Published: Thursday, March 3, 1994
Section: DAILY BREAK – page B1 Source
BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
My JOURNEY into romance novels began with an article in one of my favorite magazines, Whole Earth Review, the San Francisco quarterly that regularly runs against the mainstream current.In that issue, budding romance novel writer Augusta Wynde defended the chunky paperbacks featuring pectorially well-endowed young men like Fabio on their raised inset covers. These books sell in phenomenal numbers, she pointed out, yet are virtually ignored by the mainstream press and literary world, more so than other types of genre fiction such as mysteries, detective or science fiction.
“Reading bad detective novels is considered mildly eccentric; reading romance novels is evidence of irreversible vapidity,” Wynde said. “The New York Times Book Review regularly reviews mysteries, and occasionally reviews science fiction, but never reviews romance; the very idea seems almost embarrassing in its silliness.”
It is sexism, Wynde said, adding that women read romance novels, and the male literary world dismisses the books because of that. Playing around with guns, Wynde said, is more respectable than playing around with good-looking young men who might rip your bodice. Romance novels, Wynde said, get their power by using “heightened emotional intensity, not action.” So putting down romance is putting down emotions.
This seemed like a good argument to me. Maybe the romance novel really was misunderstood. Plus, I’ve always been interested in the contours of the female psyche. So I plucked off the grocery store rack “Sweet Liar” by Jude Deveraux, an author whom Wynde recommended.
“Her characters are entertaining and sympathetic,” Wynde said of Deveraux.. “She has a knack for wonderful fantasies. She’s immensely popular, and she deserves it. Her prose is uncluttered.
The royal-blue cover showed a jeweled broche and said, “The Dazzling New York Times Bestseller.” A note about Deveraux inside the back cover said more than 20 million copies of her books were in print.
The plot was this: A woman in her late 20s, Samantha, reluctantly travels to New York to search for her lost grandmother. In New York, circumstances force her to live in the same townhouse as a friend of her dead father’s, 30-year-old Michael. (In “Sweet Liar,” circumstances always force Samantha to do something.)
Samantha and Michael end up playing detectives and searching for the lost grandmother. The heart of the novel though, was Michael’s tortuously slow conquest of Samantha. For no apparent reason, Samantha was intensely hostile toward Michael, and he had to slowly break down her will, chapter by chapter.
Not a bad plot. But there was a strange hot-house air about the novel, especially in the descriptions of Samantha and Michael. It was as if I’d entered a room I wasn’t meant to be in. It reminded me of something.
Then it came to me. The novel reminded me of reading explicit sexual writing aimed at men, like the Forum section of Penthouse magazine, where readers detailed their supposed sexual exploits.
Romance novels, it hit me, were female pornography. As with male pornography, it was for women a generally private world, where unbelievable things were free to happen purely as a backdrop for something else. In Sweet Liar, Michael kissed Samantha in the street before they were introduced to each other. It was like in Penthouse when the airline stewardess offers herself to a passenger after a minute’s conversation. They also both objectified the opposite sex to an extreme.
Wynde’s thoughts that romance novels were really emotional dramas didn’t hold up to me, at least not with this book. Samantha and Michael seldom developed or interacted on a true emotional level. The romantic interplay was mechan-istic.
The feverish portrayal of courtship also revealed something about women, or at least about some women. In Sweet Liar, Samantha was a spoiled, brattish child. She treated Michael atrociously, often kicking, slapping and elbowing him. Michael not only put up with her, he showered her with gifts like designer clothes. (Samantha, though, didn’t figure out that Michael was spending thousands of dollars on her. She lived in this protective fog of ignorance, although she wasn’t meant to be a stupid woman.) Michael had his own faults. He would often manhandle her, preventing her from leaving rooms or shoving her along.
Lovers of romance novels, it seems, have, in their fantasies, a taste for passivity and a hint of violence.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with reading romance novels. A fantasy is a fantasy. But it’s interesting that descriptions of courtship may occupy the same place in the female psyche as descriptions of love-making do to men.
I don’t know how Sweet Liar turned out. The story pulled me about halfway through but then I stopped. I couldn’t stomach any more.