Readerly Desires and Aspirations
In the responses to my most recent post we've been exploring how different readers relate in different ways to their reading material. GrowlyCub, for example, commented that
I get intensely involved with the story lines and characters. And I've literally thrown books against the wall and been horribly upset, even though I know very well the story and characters are fictional
whereas AgTigress revealed that
I enjoy reading fiction, regarding it as a pleasant leisure activity, but it is clear that I simply do not become emotionally engaged with it to anything like the same degree as other readers. I actually find it quite hard to imagine being caught up in a fictional tale in the same way as the rest of you. I am always removed, standing back, from what I am reading, in the sense that I am an onlooker, never a would-be participant, and therefore never become deeply emotionally involved.
This has brought to mind a discussion Tumperkin and I had not so long ago about heroes, heroines, and how readers relate to them. First of all, Tumperkin pondered
whether [the] heroine represents for the reader what she wants to be while the hero represents what she desires. For both, it's aspirational but a different type of aspiration.
and she later observed that
one of the things that I love about romance [is] that the things readers like are so very often not the thing itself but what it represents
I think her second point may be very important in untangling the ways in which some readers respond to romances. If we accept that some things and people in romance may have meanings on more than one level, we need to provide more layers of explanations. Some readers may find that romances evoke responses on two or more levels simultaneously, while at other times, or for other readers, responses may only be evoked on only one of the possible levels.
Thus, in addition to recognising that some readers have much more profound emotional responses than others, we need to bear in mind different ways of relating to the characters and the situations in which they find themselves. Readers who relate to the characters and their situations in a more literal way, for example, may have very different responses to a scene of forced seduction than will readers who respond to the same scenario as though it was a sexual fantasy.
It may also be that different readers seek out different books, with different types of characters, in order to get the kind of experience they prefer. Tanya Gold suggested that
Mills & Boon heroines are like madams in brothels. They essentially have to facilitate a sexual encounter between two other people – the reader, and the hero. They are the third person in the romance.
Michelle Styles, who had been giving Tanya advice on how to write a Mills & Boon, later said on her blog that
the heroine as a conduit is something I learnt from the editors years ago. With Modern/MH [Harlequin Presents in the US], the heroine is the conduit. With Romance [the M&B and Harlequin Romance line], the reader walks in the heroine's shoes.
On the most obvious level of sexual attraction, a heterosexual female reader might be expected to want to be the heroine i.e. she wants to take the place of the heroine, and experience much of what the heroine experiences, but there's obviously a difference in the level of identification with a "conduit" and with someone in whose shoes one walks. In the guidelines to authors who wish to write for the Romance line, the editors ask
Do you want to walk in your heroine's shoes?
We celebrate women: their lives, triumphs, families, hopes, dreams…and most importantly their journey to falling in love. These are heroines every woman can relate to, root for, a friend you can laugh with and cry with. There should be a sense that the story really could happen to you!
Readers of this line seem to be expected to identify with the heroine. In the guidelines for the Modern line, however, the editors state that
Modern Romance is the last word in sensual and emotional excitement. Readers are whisked away to exclusive jet-set locations to experience smouldering intensity and red-hot desire. [...] A Modern Romance is more than just a book; it's an experience, an everyday luxury. Let the pleasure and passion envelop you as you take a ride in the fast lane of romance!
This is the heroine as conduit, as a "placeholder" who permits the reader herself to be "whisked away" to experience "desire", "pleasure and passion."
Whether the heroine is identified with, or is a purer form of placeholder/conduit, there seems to be some consensus that
the reader [...] does not identify with, admire, or internalize the characteristics of either a stupidly submissive or an irksomely independent heroine. The reader thinks about what she would have done in the heroine's place. The reader measures the heroine by a tough yardstick, asking the character to live up to the reader's standards, not vice versa. (Kinsale 32)
I'm not sure that placeholding and identification can be entirely separated out, because readers perhaps would prefer not to be put in the place of a heroine who acts in ways they dislike.
Lisa Kleypas [...] firmly believes, based on her own experience, that the heroine is indeed a placeholder for the reader:
I believe the heroine is the placeholder [...]. I've gotten so many comments throughout my career from readers who complain about the heroine's actions in terms of "I wouldn't have made the choice she did ... she didn't react like I think she should have ... why didn't she just ..." and all of these comments are evidence to me that the reader generally experiences the story from the heroine's POV even when the hero's POV is strongly represented.
And it's the trickiest part as an author to create a heroine that most readers will like, and it's not always possible. (Wendell and Tan 60-61)
It's tricky in part because some readers want to identify with the heroine, but at the same time the characterisation mustn't be too obtrusive, lest it prevent some readers from slipping easily into her place. These readers want the novel to read as though it were their own story, enabling them to fall in love with the object of the own (as well as the heroine's) desires: the hero. To quote Tanya Gold again,
I can have virtual sex with a non-existent man who is made of paper. So I retreat to my bed with The Venetian's Moonlight Mistress and live in a perfectly etched fantasy world where I get everything I want.
