Quick thoughts on romance and class.
And I do did mean quick.
Re-reading Stephanie Laurens' Cynster and Bastion Club books has had me thinking, not always pleasantly. I get that the "-ism" threshold is set pretty low, when it comes to romance; as a genre it is mostly written to one perspective and does not often trouble itself to incorporate other viewpoints. In eight years of reading romance, I have read one romance with a non-white hero. One. Jesus wept.
Some of that has to do with the fact I read historicals, and that the only history that consistently interests the white modern West is it's own. (We call this Canon, and Tradition, and we do it tongue and cheek but I am still a less-than serious student of the English language because I cannot be bothered to read Joyce.)
To start the ball rolling, a quote: "He had sable brown hair, worn slightly longer than was fashionable; his features possessed a distinctly autocratic cast." The Lady Chosen, p. 22.
Not the best example of this, but it'll have to do because I only have one of the books readily to hand. Still: the gentlemen of the Bastion Club are uniformly possessed of guardsmen's builds. They (and their belle dames) are not only rivetingly attractive in one way or another: that attractiveness predicates on their:
1) Norman-French ancestry --aristocracy back to the Bastard, don't you know?
-and-
2) Invariably excellent carriage, speech, address, clothing and mores. (One of these things is not like the others: can you pick it out?)
I wish I could find the author who observed, dryly, that fans often come up and tell her how much they would have loved to live back in the Regency; she reflected that she couldn't agree, and much preferred the era of pain-free dentistry and actually having a say in government. Her wise observation was that these women seem to be imagining themselves the heroines of these novels --one of the lucky 1%, enjoying yards of silk and lace and balls every night.
Maybe it's my study of economics finally impeding on my more innocent past-times, but the point of the lucky 1% is that it's only one percent. There is scarcity inherent in exclusivity: 99% of the world does not get to be that fortunate. And while I understand that the genre exists as an escape, I'm past the point where I can make the math work in my favor.
Or, to put it another way: I know that two hundred years ago, I wouldn't have been in that 1%. Give that, it's a little hard to like heroes and heroines who can only relax in the presence of the very most upper-of-the-crust, who find the grasping and desperate plotting of their social inferiors tiresome, who are all distinguished by a beauty that clearly indicates their character. Back in the Regency weak chins and bad teeth only happen to villains, y'all. Wonder what that says about Prinny --and also how the dentists made their daily bread!
These days I really can't read about lithe-limbed heroines in ballgowns, whirling away their evenings, and not feel as grotesquely out of my element in their head-space as I would feel in their reality. Even in my fantasies, I am not one of these women: I am clumsy and I have bad table manners and no innate graces nor even a particularly clever turn of mind or phrase. By the standards of a romance novel, I am a sidekick, always assuming I'm not outright the villain. And yet, I don't think so little of myself, and I doubt that they thought so little of themselves --all those maids with their petty affairs and the under-footmen and the many other faceless cogs Laurens and others like her so casually dismiss. But for the purposes of a romance they (I) am a character worth following only insofar as I advance the agendas of those under better stars than me.
It's this psychological mismatch that is, I think, killing my enthusiasm for the genre. (To be fair, no one I'm reading is publishing right now, so that's probably a part of it.) And it's not that I can't still enjoy the stories; I very often do. But there's a degree of dramatic irony in every vicarious interaction, because I'm always conscious that the gentleman to whom (for the purposes of the story) I am supposed to be so swooningly attracted is only interested in the skin I'm wearing. [This will someday be *my* version of the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, but let's leave it there for now.] The fact is, if that so-suave gentleman encountered me on the street in an ordinary way, wearing my own limbs and my own face, he would not even see me. And supposing I stepped on his shoe hard enough to get his attention he would likely pinch my ass and offer me five pence for a tumble in the alley. This is not the way to my heart.
I think I sound like I mind this discrepancy between myself and the sort of women who are fit consorts for 'dreamly men' like the fellows at the Bastion Club. I'm fairly sure I did, before I started writing this post. But I think what bothers me now is more that there are so few romances in which I feel at home, where the characters wear faces I might conceivably wake up wearing, in five years or ten. Joanna Bourne and Amanda Quick are fantastic examples of writers who create just such inclusive characters (although, again, not a racially diverse cast, or a sexually diverse cast, or . . . yes.) But I'm more comfortable peering out of Jess's eyes, or Annieke's, than I am Honoria Anstruther-Wetherby's. Neither Jess nor Annieke wear nobility like a coin wears its face; neither's interests or empathic capacity seem limited by to those of her class. (Although it may be that I just don't notice the limitations, because they are engaging-and-not-overly-titled young women who also happen to be white and educated on some level --ie: maybe they're just more my height and shape, more middle-class.)
But the point is that even if they're more "middle-class" and that's really only the ground that's been gained, at least I have an alternative. At least I have authors I can turn to and say: I couldn't find myself in X, but here I have Y and I know I feel more like these girls. I don't know how those of other sexual orientations, of different ethnicities or faiths cope with the absence of matches for them in so many of the genres I read and which have been so formative for me. By going somewhere else, I suppose --but that in itself is a loss. I just don't think I'd appreciated how much a loss, until now.
