The Hunger Games and Divergent may have romance elements but they’re not romance novels. Katniss and Tris don’t, for the most part, have time to focus on boyfriends; they’re too busy trying to stay alive and fighting their oppressors. Romance is about love; the most popular YA dystopias are about freedom. That’s a fundamental difference.
Or is it? When you actually read romance novels, it’s not so clear. Especially in historical romances, the parallels with YA dystopias can be startling. For example, Laura Kinsale’s 1993 classic For My Lady’s Heart is set in Medieval Europe — a setting as alien, and in many ways as authoritarian, as Tris’ future Chicago or Katniss’s District. The Princess Melanthe, like her peers in YA, is hemmed in by rules and proscriptions, her every move monitored and enmeshed in plot and counterplot. Born in England, Melanthe married into an Italian house, and her husband’s death set off a cascade of political intrigue as various suitors vie for her lands and power. One of her husbands’ Italian rivals has forced her to travel with his son, a castrated assassin who sleeps in her bed to make sure she doesn’t betray his father even in her sleep. Her entire life is devoted to concealing her real feelings under an icy veneer of calculation. Her husband “had trained her to trust no one and nothing, to lie of everything to everyone.” That’s how you live under totalitarianism. Katniss pretending to love Peta; Tris concealing that she’s divergent; Melanthe pretending to marry a man when she has no intention of doing so — they’ve all learned to dissemble in the face of power.
Rose Lerner’s recently published Regency romance Sweet Disorder is less grim — no one is threatened with death — but there are still parallels. Phoebe Sparks is a poor widow whose sister has become pregnant out of wedlock, and faces exile and shame As a woman without much money, Phoebe’s options are constrained by rules which are both arbitrary and cruel. There’s a local election, and both sides are willing to provide her with much needed cash since her vote is needed — except that it’s not her vote, but her husband’s. should she remarry. Because of the elaborate mores of a strange society, she has to sacrifice herself to save her sister…which is exactly the dilemma which faces Katniss in the Hunger Games.
All of these books, then, are devoted to dystopias, past or present — they all involve women trying to live their lives in the shadow of repressive power. Or, to look at it another way, they all concern women trying to negotiate between patriarchy and love.
It’s true that the exact nature of that negotitation is somewhat different in Hunger Games and Divergent than it is in For My Lady’s Heart and A Sweet Disorder. Most obviously, the YA novels involve significantly more guns. Katniss and Tris protect their loved ones, or try to, through violent political action; the response to exploitive power structures (which, significantly, aren’t always run by men in either book) is revolution. Romance novels, on the other hand, tend to look for non-violent, personal solutions to political problems. Pam Rosenthal’s Regency The Slightest Provocation, for example, concludes with the protagonists, an estranged husband and wife, reconciling and declaring their love as they work together to prevent agent provacateurs from goading laborers into a demonstration that the government can bloodily quash. Injustice is undermined by peace and love, both personal and political. YA responds to patriarchal dystopia with violent political resistance; Romance with nonviolence abetted by personal affection .
Again, though, the binary is less clear than it appears. The Hunger Games, for instance, is acutely aware of the limitations of violence as a response to violence. Katniss’ embrace of revolution ultimately destroys the sister who she was fighting for in the first place. The rebellion in The Hunger Games, led by a woman, doesn’t challenge the patriarchy. It just replaces one boss with another, cosmetically different, but every bit as vicious. And for its part, For My Lady’s Heart doesn’t exactly forswear violence; Ruck, the hero, fights for Melanthe on a number of occasions, and while the tourneys aren’t to the death, the novel still unequivocally glories in his prowess, and in might asserted on behalf of right.
Rather than seeing YA dystopias and historical romances as opposed, then, it makes more sense to see them as thinking through related questions in complementary or overlapping ways. Can you use the tools of patriarchy, such as violence and paranoia, against patriarchy? Does forswearing those tools leave you defenseless? Is love a weakness, which gives patriarchy a hold on you, sending you to the Hunger Games (like Katniss), or into an arranged marriage (like Phoebe, in A Sweet Disorder)? Or is love a strength, which gives you the heart to resist oppression?
