Scribble Lockdown Reads

The romance genre: Why do we love it so much?

By Imogen Hollis

Read with caution: you may relate!

We are all guilty of going back again and again to a book that comforts us, whatever the genre. Romance is a big business where writers successfully use escapism to entice the reader in. They use powerful descriptions, tension, passion and fantastic protagonists to enhance the narrative. Romance sweeps the reader up into a specific type of emotional roller-coaster of suspense, arousal and romantic desire. The reader falls in love with the narrative and the protagonists as they live vicariously in a ‘fantasy’ life. Successful romance writers are ‘sitting pretty’ as romance is a major industry with annual revenues that reach hundreds of thousands of pounds. So, what is it that compels women to be so susceptible to this particular genre?

The romance genre is typically adored and cherished by women of all ages, whether it be literature or television, we seem to have a natural predisposition to it. Whatever your role model, the ‘bunny boiler’ in Fatal Attraction or the soft and innocent Sandy in Grease, we have a weakness for the tension and the mystery and the proximity of our favourite protagonists.

There has been ‘romance’ for as long as we can remember. Although now disproved, for a long time we were led to believe that in prehistoric days we ladies were hit over the head and taken advantage of in a cave. Since the emergence of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, scientists now believe that once our brains were big enough to produce the right hormones for desire and the much-needed parent-child bonds we still see today, we sought a ‘partner’; A partner that showed the characteristic to survive- strength. This partner needed to make us feel good enough to stay with long enough to start a family. Once the family was established, we were free to move onto another partner and have other children, the honeymoon period was over. Today, this is seen in many relationships once the first flush of desire is gone, we settle for a more comfortable relationship or even, another relationship. The behaviour of our caveman ancestors is still alive in us today but isn’t quite so easily replicated with today’s societal expectations. If we are not inclined to move on, could it be that romance gives us the escapist feelings that we are hard wired to expect. (BBC Earth The sinister reason why people fall in Love 2016).

Although we are led to believe that romance through history has been about simpering heroines being domineered by the ‘hero’, it is not always true. Romantic heroines have often taken center stage and saved themselves and sometimes the hero too. They have been characters who have challenged societal values or changed the genre’s tropes. Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra depicts the Queen of Egypt as someone who had everything but she fell in love with a Roman General. Although it was love at first sight, Shakespeare depicts their relationship as volatile and as is often the case with his plays, their love story ends in tragedy. Readers love Cleopatra despite her faults, as she was witty, smart, independent and deeply charismatic.

In the 1950’s and 60’s, heroines were moving to exotic locations and they had careers outside the home. Although these books had predictable plots and happy endings, as the feminist movement grew, the plots became as important as the romance itself with the heroine taking an active role in the stories.

We generally now don’t seek out the bodice ripping romance of Mills and Boon. We look for books and films which portray women as valiant protagonists struggling against gender and class limitations. Critics of the romance genre, like Germain Greer said readers of romance were “submitting themselves to nothing more than serfdom to their heaving, rippling fictional heroes; alpha males with giant pectorals, important lives, patriarchal views and very little interest in love… until just the right petite, witty heroine comes along”. Today, we can be guilty of belittling the genre, associating it with being an enslaver of women and their rights.

As we enjoy romance so much, heroines can’t surely be that pathetic? According to statistics, 33% of all books sold are romance novels and 84% of the readers are women. Would all those modernday women wouldn’t enjoy reading about a belittled character who has a brief love affair before disappearing into drudgery? We like romance because the heroine is usually likeable, someone we would like to be. We need to identify with her consciously or subconsciously, we need to empathise, to be carried away on her feelings of desire, fear and excitement.

The formulaic romance novel or film is so firmly established in our minds, that we don’t like to see it changed, even in soap operas the usual formula is followed. The target couple meet, they are often ‘cool’ to each other, if not openly antagonistic. Yet one or both parties have a hard time dismissing the other; the attraction is illogical and yet compelling. As they warm to each other, complications arise, they have a shared ‘trial’ to overcome and then they are free to revel in their love and future happiness.

