Tag Archives: Kathleen Gilles Seidel

Can a Romance Novel Be Ambiguous?

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2385082Multi-layered, ambiguous, nuanced, complex. That’s generally the sort of thing literary critics say when they are praising some important work of literary fiction for its importance, seriousness, and literariness. Great novels, or works of art, are supposed to have meanings within meanings, perspectives within perspectives. To be great is to be multiple. Pulp or genre novels, on the other hand, are often seen as being singularly utilitarian. A horror novel scares you; a spy novel gets the blood pumping, porn does what porn does.

In an interview with me last week, romance novelist Kathleen Gilles Seidel suggested that romance, too, was more singular than multiple, at least in some respects. As a writer, she says,

my relationship with my reader is a romance writer’s. I am not out to challenge her (or him), threaten her, or even change her. I am very controlling of her (or his) experience. The characters may be complex, and the judgment about them may be nuanced, but ultimately there is almost no ambiguity in the judgments. A reader is going to end up drawing the same conclusions that I have.

So for Seidel, romance novels are restrictive and, at least in some ways, unambiguous. Is this true?

There are buckets and boatloads of romance novels, and it’s hard to make any statement about them in general that would be true of every one. But it does seem to be true of one novel — Seidel’s own 1991 book More Than You Dreamed.

More Than You Dreamed is about an (extremely) wealthy director’s daughter, Jill Casler, and a basketball coach, Doug Ringling, who is the nephew of the famous actor Bix Ringling. Bix and Jill’s father, Cass, were both involved in the making of a 1948 blockbuster, Weary Hearts, a historical drama focusing on one Confederate family’s struggles during the Civil War. The making of the film is shrouded in confusion, and Jill and Doug work together to uncover the production mysteries. While falling in love. As you’d expect.

To repeat, that outcome is expected. You’re introduced to Doug and Jill on the first page, and you know what’s going to happen. That singular, predictable reading is mirrored, emphatically, in the film within the book. Just as the reader reads “Doug” and “Jill” and says, “aha!”, so Doug and Jill read various versions of the script for Weary Hearts — and those readings are always singular, immediate, crystal clear. When Doug and Jill find Bix’s original script, they both know it’s a masterpiece — and everyone else who sees it thinks exactly the same thing. When Doug and Jill see an early print of the film, they both agree it’s a failure, and for the exact same reasons. Art, in More Than You Dreamed, is unitary. It speaks to everyone with the same voice.

Or does it? Is Doug and Jill’s reading of Weary Hearts the only reading? Again, Weary Hearts seems based, at least in very broad strokes, on Gone With the Wind — another sweeping Confederate historical. Gone With the Wind, like Weary Hearts, was, and is, widely beloved. But it’s also extremely contentious. GWTW was a racist film; as a result, its tragically defeated white heroes can also be seen as awful, white supremacist villains. Instead of a romantic triumph, the film could be seen (and frequently is seen) as an ugly apology for evil.

And what about Weary Hearts? The film, as described, seems to be much less focused on race than GWTW — the characters are not landholders, but small farmers, and only one black character appears. But still, if you take seriously the idea that the Confederacy was a racist endeavor, the view of Weary Hearts has to shift. Is Pompeii, the one black slave in the film, really content to travel with the Confederate hero Charles as he wanders about fighting Yankees? Is that original print really flawed because of poor acting? Or does the early version lack power because it fails to confront the moral evil of the Confederacy?

There are clues in the book that perhaps support this alternate reading of the film. Doug, who looks almost exactly like the star of Weary Hearts, participates in a Civil War reenactment, during which he makes a passing joke about the South’s racist and sexist past. Later, and more uncomfortably, while he waits for a black basketball star friend, he quips, “I kind of like this, meeting him in a Confederate uniform. He can call me Massa, it will be good for him.” Jill replies that Doug should probably be the one calling Lynx master, since Lynx “could buy and sell you.” On the surface, it’s supposed to be a moment of fun banter. But it’s also an uneasy reminder of what the American South (and not just the South) was about. And though, again, it seems to be directly denying the continuing relevance of that history (Lynx has the power now) it could also be seen as a nervous suggestion that the past isn’t quite yet gone.

