissive positions. And because the silence that surrounds this topic doesn’t seem to be resolving it or making it easier to discuss in mixed company.
I know it’s tough to keep all the different versions of rape in Romance straight—rape fantasy as it’s portrayed in Romance, rape fantasy as it’s experienced by the reader and catalyzed by a Romance, forced seduction, violent rape against the heroine by others, punitive rape against the heroine by the hero, other forms of violence against anyone and everyone—and that slippage I’m sure has occured. I know I am not always as careful as I’d like to be in elucidating all the subtle differences I grasp in my head. So perhaps we all need to be more careful about that and try to keep all those different manifestations of the device better distinguished. But as someone who’s really, really fascinated by the device, and who wants to see it as something women are trying to reclaim, I didn’t see an overwhelmingly negative tone here. So like I said, I wish those who did would have made that more expressly known here.
I have Glenn Savan’s White Palace and have even kept it. Nora’s forced seduction of Max is in the book. It happens pretty early on. Nora and Max run into each other at a bar, having met briefly before at the White Palace where she worked was there complaining about not getting his full order. They get drunk together at the bar and Nora gets Max to drive her home because she’s too drunk, even though he’s afraid she’ll try to make a move on him.
But Max himself is drunk, and when he gets to Nora’s house he realizes he should at least have some coffee before he gets on the road again. Nora says she’s got some, so he goes into her house. Once there, she admits she got him there under false pretenses. Max can’t drive and he doesn’t have the money to call a cab, and Nora says he can sleep on her sofa. He says he’ll accept on one condition—“No hanky panky,” to which Nora agrees.
After he falls asleep Max has a weird dream at the end of which his dead, beloved wife goes down on him. There follows a scene break and then these scene (quoted under fair use):
“He opened his eyes and there was Marilyn Monore.
No—it was only a poster of Marilyn Monroe, lasciviously smirking in a matador’s hat. The sensations of his dream raged on; he was being swallowed, sucked, milked, and then he raised his head and the iridescent black hair fanning across his belly, and the upraised, fleshy, coppery ass rising and ducking behind it, and he understood, without knowing if he was grateful or outraged or what, that Nora was in the process of raping him.”
That’s the end of chapter 3. The scene continues at the beginning of chapter 4. I won’t quote the full description, but here’s the paragraph I find most salient, and interesting, for the purposes of this discussion:
“Had Nora been any less forceful or unhesitating in her assault, Max might have recovered the presence of mind to defend himself. But by the time he struggled out of his dream and saw clearly what was happening, Nora was already so far along in her work, and he himself was already so aroused, that the call to resist sounded as far-off, tinny, and ridiculous as the voice of a soapbox madman on a street corner three blocks away. Resist on what principle? For what purpose? To whose benefit? Yet somewhere he had a grievance. Then he remembered that this was an attack, a violation of his person and a breach of promise, not to mention a display of extraordinary chutzpah—and then Nora, as if to counter these objections, bore on him still further, pushing, pushing, pushing, until something came unlocked at the back of her throat with a definite tactile click, and she swallowed, along with the whole length of his prick, the last of his defenses.
Max’s head hit the pillow. Oh, whatever else this woman was, she had a talent when it came to this.”
I remember being disturbed when I read this scene, because it was clear from earlier scenes that Max was not attracted to Nora before this happened. If he had been, I might have found the scene erotic, but as it was, I didn’t. I liked the book though, and FWIW, didn’t think it was depressing. It was discomfiting in places, though.
I agree that Kinsale could have taken Sheridan’s story in another direction with another heroine, but I think in the context of this particular book—which is one of my top 3 Kinsales—that a big part of what makes this book so powerful is Olympia’s crushing loss of innocence.
I agree completely on that point, it’s that shattering of her innocence that gives the book its power. Seize the Fire is in the top 5 Kinsales for me, BTW. I would put TSATS, FMLH, TDH and FFTS, all almost flawless books IMO which I’ve read dozens of times, ahead of it, but that’s still very high praise.
Is there a part of the tremendous pain she suffered that seems senseless? Of course, in the same way that the terrible life Sheridan had seems senseless. That’s what makes it so painful to read and so tragic for us.
I got all these same things out of the book too. I’m just saying that that powerful, moving horror and loss, that very same tragedy, makes it harder for me to see a true happy ending to this tale.
But given the world of the book… the fact that Sheridan and Olympia have a chance at making sense of their own lives amidst that mess, of ultimately charting a different course for themselves, I feel that at least the senseless horror and violence doesn’t triumph.
