he's a rake, she has a HOBBY
Novels and Children by Roland Barthes
To say I have a nostalgia for an author feels a little goofy, but I strongly associate Tessa Dare with my earliest days of reading romance, while I was still in law school, my second year made virtual by COVID isolation. Her books felt incredibly accessible because they follow a steady rhythm of character and conflict. This was at time when I was desperate for anything to keep my attention long enough so that I could finish reading a novel, something I already struggled with in law school before COVID. “Predictable” is not always a foible in genre fiction and I ate up Dare’s rom coms that always managed to make me cry around the 65% mark. The arcs and beats were consistent and reliable.
One of those rhythmic beats is something I have taken to calling the “hot girl hobby.” Dare’s heroines all have some special interest: biological illustrations, watchmaking/astronomy, sewing, brewing beer, linguistics, animal husbandry. They tend to lean scientific, but not exclusively. If you have read enough wallpaper, feminist branded romances, you’ve probably read a book with a HGH. Tessa Dare is not the only author to do this by far. Amanda Quick also uses this model throughout her work and predates Dare. Other authors use HGHs in some books, even if they don’t adopt that characterization arc for every heroine. Some stand out examples of fun ones outside of Dare: gaming the stock market (Scandal by Quick), antiques and antiquities (Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase, Ten Ways to be Adored While Landing a Lord by Sarah MacLean, This Earl is On Fire by Vivienne Lorret), board game design (Devil in Spring by Lisa Kleypas), aviation (Midsummer Moon by Laura Kinsale), ghost hunting (Dangerous by Amanda Quick), paleontology (weirdly, so many books).
A hot girl hobby is how the character spends her time, but it also distinguishes her from those around her. Other characters may view it as a talent or an oddity, though more often the latter. It can be a vehicle, and sometimes a substitute, for characterization. Both structurally in the novel and in the heroine’s life, the interest could be subbed out with any interest fairly easily. The hobby will probably lead to at least two of the following beats of the romance: the meet cute, the internal conflict or the resolution of an outside conflict.
The inclusion of a hot girl hobby repeatedly signals a few things in a historical romance novel. 1. The author of the book gets to flex their historical research of some topic in the period, even in a wallpaper. 2. The hobby gets to be the basis for extended communication between the couple 3. The hobby often explains away some behavior in the heroine that needs to be explained for some token nod to historical “accuracy.” Why does she need to go on a road trip with a man alone? To present at a scientific conference. Why did she break into his house? Her wayward piglets that she raises wandered in on their own! Why were she and the rake alone together in a cave? She’s an amateur paleontologist, duh.
I admit that the phrase “hot girl hobby” sounds a little dismissive and I do say the phrase with equal parts affection and some derision. But the derision is to the surface level engagement of these books with questions about gendered labor and work. Work done by women, we know, is diminished and undervalued, including unpaid domestic tasks. These roles are distinctly not what a HGH is. An important element of the interest is that, even if the woman makes money doing it, it is not her livelihood, at least by the end of the book--the marriage will be blessed with independent wealth.1 No one’s HGH is “domestic service.” A HGH may earn the heroine money, but her life in her happily ever after is not dependent on that income.
I’m attaching all the needed caveats here: I enjoy many of these novels! What I care about is the why and the how of the pervasiveness of this structure, particularly given the genre’s reputation of not depicting working class romances. Often when these stand-ins for work and labor are shown, it remains at the ruling class’s leisure.
novels
To talk about functions and structures, I have to talk about semiotics. Roland Barthes was a semiotician and expanded the sign model from Ferdinand de Saussure to include a third layer of myth. De Saussure created the terms “signifier” and “signified” to describe the phenomenon of a “sign.” to A signifier is the “sound-image” of an idea--the representation, be it with graphemes, phonemes or visual depiction, that we use to communicate the signified, or the idea. Both the signifier and the signified create bounds for each other and if one is lost, the meaning’s edges become feathered and undefined.
For Barthes, when the signifier and the signified collapse together into a sign, that sign becomes the new signifier, with the new signified of cultural connotations. When those collapse once again, they make a new sign, forming the myth triad.
Barthes’ book of essays Mythologies from 1957 is a study of modern “myths,” or stories that we tell about our culture. In one of the essays, “Novels and Children,” Barthes discusses an Elle magazine feature of French female novelists, where next to the women’s names, there was a parenthetical listing the number of children they had and then the number of books they had written. I’ve linked the essay as reproduced in the New York Times in 1972 here, but as the NYT notes: Barthes is being sarcastic throughout. Don’t read his tone straight!