If, however, we look at the hero, not as himself (i.e. as a sexually attractive male) but in terms of what he represents, the relationship between the reader and the characters looks rather different. According to Cohn,
Romance fiction tells the story of the heroine and to that extent romance is about the heroine. But the dominant character in contemporary romance is always the hero. In the character of the hero inhere the excitement, the glamour, and the power of the desired. [...] The contemporary hero is a fantasy construct [...]. For romance readers he represents the satisfaction of all those desires that our culture both fosters and disappoints for women. Our culture values individualism, success, money, power, but has traditionally granted only to men the right to pursue them. (Cohn 41)
Readers, then, might still desire the hero but, as Laura Kinsale has suggested, they may also desire to be him in order to experience the "satisfaction of all those desire" that he, as a romance hero, can experience:
I think that, as she identifies with a hero, a woman can become what she takes joy in, can realize the maleness in herself, can experience the sensation of living inside a body suffused with masculine power and grace [...], can explore anger and ruthlessness and passion and pride and honor and gentleness and vulnerability [...]. In short, she can be a man. (37)
But if the hero represents all the power and emotions denied to women and which women readers desire to incorporate into their own lives, what does that mean for the heroine? What does she represent? Kleypas notes that "a heroine cannot be a bitch and be afforded the same forgiveness [as would be afforded a hero who was "a complete jerk"]. I still haven't decided why - it's possible that most readers like the heroine to be an idealized version of themselves?" (Wendell and Tan 61). Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie have written that
Women in day-to-day life face a lot of pressure to be the "right kind of women" (i.e., the ones men want). For celebrity women, the heat is turned up a lot … because, of course, celebrity women are the yardstick with which people measure the women they know, the yardstick by which the rules of sexiness, attractiveness, and appropriateness are determined.
Perhaps the romance heroine often resembles the "right kind" of celebrity women in that she may not be exactly who we as readers want to be (because at least some readers would like to have more freedom to experience the hero's "masculine" emotions), but she's who we as readers feel culturally pressured to be. She's the ideal to which we can never match up but against which we judge ourselves and other women. Sometimes she's a more accessible, relatable, ideal than others: some heroines are less than perfectly beautiful, for example, and some have minor character flaws (she's adorably clumsy! she's a little bit forgetful!) but taken as a whole, heroines aren't generally permitted to have the kind of serious flaws that heroes have.
So at this level, if the heroes represent what we want to be, and the heroines represent what we (the mostly female readers) feel we ought to be (in order to be "good", socially acceptable women), we're offered freedom during the course of reading the novels to experience "masculine" emotions, but we're also being reminded of those outside pressures to conform to feminine ideals.
I should perhaps conclude by admitting that, when I read, I'm neither the hero nor the heroine. I don't enter into the hero and heroine's sensual experiences, even though I may sympathise with them in their pain, or rejoice with them in their happiness. I'm an emotionally-involved fly on the wall, albeit one who (a) has the power to mind-read and (b) feels she might be more socially acceptable if she looked or behaved more like the heroine (people can have such negative responses to flies!). Looking back at a post I wrote several years ago, about voyeurism as part of romance reading, I wonder if my preference for romances in which the bedroom door is kept shut is due at least in part to being a fly who conforms to certain social norms; I feel as though I ought to give the protagonists some privacy. I was also intrigued by a possible conclusion that could be drawn from Laura Kinsale's statement that "When placeholder and reader identification merge, the experience of the story is utterly absorbing and vital; analytical distance recedes" (35). Could it be that flies find it easier to be literary critics?
Edited to add: Had I not been so busy thinking about the implications of being a fly, I would have asked a few more questions, so here they are:
Do you read in the same way across different genres? Or does placeholding only work for you in romance?
The theories about readers' responses to romances tend to assume that most readers are heterosexual women but of course this excludes other possibilities. How do different variations in reader and protagonist gender and sexual orientation affect the reading experience? Tania Modleski, for example, has written that after an "encounter" (26) with a
woman from my past I found myself as I read the lovemaking scenes identifying with the lover of woman as well as the woman herself and found myself vicariously experiencing the touch, taste, and smell of a woman's body. (26-27)
There are also plenty of female readers and authors of romances about two male protagonists.
If you're male, how does that affect your reading of romances with regard to identification and placeholding? What if there are two male protagonists in a romance? And do you read romances differently from other genres?
Cohn, Jan. Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women. Durham: Duke UP, 1988.
Edison, Laurie Toby and Debbie. "Women Athletes: Choose Between Strong and Sexy." Feministe 23 August 2009.
Gold, Tanya. "Confessions of a secret Mills & Boon junkie." The Guardian 11 Sept. 2009.
Kinsale, Laura. "The Androgynous Reader: Point of View in the Romance." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 31-43.
Modleski, Tania. "My Life as a Romance Reader." Paradoxa 3.1-2 (1997): 15-28.
Wendell, Sarah, and Candy Tan. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels. New York: Fireside, 2009.