I’ll agree that the horror and violence don’t triumph, but neither do I feel that something else triumphs over them. For me, the book ends in a draw. Sheridan is on the path to healing, but Olympia is almost completely destroyed. His ability to open up to her and to get her to respond is a miracle, and so the book does end on a hopeful note (the reason I love to reread the ending and have read those last few pages so many times) but a hopeful note does not a happy ending make. I’m not complaining, because I think that Seize the Fire would be a far, far lesser book if Kinsale had given us an epilogue with babies and a white picket fence. I think the book has exactly the ending it should have. I just think a wrenching tale that’s at least as much about how tragic and senseless our world can be at times as it is about the power of love.
So despite her appearance of being “broken†at the end, I think she has such a foundation of stability, and of friendship and love from Fish, that I think she’ll ultimately be able to re-connect to that part of herself.
Here’s where I disagree with you. I didn’t see Olympia as all that strong. She was always making up stories about herself being a heroine to her people, borderline delusions really. I saw them very much as her defense mechanism against a harsh reality that she could not fully cope with. She had to make up stories to protect herself from a feeling of being unloved, unwanted and unworthy. The thing she wanted more than anything was to be a heroine, and in the end, her actions led (however unintentionally) to the deaths of many people. I think it would take a very, very strong person to cope with that reality, which would be crippling to a lot of people. And indeed, at the end there Olympia seemed pretty much in shellshock to me, and only came out of it because Sheridan needed her so badly.
That’s the part that was able to bring Sheridan’s more tender feelings out of hiding, so it’s really quite powerful, IMO.
I felt that it was Olympia’s defenselessness and vulnerability that brought out Sheridan’s tender feelings. I didn’t feel that she was stronger or healthier than Sheridan; if anything, I felt that he was the stronger of the two, as he was at least able to see reality and accept it.
Sheridan, on the other hand, who had the rug pulled out from under him SO early, seems to have found a strength in his need to comfort Olympia that I believe will continue to grow after the book ends.
Completely agree here.
I definitely see their happiness as a ways off, but I see them as having much more of a shot at happiness once Sheridan could feel he actually had something to give to Olympia and she had lost her heroic illusions and gained true knowledge and understanding of who he was. I wonder if he would ever have felt worthy of her if she had come to him at the end, if her breakdown had not triggered his, and if she didn’t truy know what he had suffered. It’s terribly sad, IMO, that she finally learns the lessons of human depravity that Sheridan tries so hard to teach her, but the fact that she does seems to be the only thing that wakes Sheridan up finally.
Yes, I too think that all this was necessary to Sheridan’s healing. I don’t disagree that Sheridan began to heal, and I don’t blame him for the worst of what happened to Olympia, either. It truly is a great book, and so brave. I can’t think of a romance genre book that takes a more unflinching look at the human condition.
Candy, I do enjoy the forced seductions / rape fantasies / whatever we want to call them in romance novels. I think it is just very, very hard not to feel defensive if you enjoy these fantasies, because lets face it, these fantasies are not politically correct. I am ambivalent about them myself. I don’t think we choose our turn ons, though. I think it’s very hard to be a woman in this society at this time in history and not feel somewhat embarrassed or defensive to admit that you enjoy these fantasies, and not worry that you will be judged for saying it.
I have also participated in discussions that did make me feel that I was being judged by some of the participants for saying that I can enjoy forced seductions. Indeed, at one time, I was likened to a KKK member for defending Gaffney’s To Have and to Hold. However, for what it’s worth, this discussion has the distinction of being one of the rare discussions that didn’t make me feel that way.
And now I really stop posting so much!
Coming late to this one—what a great post!
Just like you, Candy, I was very annoyed/saddened/disgusted/pissed off by all the unrepentant rape going on in the 70’s era romances—about the time I started reading them. I was infuriated by the heroines literally lying down and not only taking it but liking it. And I stopped reading romance for a long time.
When I came back to it, in the late 90’s, I was pleasantly surprised to see heroines so much more in control, so much more in my own mindset. Nowadays I think romance rules. And the baby (who the hell was she?) has come a long way indeed.
In addition, what some of the above comments mentioned is that to each his own, and yes, the rape/BDSM/forced/dominance act can be a turn on. Sure, I agree. However, what turned me off those early 70’s romances I read was that nearly ALL of them portrayed the hero/heroine dynamic that way. All were rape scenarios, and I got fed up. They were not a turn on but an “annoyance off.” They spoiled my mood because they did not “sing in my key.”
Sure I want some interesting dominance play in my sex reading, but I also want the tables turned. I want women being dominant and agressive, and the men being forced. I want men groveling. I want both partners taking turns. And I want balance. And I want all the flavors and nuances inbetween.
