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!
I found this interview very interesting; however, I was amazed at your statements of the contempt and dislike by virgins in romance novels toward experienced women, AKA, “sluts.” You say, ““virgin heroines who are all like, ‘I am a virgin because casual sex is disgusting, you filthy sluts’ are incredibly annoying. ” Having read thousands of romances, I cannot think of EVEN ONE virginal heroine with this attitude, an attitude that would be foolish for an author to put in the mouth of her heroine. Can you site the books that heroines said such things about women who were not virgins?
re: Lauren. Thank you so much! That article was terrific.
Jonathan Allen has been doing academic work on male virginity in romance novels. I have read about on the Teach Me tonight blog.
This links to one article about this work that has the interesting comment: “but his [male virgin’s] place in the history of popular romance seems important given the fact there hasn’t been a year since the 90s in popular romance in which a male virgin has not appeared (and often enough we see as many as ten male virgins in a given year).”
http://teachmetonight.blogspot…
Luckily the Greek romances are all published in English – probably the best current edition is B.P. Reardon’s “Collected Ancient Greek Novels.” It has all five of the Greek romances in modern translations (i.e., without the sexy parts translated into Latin or removed entirely) with good introductions, plus it has the summaries and fragments I mentioned. I don’t remember how much the intros talk about virginity, but there is definitely a good amount of scholarship on the topic out there.
Jodi, you are a treasure. I enjoyed the interview and your candid comments so much. Good luck to you and keep up the good work!
Love love love this post! Not nearly long enough! I only wish I had Jodi as a lit prof in university! Did my degree in French Lit and my most favourite book studied is actually an anti-romance – Dangerous Liaisons (yes, read in the original French). You have one character who had married and obviously not a virgin but oh so virtuous that she is portrayed like she is one AND another who actually is a virgin and when she loses IT becomes quite the little temptress! Then there is the woman who is so sexually liberated but goes to extreme measures to preserve her reputation despite her manipulations. No HEA in that one. I remember arguing with a professor about that one – she said it was a study in the decadence of the aristocracy using sex as an example but I said that she was missing a huge point by not looking at how women’s chastity was portrayed and the mores related to that historically (I also majored in history).
I think all the best books have elements of romance in them whether the ending is happy or not because quite simply that is life! Tale of Two Cities, Shakespeare’s plays, Ivanhoe, Witch of Blackbird Pond, even Harry Potter has small romances at the end!
It’s posts like this that make me love your website Sarah!
@Lisa JH I haven’t read that one! I’ll check it out.
@Lynda I’m hyperbolising, but I’ve definitely noticed a fear and disdain for the experienced woman in 80s and 90s category in particular. (This isn’t to say it’s common – it’s not, particularly – but I think it certainly exists.) It’s usually implicit and/or directed at a specific Other Woman: you’re right, it wouldn’t exactly be the brightest move ever for a romance author to express that sentiment explicitly! What is more common are passages like this one (which is from Diana Hamilton’s 1991 Presents An Inconvenient Marriage):
“All these years of believing she wasn’t interested in sex – she had told herself that nothing would ever induce her to adopt the casual attitude toward sex of so many women she knew, which she found repugnant – had been washed away by the ferocity of her own desire…” (p.130)
@Vestusta Thanks for that! They sound super interesting. Will definitely look into them.
@Milly Dangerous Liaisons is a wonderful, thought provoking book. I don’t write about it in my thesis as I’m focusing on English language books, but I think the relation between love and power in it is so interesting – as well, of course, as the relationships of Merteuil, Tourvel and Cecile to ideas of virginity and virtue. Merteuil in particular is so interesting: Valmont can basically fuck his way across France and no one will bat an eyelid, but she has to go to such efforts to conceal her conquests. She is such a subtle and clever character – and when she announces that she’s basically been using Valmont as a tool to screw over Tourvel you can’t help but be a little bit impressed, no matter how amoral she is.