This formula and its escapism through literature has never been more poignant than it is now. With the global pandemic, I for one have been thankful of the sanctuary in which literature provides. The safety that the permanency of a narrative can provide in an impermanent environment, has been ever present throughout the centuries. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Napoleonic wars were commencing. During this period Jane Austen wrote Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. In these works, France was only mentioned around three times, however some characters were given anti-French qualities. Her avoidance of the important events shaping the life around everyone, allowed the readers to find an element of escapism. Winston Churchill commented that in Pride and Prejudice the characters ‘had calm lives… no worries about the French Revolution, or the crushing struggles of the Napoleonic wars.’

We are hard wired to seek our hero and the comforting formula of a romance is as old as ancient fairy tales. Although the form of romance sought is not always concluded with the happy every after, think of Romeo and Juliet; our hero isn’t always as perfect as our beloved Mr Darcy

When we pick up a romance novel, are we exploring a subconscious desire rooted in our DNA from our predecessors or are we escaping into a world where men are portrayed as being just as invested in love and relationships as women are?

“A room of One’s own or her own?”’

Virginia Woolf’s extended essay ‘a room of one’s own’ has been repeatedly reviewed, critiqued and analysed since its publication in 1929. It examines the educational, social and financial factors that have historically limited women’s place in the literary hall of fame and has been called ‘the epitome of firstwave feminism’. Although it contains her famous argument that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction…’, she calls this ‘an opinion upon one minor point’ and the essay explores the ‘unsolved problems’ of women’s role in fiction ‘to show you how (she) arrived at the opinion about the room and the money.’

It follows a character ‘Mary’ who explores the British museum to discover everything that has ever been written about women, and through her Woolf constructs the argument that literature and history is a male-centred construct that has traditionally marginalised women. She refutes the widely held opinion at the time that women were simply less talented as authors and less interesting as subjects, instead highlighting their material and social circumstances as explanations for her gender’s literary silence. She constructs the hypothetical of ‘Judith Shakespeare’, Shakespeare’s equally talented sister who she claims ‘would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.’ She says that it is ‘the masculine issues that prevail… this is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.’

Let us take a step back. If I asked you to name your personal female literary role models, the ones who you consider to have contributed the most to the world of female literature, I highly doubt that yours would differ much from the list Woolf had in 1928 – the Brontë sisters, Shelley, and Jane Austen. Woolf is seen to be incredibly dismissive of their talents, ‘give her another hundred years, I concluded, reading the last chapter – people’s noses and bare shoulders naked against a starry sky, for someone had twitched the curtain in the drawing-room – give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days.’ She appears to not value the power of the feminine literary voice, and seemed to believe that the culture at the time indicated the demise of great literature – ‘nobody, it

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor, 1901. Oil on canvas. Statens Museum for Kunst, courtesy: Scandinavia House

seemed, was reading Antony and Cleopatra. London was wholly indifferent, it appeared, to Shakespeare’s plays. Nobody cared a straw – and I do not blame them – for the future of fiction, the dearth of poetry or the development by the average woman of a prose style completely expressive of her own mind.’ There is a shocking similarity in her critique of the misogynistic treatment she envisions for Judith Shakespeare who ‘would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people…’ and her critique of Brontë that the strength of her emotions in her writing led her to ask ‘how could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?’ (linking to the widely spread rumour that the tragic subjects she spent her time on led Emily Brontë to die of melancholy.) Through her perception of “strong feminine emotions” which led her to the conclusion that female authors ‘will

“A room of One’s own or her own?”’

By Libby Driscoll

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor, 1901. Oil on canvas. Statens Museum for Kunst, courtesy: Scandinavia House

write in rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.’, we can see that she is not totally immune to the sexism of her day.

As well as offering my personal insight into Woolf herself and her work in terms of feminism, I will discuss two alternative interpretations – that of Arnold Bennet, an early twentieth-century novelist who claimed that Woolf’s essay is not feminist and reduces the scope of the essay to simply a set of musings on women in literature, ‘it is a book a little about men and a great deal about women. But it is not “feminist”. It is non-partisan.’ and David Daiches, a literary critic who wrote an analysis entitled ‘Virginia Woolf’, claiming that Woolf’s work is not only feminist in terms of women and their relationship to fiction but of all geniuses who have not had opportunity to explore it due to their lack of privacy and money.

