Tag Archives: romance

How to Cry: On Ice Castles

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Systematic readers of HU will note that Noah has been running periodic weekend surveys in the interest of fostering chatter and garnering recommendations for further reading and viewing. In general, it’s all been a bit highfalutin; almost like an exercise in canon making by the service lift. Noah is basically a serious man despite all avowals to the contrary. Even his community survey on computer games wondered out loud whether they were “art” and misogynistic.

But do you remember when HU promoted low brow endeavors—I suppose superhero comics might be considered in some circles to be the lowest brow of all—and denigrated the canon? If HU really is a smarmy pit of frivolous bad taste, why hasn’t it asked the really tough questions—like which movie endings always make you cry?

For isn’t crying in a darkened room a thoroughly worthwhile experience—a cathartic event on the level of watching an injured bull struck down in the ruedo. Of course, this presumes that the entire experience doesn’t disrupt your manhood or defile your intellect. [I should add here that no comic book has ever made me cry—the form seems to score very low in its ability to manipulate its audience.]

Now I think Noah has admitted to crying together with some art objects like Laura Kinsale’s latest novel and Ian McEwan’s Atonement but the former is like saying you cried at the end of Cinema Paradiso and the latter like admitting you wept at the end of City Lights or Nights of Cabiria. All these examples seem far too beholden to conventional good taste.

But what about crying at the end of Ice Castles?

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The last time I watched Ice Castles was in August 2014, which is about 35 years since I first saw it in the late 70s when it was first released. This was also around the time my mother brought me to watch Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, an experience which has more or less scarred me for life (I was about 5 or 6 at the time; now released on Blu Ray for those so inclined).

Not having seen what might justifiably be called one of the most beloved movies about figure skating for over a quarter of century meant that I could recollect the one line plot summary but not the particulars. Still, I told my wife that Ice Castles was a Korean-drama made two decades before they made K-dramas. And after watching the thing, she concurred. Dying, suffering, and love suffused heroines are fixtures of Korean and Asian primetime television where the US can only boast of the likes of Outlander (which hasn’t been terribly romantic as far as I can tell). Love and sex are in abundance on American primetime TV but not so much romance; perhaps an accurate reflection of a society now grown cynical of fidelity and affairs of the heart.

Donald Wrye directed the 1978 version of Ice Castles and he is a middling director by reputation. It doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference since Ice Castles is the Casablanca of low brow weepies—a confluence of factors have colluded to make the slightest of material work to the greatest benefit. It is in many ways the perfect “onion.”

The plot is well summarized at its Wikipedia page. In essence, Lexie (played by a young Lynn-Holly Johnson) is a skating prodigy who suffers a tragic accident just as she is about to make it big in the world of skating—she falls and becomes blind due to a brain haemorrhage.

It is only in retrospect that I realized that Wrye had filled the first five minutes of the movie with thinly veiled symbolism. This seems to have been part of the 70s zeitgeist and infected not only De Palma’s reworking of The Phantom of the Opera but also the films of Dario Argento. Yet it seems strange that it should sink its teeth into an unassuming movie about young love. There are a few bars of ominous music played against a blurry white backdrop—a kind of opening which would not look out of place in an Ingmar Bergman movie. Then there’s a slow off focus pan to a winter landscape and a small frozen over lake where Lexie is seen indistinctly skating in mild snow storm. The lake itself is covered in snow a few inches deep and the skater is seen doing her routine in these mildly treacherous conditions.

Some viewers have complained that it takes almost an hour before the key tragedy occurs but the movie is liberal with its premonitions of blindness. It’s the gaping white blurry monster which opens the movie and it’s seen once again just before Lexi falls on an outdoor rink at a post-competition party where she feels out of place. Near the hour mark, there’s a large ice sculpture which Lexie stares at for what seems like half a minute—an eternity in a genre devoted to cut and dried tropes and techniques. The screenplay as a whole positively shuns exposition and embraces conspicuous periods of silence. The sculpture itself is soon transformed into a large white cataract which fills half the screen due to the low depth of field of the cinematographer’s choice of lens.