Despite the similarities, I wouldn’t necessarily insist that YA dystopias should be shelved with, Romances. Genre markers are fairly arbitrary. But as in YA and historicals, that arbitrariness is itself indicative of lines of power. YA isn’t generally seen in the context of Romance novels because Romance novels simply aren’t seen; mainstream conversations about genre fiction include sci-fi and mystery and children’s lit and YA, but the genre with the largest sales and readership is almost entirely ignored. Seeing Hunger Games and Divergent as future historicals is a way to see them as not just about the dystopia to come, but about the dystopias we’ve already (and continue) to have. And it’s also a way, perhaps, to grant Katniss and Tris their love along with their violence, and to see that they aren’t the first to wrestle with those options. They have many sisters who came before them.
I’ve been following a trend of old school pulp genres entering into “literary fiction” heavily since about 2002, and you’re exactly right: romance is one huge exception. Chabon, for instance, can do a hard boiled detective in an alternate timeline, and Cunningham can combine gothic, police thriller and androids in one novel, but romance as a genre is still considered outside literary bounds. I think it’s because of its plot rules. Romance looks like narrative realism page by page, but it guarantees an ending of romantic closure, while SF, horror, and fantasy are generically open-ended.
There’s actually wiggle room with the HEA (happy ever after) ending, I’d argue. And there would be other ways to incorporate romance — and it does happen occasionally (A.S. Byatt’s Possesion, for example. Or Longbourne.)
I think it has more to do with the way that romance is in a lot of ways defined, not by HEA, but by being non-literary. A literary novel that’s a romance is just seen as a literary novel, not as genre. Wheras romances that have literary aspects (like Black Silk), but which are marketed as romance, don’t get treated as literary novels, don’t get reviewed, etc.
I think it has much more to do with status and marketing than with formal elements, in other words.
Reading this makes me realize that I’ve actually always sorted YA and romance together. The first time I heard of The Hunger Games back in late 2008, I was recommended it by a friend on the basis that it has “one of the most compelling love triangles ever.” My current roommate wanted me to read Divergent with her for a similar reason– “there’s this really hot scene in it.” People hate on Twilight because it slipped from YA category into the romance category, (not enough guns, I guess.)
There’s precedent for this in manga. Ranma 1/2 and Inuyasha by Rumiko Takahashi (I know you’re familiar with them, Noah,) are marketed as boys action comics, but at least in America, their readership is by far mostly women, who are into it partially for the romantic tension.
Yes; shojo is sort of romance, but not exactly, since it focuses more on who’s reading than on content per se. Though even that’s blurry; I’m pretty sure Takahashi was successful with girls in Japan too…
There’s a growing set of research about the romance genre, but I’m not aware of anyone directly studying the underlying reason(s) why the genre is so aggressively singled out for denigration. The traditional speculation among us romance writers is that it’s a genre written by women, for women. However, I think that oversimplifies. To me, there’s a great deal of simple snobbery, and I can include myself in this in my pre-writing days. The genre has the reputation for being written and read by housewives in curlers (ie, stupid powerless, uneducated people) and therefore being able to say, “Oh, I don’t read THAT stuff,” is an easy way to establish a cultural/social position of being Above That Sort of Thing.
Thank you, I really do appreciate it when anyone takes a close and thoughtful look at my own books, and I’m often surprised at how much readers find in them that I hadn’t noticed myself. This notion of post-plague England as an authoritarian dystopia is obvious, now that you’ve pointed it out, though I didn’t think of it that way when writing. My focus was on the desolate wilderness and fantasy of the Gawain poem, but it resulted in a dystopia, didn’t it?