Candy said:
On the other, other hand, I feel like the pleasure is often used punitively, and the smugness of the hero afterwards, like “Ha! I knew better than you what you wanted, little girl†bugs me too. Because in those old romances, I feel as if the hero and heroine were in competition, and the one who was right more often was the winner, and the heroine LOST EVERY TIME. Bugged the hell out of me because I’m so goddamn competitive, and I mostly identified with the heroine. But this probably reveals more about me than about the rape device.
Oh mah gawd, YES! This is exactly how I saw it too, and this competition aspect is so right on! The woman always seemed to be “shown the error of her ways” by the hero, and his smugness was the worst part of it.
>>The woman always seemed to be “shown the error of her ways†by the hero, and his smugness was the worst part of it. <<
Frankly, I still see this happening a lot these days in less brutal circumstances. Very paternalistic and one reason I don’t like most of the ultra-alpha male characters. Yes, the hero also sees the “error of his ways” later in these books. . . most of the time. But smugness is not sexy to me and I don’t fall in love with these guys.
I believe it was Tori Amos who said, “So you can me come, that doesn’t make you Je-ee-sus.” Sing it, Sistah! A great come back to a forced seduction! Hee.
Or, even better, “So you can MAKE me come, that doesn’t make you Je-ee-sus.”
Sorry.
“I didn’t see Olympia as all that strong. She was always making up stories about herself being a heroine to her people, borderline delusions really. I saw them very much as her defense mechanism against a harsh reality that she could not fully cope with. She had to make up stories to protect herself from a feeling of being unloved, unwanted and unworthy. The thing she wanted more than anything was to be a heroine, and in the end, her actions led (however unintentionally) to the deaths of many people.”
Oh, I agree that Olympia is delusional, and that her naivete is frightening. But I don’t see her as weak. That passage in the book where Fish is taking her to meet Sheridan, and she’s musing about all the things Fish has taught her to do, where she understands that the cold and beautiful Julia was her “governess, but Fish was her family,” indicates to me that she didn’t feel completely unloved or unworthy. I’ll absolutely agree that Julia did a number on her, one that it takes Sheridan a long, long time to undo, but I think her life with Fish has given her a sense of place and stability that she will ultimately reconnect to, albeit in a different way.
I saw Olympia as an example of what happens when the naive passions of youth met the idealistic passions of revolutionary political rhetoric, and perhaps that speaks to a certain weakness of mind or a tremendous ignorance of the world and the depth of evil possible from people, but on the island I think Olympia really discovered how strong she was, not only physically, but emotionally, as well. When, for example, she retrieves the knife, and Sheridan hugs and hugs her, I saw that moment as really pivotal in their relationship—she does something she never thought she could, and he sees her in a new way that seems to make them partners for the first time. She’s even the one who stands up and refuses her marriage, confounding Sheridan’s plans to rescue her and play the hero himself. I wonder sometimes if he had been able to “save” her if they could have lived HEA. I don’t think so, though, because the hero he thinks he needs to be is not the man she neds him to be, and IMO that would continue to be a problem for them.
As for Sheridan’s strength v. Olympia’s, I still see her as emotionally more stable than he. As for stronger, I don’t know. He has more coping skills, and more understanding of the world and therefore fewer opportunities to be disappointed in people. And he’s had to be strong in some ways to survive, but he always seems to be hanging on by a thread until he finally has to reach out to Olympia and know that he has something to offer her.
As for what attracts him to her, I think it’s more than Olympia’s vulnerability that draws him in. I think in a strange way it’s partly the fact that she has the ability to believe in ideals, as misguided as she may be in that. What an appeal and an insult that must have been to a former boy who thought he was going to Vienna to study music and ended up on a ship in the most brutal circumstances. On the one hand he clearly wants to show Olympia that she’s as stupid as he was, but I also think he still mourns the child who had his hopes dashed by a capriciously cruel father. And as many times as Sheridan tries to steal from her, trick her, and otherwise show her what a blackguard he is, she survives and refuses to be completely cowed by him. Had they not had their time on the island, I might feel that’s just a function of Olympia’s isolation from the real world, but I think it’s more than that, and I think there’s a certain resiliency in Olympia that keeps her afloat and keeps Sheridan both attracted to her and trying to sabotage that.
And back to the subject of forced seductions for a second, what do you think of the scene where Olympia is trying to get Sheridan to penetrate her? Obviously she doesn’t have nearly the physical strength he does, but isn’t that a forced seduction, of sorts? I never really thought of it that way until this discussion, and especially your description of White Palace, but it seems to me now that if the genders were switched, that scene would definitely fall under FS.