Beyond Heaving Bosoms

by Sarah Wendell

  Here’s a shocking revelation: the content of the book is rarely reflected in the cover.

  But what are the romance novels about, then, if not about a man’s tender voyage into the most secret depths of a woman’s bowels to study the proliferation of rectal polyps?

  Don’t get us wrong: some romance novels are full of assholes—but not in quite the way the covers would have us think. The basic formula is deceptively simple:

  Boy meets girl.

  Holy crap, shit happens!

  Eventually, the boy gets the girl back.

  They live Happily Ever After.

  One would almost think that we could tell the story once and be done with it. But we’ve written and read countless thousands of variations of this story, and we show no signs of being sick of it.

  The romance tradition goes all the way back to the oldest myths, and we could wank on and on about medieval courtly love, the rise of the gothic tradition (which marked some of the first popular novels written by and for women), and the influence that people like the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen have had on the various elements of romance, but that could easily take up a book in and of itself. We’re just going to cut right to the chase and talk about the clearest predecessor we can find for the modern romance novel: The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss.

  The Flame and the Flower was first published in 1972, and it’s one of the most famous in the bodice-ripper tradition. These books are typically set in the past, and the hero is a great deal older, more brutal, and more rapetastic than the heroine—but then, despite the way more and more romances push the envelope, we’ve yet to encounter one in which the heroine plunges the depths of the hero’s dark tunnel of muddy love against his will.

  But back to The Flame and the Flower. This novel is, in many ways, the Platonic ideal of the bodice ripper. The heroine’s bodice is, in fact, ripped; the hero is appropriately arrogant and hard-edged before being brought low by the power of love; swashes are buckled; buckles are swashed; villains are suitably hideous; and the adventure runs at quite the fever pitch. No noun or verb is left unmodified, and Woodiwiss works simile and metaphor to limp exhaustion. It was a runaway bestseller and spawned countless books that followed, with various degrees of success, that particular formula, such as Rosemary Rogers’s infamous Sweet Savage Love (which, if nothing else, is probably the most-parodied romance novel title of all time).

  And honestly, “sweet, savage love” serves as a neat encapsulation of the older style of romances. The turmoil and violence, they runneth over in torrents as mighty as the hero’s seed. And speaking of mighty torrents of heroic seed, it was well-nigh de rigueur for the heroine to be raped by the hero in those novels. The rape would be justified in any number of ways within the framework of the story (something we’ll discuss in much more detail later). Sometimes, the heroine was the spoils of war, so clearly, it was acceptable to rape her. Other times, the hero would assume the heroine was sexually experienced, and as we all know, rape counts only if the rapist knows the victim is a virgin. Other times, the allure of the heroine was too much for the hero to take, and his penis took over—and what can a man do, really, once his Privy Counselor demands he invade the heroine’s inner sanctum?

  And oh lawdy, the sexual euphemisms. Romances like Sweet Savage Love and The Flame and the Flower were a great deal more humpy than any of the other mainstream love stories at the time, and there was a veritable arms race to see who could come up with the moistest grottoes and the most potent (and jutting) spears of manhood so they could titillate without being considered obscene.

  They were discreet enough at first. They danced the dance as old as time, culminating in explosions of ecstasy. Then quivering mounds and flowers of femininity—and the feasting on thereof—started making an appearance. Steely shafts with throbbing veins quickly followed suit. Honestly, with all the rearing stallions, jutting man staffs, and tall soldiers everywhere, one would be hard-pressed to decipher how the men hid their tumescent towers.

  By the late 1980s, oral sex scenes were practically a requirement (as was the accompanying fluttering distress and confusion of the heroine the first time her hey-nanner-nanner made the acquaintance of the hero’s mouth), and we had the occasional startling turn of phrase, like the hero who “burst like a ripe melon” within the heroine, as recorded by Rebecca Brandewyne’s deathless prose in Desire in Disguise. Then authors like Susan Johnson and Linda Howard showed us their heroes’ rampant cocks—and we’re not talking about a coat of arms or a rooster, if you know what we mean.*

  The genre, however, has changed a great deal since those Old Skool romances were published. It’s true: the covers haven’t changed that much. There are still allusions to anal probing and buxom men grasping at equally buxom women. But though the covers may be similar, the content is different in some substantial ways.