The image was created by Egon B and I downloaded it from Wikimedia Commons.
Posted by Laura Vivanco at Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Labels: AgTigress, emotions, GrowlyCub, Harlequin Mills + Boon, heroes, heroines, Jan Cohn, Laura Kinsale, Laura Vivanco, Lisa Kleypas, Michelle Styles, reader preferences, Tanya Gold, Tumperkin
Sandra Schwab 16 September, 2009 17:00
Do you read in the same way across different genres?
Absolutely not. :) Since I started reading (or perhaps even before) I've not only been "re-writing" stories in my head (especially when characters that I like die in the course of the story) but I've also written myself, or rather, a fantasy self, into these stories. With romance this has never worked, and I've never felt the need to mentally revise any romance novel either.
My romance reading experience in many ways resembles yours, I'd guess. For me, the placeholding only happens when I'm actually writing the novel. Then I slip into the role of the heroine.
Kleypas notes that "a heroine cannot be a bitch and be afforded the same forgiveness [as would be afforded a hero who was "a complete jerk"]. I still haven't decided why - it's possible that most readers like the heroine to be an idealized version of themselves?"
Hmmm. One reason might be that romance tends to present the male as the Other. As a (female) reader you're invited to sympathise with the heroine (the Great Female Conspiracy! *g*) - but this doesn't work if she behaves like a bitch or, indeed, a moron. However, if the hero behaves in an irrational manner, this is part of his being different.
(I'm afraid, this is not very elegantly put. Can I still blame it on the horribelz dragonz which ate my brains?)
Laura Vivanco 16 September, 2009 17:32
I can understand why you might want to re-write something you don't like in a story, but why do you feel a need to/feel able to write yourself into stories in other genres, but not into romances?
Could it be that in many romances the focus on the hero and heroine is very tight, so there isn't so much space for you to add in an interesting character who would have something important to do?
"this doesn't work if she behaves like a bitch or, indeed, a moron"
It does seem that she's got to win the Miss Congeniality title by being active enough that some readers won't call her a "moron", but not so assertive that other readers will label her a "bitch."
Why's the range of acceptable behaviour for women so contrained, but apparently women still find the "Other" attractive even if he behaves badly?
Angela 16 September, 2009 18:23
Oddly enough, my great desire at the moment is for a heroine who is a bitch.
I suspect that most readers don't really know what they want. Like Goldilocks, the desire is only manifested by encounters with those things that are not quite right. If a reader says something to the effect of "I don't think that's what she sould have done because I . . ." Is it because she reads for a heroine as a placeholder or is because there is some nebulous missing link in the story, in the relationship between hero and heroine that makes the reading experience fall short in some way? For example, in another genre, say drama, would we characterize the same criticism in those terms? I think, yes. I have heard people say of Hamlet that they just don't like it because Hamlet delays and if it was them and their father, they would have killed the king right away. My point is that often the grafting on or the transference of self onto the characters is the only vocabulary with which reader has to try to identify something (plot, character etc.) that didn't work for them. The question then is: Why didn't it work? Was it because you as the reader failed to identify with the character or was it because there was something else missing from the equation that prevented you, the reader, from going on the journey of the story? Because the opposite also happens, where an author wraps you in the story and the characters' lives despite the fact that you neither identify nor even like any of them? "The Age of Innocence" comes to mind (at least for me). I hate Newland Archer and yet, I am emotionally moved by the story.
This is not merely a problem of romance, although perhaps romance is more subjected to this problem because a person reads romance for pleasure whereas most people do not read Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Wharton for pleasure but for improvement/education. Thus a person is less likely to criticize a canon piece for its lack of fulfillment because they do not expect it to be a fulfilling experience in the first place but an educational one.
Perhaps the problem with heroines is that as long as they are written to be a placeholder or a conduit they will always be harshly criticized for the reason that a supermodel or an icon is criticized; that their purpose and role is to be "perfect", a mere mirror to reader's own self and therefore, when they invariably fail to mirror the reader, the reader cannot help but be harshly critical. The expectation of "perfection" is what kills good characters.
I also think that this is why the criticism that romance is just "porn for women" is always being leveled at the genre, because the heroines are doing for the reader what Ron Jeremy is doing in a skin flick, standing in for the viewer. How can the genre be taken seriously as long as writers write heroines and readers read heroines only as placeholders?
Yes, absolutely. Romance novels are very self-contained stories.
One of the major themes of romance is "The Taming of the Beast" - or, as Gaelen Foley puts it, "[r]omance novels [...] show the woman re-education the man, forgiving him, and starting a new 'world' (frequently symbolized by the birth of [a] baby at the end) founded on harmony and mutual respect" (qtd. in the forthcoming Of Dragons, Knights, and Virgin Maidens by yours truly). So if the underlying narrative pattern of a great number of romances is the story of the Beauty & the Beast, it follows that the hero needs to behave "beastly" in order for the story to work. (Yes, yes, I know, there are also quite a number of stories that do not use this particular narrative pattern and, instead, show man re-educating woman - Julie Cohen's Delicious is a book that comes to mind here.)