Agreeing with Laura Kinsale that there’s growing literature and research on romance fiction and its (low) status in the literary canon. In addition to formal academic explorations such as the Popular Romance Project, Laura Vivanco’s Teach Me Tonight blog, or JSPR/IASPR (Journal/Society for Study of Popular Romance, I think), there are many thoughtful discussions taking place within the romance reading community itself, about the reasons, which are always evolving, of course, for romance’s unique position in literary and commercial terms. I’d argue that recent more mainstream media attention (NPR, Salon, etc.) is also in the mix in these discussions as romance readers respond to what’s being said. I also agree that traditional marketing of romance is part of it’s historically low status. I think the connection with the YA/dystopian phenomenon is one of several broad trends (erotic/BDSM romance, “New Adult” romance) that are bringing more attention to romance even as they’re blurring the traditional boundaries of the genre.
I”ve tried to write about romance at Salon!
And I am thrilled to my socks to have you comment, Laura. We’re having a similar conversation on another thread where Eric Selinger (who is a romance scholar) weighed in and said something similar (that is, some growing interest in romance as a scholarly matter, but still strong mainstream contempt for it.) I think a lot of it is linked to gender…though that goes beyond just “women write it”, and on to the sense that love and happy endings aren’t sufficiently masculine. So it’s both about the gender of the people writing the books and the perceived gendered nature of the content, would be my guess.
Noah, since you’re getting interested in romance novels, you might enjoy the episode “Marky Ramone’s Romance Novel” from the late, lamented radio show The Best Show on WFMU. Like all Best Show skits, it takes a long time to build, but I liked it a lot: http://castroller.com/podcasts/BestShowGems/3185592
Yes, I know – I read your piece about Black Silk and highbrow book reviewing! My daughters are obsessed with Catniss and just learned how to appropriately use the term “dystopian” (they’re 10) so when I saw Laura K’s tweet I followed the link and ended up here, and my first thought was sort of “hey I think that’s the Salon romance guy…”
Anyway, I had really been thinking of the romance elements in the Collins books as quite secondary, perhaps because my kids are still young enough that this part is the least interesting aspect for them. I like the questions you’re asking here, about the ways in which romance conventions can inform a reading of this wildly popular YA subgenre, regardless of the specific love stories incorporated into a particular novel. And the circle is completed with the even newer trend toward dystopian fantasy romance, such as the Kit Rocha “Beyond” series (which is also definitely NOT for YA readers, unless they’re actual adults).
I am pleased to be the Salon romance guy.
I haven’t heard of the Kit Rocha books; are they worth reading?
Oh, and before your kids tell you; it is “Katniss”, with a “k.” (My son is 10 as well, and is not obsessed with Katniss, but enjoyed the first book.)
Whoops, thank goodness they didn’t catch me spelling her name wrong; thanks for the heads up! The 10 year olds in our neighborhood are planning some sort of Hunger Games LARP-ish event this weekend and I’m doing my best to keep up. I think it’s great that this seems not to be a gendered reading experience for them – there are as many boys as girls involved and it’s the first time in a while that these kids have returned to informal coed play.
I’ve heard the Kit Rocha books have strong worldbuilding, cage fighting, powerful women, alpha heroes, and a lot of every flavor of menage. There is buzz about them, and it’ll be interesting to see if this Hunger Games-inflected but very adult erotic dystopian trend takes off.
Pingback: Nightly Glass Review 4/4 | The Nightly Glass
I’m a reader of romance, and it’s funny because, when someone asks me about a well-written romance novel, in the sense of a literary good style, I usually mention Kinsale.
I’m one of those that think that popular culture is not really appreciated, sci fi is not very applauded, either.
But I’m one of those that still think that the ‘problem’ with romance novels is that they are written and read by women and they talk about things like love and emotions and sex, topics that -usually- make an average man uncomfortable, so they don’t read it and they don’t review it. Something like ‘If I don’t read them, me, this incredible person that is so important and cultivated, then it’s not worth’.