  In fact, we have a flowchart to help you tell the difference between Old Skool and New Skool romance on chapter 1. The Old Skool, very roughly speaking, ran from the late 1970s through the ’80s, while the New Skool started sometime in the late 1980s and continues to the present, but as with any attempts at categorization, there were some books published in the ’80s that were in the New Skool mode, and Old Skool–style romances are still occasionally published. That’s why the chart will serve as a handy-dandy guide.

  Most Old Skool romances, from historicals to contemporaries to category romances, shared several elements in common, elements that don’t necessarily hold true for the newer types of romances that now dominate the market. Some of them include:

  BRUTAL HEROES

  These heroes aren’t just determined, assertive, and confident—they’re hard, arrogant, and harsh, and the heroine is often afraid of him. He’s a punisher as well as lover and protector, but he hurts her only because he loves her so much. Baby. Punitive kisses were dealt with abandon, and the heroine, after stiffening up and resisting, would eventually soften into his kiss—after all, who wouldn’t love having their lips mashed hard enough to leave bruises? And speaking of bruises: grabbing the heroine by the arms so hard that they leave marks was another earmark of Old Skool heroes.

  RAPE

  As we mentioned above, it was practically de rigueur Back in the Day, and, boy, did the critics have a field day with that particular aspect of romance novels. We won’t go into the whys and where-fores at the moment, but just know that if it was a romance novel published between the 1970s and mid-’80s, and especially if it was a historical romance, you could usually count on some forceful plucking of the heroine’s delicate bud of womanhood.

  But never, ever doubt, dear reader, that they live happily ever after.

  THE HEROINE: COMING-OF-AGE COMES EARLY

  The heroines in Old Skool romances were often much, much younger than the hero. How much younger? Eighteen-year-old heroines were very, very common for a long time; they were often distressingly innocent—if they had been married before, the authors would often go through the most elaborate contortions to preserve her virginity, most of them centering on the erectile deficiencies of the first husband. But the innocence extended beyond the heroine not knowing her hoo hoo from a hole in a ground. One of the defining characteristics of the Old Skool romance is how most of them are coming-of-age stories for the heroines; the heroines are often incredibly sheltered and just starting to come into their own when they’re thrown into a world full of high-finance hostile takeovers or cross-dressing adventure on the high seas.

  THE CONFLICTS

  The Big Secret was a staple of Old Skool romance novels. Ranging from “My brother is a spy for the enemy” to “I’m a maaaan, baby” to “I lied about something very small and extremely pointless at the beginning of the story, and now it’s snowballed out of control because the author needs about twenty thousand more words’ worth of conflict,” Big Secrets littered the landscape of Romancelandia like dollar bills on a strip club stage.

  And then there were the Big Arguments. Relationsh
ips were much more antagonistic in most of the romance novels Back in the Day—they were, in many ways, Fight ’em and Fuck ’em romances. The heroine usually hated the hero on sight, and they’d scrap and make up and scrap and make up again until the difference between fighting and fucking would be blurred into a roiling cloud, not unlike those cartoon clouds that indicated huge brawls, except with more pebbled nipples and turgid staffs.

  And perhaps because knowledge is power, and the power struggle was more overt in the Old Skool, Big Misunderstandings would often be part of the romance landscape, too. The protagonists would have an exasperating knack of overreading or underreading a situation at just the wrong time, but if the two of them were locked in a room for five minutes with truth serum and a big stick for beating heads, all problems would be solved, but not only would that be too convenient, the book would also be over in a mere dozen pages. So, much like a soap opera, in which the happiness of the characters can last only an episode or two before Much Sadness-Soaked Angst and Drama must befall them again, the entirety of a Big Mis storyline was sustained not only by the Big Mis itself, but by the bullheaded idiocy of the protagonists.