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Lexi has just split up with her boyfriend (played by Robbie Benson) and this physical obstruction to her senses and vision seem almost like a metaphorical representation of her spiritual turmoil. She’s even decked up in thick make-up where the rest of the film only shows her with a more natural complexion (hidden message here folks). When Lexie finally falls and loses her vision a mere 5 minutes later, it is no more than a physical manifestation of her soul. In many ways, Wrye seems to have taken the famous theme song from the movie (used in countless weddings in the 70s and 80s no doubt) to heart; that song being “Through the Eyes of Love (written by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager and sung memorably by Melissa Manchester). I would not be surprised to hear that Sager had read the screenplay prior to setting down her lyrics.

That the movie is deeply conservative seems self-evident but this too, apparently, was by chance. The trivia section of IMDb suggests that Lynn-Holly Johnson declined to do a nude scene repeatedly over the course of filming. Nor is Lexie the kind of heroine demanded of the modern day marketplace. The movie is about Lexie’s inner core of strength but she is also soft-spoken, traditionally feminine, and inclined to take advice from her father and boyfriend—she is, in a word, dependent on those around her. Her accomplishments are not solely the product of self-reliance but of love and family. She is, in other words, completely normal. Her final scene together with her family and partner is an encapsulation of these seemingly primitive values.

Roger Ebert once accused the makers of Ice Castles of “emotional bankruptcy,” but its motives are much more fundamental; engaging the irrational, and child-like parts of us. Most viewers of Ice Castles understandably focus on the romantic and inspirational aspects of the film, but Sager seemed to grasp its true intent. Her lyrics to the famous theme song are much more ambiguous about the nature of the love being extolled and do not apply exclusively to the amorous parts of our nature. The most passionate kisses seen in the final segment of the film are those of a father for his daughter. In a world grown fat on narcissism, the idea that our accomplishments would be unthinkable without family and friends seems thoroughly implausible. It is this aspect of Donald Wrye’s confection which thoroughly grates on our sardonic adult selves—this faith in those closest to us seems unworthy and false. If we manage to cry with Ice Castles, it is in part because we’ve remembered a part of ourselves long since forsaken.

The movie ends where its begins—Lexie can skate again and she’s together with her boyfriend.  Except that she’s blind of course. But was she thus aflicted in the first scene as well, the one where she’s skating in a blinding snow storm?

Wrye also directed the 2010 TV remake of Ice Castles but that strange spark and happy confluence of unexpected decisions seem to have deserted him; the kind of decisions born of seemingly unwarranted dedication and (occasionally) insufficient time and money—the hardness and frugality of the locales and sets, the persistent lingering on faces, the tentative steps carefully built into Lexie’s final routine, the unaffected and uncertain acting of the stars both young and old; their commitment to the barest of material and almost palpable happiness at the movie’s close. It is hard to imagine anything more genuine then Robby Benson’s smile at Lexie at the end of the show.

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Gone are the serendipitous (?) snow storms, cheap clothes, cataract inducing ice sculptures, and old fashioned (even for the time) chasteness. The remake is an unneeded gilding of the lily and an object lesson in how even the meanest of entertainments require a certain level of craftsmanship. It’s strange that this pair of undistinguished films should prove so educational in terms of the film editor’s art (the original was edited by Michael Kahn, Melvin Shapiro, and Maury Winetrobe).

Ice Castles isn’t one of the greatest films ever made. It’s not even considered one of the great movie romances by aficionados of the form. I can’t imagine anyone will be watching Lynn-Holly Johnson skate on a frozen pond in 50 year’s time. But Ice Castles did make me cry.

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[All screen captures from M.Lady’s Inspirational Sports Movie List.]

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.

How Do You Say “Love” in Alien, or Vice Versa?

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This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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In her short story “Speech Sounds”, from the Bloodchild collection, Octavia Butler imagines a world in which a mysterious plague has robbed most people of language — both speech and written. The story opens as the protagonist, a former freelance writer who can still speak but not read, sees a dispute on a bus.

People screamed or squawked in fear. Those nearby scrambled to get out of the way. Three more young men roared in excitement and gestured wildly. Then, somehow, a second dispute broke out between two of these three — probably because one inadvertently touched or hit the other.