In researching Weary Hearts, Jill and Doug both want to prove that their relatives — Jill’s dad, Doug’s uncle — were good, thoughtful, brilliant, talented people. They succeed in doing so; that’s the message, and part of the happy ending, of the novel. But there’s ambiguity there too. Is it good, and thoughtful, and brilliant, to present a romantic Confederacy sans racism? The title line, near the end of the book (“…once you start to look, you may find more than you ever dreamed”) could be about the wonder of finding love. But it could also be an ironic comment on how dreams (filmic or otherwise) can ensure that you don’t look for, and don’t find, certain things.

Probably this isn’t the reading Seidel intended. But again, there’s some textual support. Jill, we learn in the novel, is an incredibly controlled person, terribly afraid that the people around her will become angry. “Jill’s goal in life was to get people to stop being angry. That’s what she did, calm everyone down so that things would get done”. Doug, for his part, lost his job at a Division I school; he is adrift throughout the book in part because he hasn’t let himself feel rage at the people who maneuvered him out of his position.

The book, then, is not only about the secrets of the past, but about repression in the present. And the two are linked. At the end of the book, Doug realizes that his uncle Charles, who played Booth the Confederate soldier in the movie, was a lousy actor. But he determines to keep that a secret: “He’s weak, he’s a coward, and he’s a quitter but he’s family.” Jill and Doug have connections, wealth, knowledge, and power; they can protect their own. In the name of family, history is altered, and myths promulgated. Does that refer just to Charles? Or does it implicate the film he was in, and it’s neo-Confederate romanticism as well? Jill and Doug’s happy ending also becomes a conspiracy about a happy past. Bliss in the present erases ancestral moral failings — which can be an exhilarating message, but which can also have less sunny connotations.

Seidel’s control, then, can itself be read as ambiguous. The characters in the novel find new scripts and scenes and perspectives on a classic story, and they refuse them — they push them away. The shelving of multiple meanings, though, can itself have more than one meaning. To reject ambiguity is itself ambiguous; to push aside a meaning is (multiply) meaningful. More Than You Dreamed settles on one romantic dream, but it also says, ambiguously, that there are more.
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For those interested in the question of romance and directed reading, Liz McCausland hosted a lengthy discussion on the issue which is worth checking out.

The Romance of Dead Parents

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Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage is structured as, and by, a romance. The novel starts off with a description of the relationship between freed slave, thief and wastrel, Rutherford Calhoun, and the prim schoolteacher Isadora Bailey. Calhoun and Bailey are in love with each other, but he’s not willing to be tied down; she forces the issue by offering his creditor, Papa Zeringue, to pay his debts if he’ll marry her. Zeringue determines to force Calhoun to do just that, but he slides out of the ring or the noose or whatever metaphor you wish by sneaking aboard an illegal slave ship bound for Africa. Adventures and hijinks ensue…but in the end his travails and misfortunes bring him back around to Isadora, and the book ends, as romances should, with a marriage and happiness.
 

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Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s Please Remember This isn’t really structured as, or by, a romance. There is a romance in it — between coffee-shop owner Tess Lanier and historical excavator Ned Ravenal. That romance, though, doesn’t really get started until something like 2/3 of the way through the book. The bulk of the earlier part of the novel, and the main thrust of the plot, is about Tess’ relationship with her dead mother, the brilliant author Nina Lane, who killed herself several months after Tess was born. The novel meanders through it’s small as life, non-adventurous plot, letting Tess figure out that she doesn’t have to be Nina, and doesn’t have to not be Nina, before getting her to a place where she can take up the rest of her life — which, almost as an afterthought, involves Ned.
 

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Both of these books in broad terms fit into Pamela Regis’ eight essential elements in “Natural History of the Romance Novel,” but Johnson’s book is much more insistent about it — the action in the novel all derives from the development of the romance, whereas for Seidel the bulk of the novel’s structure and themes would be little changed if Tess had just recommitted herself to her coffee shop at the end, rather than finding a man immediately. Yet, “Middle Passage” is generally considered a work of literary fiction, while “Please Remember This” was marketed as a romance novel. What’s with that?

Part of the answer is right there in that last bit; Seidel is a romance novelist and marketed as such, so her book is considered a romance. Johnson writes literary fiction, so his book is literary fiction. In genre, form is less important than commercial labels.