As Professor Wendy Nicholson said in her lecture on this piece, at the period Woolf was writing, feminism, by popular definition, meant wanting suffrage for women. This is clearly not Woolf’s feminist perception; having received the news of her inheritance around the time that women won the vote, Woolf wrote that ‘of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely more important.’ But although such matters were key parts of the early waves of feminism, the movement has evolved to include many other aspects of gender equality. The thesis for Woolf’s essay, that women should be allowed equal opportunities to write fiction, is feminist by the broader definition of the word. In Bennet’s time, however, when the words ‘feminist’ and ‘suffragist’ were synonyms, Woolf’s blatant nonchalance about the franchise movement may have been considered not only non-feminist, but anti-feminist. This makes his interpretation of the work not only understandable, but raises questions as to which box of feminism Woolf’s personal brand fits into; was she simply waves ahead of her time?

Bennett claims that Woolf ‘comes to no satisfactory conclusion about the disparateness between men and women.’ He’s right, she does make no attempt to ignore these differences, yet does not attempt to explain them. She believes that these differences are important to recognise in order to write fiction of integrity, “The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike [woman’s]…for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully”, warning against women trying to write in the style of men. She later queries, ‘ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences (between the sexes) rather than the similarities?’ She is certainly aware of the differences between women and men and advocates that these should be cherished. However, her concern is that women have not been allowed to develop their own literary style throughout history – they have not the time, the money, the privacy or the tradition. Only a few women have been given the chance to shed their impediments that afflict their sex and write ‘as women write not as men write’. Bennet limits her essay by narrowly defining her intention as explaining the differences between the sexes, whereas Woolf’s intent is to

praise the difference between the genders and focused her essay as to why, if there are such big differences between them, women had not been able to develop their own personal style in fiction. To me, this stands out as a point of contradiction. She appears to want to foster a more ‘female’ literary voice, yet, as discussed earlier, puts down the romance of the female author’s works at the time to ‘someone (twitching) the curtain in the drawing room’ and diminishes this more traditionally feminine take on literature as a flaw that reduces its value.

Daiches, in his later criticism, also appears to have misunderstood her intentions. As opposed to Bennet’s interpretation, he labels her feminism as ‘rooted in a larger democratic feeling’ and asserts that Woolf utilises her analysis of women’s role in fiction to make a more universal statement. His take on her larger theme is that ‘all those who have talent should be given the opportunity to develop and use it… (and) should be allowed to have an income and a room of their own.’ Though she often uses generalising statements about the possibility of the working class creating good fiction, she only does this as an argumentative tactic to prove her point about women – not visa versa as he implies. Woolf, in this essay, is only interested in women. She uses many devices to show this, such as the line ‘for genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among uneducated, servile people… it is not born today among the working classes’. This line could lead some to the same conclusion as Daiches, that she is addressing the larger issue of genius and the effect any kind of marginalisation has on its actualisation, if she did not quickly follow it with ‘how then, could it have been born among women…?’. Her focus is women, and upper middle-class women at that. As she explores money as an issue in the creation of art, she purely discusses the gender side of the economics of the time, rather than the class side. Women at the time, even aristocratic women, were inherently poor. Their husband owned the property and the money, and with that, the chance of writing fiction.

Through his attempted expansion of her point to be broader than it is, he ends up disappointed with her result. He describes her work as ‘largely concerned with ends and tends to ignore the discussion of means.’ He has universalised her view and placed it under perimeters it is unable to fill, and indeed was never supposed to fill. He seems to expect that Woolf’s sweeping statement about the nurturing of genius – with money and a private room in which to write – that she should make suggestions as to how to do this practically. Through his eyes, her essay seems naïve, idealistic and silly, with no suggestions as to how those with potential for genius shall magically become well-endorsed. Woolf, however, is an intellectual not a politician, and does not concern herself with practicality. ‘A room of ones own’ is supposed to be a socially prescriptive work to better society; it is far more limited in application than he believes. Woolf is focused on the issue of the unestablished role of female authors in the world of great literature, not the universal problem of unrealised potential across society.