The first time you read this, it’s not especially clear that the combatants can’t talk to each other; their screams and squawks, gestures and roars, seem figurative — a description of chaos, in which communication becomes irrelevant because of anger and fear and violence. It’s only as you go along that you realize the description is literal; people are really screaming and squawking inarticulately, because no one can speak. A scene that seems familiar is actually strange. The people who we think we recognize as ourselves, under stress, are actually separated from us by an insurmountable barrier; we think we understand them, but we don’t; we think they are speaking to us but they aren’t. Through a trick of language, a realist anecdote becomes science fiction, and the world, and those in it, become more alien than we thought.

In her historical romance, Flowers From the Storm Laura Kinsale’s hero, Christian, the wealthy powerful rakish Duke of Jervaulx, suffers a brain hemorrhage which robs him of the power of speech. He ends up in an insane asylum, where he is cared for by Maddy, a Quaker and coincidentally the daughter of a friend. Jervaulx’s loss of speech seems like it should put him beyond communication, or shut down his ability to communicate with Maddy. But instead, somewhat miraculously, it makes it possible for them to love each other, both because his illness is the cause of bringing them together and by making her understand him better.

She lifted her head. He wasn’t a two-year-old. He had not lost his reason.

He isn’t mad; he is maddened.

The thought came so clearly that she had the sensation someone had spoken it aloud….

Jervaulx had not lost his reason. His words had been taken away. He coulcn’t speak,and he couldn’t understand what was said to him.

Christian’s silence enables Maddy to hear something which Kinsale strongly suggests is the voice of God. And what the voice tells her is that the stranger she thinks she sees is not actually a stranger. Through a trick of language, the other, beyond reach, becomes an intimate, and tragedy moves towards romance.

For both Butler and Kinsale, then, genre is built around language and the loss of language. And if both depend for genre on who understands what, it seems like you could understand them both as part of the same genre, depending on how you listen to them.

It’s not too difficult to see “Speech Sounds” as a thwarted romance; the main plot of the story involves the protagonist, Rye, tentatively falling in love with a man she calls Obsidian; they have sex, decide to stay together, and he is then suddenly killed. If the story starts by making you perceive the everday as alien sci-fi, it moves on to contact between stranger’s, a quick flowering of love from the storm.

By the same token, Flowers From the Storm can be read as science-fiction. It’s set in the Regency period, with rules and customs which are certainly as alien to the contemporary reader as Butler’s familiar post-apocalypse. A good bit of the story is told from Christian’s perspective, and so you see the alien world speak to him in an alien language. “Weebwell,” she whispered. “Vreethin wilvee well.” The Quaker woman, with her rituals and strange taboos (no lying, using “thee” and “thou”) is seen by Christian, too, as other and distant; he becomes the readers’ point of identification, a stranger in a strange land.

Both Butler and Kinsale are writing in a genre of difference — a genre that can broadly encompass both sci-fi and romance. This focus on difference is also, as Lysa Rivera says of Butler’s work, a focus on marginalization. Those who are seen as different are also marginal. When everyone else loses language, Rye, who retains it, becomes a potential target of jealousy and violence. Christian is rich and powerful, but when he loses language he becomes a madman, marginalized and subject to arbitrary imprisonment and punishment.

It’s significant that these differences and marginalizations are, literally and figuratively, a byproduct of language. This is true on multiple levels. Both Rye and Christian are marginal, or marginalized, because of their relationship to speech, or words. But they’re also marginalized because of their positions within an arbitrary fiction. Butler has created a future world, and placed Rye on the margins within it; Kinsale has created a past world and placed Christian on the margins within it. The characters’ struggles with language could be seen then as a kind of awareness of their own status as subjects to, and objects of, language. Their speech is wrong because they’ve been spoken wrong.

If the characters are positioned through language, the same can be said of the authors. As Rivera pointed, out, Butler’s work can be seen as marginal in many ways — it’s by an African-American woman, which is a marginal identity within science-fiction; and it’s science-fiction, which is a marginal genre in terms of literary credibility and academic interest. In comparison to Laura Kinsale, though, Butler is certainly more centrally positioned in numerous ways; sci-fi has more credibility than romance, and Butler is fairly well-established as an object of academic inquiry in a way Kinsale certainly isn’t (there’s a lengthy entry for “Speech Sounds” on Wikipedia; none for “Flowers From the Storm”). Marginalization and difference, for both authors, isn’t an absolute, but a function of their relative position to genre and to speech. Who is different, and from what, depends on what, or how, you’re talking about, or to.