I guess I should have been a bit more precise earlier on. For me, at least, the heroine doesn't need to be perfect. She certainly can be bitchy at times (I don't equal being bitchy with being assertive, but with being mean), and she can make a dumb decision or two, too, but on the whole, she has to be somebody I can like and respect. But if she has real mean streak or acts like a featherhead all of the time / in regard to important issues, I won't be able respect her aka I won't finish the book. By the same token, I won't finish a fantasy novel / mystery novel if I don't like the protagonist.
This is not merely a problem of romance, although perhaps romance is more subjected to this problem because a person reads romance for pleasure whereas most people do not read Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Wharton for pleasure but for improvement/education.
I'd replace romance in this sentence with popular fiction. In addition, we shouldn't forget that most of the works we now regard as classic literature were meant to entertain their audience. Take Thackeray's The Newcomes - the original "loose, baggy monster": the nineteenth-century audience apparently went utterly nuts over this story and had a strong emotional investment in it (there are numerous reports of readers crying their eyes out over Colonel Newcome's death at the end of the novel). In contrast to Vanity Fair, whose highly satiric style produces a distancing effect, The Newcomes was certainly meant to make the reader sympathise with the characters and relate to their plights.
"often the grafting on or the transference of self onto the characters is the only vocabulary with which reader has to try to identify something (plot, character etc.) that didn't work for them."
Yes, that's a good point.
"How can the genre be taken seriously as long as writers write heroines and readers read heroines only as placeholders?"
I think you're right that anyone approaching the genre who read comments about place-holder heroines might assume that not much effort goes into making them fully individual characters with unique personalities.
"if the underlying narrative pattern of a great number of romances is the story of the Beauty & the Beast, it follows that the hero needs to behave "beastly" in order for the story to work."
I always thought that the Beast was only beastly externally, because although in some versions he'd been turned into a beast because he'd been arrogant or otherwise behaved badly, his years as a beast had made him realise the error of his ways. So the way I read the story, Beauty just had to look deeper than his appearance in order to fall in love with his personality.
That said, there do seem to be a lot of romances which "show the woman re-educating the man, forgiving him, and starting a new 'world'." Why do the gender roles so often end up this way round?
Regarding other genres, I was wondering what other female readers do when they come across this sort of thing:
"Marie Brennan over at SF Novelists looks at epic fantasy and the Bechdel test: "Two hundred pages into the book, and there's been three named female characters. One is evil. The second existed only for a brief scene, for the purpose of highlighting how attractive the third one is." " (The Cultural Gutter)
I suppose there might be a similar situation in novels like the James Bond series where there's one central male protagonist. But perhaps he is/was a place-holder for many male readers?
And would anyone try to insert themselves into characters like Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes? I'm guessing that would be harder, because it would be more difficult to slip inside their minds, whereas if one comes across a central character like Bond who's action-orientated, it's easier to slip inside their fictional body to have adventures.
I'm only a fly, though, so this is pure speculation on my part.
Marianne McA 17 September, 2009 12:32
I'm not sure I do use the heroine as a placeholder, or at least, I'm not sure that I do it any differently that I use Harry as a placeholder in the Harry Potter series.
And I've a feeling Dr Watson is the placeholder in the Sherlock Holmes series -IIRC they're all told from his pov.
So I suppose I'm using 'placeholder' to mean the pair of eyes through which I see the story - and in that sense I agree with Kinsale - when a character becomes so real to me that I'm identifying with him or her as I read, that's when the story is totally absorbing.
The character doesn't even have to be fictional - if you're reading an autobiographical account of someone sailing round-the-world single-handed, you can be completely caught up in their triumphs and disasters.
So that real person would be a placeholder, in that the reader can imagine experiencing these events - but that doesn't show that the reader aspires to be like them, or to actually have that experience.
The reason I need to like the heroine (and hero) is not because I need on some level to become them - but because the pay off in romance is that something happy happens. I have to like the people involved to be happy that they've found each other. Louche wastrel hero falls for bitter nasty heroine - even if they really love each other, I don't care, so I don't get my reward for reading the story.
I have a background in marketing, so my take on aspirational characters is padded by that viewpoint.
Think, for example, or women's clothing catalogs, most notably the large-size catalogs. The models for them are usually size 12, despite the fact that the clothing starts at 14. Marketers claim that if the vendor uses larger women who more accurately represent the market, the customers won't buy. They want clothing that will hang on them like a size 14 does on a size 12 woman. They want to look like what they saw on the slick and glossy catalog page.
In the same way, romantic heroines are probably often what we want ourselves to be--the idealized version of ourselves, perhaps more clever, braver or a touch more bitchy, or maybe a little sweeter. However, I suspect that if they're too far off the mark, we can't relate to them.