  Imagine the Big Mis romance confronting Judge Judy:

  HEROINE: “Your Honor, the defendant’s older brother looks just like him, and because I once took his arm at a masked ball following a musicale in the garden beneath a weeping willow tree, the defendant now thinks I am a cheating harlot. And really, he is an unfeeling callous monster who has a first wife he swears is dead, but is not!”

  HERO: “Your Honor, the plaintiff is a cheating harlot.”

  JUDGE JUDY: “Sir, be quiet. It’s not your turn.”

  HEROINE: “I am not a cheating harlot! And it’s never my turn. You only say I’m a harlot because you saw yourself in the mirror after we…after we…”

  HERO: “After you gave it up like the slut you are, spreading your legs for anyone in the family, since you’re desperate for a title and a fortune, as I heard you whispering to your late father the day before we were wed!”

  HEROINE: “I have a title, numbnuts! I’m a princess, a duchess, and a marchioness through my great aunt’s half sister’s dogwalker’s estate entailed through my mother, and I didn’t tell you because you’re merely an earl and I thought it would hurt your pride!”

  HERO: “You’re a cheating harlot!”

  HEROINE: “I am not! I’ve never had anyone in my tender river but you!”

  HERO: “Prove it!”

  HEROINE: “Your brother has no man root—your father told me! How could I…do that…with a man who has no manhood? And speaking of things you never told me about, what about your first wife? I’ve seen her everywhere! She’s still alive, you bigamist!”

  HERO: “She’s dead!”

  HEROINE: “Oh, my stars, you killed her!”

  HERO: “No, I was having her portrait cleaned and was moving it about the house to make sure the surface was consistently pure so I could—”

  HEROINE: “You’re still in love with her, you callous, heartless man!”

  HERO: “…have it painted over with your image, since I love you so.”

  HEROINE: “…Oh.”

  HERO: “Oh, my darling Epistemologia, I do love you so.”

  HEROINE: “Oh, I love you, too.”

  JUDGE JUDY: *shoots self*

  THE SUDDEN REALIZATION OF LOVE

  Given the antagonistic nature of the lovers, resolving the tension between their evident hatred for each other and their out-of-control lust was quite the trick to pull. Thus was born the Sudden Realization of Love device. At some point, the hero and heroine realize: OH! All that hatred, and the fights, and the fear? All actually manifestations of love. Hey, Ike hit Tina because he loved her, okay? And when the hero hits her, it feels like a kiss, obviously.

  We’d almost always witness this critical epiphany on the part of the heroine, inevitably followed by page upon page of angst about how the hero could not possibly love her back, so she’d act like even more of a spoiled buttnoid because it’s not as if what she did mattered any more, anyway (cue the world’s tiniest violin). And sometimes, we’d witness the hero being coldcocked by the brass-knuckled fist of love as well, but that was a relative rarity. It was much more common in Old Skool romances for heroes to relate to the heroine, in excruciating detail, about the Exact Moment the scales fell off his eyes—usually during the denouement at the end of the book. Why? Because of:

  THE POINT OF VIEW

  Most of these Old Skool romances were written solely or mostly from the heroine’s viewpoint, though a few early authors started including the hero’s point of view, too. This was sometimes a good thing, because it allowed us to experience the process of falling in love from both perspectives (and trust us, sometimes the readers needed all the explanation they could get about why and how the constantly warring factions could find enough time to fall in love). Sometimes, though, it wasn’t so good, when the hero revealed himself to be an unrepentant rapist assclown.