So who is the person talked to? Arguably it’s you, the reader. In both Butler and Kinsale, language positions you as other, trying to understand, and as intimate, comprehending and empathizing. Language alienates and seduces; it conveys the terror of difference and the joy of bridging it — or, alternately, the joy of difference and the terror of bridging it. Language, that intimate betrayer, makes you each book’s monstrous invader, and each book’s lover.

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?

Real Romance

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802147In Laura Kinsale’s medieval romance novel “For My Lady’s Heart,” there’s one scene where the heroic knight Ruck is guiding the noble lady Melanthe through the north of England, an area, he explains, which he has visited before while hunting dragons. Melanthe is doubtful that dragons exist in that part of the world, but Ruck insists he has killed one. Melanthe still demures…perhaps, she suggests, he merely encountered a large basilisk. He assures her that it must have been a dragon,and after a rousing tale of his battle, he offers to show her its bones, which are located in a church close by. And sure enough he does:

She saw it immediately. The skull lay in the shaft of light from the door, enthroned upon a wide bench below the crude altar. It was huge, and nothing like a basilisk’s eagle head. Just as he had said, a long and pointed snout, with great eye and nostril hollows and vicious teeth like no living creature she had ever seen. Remains of its spine lay scattered in a rough line down the bench. A fan of thinner bones, like an enormous hand or a wing, was assembled carefully on a nearby talble.

“It is a dragon.” Melanthe strode into the church, stripping off her gloves, leaving the knight leaning upon the door to hold it open. She bent over the skull.

And, bending over, she discovers that the skull is not a real skull; it’s made of stone. The dragon isn’t a dragon after all, and Ruck certainly didn’t kill it. He was lying…or, as he says, simply telling “A tale, my lady, that I made for your pleasure.”

The twist here is that the reader doesn’t necessarily know that it’s just a tale any more than Melanthe does. It’s true that up to this point in the novel, there haven’t been any fantasy elements — Kinsale’s medieval milieu includes a lot of talk of witchcraft and enchantment, but (at least until we reach the dragon) it’s all explained naturalistically. But this is a novel, not a history, and Ruck is a very honest, straightforward character — certainly as I read, I felt, with Melanthe, that maybe, possibly, he really had killed a dragon. Maybe there were more things, not necessarily in heaven and earth, but in this book than I’d initially thought. It would be fun to suddenly have a fantasy dragon make a walk-on in the middle of a romance novel. It could happen, couldn’t it?

That tease — the delighted possibility that the fantastic might be real, and the concomitant delight/reversal/disappointment that is isn’t — is a kind of magical, virtuoso acknowledgement, or demonstration, of the links and disjunctions between the genres of fantasy and romance. Romance is often sneered at for its lack of realism; for the way that, when “My lady wished a firedrake,” as Ruck says, a firedrake, and/or a perfectly noble man, is provided. Yet, if romances are about wish fulfillment, historicals like this one are also about period detail — the machinations of the Italian court, the intricacies of Ruck’s armor, even the lapse into a readable but still well-researched form of Middle English. Reality in fiction (and perhaps elsewhere?) is a negotiation; a matter of tropes and trust. Which is why Melanthe is not, in fact, delighted with Ruck’s tale. Instead, she becomes enraged, telling him coldly, “If I find thee in a lie to me again, knight, thou will rue it to thy early death.”

Melanthe’s freak out seems like caprice. But it’s actually part of the romance plot. “There is but one person on the earth that I trust, and that is thee,” she tells Ruck, by way of explaining why his dragon fiction upset her. Melanthie herself, having married into an important Italian house, with all the backstabbing and intrigue that that (stereotypically) implies, has been trained to lie constantly, to stifle all her natural impulses and do the opposite of what she feels. “I have some talents in common with base liars and cowards,” she tells Ruck bitterly.

The lying, at least, is something she has in common with Kinsale, the author of the story, as well. At one point Melanthe tells Ruck that she is always lying, and that’s the truth — everything she says is fiction. For that matter, even Ruck’s honesty is a fiction — except, perhaps, when he makes up that story about the dragon. The fiction really is a fiction; dragons, in the book and outside the book, aren’t real.