As far as genre goes, I suspect that holds true if we're looking at the romantic character. Coming from Speculative Fiction as I do, we have a lot of heroes and heroines who are tortured and bitter, and we don't want to be them. We might want to hang out with them, but we don't want to intimately share their bad experiences. We do, however, still want to be that character (primary or secondary) who falls in love. That bit of romance happens a lot in other genres, but it's simply not the main thrust (no pun intended) of the story.
The example that came to mind, by the way, was Bella Swan in Twilight. Bella didn't have strong characteristics which would get in the way of the reader putting themselves in her shoes. She's a conduit for the average high school girl, who wants to be the object of desire....which may help explain why so many girls fell in love with those books.
Joanna Chambers 17 September, 2009 20:55
Wonderful post. I held off reading it properly until I finished mine.
There is much in here to chew on. I think it's interesting how many commenters are saying they don't specifically see the heroine as a placeholder for themselves. I agree with that. I don't feel - as a reader - that either the hero or heroine straightforwardly IS me or even represents me. But I do think that that might happening in a much more subtle way. The characters are, as Marianne said, the literal eyes through which we see the story unfold. And we get a vicarious experience through them. Could this explain that fairly recent change from almost uniformly heroine-POV romances to the more usual (now) revolving H/H POV?
I LOVE your idea that the reader is experiencing both masculine and feminine desires through both characters and am strongly attracted to that idea.
"I've a feeling Dr Watson is the placeholder in the Sherlock Holmes series -IIRC they're all told from his pov."
Marianne, I hadn't thought of that, but I think you're right that the point of view from which the story's told could make a big difference to this.
"Could this explain that fairly recent change from almost uniformly heroine-POV romances to the more usual (now) revolving H/H POV?"
Sounds plausible to me! Presumably having access to the POV of two characters rather than just one widens the range of emotions which the reader gets to experience.
Some romances I've read include short sections from the POV of the villain. I'm not sure what to make of that, though, in relation to this discussion. I wonder if those serve a different purpose?
"I suppose I'm using 'placeholder' to mean the pair of eyes through which I see the story"
"The characters are, as Marianne said, the literal eyes through which we see the story unfold."
So is it as though you're sitting inside the character's head, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel, and at times you might be caught up by those sights, feelings, etc so that you don't notice yourself? So rather than the heroine being such a blank slate that you literally imagine yourself taking her place, it's more that at times you let yourself become a blank slate filled by her emotions (or the hero's)?
If that's what's going on, then the wording "seeing through her/his eyes" addresses the issue that Angela raised about the use of the term "placeholder" giving the impression that romance authors can't write interesting, individualised characters.
"Coming from Speculative Fiction as I do, we have a lot of heroes and heroines who are tortured and bitter, and we don't want to be them. We might want to hang out with them, but we don't want to intimately share their bad experiences. We do, however, still want to be that character (primary or secondary) who falls in love.
OK, so I'm going to attempt a summary of the conclusions I'm drawing from Marianne's, Kathleen's and Tumperkin's comments
a) readers like sharing good experiences with the characters, but not the bad ones, regardless of the genre. This doesn't mean that readers aren't affected by characters' suffering, but they perhaps let themselves get closer to "living" a character's emotions when those emotions are happy ones.
b) the romance genre gives readers a guarantee that there will be lots of good experiences without the worry that the main characters might die or have bad experiences right at the end of the novel.
c) the shift to include both the hero and the heroine's POVs means that there's potentially double the amount of good experiences for the reader to enjoy (as well as the different genders of the protagonists potentially giving readers access to a wider range of types of good experience).
I am only a fly, not the sort of reader who can see through the characters' eyes, so please correct me if I'm going way off track with my interpretation.
"I held off reading it properly until I finished mine."
Now that I've (temporarily) finished commenting on this one, I'll go off and read your post.
AgTigress 17 September, 2009 22:20
I think I am more baffled than ever!
The only eyes through which I see a story are my own, as they observe the characters interacting. As somebody said (probably Laura) this is an omniscient viewpoint, because one also sees what the characters are thinking and feeling. But there is, for me, absolutely no conflation between me, the reader, and any of the fictional characters.
Definitely a fly on the wall.
as a writer and aspiring author (that is, I haven't sold any fiction yet!) I am horrified by the idea of a heroine who is simply an ersatz version of the reader. Who wants to write characters like that? Who could? I don't believe that any of the writers I know create characters as placeholders. Although I do know writers for whom the hero is the whole point and for whom the heroine is secondary. It is not so for me. For me, a romance (and indeed, all the stories I write) is about the woman or women in it. The hero or heroes are her reward for her growth in the course of the story. That doesn't mean that he gets to be a cardboard cut-out either, but for me, he is the icing on her story-cake. I know (now) that some readers do go for the place-holder stories. I guess I just need to hope that there are enough readers who like 'real'female characters to get me over the publication hurdle!
Gin Fancier: hampered as I am by my difficulty in understanding the whole 'placeholder' concept, I hesitate to say this, but surely its operation does not depend solely on the author? The author/reader communication is two-way. A writer who consciously intends her heroine to be a placeholder for the reader will only achieve that with a reader who goes along with the process. Not with me, for instance. And vice-versa, presumably.