Woolf begins her essay, ‘but you may say, we asked you to speak about women in fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?’ Hence the thesis emerges, in order for women to write fiction, they must have 500 pounds a year and a room of their own. Though both critics were incorrect, they did both point out important limits on her feminism. As Bennett highlights, her lack of political interest does limit this, and as Daiches points out, it does not point to a ‘larger democratic’ feeling and only applies to British, upper middle-class female writers. Although she can be considered a feminist by modern definitions, and this essay was certainly ahead of its time in ideals, the borders of class, culture and profession that composed her views certainly limit the scope of her feminism. Personally, I think that her take on the role of females in literature is ignorant. As I pointed out before, she is attempting to establish that women have not had a place to shine in literature, which although that may be true, she is ignoring the extraordinary achievements of the writers discussed earlier which are at the centre of the literary canon. To me, it is like trying to pave the way for female pilots and saying that they only need more practice and money than men in order to get to the same standard, while completely ignoring the ground-breaking work of people such as Amelia Earhart and Harriet Quimby who revolutionised the role of women in the industry only 100 years prior to the statement as Woolf did to Austen, Brontë and Shelley. Although she seems to dislike ‘the critic’ and their view that literature is good because it appeals to masculinity, she only reinforces that by claiming that the works of the great women that preceded her were subpar and they needed special treatment in the hope that they would write ‘a better book one of these days’. It is possible that she is viewing the authors of the past through rose-coloured glasses, as I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of – leading her to romanticise Shakespeare, who was considered brash at the time for his dirty, innuendo laden work, and diminish her contemporaries’ talents.

Although I clearly disagree with her stance on feminism, I recognise that it is widely up to interpretation. It is up to you to decide where you stand on this controversial work, which I highly recommend reading. I leave you with the more pleasant note with which she ends her essay, Judith Shakespeare ‘would come again if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile… so long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say… it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people… therefore I ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast.’

Scribble Lockdown Reads

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Holly Lovett

 1/5

When I began Moby Dick, I had little knowledge of what the novel entailed, aside from a big white sperm whale. In the beginning I was pleasantly greeted by a blossoming relationship developing between Ishmael and Queequeg. However, as I moved on with the narrative the contents of the storyline became blurred behind intense explanations of whale characteristics and anatomy. The dense descriptions surrounding this animal frequently links Moby Dick to being ‘god-like’ but the different ideas that Melville attempts to discuss, such as this, become swallowed up in the colossal information being provided on this mammal for the readers. Although I enjoyed the sections of the novel involving the crew and the infamous chase, due to the relentless accounts of whale appearance and activity I decided that this novel is not one that I would be keen to revisit. It is not a novel that I would personally recommend in high regard.

Wuthering Heights by Emilie Brontë

Lily Harding

    4/5

A gothic romance classic, I went in braced for cliché and was treated to one of the most revelatory reading experiences in recent memory. The short version? Never underestimate a Brontë. The relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff, often reduced to its base components by pop culture, shines in all its original nuance and ugly complexity; they are both utterly insufferable and all the better for it. Highly recommended, especially for young readers who might cast it off with the belief that they won’t get anything out of it- trust me, you will.

The Picture of Dorian Grey (Unabridged) by Oscar Wilde

Lily Harding

    4/5

Though perhaps more of an acquired taste, Wilde’s luxuriating prose and persistent self-awareness proved a fascinating read. For all Wilde’s infamous flair and emphasis on beauty, the novel is surprisingly psychological particularly if you have any foreknowledge of Wilde’s personal life, but even without that it’s hard not to be taken in by the twists, turns and prescient social commentary of this gothic story. Recommended for those of you looking to challenge yourself and dive into some dense Victorian drama.

Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Aaina Jassel

     5/5

I read this novel over the lockdown after Christmas, and I have never felt more destroyed after a book. This novel single-handedly destroyed my soul. Everyone is aware of the story of Achilles, but Madeline Miller has taken fresh eyes to this story and conveys it in such an inspiring way. Whilst reading this I was taken back too 8th Century BC, back to the way of the ancient Greeks and I loved every moment of it. It is written from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles’ friend, and lover. This means we see the great Achilles from the perspective of someone close to him; we see how he acts publicly and privately and most importantly we feel connected to him. Without giving anything away (because you all should go and read this!) the story of Achilles is famous, Patroclus and other characters from the Iliad such as Briseis are not given so much time. Miller’s novel has given these characters time, a story worth telling and most importantly given them their voice. We see the change in the characters, we see how the Greeks camped outside of Troy became a family over their 10 years. We see all of this and at times forget that this is in fact a war. This, I can imagine, is precisely how Achilles, Patroclus and many others would have felt. The fact we can feel this too is completely down to Madeline Miller and her amazing writing skills. I cannot recommend this enough and I have gotten several of my friends to read this as well. You will not regret it!