The cracktastic magical fairy princess series
the series is called “In a Fairy Tale World”. This is a Good Reads page with the titles
http://www.goodreads.com/serie…
Well, in terms of the canon of 18th and 19th century British literature, you’re really not far wrong about Clarissa and Tess. There are, of course, ridiculous numbers of other examples (including the ones I named), but despite the wonderful expansion of the 18/19c BritLit canon over the past 30 years, those are still probably the most cited examples.
(On feminist and new historicist grounds, however, I reject the death of the author as pretentious nonsense. Funny how the author ceases to matter at almost exactly the same historical moment that women writers and writers of color were just beginning to gain critical prominence in the academy.)
It does seem to be a way of working around the standard genre forms, but the thing that hits me is that in our current social climate, it isn’t *necessary*. For something to become a trend, it has to speak to people. That’s where I get fascinated, looking at just what subconscious needs and desires are being fed by different trends and tropes, and seeing what in the current culture (for whatever era it was a Thing) that they might be an answer to. We, as readers in this age, don’t *need* the paternalistic hero to ease the way for us to accept the sexually curious heroine; we can identify with her on our own without a safety net. Theoretically, anyways. So, there must be something comforting about the idea of having someone there to help protect the heroine from possible errors in judgement. She is able to take “risks”, and we are comforted that they will turn out the way they are supposed to, because someone is looking out for her. The historical setting, of course, makes it acceptable and fitting. It is not entirely unlike what happens in some of the modern paranormals, where the heroine is not so likely to be a virgin, but she is often somewhat naive, or “lost”, or somehow not quite able to find her place, despite her desire to be independent and strong. In a contemporary romance, an overly strong and paternalistic Alpha hero would be more likely to be criticized, but within the defined world of a paranormal, it is often explained by his being centuries old and/or from a different (generally supernatural) culture, where his attitudes are the norm. The heroine is flawed and sometimes reckless and often heedless of the dangers around her, but our fear for her and worry over her actions is mitigated in some way because there is the hero there who “knows what is best for her”, or who will keep her from harm and will guide her toward her (HEA) fate.
I should stop. I can go on about this stuff for*ever*. I just rarely have anyone willing to listen (the cat, as usual, is Not Impressed by my brilliance).
Loved, loved, loved this interview and am eager to read / hear more. But I confess you almost lost me at: “I spent many, many hours which I will never get back reading through lives of virgin saints, for example…”
Hey! I wrote *my* thesis on those very same virgin saints, and the gradual change from the Neo-Platonic ideal of “virginity” (philosophically, an ontological transformation; practically, an avenue for female empowerment that transcended strict boundaries of class) into the Roman virtue of “chastity” (which was considered an obligation instead of a heroic achievement, and in practical terms only accessible to the already privileged.)
None of which has much to do with modern romance, but how often do I have opportunity to natter on about the topic?
I do agree with you that Hardy was critiquing the attitudes of his day, but there’s still something wrong about the way that tragic women in those “mainstream” novels always ended up doomed and dead. This was brought in focus to me when I learned the back story behind Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane, the adultery novel where everybody around Effi is portrayed as horrible hypocrites and Fontane thinks she doesn’t deserve the crap that society hands out to her, but she dies anyway. Turns out that the author was essentially inspired by a real-life adultery case. But in that one, the woman in question, after the divorce, became a nurse, accomplished a lot, and died very old. How come no “mainstream” novel back then ever had such an ending?
I win because . . . I’m a 31 year old virgin, so (egads!) I’m even older than you. I have also made this decision for religious reasons. LLike you, I have read a few contemporaries with virgin heroines (sometimes younger than me!!) who agonize over their *weirdly* virgin state. Clearly they need to get some nookie or their ladyparts will shrivel up like prunes, right? It makes me want to climb up on a soap box.
Look, sometimes sex just doesn’t happen at an age when other people consider it “normal.” Even people who don’t have strong feelings about sex outside marriage tend to want some kind of connection with a sexual partner (I realize this isn’t true of everyone, but I know very few people who actually have casual sex like you might see in fiction), and not everyone meets someone special early, or ever. I’m not interested in criticizing someone’s decision to have sex (as long as everything is consensual and safe), so I’d like to be afforded the same courtesy. In this modern era, the age at which people marry keeps getting pushed back, so there are more older virgins around than you might think. I know several. And we don’t drive buggies, you know?