ETA: Oops, birthday.
Re-reading Stephanie Laurens' Cynster and Bastion Club books has had me thinking, not always pleasantly. I get that the "-ism" threshold is set pretty low, when it comes to romance; as a genre it is mostly written to one perspective and does not often trouble itself to incorporate other viewpoints. In eight years of reading romance, I have read one romance with a non-white hero. One. Jesus wept.
Some of that has to do with the fact I read historicals, and that the only history that consistently interests the white modern West is it's own. (We call this Canon, and Tradition, and we do it tongue and cheek but I am still a less-than serious student of the English language because I cannot be bothered to read Joyce.)
To start the ball rolling, a quote: "He had sable brown hair, worn slightly longer than was fashionable; his features possessed a distinctly autocratic cast." The Lady Chosen, p. 22.
Not the best example of this, but it'll have to do because I only have one of the books readily to hand. Still: the gentlemen of the Bastion Club are uniformly possessed of guardsmen's builds. They (and their belle dames) are not only rivetingly attractive in one way or another: that attractiveness predicates on their:
1) Norman-French ancestry --aristocracy back to the Bastard, don't you know?
-and-
2) Invariably excellent carriage, speech, address, clothing and mores. (One of these things is not like the others: can you pick it out?)
I wish I could find the author who observed, dryly, that fans often come up and tell her how much they would have loved to live back in the Regency; she reflected that she couldn't agree, and much preferred the era of pain-free dentistry and actually having a say in government. Her wise observation was that these women seem to be imagining themselves the heroines of these novels --one of the lucky 1%, enjoying yards of silk and lace and balls every night.
Maybe it's my study of economics finally impeding on my more innocent past-times, but the point of the lucky 1% is that it's only one percent. There is scarcity inherent in exclusivity: 99% of the world does not get to be that fortunate. And while I understand that the genre exists as an escape, I'm past the point where I can make the math work in my favor.
Or, to put it another way: I know that two hundred years ago, I wouldn't have been in that 1%. Give that, it's a little hard to like heroes and heroines who can only relax in the presence of the very most upper-of-the-crust, who find the grasping and desperate plotting of their social inferiors tiresome, who are all distinguished by a beauty that clearly indicates their character. Back in the Regency weak chins and bad teeth only happen to villains, y'all. Wonder what that says about Prinny --and also how the dentists made their daily bread!
These days I really can't read about lithe-limbed heroines in ballgowns, whirling away their evenings, and not feel as grotesquely out of my element in their head-space as I would feel in their reality. Even in my fantasies, I am not one of these women: I am clumsy and I have bad table manners and no innate graces nor even a particularly clever turn of mind or phrase. By the standards of a romance novel, I am a sidekick, always assuming I'm not outright the villain. And yet, I don't think so little of myself, and I doubt that they thought so little of themselves --all those maids with their petty affairs and the under-footmen and the many other faceless cogs Laurens and others like her so casually dismiss. But for the purposes of a romance they (I) am a character worth following only insofar as I advance the agendas of those under better stars than me.
It's this psychological mismatch that is, I think, killing my enthusiasm for the genre. (To be fair, no one I'm reading is publishing right now, so that's probably a part of it.) And it's not that I can't still enjoy the stories; I very often do. But there's a degree of dramatic irony in every vicarious interaction, because I'm always conscious that the gentleman to whom (for the purposes of the story) I am supposed to be so swooningly attracted is only interested in the skin I'm wearing. [This will someday be *my* version of the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, but let's leave it there for now.] The fact is, if that so-suave gentleman encountered me on the street in an ordinary way, wearing my own limbs and my own face, he would not even see me. And supposing I stepped on his shoe hard enough to get his attention he would likely pinch my ass and offer me five pence for a tumble in the alley. This is not the way to my heart.
I think I sound like I mind this discrepancy between myself and the sort of women who are fit consorts for 'dreamly men' like the fellows at the Bastion Club. I'm fairly sure I did, before I started writing this post. But I think what bothers me now is more that there are so few romances in which I feel at home, where the characters wear faces I might conceivably wake up wearing, in five years or ten. Joanna Bourne and Amanda Quick are fantastic examples of writers who create just such inclusive characters (although, again, not a racially diverse cast, or a sexually diverse cast, or . . . yes.) But I'm more comfortable peering out of Jess's eyes, or Annieke's, than I am Honoria Anstruther-Wetherby's. Neither Jess nor Annieke wear nobility like a coin wears its face; neither's interests or empathic capacity seem limited by to those of her class. (Although it may be that I just don't notice the limitations, because they are engaging-and-not-overly-titled young women who also happen to be white and educated on some level --ie: maybe they're just more my height and shape, more middle-class.)
But the point is that even if they're more "middle-class" and that's really only the ground that's been gained, at least I have an alternative. At least I have authors I can turn to and say: I couldn't find myself in X, but here I have Y and I know I feel more like these girls. I don't know how those of other sexual orientations, of different ethnicities or faiths cope with the absence of matches for them in so many of the genres I read and which have been so formative for me. By going somewhere else, I suppose --but that in itself is a loss. I just don't think I'd appreciated how much a loss, until now.
ETA: Oops, birthday.