There’s some more to it than that, though, I think. Middle Passage presents itself as literary fiction in a number of ways — most insistently in its prose. Seidel’s prose style is accomplished, precise, and frequently delightful; “It was part rock festival, part Star Trek convention, and part plain old down-home country fair without the baby pigs and homemade jam” is an imaginative and funny first line. It’s significantly less performative than Johnson’s opening, though:

Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. In my case, it was a spirited Boston schoolteacher named Isadora Bailey who led me to become a cook aboard the Republic. Both Isadora and my creditors, I should add, who entered into a conspiracy, a trap, a scheme so cunning that my only choices were prison, a brief stay in the stony oubliette of the Spanish Calabozo (or a long one at the bottom of the Mississippi), or marriage, which was, for a man of my temperament, worse than imprisonment — especially if you knew Isadora.

It’s not coincidental here that the virtuosity here, the hyperbolic/mock-hyperbolic irony, is achieved through riffing on misogynist tropes. Isadora becomes a disaster, a conspiracy, a trap, a scheme — she’s a placid nonentity on which to embroider flights of cheerfully rhetorical antipathy. That is more or less the case throughout the novel, in which Isadora serves mostly as a plot device. We don’t see into her head, and while our protagonist/narrator Rutherford says he loves her, we get much less of a sense of his relationship with her than of his attraction/repulsion to the Bly-like Captain Falcon, or the Allmuseri tribe members who have been captured and enslaved on ship. The romance with Isidora is the impetus and the structure of the book, but Isidora herself is mostly a trope — a stand-in for the world of home from which you set sail and then return (Johnson explicitly compares her to Penelope.) Even her body becomes subordinate to the plot and Rutherford’s attitude towards her; she loses 50 pounds while he’s away at sea, physically demonstrating her transition from disaster to desirable in Rutherford’s eyes, though how she feels about the change is never either mentioned or considered. The book’s literariness, it’s (multiple, deliberate) textual links to the Odyssey, Moby Dick, Joseph Conrad, are based on repressing or displacing the romance plot that guides it in general, Isadora’s consciousness in particular.

In this regard, it seems important that Rutherford’s main internal conflict involves his feelings for his brother, and especially for his father, a slave who escaped and left his sons behind him. Rutherford has always bitterly resented being abandoned, but after a traumatic encounter with a kidnapped, delightfully Lovecraftian African God, he understands that his dad never came back to visit because he was killed by patrollers almost as soon as he tried to escape. The recognition that his father didn’t abandon his responsibilities, but was murdered out of them, allows Rutherford to accept responsibility himself (after a good deal more trauma.) Which is nice for him, but leaves another question unanswered, and almost unasked — viz., even if he barely knew his mother (she died when he was 3), why doesn’t he, or the book, seem to care about her at all?

You could ask the inverse question of Please Remember This. Tess is tied in knots about her mother, the brilliant, erratic Nina Lane — where Rutherford can’t settle down (it’s implied) because of his father’s shiftlessness, Tess is too settled as a reaction to her mother’s eccentricity. And where Rutherford doesn’t seem to care about his mother, Tess is similarly disconnected from, and uninterested in, her father. Early on, we learn that the man she thought was her dad, wasn’t; Nina had conceived Tess not with her then-boyfriend, Duke Nelson, but (maybe? possibly?) with some passing-through hipster artist dude, who Tess never even bothers to try to track down. Instead, rather than looking for fathers, Seidel multiplies mothers, focusing on Nina Lane’s relationship with her own mother, Violet, who raised Tess, and with one of Nina’s friends, Sierra, who cared for Tess for the first couple of months of her life,and wanted to keep her.

In Middle Passage, Johnson suggests that the Lovecraftian African God may control multiple worlds and multiple realities, and Rutherford imagines himself as the captain and the captain as him, the hold crammed with “white chattel” — a vision of racial poles reversed, but also of Oedipal substitution, with Falcon serving as a sinister father figure, the twisted European forebearer (Conrad? Lovecraft? Melville?) in whose stunted footsteps Johnson ironically but inevitably treads. In Please Remember This, on the other hand, narratives are composed not of alternate fathers, but of alternate mothers. Tess sees herself, or her possible selves, in the mother/daughter relationship in Nina’s last, unfinished novel; in the actual relationship between Nina and her mother, Violet; in the possible self Tess could have been if Nina’s mother had raised her:

And what would being raised by Sierra have given Tess?