The fact that we all have likes and dislikes in books is based not only on the fact that writers work in different ways but that all of us read in different ways, too.
All writers (non-fiction as well as fiction) are likely to be surprised from time to time by readers' and critics' perceptions of their work, the way in which some readers will miss things that the writer thought blindingly obvious, or read into the text messages that the author never intended. As in any conversation, there can be unwarranted assumptions and misunderstandings between writer and reader.
One that always strikes me concerns the huge popularity these days in fiction of the 'show, don't tell' mantra, often leading to opening pages that plunge the reader into a maelstrom of unexplained activity before she has got to know anyone or anything. Clearly, this must work well with many readers, but it is a major turn-off for some others, who become bored and disengaged almost before they have started the book.
What I am saying is that I think the writer of fiction is always going to write in the way that feels right to her, meaning in the way in which she reads. It follows that some readers will be on the same wavelength, and others won't.
"One that always strikes me concerns the huge popularity these days in fiction of the 'show, don't tell' mantra"
I like the way Austen and Heyer include "telling" as well as "showing." It makes me feel like the author is another, even more knowledgeable fly, sitting on the wall beside me and acting as a tour guide who makes witty comments.
"It makes me feel like the author is another, even more knowledgeable fly, sitting on the wall beside me and acting as a tour guide who makes witty comments".
Exactly! I love the feeling of being there, with the author, watching the play!
Not for me, no. I'm not 'in their head'. It's more like watching a film. It's like you're following the characters around, like an invisible person and getting a bit of their internal narration at the same time. It's really intimate observation but it's not 'me' experiencing their feelings. For example, if a hero is traumatised with longing for the heroine (say) I do not experience his trauma. What I experience is pleasure because I like heroes to feel that way. It's an observer's pleasure, still. But I do think there are other, more subtle layers at work too. Maybe some things that I feel I experience as an observer are more vicarious than that. It's something I need to ponder more.
AgTigress: Reading your response proves your point - or part of it, anyway - that what is written does not always convey what one meant!
I quite agree, what the author intends is far from the be-all and end-all of a written work. Thank goodness! There is an alchemy at work in all art in which what is conveyed is sometimes not at all what the concious mind of the artist intended. And of course, the reader brings all her (or his) own experience and feelings to the work and makes it something else again. I love that, and did not mean to imply that it was not so.
When I said that I don't know any writers who write placeholder characters, I was responding to what Angela said:
"Perhaps the problem with heroines is that as long as they are written to be a placeholder or a conduit they will always be harshly criticized for the reason that a supermodel or an icon is criticized."
I suspect now that she wasn't really talking about writers but the role of the character in the reading experience, but since I am a writer, the sentence leapt out at, and horrified, me.
Even if she was talking about the writer, my reaction is still probably very personal. If there are writers who conciously go with the 'placeholder' model, it doesn't necessarily mean that they write a 'see-through,' cardboard character - that's just what it implied to me, as someone who, like you, AgTigress, doesn't really understand the whole placeholder thing.
You are right, of course. Writers write what works for them, and we have to hope that it works for others. I guess I am just a little disheartened by this 'placeholder' concept. It isn't (I don't think) how I read, so it isn't how I write and so, when I find that it seems to be the required model for many (?) romance readers, it makes me wonder whether I will EVER pull this thing off. But that is just a little writerly paranoia which, especially in this forum, should probably be ignored! ;>
Thanks to all the writers and readers of Teach Me Tonight, who take this genre seriously enough to think it work discussing. It is one of my favourite blogs.
"I guess I am just a little disheartened by this 'placeholder' concept. It isn't (I don't think) how I read, so it isn't how I write and so, when I find that it seems to be the required model for many (?) romance readers, it makes me wonder whether I will EVER pull this thing off. But that is just a little writerly paranoia which, especially in this forum, should probably be ignored! ;>"
The "writerly paranoia" seems quite understandable, given that there seem to be quite a lot of "rules" that people mention with regards to writing romance. Luckily, a lot of other people keep saying that the "rules" are more like guidelines, and they may not be applicable to everyone's way of writing. As far as heroines are concerned, I'm sure you're right that there are some "writers for whom the hero is the whole point" but equally there are some romance authors who seem to be more focused on the heroines. Here's something very heroine-centric which Jennifer Crusie wrote in one of her essays:
"The romance heroine pursues a worthy goal and achieves it on her own while the romance plot runs in tandem with her quest; therefore the romance is something the heroine achieves inadvertently while working to win her external goal. She doesn't have to earn her hero's love; she gets it as a freebie, unconditionally, because she's intrinsically worthy of being loved, and her worth is demonstrated to the reader by the way she conducts her quest."
And thanks for the compliment about Teach Me Tonight! I'm very grateful to TMT's readers too.
ann herendeen 19 September, 2009 22:01
As usual, coming in (too) late on this discussion, but thank you all for helping me understand some of the reactions to my writing, and showing me the larger context in which my own personal decisions as a writer exist.