Kinsale’s narrative, for the most part, is organized to demonstrate the virtue of Ruck’s straightforward honesty in opposition to the treachery and deceit of the manipulative dusky southerners. But that binary of good-truth/evil-lies has many caveats and winks. Ruck passes Melanthe off as his “wench” at one point in order to protect her from kidnapping — or is it instead, extra-diegetically, so that she can play at being his to do with as he will, just as, through much of the rest of the novel, she is his lady, and he must do her bidding? It’s the pretense of being his lover that precipitates their first actual intercourse, immediately preceded by their private commitment of marriage before God and each other in the darkened bed-chamber. True love comes through a lie…or, if you want to take it back a step, the fiction of true love is delivered through the play-acting characters realizing that the fiction they are acting is the truth.

The declaration and marriage come somewhat early on in the book; there are many contrivances, most of them unlikely, before you get to the also-not-especially-likely happy-ever-after. But to complain about the improbability seems as churlish as Melanthe getting upset that her knight has told her a story. For that matter, even Melanthe has to admit that the Ruck’s fiction “was somewhat agreeable.” What romance writers and romance readers know, perhaps, is that it’s not so much whether the dragon’s tale is true, as whether it is told with love.

How Ariel Became Disney’s Bad Woman: A Look at Disney’s Frozen and The Little Mermaid

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Tongue in cheek, a few of my friends will wonder aloud how I can be so very obsessed with Disney if I’m a feminist. Wink, nudge.

Though these jokes are, well, jokes, they hint at common cultural understandings of Disney’s relationship to women and feminism. Comments that I’ve heard imply that being a feminist can, somehow, be quantitatively determined by one’s hobbies and likes and, once graphed on some X-Y axis or other, that feminism is negatively correlated with an appreciation for Disney movies. Similarly, some Disney princesses are seen as more or less feminist by virtue of their hobbies. Merida from Brave is a feminist because she doesn’t care for marriage and likes archery, but Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, isn’t a feminist icon because, well, she obsesses/lusts/romances over a prince and surrenders her voice in an attempt to win him over. However, this reading of Ariel is too easy, too clear, an analysis that lacks the messiness that comes hand-in-hand with desire and obsession.

Strangely, however, instead of rigorous feminists accusing Disney of this mish-mash of oppression, the protests against Disney show up on my Facebook feed from casual allies, non-feminist men, brogressives, and teenagers engaged in various sub-cultures. Protesting Disney is no longer the foray of feminists who, in any case, have been long-time fans of complicating narratives, a tradition in which I am happily cemented. Just as male comic book nerds protest the antiquated gender roles in Twilight, so too have these groups accused Disney of not following some make-believe feminist handbook. I’m left hearing sarcastic comments or well-meaning comments, both annoying, that caricaturize the meaning of strength and reconstitute feminism as a rigid set of rules instead of an analytical category with emancipatory possibilities. What of Virigina Woolf, who declared that “a feminist is any woman who is honest about her life?”

I’m not interested in rescuing Disney from its errors—of which there are many—but I am interested in complicating dominant narratives surrounding Disney heroines and how our very rejection of romance, a rejection based on a belief that Strong Women just don’t do this and that and they especially don’t obsess over boys, is a form of reifying traditional gender norms. Not only does rejecting infatuation create social problems (goodbye, teenage girls, your problems matter no more), but the existence of uncontroversial female characters who don’t make mistakes, experiment with love, and aren’t obnoxiously demanding risks veering into Mary Sue territory. In Frozen, Disney avoids controversy by constructing a plot where good people react to situations beyond their control. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is an active participant in her own plot; she makes mistakes that she then tries to fix, or makes decisions that the audience finds disagreeable but that she defiantly claims for herself. In fact, Ariel’s entire character is marked by defiance and resistance, making her a more compelling but polarizing character.

I enjoyed Frozen, as I was instructed to enjoy the film—I couldn’t help but feel like the film was green-lit with the approval of a focus group consisting entirely of my clones. But as I watched the film, I shifted uneasily in my seat because, though Disney had created a story focusing on sisterly love instead of the usual male-female romance, the plot was underdeveloped because the main character, Anna, was written as a parent-approved role model. The desire to avoid the criticisms that have usually stalked Disney princesses suffocated Frozen like a pageant parent who scrubs her child clean and only allows her to perform in ways approved by the judge. The result is a delightful movie, a movie that we expect. But is creating a clean-cut and uncontroversial character a sign of progress?