She might not be as independent as she was now. She might not be as observant or as serene. She might not have been allowed to develop her own style and her own voice.

But she might have had the capacity to love Ned Ravenal as he deserved. And that would have been good.

“We might have done all right together,” Tess heard herself say to Sierra. “We might have done all right.”

The phrase, “Tess heard herself say” is a good example of Seidel’s subtlety. Tess is imagining herself as someone else, and then she speaks as someone else, as if the other she might have been is talking through her. It’s a quiet nod, too, to reader, and author, identification — we, after all, are both identified with Tess, and hearing her speak. The novel becomes a way to imagine other mothers, other lives, and to think how we might have been someone else, and done something else, and loved someone else. Though for Tess, in the end, imagining that someone else she could be allows her to love as she thought only that someone else could.

The reason that Seidel’s book is romance, then, is because it cares about dead mothers; Johnson’s is literary fiction because it cares about dead fathers. And that’s also, perhaps, why Johnson’s feels more formulaic — more wedded to both the romance narrative and, contradictorily, to the performance of genius that signals literary fiction. Supplanting the father is an old story, in which the new boss is always already the old boss and vice versa — like Isadora or Penelope, you unwind the thread each night only to rewind it the next morning, waiting for the guy to return. Mothers, though, in Seidel’s vision at least, don’t replace each other, or duplicate each other, but multiply possibilities. Different loves are different, which is how a novel which isn’t a romance can be a romance, too.

Romance as Criticism, Criticism as Romance

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1537545Many romances are meta, but surely few can be as meta on their meta as Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s iteratively titled Again. The novel’s heroine, Jenny Cotton, is the chief writer on a soap opera, My Lady’s Chamber, which is set in the Regency period. The novel, then, is both a historical and a contemporary, with the two constantly commenting on each other, as Jenny distributes the characteristics of her unsatisfying maybe-soon ex Brian and her possibly potential suitor Alec to various period figments of her imagination. Jenny has been with Brian since they both were children, but she only discovers that he’s a selfish git incapable of generosity or caring when Alec, playing the evil duke Lydgate (where’d that name come from?) picks up on one of Brian’s characteristic mannerisms. So Jenny reads Brian by reading Alec, or more accurately, Jenny reads Jenny by reading Alec reading Jenny reading Brian — which is to say, Jenny figures out that she has modeled Lydgate on Brian when Alec playing Lydgate picks up on Brian’s mannerisms to portray the character. Past, present, self and other, and, most emphatically, reader and read are shuffled about as in a shell game; the heart (whose heart? everyone’s heart?) is revealed simultaneously through reading and being read — the protagonist as text, reader, and critic.

Not just any critic, either. Like Jennifer Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation, Seidel seems to deliberately reference and engage with the major early feminist critic of romance, Janice Radway (and probably also with Tania Modleski, whose work drew explicit parallels between romance and soap opera.) Radway argued, following Nancy Chodorow, that the romance genre was a fantasy of reconcilement with the mother. Romances, she said, presented brutal men who were eventually melted by love into unexpectedly maternal softies, providing women with the consolatory dream of a caring patriarchy of love and empowerment, and so enabling them to tolerate their inadequate marriages and lives.

Radway’s thesis is quite unpopular with many current romance readers, if my experience mentioning her name on social media is any guide, and Seidel is undoubtedly being arch when she provides an almost parodically perfect Radway narrative of man-as-mother-substitute. Jenny’s own mother died when she was a year old, and as a result she feels that she never learned how to be a woman, and never had anyone to take care of her. For his part, Alec is an obsessive care-taker; in just about his first meeting with Jenny, he discovers she’s having a miscarriage and bustles her off to the hospital, literally sweeping her off her feet to carry her at one point. She needs a mother; he’s a mother. The Radway formula, illustrated.