I wrote my first novel with a heroine who was intended to be an honest version of me, as far as that was possible in a fictional, Regency-era setting. I imagine I broke just about every one of those rules Laura mentions by doing this, but that was the fun of writing the story. I wanted to give my heroine ("me") the reward of the type of hero I desire. So when some readers disliked her for, among other things, acting stupidly, even going so far as to employ what I discovered was such a common term of dismissal for romance heroines ("too stupid to live") that it has its own acronym--TSTL--I was both annoyed and also, on some level, satisfied. Yes, my heroine, Phyllida, is, as she was criticized for being, an intelligent woman--a writer, self-educated--who nevertheless seems to make some very silly or thoughtless choices during the course of the story.
Well, of course she does! Don't we all? Don't most of us who feel like intelligent, educated women feel at a loss sometimes when it comes to matters of love, of sex, of desire--especially if we're inexperienced in these areas? Isn't that one of the pleasures of romance as a genre? That we can allow our female protagonists the "reward" of success in love that may elude us in life? And isn't that perhaps part of the meaning of "Love conquers all": that a true romance, a love between people who are right for each other, will prevail despite the silly choices or stupid behavior of the people involved, before reaching their moment of understanding?
I think the issue of "placeholder" in romance or any other genre is a fascinating one, one I'm not sure I fully understand. I don't really like the heroines who are too sweet and good and "nice." I don't identify with them, and I find their stories boring to read. I wish them well--I just don't feel like spending two- or three-hundred pages of reading time in their "perfect" company.
I may be like Angela, who is looking for a "bitch" of a heroine. I like the Bette Davis types. Maybe not as hard-bitten as the "tortured and bitter" characters that j-cheney speaks of in speculative fiction, but they are more interesting. Why shouldn't people like that be able to find love? Isn't romance the perfect genre for them?
"Phyllida, is, as she was criticized for being, an intelligent woman--a writer, self-educated--who nevertheless seems to make some very silly or thoughtless choices during the course of the story.
Well, of course she does! Don't we all? [...] I don't really like the heroines who are too sweet and good and "nice." I don't identify with them"
Not all readers have the same flaws, though, and we don't all make the same silly and thoughtless choices, so could it be that it's more difficult to write a flawed heroine with whom a lot of readers will identify (because they have the same flaws that she does) than it is to write a "good" heroine whom lots of people aspire to resemble?
Laura Kinsale 21 September, 2009 03:08
Way back when I wrote the essay where I coined the term "placeholder heroine"--I guess I can take credit for it, for better or worse--there was an extremely simplistic view of "reader identification" in the romance genre. The academic analysis, such as it was, started and ended with one assumption. The reader was female, the book was written from the heroine's POV, so the reader "identified" with the heroine, and that was that. The only question was, was it good for her to identify with submissive females who only wanted to fall in love and get married?
My primary purpose in writing, at the time, was to point out that the reading experience is far more subtle and individualized than simply "identifying" with the point-of-view character. The whole concept of reader identification is extremely slipperly (as the comments here suggest). The emotional experience is not only different from reader to reader, but changes from moment to moment for the same reader. The main thing that pleases me about the "placeholder heroine," which is always controversial and gets people upset because 'placeholder' such a loaded word, is that it opened up this whole discussion about identification, fantasy, internalization and point of view and got ppl thinking about it.
I tried to make the point that, far from always 'identifying' with the heroine, that readers sometimes disliked the heroine but kept reading anyway. They didn't always experience the heroine's emotions, they often experienced the hero's emotions, and sometimes they experienced both at the same time.
The main thrust of the essay itself (which is seldom actually read!), is really not about the placeholder heroine, it's about hero identification, because THIS was what I felt the academics of the day were missing--that many times readers might think the heroine was TSTL but the hero was so compelling they loved the book anyway. I tried to explore some ideas of why this might happen, and one of them was the placeholder concept. The other was the idea that the hero represented masculine experience for and within the reader.
The word placeholder itself carries a negative connotation. I used it to try to explain the books where the heroine was disliked but the book was still compelling. I never ever ever said that books SHOULD be written with placeholder heroines! I actually said that the finest romances were the ones in which the reader identifies intensely with both the H/H, and that authors should strive for this.
So rather than the heroine being such a blank slate that you literally imagine yourself taking her place, it's more that at times you let yourself become a blank slate filled by her emotions (or the hero's)?
For what it's worth, when the book is GOOD, when I'm in the flow and the world has vanished and there are only these people living this story, this is a good description of my experience. Well put!
It also feels that way when the writing is going well.
Jill Sorenson 21 September, 2009 14:19
Considering how often I cry when reading romance, I would have to say that I experience a character's emotions and put myself in his or her place. It's fairly easy for me to get completely engaged in a book and lose the sensation of "reading." Rather, I am living the story.