Disney’s Frozen was a film that was self-aware of its legacy, as illustrated by the song “Love is an Open Door,” where Anna falls in love and becomes engaged to Prince Hans in the course of a 3 minute song-montage on the night of her sister’s coronation. Like many contemporary young adult films and books, an inevitable love triangle occurs once Anna leaves the castle in search for her sister and befriends Kristoff. He asks her, in absolute disbelief, how she could become engaged after knowing someone for one day. (And he also insists that all men pick their noses and eat their boogers, a statement which I refuse to empirically verify.) Anna retorts that it’s true love, duh. Disney engages in some fun inter-textual analysis where it pokes at its own films. Historically, their films have featured heroines that have hopscotched into a life of happily-ever-after once the obligatory two-second kiss has been bestowed by a prince whose name the audience doesn’t even know.

Instead of focusing on the love triangle, however, Frozen is a story about sisterly love, though still featuring the theme of sacrifice commonly found within Disney. Its strength lies in its characters grappling with notions of responsibility and learning what love truly means. However, despite its excellent passing of the Bechdel test, Frozen has a number of problems with plot. Here I grated my teeth. Because I was supposed to fall in love with Frozen and I kind of did—finally, a Disney film that could meet my feminist credentials. Except, as a wannabe storyteller, I could see the problems caused by trying to keep Anna controversy-free and within the box of “appropriate role model.”

Frozen’s plot seems to advance through convenience instead of character agency. Ariel must choose between her obsession and her family, a decision which infuriates casual Disney watchers—how could she choose a boy over her family? How could she give up her voice for a man? But Anna isn’t required to make this decision. Instead of Anna rejecting Hans, admitting that she may have made a mistake, Hans is conveniently revealed to be a Bad Guy who used Anna as a way of becoming king. This plot-twist is also familiar, though Disney seems to have gender-bent the trope. Margaret Atwood once remarked that Victorian love-triangles often featured ailing wives dying conveniently so that the path would be made clear for the heroine and the dark, brooding hero to get married without facing the prospect of actually divorcing, a decision which would remove sympathy from the male lead. Anna’s good-heartedness is solidified when she is omitted from having to make this difficult decision; if Hans had been good and she had broken off the engagement then she becomes too complex, too authoritative, too unsympathetic.

In a sense, Frozen features characters that are the victim of circumstance rather than their own choices, a writing mechanism which shields them from the controversies that have plagued other princesses who have made questionable decisions. Anna discovers the true nature of love by saving her sister, a type of selfless love that is above criticism but a role that girls and women have traditionally been expected to fulfill anyway. Anna’s life is never seriously in danger, of course, (and not because Disney is the creator—the studio has made a number of darker films) and so the question of her sacrifice, plot-wise, is compromised. Discovering the meaning of selfless love is an important part of human development, but a theme that would have been sharply criticized had Anna sacrificed herself for Kristoff instead of Elsa—a claim that I cannot prove empirically, but which I feel confident in asserting upon observing how we treat teenage girls trying to understand their sexuality –poorly. Despite Anna being distinctively cute, Frozen is relatively free of sexual desire minus short bursts of puppy love and infatuation with Hans, which are shown to be a Big Mistake when Hans reveals his duplicitous nature. In the end, Anna faces a choice; be rescued by true love’s kiss (from Kristoff) or sacrifice herself to save Elsa. She chooses the latter.

Disney’s The Little Mermaid is an undeniably darker story, though the original story by Hans Christian Anderson is even more bleak. Whereas Anna and Kristoff share a bumbling and endearing kiss at the end of the film, Ariel spends much of The Little Mermaid lusting after Prince Eric’s body. She wants to be human, wants their legs, to know what it feels like to walk. Eric is a prince, but he’s also a body that is imbued with symbolism—he’s not only Eric, but a representation of everything she wants. She gushes over him, and once she saves Eric from the peril of the sea and returns him to land, pauses to admire him, leaving no question that her crush is based on sexual desire. It’s this sexual desire that makes Ariel a controversial character.