As for the dissertation, it sounds far more fascinating than many others I’ve heard about. As I’ve stated here before, old skool romances tend to give me The Rage, and not in a fun way. It’s interesting to remove myself a bit from the emotion of virginity and rape in literature, and think more about how they work to move plot and character along. You’re doing good work. Keep it up! Writing a dissertation is all too often begun in eagerness and ended in drudgery, but it sounds like you’ve found a topic that will keep you enthusiastic.
When I was in grad school, a common word of encouragement was “Go make [insert work/author] your bitch!” I’ve got to say that “Go make those virgins your bitches!” has a certain ring to it. It actually makes the figurative literal again, and then reminds me of why I hate those old skool romances.
Love that you’re doing this Jodi, and that you posted this Sarah! We need more women writing about topics like this and in this way, to really equalize academia!
2 suggestions on virginity in the paranormal genre: “Once Burned” by Jeaniene Frost, and the “Within” Series by Mima.
“Once Burned” uses your trope that the heroine just happens to be a virgin because of the extra-special super weirdness in her paranormal world (she’s electrified, so no one she’s ever met but the hero, who also has extra-special super weirdness, can touch her). But she’s not super-virgin-y, and the scene/book is a great example of “the hero introducing the heroine to exciting new experiences” instead, as you said—which also ends up binding them as The One for each other.
I highly recommend the whole “Within” Series by Mima as well, as a truly interesting exploration of a variety of sex roles through a paranormal framework. Each of the heroines has a different sexual background (sex worker, virgin, sexually empowered normal female, oversexed dominant female, rape survivor, etc.). I’m relatively new to Romance myself, but as a journalist and arch feminist, when I stumbled upon this series, I was surprised not to have seen it referenced more elsewhere… The entire world of male/female power dynamics is explored in SOOO many interesting ways, it’s fascinating—the sex and relationships REALLY push the theme of equality, contrary to expectation in such a super-graphic narrative. It’s truly what the whole series is about. Plus, the animalistic-paranormal bent forces a scene in each book where the “shifting” aspect stands in for a deflowering, as you said, if the heroine isn’t a virgin. One caution, there’s a very yin-yang polticial commentary running throughout as well that relates to a very literal war, so there is rape and torture in some of the books. That kind of thing is usually untenable for me—can’t handle it (and I have avoided certain entries in the series as such). However, I was so amazed by the treatment this author gave, I continued to read in most, just to see what she was trying to say. VERY interesting stuff. Good luck!!!
All interviews should be like this. Just sayin’.
This is the BEST PHD EVER.
A few weeks ago I got a crazy notion to submit a paper to the JSPR for their romance and religion call for submissions on the parallels between Israel’s virginity and re-virgination and virginity/re-virgination in romances. Then I remembered I have to submit my own PhD in January. But anyway, I would be fascinated to know, Jodi, how you think the ‘she’s so tight’, ‘she hasn’t had sex in so long she’s closed up’ kind of thing also plays into the virgin heroine trope. And if you haven’t already, I would add Lynne Graham’s entire oeuvre into your TBR list. She has some crazy virgins – the IVF/Caesarean mother who has never had sex, for instance.
Is this a competition? Because if so, 38-year-old virgin here.
Aww, Ros, now I want to read about “the parallels between Israel’s virginity and re-virgination and virginity/re-virgination in romances.” If you don’t have time to submit anything to JPRS before the deadline for this call for papers, you could still send something in later, for inclusion in a general issue.
Oh, and now I’m wondering whether you could compare/contrast “Israel’s virginity and re-virgination” with male circumcision as part of the covenant with God.
I might well do that, Laura. My PhD is on the Song of Songs and there’s a ton of things I’d love to write about that and its links to the romance genre. But not right now.
Interesting. There’s definitely something about Israel’s gender dynamic to be explored.
“the parallels between Israel’s virginity and re-virgination and virginity/re-virgination in romances.”
I would crawl over sharp rocks to read this. Also parallels between Hosea / Gomer and “courtesans with a heart of gold” romances.