I agree that a seriously flawed heroine can be a turn off, but most of us can't relate to perfection, either. Rich and spoiled heroines are probably my least favorite.
As far as being a placeholder for either character during sex scenes, I would say this is also something I experience, especially when writing. Even with scenes from the male POV, I feel as though I'm making love to the heroine, in a sense, through the hero.
Laura Kinsale said: 'The main thrust of the essay itself (which is seldom actually read!)...'
Although academic study of romance fiction has inevitably moved forward since 1992, when Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women was published, I don't think one should underestimate the influence of the essays in it. It was, and remains, an important book because it brought together the opinions of actual romance authors, rather than academics who, one suspected, read romances only as a grim duty while delicately holding their noses. In any case, beliefs and assumptions can become widespread even (or perhaps especially) in those who have not read the original treatment of the subject.
I didn't really understand what 'placeholder' meant then, and I still don't understand it now. To me, the key factor is the one that has emerged very clearly from this discussion, which is that we all read in different ways, with greatly varying degrees of personal or emotional engagement.
"Way back when I wrote the essay where I coined the term "placeholder heroine"--I guess I can take credit for it, for better or worse--there was an extremely simplistic view of "reader identification" in the romance genre."
Thank you very much for explaining the background to your essay. I think it can be difficult for those of us who've arrived at the genre and/or discussions about it, so much later, to know about, understand, and take into account the context in which some of these older essays were written.
"The whole concept of reader identification is extremely slipperly (as the comments here suggest). The emotional experience is not only different from reader to reader, but changes from moment to moment for the same reader."
Yes, I'm just beginning to realise this! As a result of these discussions I've been learning a lot about the different ways in which different people read, and I've been finding it really interesting.
"Even with scenes from the male POV, I feel as though I'm making love to the heroine, in a sense, through the hero."
Jill, I was wondering if anyone would come along whose way of reading was similar to Tania Modleski's "read[ing] the lovemaking scenes identifying with the lover of woman," so I'm glad you mentioned this.
"It was, and remains, an important book because it brought together the opinions of actual romance authors"
I'd second that, Tigress. It also seems to be more influential than another book of essays written by romance authors,
Mussell, Kay and Johanna Tuñón. North American Romance Writers. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow, 1999.
I wonder if it's partly because it was published several years later, so wasn't as ground-breaking as Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women and partly because it's a much more expensive volume. Or perhaps the topics covered by the authors didn't capture people's interest in quite the same way as the "placeholder" heroine? ;-)
I think that Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women was and is important because it was the first book of its kind; its editor, Jayne Ann Krentz, was already, in the early 1990s, a very successful novelist, and one of the many who have moved, via category romance, into single-book NYT-bestseller status, so her name was familiar; and because it had automatic academic respectability through being published by a leading university press.
It was the first really effective riposte against those who represented popular romance as empty trash aimed at the semi-literate. The mere fact that the authors of the essays all emerged as well-educated and thoughtful women who were not blindly and cynically 'writing to a formula' but seriously trying to express ideals and principles that mattered to them and to their readers undoubtedly came as a surprise to some. It really got the academic debate off the ground: before that, it hadn't been a debate at all. It had merely been authors writing romances, readers reading them for pleasure, and some feminist scholars throwing large rocks at them all from the sidelines.
Incidentally, Jayne says that editing that book was one of the most difficult and frustrating tasks she has ever taken on.
Pam Rosenthal 23 September, 2009 21:41
Fascinating stuff. I read genre fiction in order to imagine myself a heroine and I write it in order to share this pleasure.
When I say a heroine, I mean a central actor in a story (which by definition has a predetermined form, unlike life that's so annoyingly, always already, messily endlessly emergent that it doesn't really admit of central actors).
A heroine, moreover, exists not only in her own consciousness but the delighted perceptions of other fictional actants (primarily a hero, but also a friend or sidekick like Dr. Watson), who may be placeholders for the reader as well as the narrator.
When I teach erotic romance writing I always say there are at least 4 people in that bed, including the reader and the writer, and I like to link this to the development of free-indirect discourse, wherein the narration has the flexibility to go from reporting the character's internal monologue to surrounding it, subsuming it and commenting on it, with whatever complexity the story demands. (And I'm only a little bit tongue-in-cheek when I say that since this fabulous technique of representation was very largely invented by Jane Austen, we ought to claim her as a pioneer in erotic writing).
So even when the characters aren't in bed, there's this complicated mirroring, refraction, and heightening of perception of that beloved subject/object the heroine through the manipulation of pov and story. I find it almost the guiltiest and best of pleasures as a reader -- though perhaps even better when I get to share it as a writer (but then there's all that work of actually writing the thing).
Oh, eek, Pam, I really, really don't want to be IN that bed with the hero and heroine! While I am a voyeur (or maybe a voyeuse), I am definitely not into orgies.
Wasn't it Nora Ephron who called a book Wallflower at the Orgy? Certainly my imagined orgies have room for voyeurs.
And -euses. ;-)
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