  Scholars have differing views as to why the viewpoints stayed so faithfully with the heroine for so long. Pamela Regis, in A Natural History of the Romance Novel, offers an analysis of how Old Skool romances followed the heroines partially because they had much more development to undergo than the hero, and the heroine’s achievement of autonomy and self-actualization was the point of the narrative. This is borne out by the thirteen-item plot summary for the ideal Old Skool romance formulated by Janice Radway in Reading the Romance, published in 1982:

  1. The heroine’s social identity is destroyed.

  2. The heroine reacts antagonistically to an aristocratic male.

  3. The aristocratic male responds ambiguously to the heroine.

  4. The heroine interprets the hero’s behavior as evidence of a purely sexual interest in her.

  5. The heroine responds to the hero’s behavior with anger or coldness.

  6. The hero retaliates by punishing the heroine.

  7. The heroine and hero are physically and/or emotionally separated.

  8. The hero treats the heroine tenderly.

  9. The heroine responds warmly to the hero’s act of tenderness.

  10. The heroine reinterprets the hero’s ambiguous behavior as the product of previous hurt.

  11. The hero proposes/openly declares his love for/demonstrates his unwavering commitment to the heroine with a supreme act of tenderness.

  12. The heroine responds sexually and emotionally.

  13. The heroine’s identity is restored.

  In other words, the quest of the romance was the fulfillment of the heroine, and the hero was often a tool (in the construction sense, not in the dickhead sense, though often he could be both) in that fulfillment.

  This idea has merit, but the fact that the hero was simultaneously villain and savior, punisher and lover, probably also dictated the choice of point of view. A lot of the central conflict and tension in Old Skool romances depended on the heroine and the reader not really knowing what the hell was going on in the hero’s head—insofar as he showed any capacity for rational thought not dictated by his penis, that is, and given the priapic state of many romance heroes, that capability is somewhat in doubt. At any rate, despite the reassurance of the happy ending, not truly knowing what the hero is thinking or how he’s going to react to situations lends a certain tension that wouldn’t be there if the readers were inside his head.

  But romances, as we’ve mentioned before, have undergone some fairly drastic changes over the past several decades, with trends visibly changing by the late 1980s and early ’90s. In “Trying to Tame the Romance,” an essay in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, massively bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz attempted to pin the blame on a cadre of young editors, fresh out of “East Coast colleges” (one can’t help but read that as some sort of coded term for “over-educated liberal arts major,” but then, haven’t editors been hired largely from that pool since, well, forever?). These college graduates, claimed Krent
z, were trying to make romance more politically correct, and in those efforts systematically sought to destroy some cornerstones of romance, including the brutal heroes, the obsession with virginity, and rape (which she chose to describe as aggressive seduction, and we can buy that, sure—what’s assault and battery if not an aggressive embrace?). She concluded that the changes wouldn’t take, and that the editors had been largely unsuccessful.

  That book was published in 1992. Now, whether or not Krentz was correct about the editors, or whether the market changed drastically when a new generation of readers grew into our own and had enough money to make our preferences known on the market-place—and our Bitch money is on the latter scenario, since personally, we’ve never been very fond of many aspects of Old Skool romances, and neither are most of the people of our generation and younger—the fact remains that she was wrong about her predictions. The heroes softened and became less monolithic in their roles as symbols of love and fear; rape largely disappeared from the genre; and the heroine’s sexual purity, while still an unhealthy indicator of moral integrity in many novels, is no longer clung to as stringently.

  Just as Old Skool romance has several distinct distinguishing characteristics, New Skool romances tend to feature the following:

  GENTLER HEROES

  Romance heroes aren’t wimpy, but there’s a lot more room for the nice boys now—the ones Krentz denigrated as being sensitive and unaggressive (and therefore undesirable, unlike the iconic alpha males she described) in her essay. Vicki Lewis Thompson, for example, has been fairly successful with her series of books featuring nerd heroes.

  Don’t get us wrong; romance novel heroes are still, by and large, a testosterone-laden bunch, with tree-trunk thighs and a near-magical ability to vanquish villains with nothing more than the power of their utterly huge, utterly massive, utterly intimidating…guns, when a veritable army of people have failed. The heroes just aren’t quite as shouty and grabby and punishy as they used to be.