“Romance was already moving in a more explicit direction – the first not-exactly-behind-closed-doors sex scene in Mills & Boon happens in 1967”
That had me looking, because I have a M&B from 1929, and I was sure the heroine lost her virginity in the text, but you’re quite right, she doesn’t: it’s all ‘snatching what comfort they might from mere physical contact’ – nothing specific. On the bright side, she doesn’t blame herself: ‘What we have done, you and I, seems but the fulfilling of our natures.’
(And then she ends up pregnant, goes into labour, has the baby delivered by a ‘hasheesh sodden’ medical student, after which she’s told it has died, though it has really been stolen by monks. Those were the days. Many, many adventures later, she marries the – now sober – medical man. )
OH YES!!!!
Oh, dear. I foresee a whole nother PhD worth of research here.
If you do, you might want to take a look at Francine Rivers’s Redeeming Love because I have the feeling it quite explicitly draws on the story of Hosea and Gomer.
Aww…all these 30-something virgins are making me feel less shitty about myself (which is how I’ve been feeling late). 33, here. 😀
I’m Israeli and I have no idea what this virginity and re-virgination business is referring to. Can anyone please explain?
As a soon to be PhD in a different field, I want to say well done to Jodi for picking such a fantastic topic, and please do keep us updated about your research!
Brilliant (and hilarious) post!
Yes, it’s a retelling of the Hosea story.
Sure. The OT prophets portray Israel’s relationship with God in the form of a romance: betrothal, covenant, bringing home, adultery, divorce and restoration. Part of the imagery focusses on her sexual experiences. She begins as a young, innocent girl (see e.g. Ezek 16) but becomes a harlot. As part of the restoration process God once again makes her a virgin. That is, he doesn’t ignore her previous adultery and prostitution, he wipes it out and she is again referred to as a virgin.
In romance novels, heroines who have some sexual experience can become like virgins again in some way. I haven’t ever seen surgical revirgination in a romance novel, but I bet it won’t be long.
Thanks! I can definitely see the parallels to romance tropes now. Some of it looked familiar, I guess from Passover Seders past. BTW, there’s a pop song from the 1960s about the awesomeness of the prophet Ezekiel (
.
Continuing along with the OT stuff (as in off-topic, not Old Testament 🙂 ), because of the lack of separation of religion and state in Israel, more secular people like me often feel that our religious heritage has been co-opted by religious authorities, and I’m sad to say that it keeps many people away from learning more. I am woefully ignorant about most everything past Kings 2, which is as far as I can remember getting in school – the exceptions being a few psalms (104 is beautiful and includes a whale, so I’m a fan) and the books of Ruth and Esther.
Chiming in tardily with another male virgin—Jamie in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series.
“the virgin heroine as rapist is really not something that turns up very often.” made me laugh really, really hard. I need to read this book.
I work in a bookstore and it’s insane how many of my colleagues think that our number one selling genre is a waste of time.
Linnea Sinclair’s Games of Command is SF romance and has a male cyborg virgin and a sexually experienced heroine.
This is a fascinating topic. There’s another virginity in romance trend / theme I’ve noticed – unwanted virginity, where virgins try to try pretend that they’re not virgins (as opposed as to a non-virgin trying to hid her lack on her wedding night). The most cracktastic example of this is the Jane Feather book Rushed to the Alter (read the book rant about it if you haven’t yet – it’s posted on this site somewhere)
I liked Effi Briest, but I thought it was a little disappointing, although since I read it in translation I try to reserve judgement – and Richardson is loathsome and Clarissa is a steaming pile of pooh, and I love Gaskell but Ruth is pretty wet and but I don’t think any of them are as good a book as Tess, I definitely don’t think it’s fair to lump all these authors of tragic virgins together, but it’s kind of fun, so let’s.