reading-the-romanceExcept it doesn’t quite work that way. While Jenny wants a mother, she rather hates being taken care of. For his part, Alec over the course of the novel runs through his emotional reserves; he falls in love with Jenny, but the strain of constantly trying to take care of everyone (as he once took care of his terminally ill sister) eventually renders him inert. The storyline resolves not through Jenny discovering a mother in Alec, but rather through her realization that she, herself is her mother. She always thought that her mother would have been good at the “girly stuff” — dressing up, being frilly and elegant and glamorous. But after breaking up with Brian the jerk, Jenny realizes that her mother (whose chief love was driving around from pool hall to pool hall with Jenny’s pool shark dad) was just as much of a tomboy as her daughter. Jenny doesn’t need a guy to be a mother because she was always already her mother herself. Instead, it’s the mothering guy who needs to be taken care of. Or as Alec puts it (after some coaching from Jenny, feeding him his lines as is her wont) “I need you to explain to me how I need you.”

In Radway’s formulation, romance is a trans-gendered pleasure — a fantasy of women loving the women within men. Seidel’s reworking doesn’t so much put every gender back in its place as it infinitely iterates (“Again”) the cross-gender swapping. Jenny, the tomboy, becomes the caring man as mother; Alec, caring man as mother, becomes the woman swept away and cared for. “Someone else was making everything absolutely perfect,” he thinks at the end. “There was something to be said for a woman with imagination.” The “woman” there is supposed to refer to Jenny — but given the fact that imagination for Radway is figured specifically as the transgendering of the love object, it must also refer to Alec, who, transgendered himself, is the one experiencing the characteristically Radwayian romance of motherly protection from a strong patriarchal figure (she is, after all, his boss.)

This scrambling of gendered positions is in part a critique of Radway’s critique of romance. Romance, Seidel says, is not (or doesn’t have to be) about fooling oneself into thinking that the patriarchy is your mother; it can be about insisting that women can take care of themselves, both personally and professionally. But if that’s critique, it also seems like conversation — and, perhaps, assurance. Psychoanalysis is always, after all (as that prime fetishist Freud demonstrates) self-psychoanalysis, which means that Radway’s supposed excavation of the romance readers psyche might perhaps better be read as a projection of Radway’s own particular neuroses.

And that is in fact how Seidel reads it. In a footnote to her discussion of Radway in the collection Dangerous Men & Adventurous Women, from 1992 (just two years before Again) Seidel says this:

Janice Radway, in her 1987 introduction to the British edition of Reading the Romance…acknowledges the “residual elitism which assumes that feminist intellectuals alone know what is best for all women.” In a graceful, moving statement, she suggests that such scholars should offer romance readers and writers “our support rather than our criticism or direction.” She follows this generous-hearted position with the most discouraging words I encountered in all the reading I did for this essay as she dismisses the possibility: “Our segregation by class, occupation, and race [race?] works against us.” We are still Other to her; she does not believe either party can speak to the other. I find this inexpressibly sad.

Seidel, then, reads in Radway a tragic fissure, a split between women and women — which is precisely the tragic fissure that Radway reads into romance readers and writers like Seidel. It is not romance readers, but Radway, who is bifurcated; it is not romance readers, but Radway who needs to be reconciled with the mother — or, in Seidel’s version, to realize that she is already reconciled with the mother, and that the romance is already hers.

Again, then, can be read, not as (or not just as) a refutation of Radway, but as a love letter to her. And part of what that love letter says is that Radways’ book is itself a love letter — that “Reading the Romance” can itself be read as a romance.

That romance isn’t utterly untroubled. Seidel has a lot of fun in the novel with a rival soap opera, Aspen!! written by the (significantly) male writer Paul Tomlin, a man who “didn’t know anything about soaps”, and who seems to have contempt for the form and for the audience. The satire of those who hope to save romance and romance readers for better, higher things certainly implicate Radway, tweaking her condescension and her separation of herself from her subject — the way she wants to write in romance without actually writing romance.

But the very act of criticizing the critic puts one, inevitably, in the position of critic. The original name of Aspen!! was Aspen Starring Alec Cameron; the Othering Othered is also the loved one — albeit a loved one who needs to be taught to love. And that teaching is criticism, too. “I suppose we’re to conclude from that that my best chance of being an acceptable human being is to be married to you?” Alec says, after Jenny has explained their relationship to him through a critical reading of the ongoing plot of In My Lady’s Chamber. Criticism speaks romance and romance speaks criticism. And when the genres are so nested in each other, how can you tell who is outside or who is inside, or who is saving whom?