Though Ariel is often condemned for leaving her family for “a boy,” she is, to me, a more interesting character because she made a difficult decision with moral consequences that cannot be waved away with a magic wand. It is precisely Ariel’s aggression, stubbornness, and ability to carve out her own plot by making questionable decisions that leaves a lasting impact. The permanence of her decision makes Ariel’s sacrifice more impactful than Anna’s sacrifice, the latter whose decision we know will have no lasting consequence because love will act as a magical healer and “save the day.” Ariel’s decision to marry Eric, however, isn’t heroic—heroism is selfless, and her desire to marry Eric is tainted by the fact that she’s doing something for herself. In the real world, she might be called selfish or a bitch.

She crushes hard on a human prince, has a hoardish obsession with collecting human artifacts, and eventually exchanges her voice for a pair of human legs so she can pursue Prince Eric and, if he falls in love with her in the requisite time period, will remain human forever. These human legs come at the cost of engaging with Urusula the Sea-Witch—but only after her father, King Triton, discovers her cave of human objects and destroys all that she loves, objects which are the source of her knowledge and curiosity. This tough-love disciplinary approach is for her own good—an argument as novel as the Old Testament when Adam and Eve were tossed out of the Garden because Eve just had to taste the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Ariel becomes Eve, obsessing over artifacts that promise to unfold secrets but with the potential to unbridle her sexuality. Eventually, her decision to give up her voice for a pair of legs is shown to be a mistake, because post-1990 Disney films always comes with the “be yourself” moral message. However, the film is perfectly clear that her father was also mistaken to control her. Some audiences remember the former message, but not the latter.

I am still surprised when people condemn Ariel, especially when her father is the one who believes that her desire for human knowledge is a source of harm and whose destruction of her possessions drives her into the arms of Ursula the Sea Witch, a character who functions as some kind of fat woman quasi-capitalist obsessed with creating unfair contracts in hopes of usurping the monarchy and the “rightful” king—she’s worthy of admiration, really. Ariel is the prototypical Bad Woman, removed from the roster of Acceptable Feminist Heroines (by those who parody feminism?) because she has sacrificed her family for self-fulfillment. We’re condemning Ariel for her disobedience.

In the end, her father realizes that it’s unfair to prevent Ariel from being happy and, with his magical trident, grants her legs. The reconciliation between Ariel and her family mirrors the ending of Bend it Like Beckham, but the latter is situated as a British “girl power” movie because the main character wants to play soccer, a goal that is valued more than romance in the hierarchy of fictitious Approved Feminist Activities. (And because the main character of Bend it Like Beckham is brown, and we’re more comfortable seeing brown daughters rebel against their fathers because our own orientalist inclinations lead us to view their family structures as innately oppressive—but girls rebelling against white men? Well, that just won’t do.)

My conclusion is fairly trite and I don’t mind admitting it; imperfect characters make for compelling stories. Restraining ourselves and making characters that shy away from controversy can actually reaffirm the gendered expectations that we’re trying to avoid. Often, what we do not question, such as selfless love for family, is steeped in normativity. Allow teenage girls the agency and the opportunity to make mistakes, to lust. Stories can do many things, and at the very least we should, on occasion, be challenged. Stories also deserve our criticism, of course, but they deserve levelled, thoughtful, and nuanced criticism that does not unintentionally reproduce a hierarchy of values that only congratulates selflessness and condemns self-fulfillment.

Romance and Male Fantasies

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I watched Love Actually recently, and was reminded yet again that in romcoms, and just in Hollywood in general, the women are almost always more attractive than the guys. There are lots of couples floating around the film, and some of them are more or less balanced in age/attractivness…but then there’s homely cute aging Hugh Grant with the blindingly hot Martine McCutcheon (who of course has to endure constant jokes about her weight) and the homely cute aging Alan Rickman at whom the much younger and exponentially hotter Heike Makatsch keeps throwing herself. The Woody Allen dynamic of dweebish guy with sizzling younger woman is a Hollywood staple (and is only made more uncomfortable by the allegations about Allen’s real-life abuse of a 7-year-old.) But the reverse — dweebish woman with sizzling guy — hardly ever happens.

o-FABIO-BIRTHDAY-facebookOr at least, it hardly ever happens on film. I’ve read a bunch of romance novels recently, and there the tropes are pretty consistently reversed. At least in the dozen or so books I’ve read, there is not a single instance of the character actor guy getting the incredible babe in the end. Instead, both men and women tend to be described as ravishingly attractive (and, in the case of men, as having impressive genital equipment. Size, in romance novels at least, does in fact matter.)