Writing about a woman who had sex outside of marriage – whether she was unmarried or having an affair – was a Big Deal. 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). Hardy took hell for insisting on subtitling Tess “A Pure Woman” but he wouldn’t back down, because, what with that bleak worldview and all, he figured people would miss the fact that he was on Tess’s side if he didn’t spell it out for them. Angel absolutely gets off too lightly, but not because Hardy endorses him. Hardy kills all his sympathetic characters. (Snarkhunter, I always figured I was the only one who found Father Time laugh out loud funny.) It’s the evil ones who thrive, because he wasn’t writing Disney stories. Although, if Disney is going to succeed with the little mermaid and Pocahontas, I really don’t see any reason why Tess shouldn’t be their next big hit.
There was that woman in France, Julie Clery? Or not. That might be someone else entirely… but there’s an actual historical woman who supposedly remained a virgin, or re-virginized every morning, no matter how much sex she had. She’s mentioned in Stael’s Delphine, I believe, and might be an interesting footnote in the history of literary virgins.
@Ros – I laughed at your competition comment! I’m 28, but being a virgin is kind of a non-thing to me, because it’s so completely natural that I rarely think of it (though being an asexual teenager at Catholic school being taught abstinence and how we should resist our sexual desires, which I didn’t have?, was really confusing)
@Jodi –
I’m super fascinated with your thesis! It’s something that interested me a bit, too, when I was studying lit, but mostly because of Eliza Haywood (and also Aphra Behn and the other lady writers from the Restoration through Augustan ages – why didn’t we get to read them in high school, I wonder, because they’re actually Interesting and fun!). Haywood’s Fantomina is one of my top favorite novellas, because of the way the heroine has so much agency. It’s fascinating to see how she basically turns all the social expectations topsy-turvy, and even when she gets “punished” in the end for her sexuality (and also other things she does, but mostly it’s tied to sexuality, I think), it’s not really a punishment at all. And her loss of virginity isn’t even a Thing. It gets like one paragraph of her being nervous and not entirely sure it’s what she expected when she dressed up as a prostitute, and then she’s having fun and in love with the dude.
I have the Broadview Literary Texts version that include the Tea-Table and a few other pieces, and the way that Haywood talks about love affairs throughout the works is so interesting, particularly since we’re practically taught that people were more prudish 300 years ago, and all this modern sex and whatnot is the downfall of society…and yet, in these stories from 300 years ago, folks are exactly the same as they are now, albeit without the advances of the Enlightenment or Industrial Revolution or inexpensive and safe birth control.
okay so basically Eliza Fowler Haywood is my idol and i want her portrait to hang over my fireplace like Jesus did over my grandmother’s.
I love this series too and have been re-reading it this week. The other thing that Mima does is address the fated mates issue. While we know that the heroine will end up with the hero(es) the books present the heroine with several possibilities of Truxet men who would be an equal match for mate bonding. the heroine is encouraged to meet them all and then choose.
There is one book ‘Within Reason’ where the heroine choose someone who was not the hero. This partner later dies and so there is the chance for her to matebond with the hero. The book makes clear that her first relationship was not lesser because it was not with hero. In the end the heroine joins in a menage with hero and his/their other partner and the matebond potential is consciously let go and the love relationship they are in as a triad seen as powerful too.
The Truxet partners are challenged by their Elders about what might happen if a future matebond partner is identified. Niko and Trey make the point that it would need to stretch to include these loves too – be in addition too not instead of.
“Writing about a woman who had sex outside of marriage – whether she was unmarried or having an affair – was a Big Deal. 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”
Interesting point—and it reminds me of Marijane Meaker (M. E. Kerr’s) comment about lesbianism being a “daring but acceptable” topic for popular fiction, “so long as they regret it or die in the end.” (A taboo she deliberately “broke” with her YA novel DELIVER US FROM EVIE.)
Another pnr recommendation – Sweet Starfire by Jayne Castle / Jayne Ann Krentz. It’s an early paranormal romance from the 80s (think I read somewhere that it’s the first paranormal romance but I have no idea if that’s true). The heroine (a virgin) was raised on a planet mostly populated by serene telepaths who don’t have physical appetites, but is not telepathic herself. The hero is a rough and ready pilot she hires to fly her to some planet. Besides being a fun read I think it’d be interesting for your study – iirc the heroine has a fair amount of agency.