Or, if both are not ravishing, then the one who is not is, consistently, the woman. In Jennier Crusie’s “Bet Me”, the Adonis-like Cal passes over the perfect, slim, Cynthie in favor of the decidedly not-thin Min, who is described in her initial appearance as being “dressed like a nun with an MBA.” In Cecelia Grant’s “A Gentleman Undone,” the novel proper begins with the words, “Three of the courtesans were beautiful. His eye lingered, naturally, on the fourth” — that fourth being our heroine. In Judith Ivory’s “Black Silk,” the most notable physical characteristic of the protagonist is her irregular teeth — which the hero finds “Oddly” but “strongly feminine.” Here, as elsewhere, the men see past the women’s imperfections — or, indeed, the men are attracted by the imperfections.

Obviously, this particular narrative difference has to have something to do with differing demographics. Romance novels are aimed overwhelmingly at women, so you get fantasies in which normal, non-Hollywood-hot women date perfect male specimens who can see the beauty not just in their personalities, but in their deviations from tyrannical beauty standards. The only surprise is that Hollywood doesn’t tap into this pretty simple fantasy more often — an indication, perhaps, that having films directed and produced almost entirely by men does in fact have a noticeable effect on the content of even films supposedly targeted at a mixed audience (like “Love Actually”).

So (het) men prefer fantasies in which schlubby men get hot women, and (het) women prefer fantasies in which schlubby women get hot guys. That seems predictable enough. But what’s maybe a little surprising is that, in other respects, the genders’ ideal fantasy is congruent. Or at least, both Hollywood and romance fiction seem to agree that the ideal romantic pairing is one in which the guy is substantially richer and more powerful than the woman.

The magnitude of the difference here can vary a good bit. The reductio ad absurdum is Twilight, with the fabulously wealthy and superpowered vampire sweeping the simple high school student out of the prom and into eternal life. But the meme hold up to one degree or another both in “Love Actually” (where Hugh Grant gets to crush on his secretary, Alan Rickman, as noted above, is flirting with his secretary, and one of the other characters falls in love with his maid) and in the romance novels I’ve looked at. As I mentioned last week, in Jennier Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation, the heroine is a struggling filmmaker while the hero is the town mayor. In Pam Rosenthal’s “Almost a Gentleman” the hero is a cross-dressing man of fashion, but the hero is a powerful, wealthy lord with extensive property. Cecelia Grant’s guy in “A Gentleman Undone” is not rich…but her heroine is a a courtesan whose status is precarious enough that the guy seems relatively well off. Beverly Jenkins’ Indigo goes the full-bore 50 Shades route; the heroine is an ex-slave barely maintaining herself in the middle-class, while the hero, a New Orleans freeman, has apparently limitless wealth and resources.

Again, the fantasy here isn’t hard to parse; if you can marry for true love and fabulous wealth, why settle for just marrying for true love? The guy having wealth and power is also a useful narrative convenience; it’s a lot easier to have a happy ending if someone can wave his checkbook at the finale and make most of the problems disappear. Really, what’s odd is that romantic fantasies for men don’t take this practical approach as well. Why don’t all those guys making Hollywood movies ever have their homely guys fall for some woman who is not only young and beautiful, but incredibly wealthy as well?

But that’s not how it works. In their fantasies, women imagine handsome, powerful men, while, in their fantasies, guys imagine men who are powerful, if not always quite so handsome. Everybody seems to agree, though, that powerful guys are more romantic.

That agreement is an agreement to, or about, patriarchy. Men=power; power=manliness. As I suggested in my piece about Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation last week, a good part of the rush, or allure, of these het romance novels, at least, seems to be not just the love story, but the way the love story turns into a story about women becoming powerful through men; you pick up the phallus to pick up the phallus. That’s a story about women’s empowerment, certainly, but it’s also, or along with that, a story about women endorsing power as defined in pretty straightforward patriarchal ways. Romance is good at giving women what they want. But to the extent that what they want is both men and power, it seems to have trouble in not conflating the two.