Barthes points out that in this visual fashion spread, men are absent. The women write their novels, the women raise their children. But despite being nowhere in the visuals of the magazine, the male father is everywhere. He becomes the circumference of the scheme that allows the dual role of woman, gazing inward on the “self-sustaining” ecosystem of the woman. The last two lines are a piece of ironic advice: “Write, if you want to, we women shall all be very proud of it; but don’t forget on the other hand to produce children, for that is your destiny. A Jesuitic2 morality: adapt the moral rule of your condition, but never compromise about the dogma on which it rests.”
Though Barthes does not use the American phrase, the Elle magazine article seems to be framing the women as “having it all”--profession, family and satisfaction with both. But Barthes is concerned with that myth, not necessarily as in a lie, but as in a cultural story. And cultural stories are created by the hegemony to maintain that power. Men may be absent from the image of a lady-novelist-mother, but it is because they are on the outside of that limited structure, looking in, creating the circumference of acceptable behavior.
Barthes’ essay confronts the process of creation of both a novel and a person for a woman writer and critiques the Elle magazine framing that might be meant as celebratory and freeing as enforcing a circumference on women’s experiences. Barthes writes in his preface to Mythologies that “the notion of a myth seemed to me to explain these examples of the falsely obvious.” That which seems natural in the bourgeois world is actually built and simultaneously has more than one meaning and only by looking the construction can we understand the dual meanings.
Myth is a value, truth is no guarantee for it; nothing prevents it from being a perpetual alibi: it is enough that its signifier has two sides for it always to have an 'elsewhere' at its disposal. The meaning is always there to present the form; the form is always there to outdistance the meaning. And there never is any contradiction, conflict, or split between the meaning and the form: they are never at the same place. In the same way, if I am in a car and I look at the scenery through the window, I can at will focus on the scenery or on the window-pane. At one moment I grasp the presence of the glass and the distance of the landscape; at another, on the contrary, the transparence of the glass and the depth of the landscape; but the result of this alternation is constant: the glass is at once present and empty to me, and the landscape unreal and full. The same thing occurs in the mythical signifier: its form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full. To wonder at this contradiction I must voluntarily interrupt this turnstile of form and meaning, I must focus on each separately, and apply to myth a static method of deciphering, in short, I must go against its own dynamics: to sum up, I must pass from the state of reader to that of mythologist.
Roland Barthes, from “Myth Today” published in Mythologies
children
Romances books are often accompanied “babylogues,” where in a final, tacked on chapter, readers are assured that the couple has had children or will happily procreate soon. In an anecdotal review of my notes on the 300+ historical romance novels I have read, books that I would say have a hot girl hobby are much more likely to have these assurances included. Of the 12 Tessa Dare books I have read, 11 of the couples have references to pregnancy or children in their epilogues or another book’s epilogue. The Amanda Quick books I have read do not have epilogues, but the last chapter is 80% of them has a reference to pregnancy. Sarah Maclean writes fewer strictly HGHs than Dare or Quick, and writes fewer pregnancy references, but many of what I would consider her HGH books are the ones that end with direct references to pregnancy and children.
I’m not confident in saying that there is cause and effect here—epilogues in general are more likely to happen in new histroms. But I do think these structural trends are at least developing in parallel, especially considering how often the female main characters are shown continuing their hobby-work in these scenes, often in a manner available to them based on the aristocratic wealth of their marriages.
It can be hard to write about this phenomenon without sounding negatively critical. I’m certainly not against the presence of children at the end of a novel or a female main character having a passion to pursue. I enjoy the books that involve a heroine with a hobby, for all the reasons that make up its signified, those references to historical sciences, the clever deployment of the hobby as a metaphor for communication, third-act breakups that are solved by the heroine’s special knowledge. Those make for fun romances!
But the process of naming the signifier and its signified to see the myth as a new sign does not necessarily have the aim to undo, but to view something that has been passing as inherent as actually designed and made. For a Marxist (or at least Marxist adjacent) like Barthes, the myth designers and enforcers are the bourgeoisie, aiming to shore up power. The myth is depoliticized to the advantage of the bourgeoisie when it successfully appears natural, and then can be made political again when called a myth.
The hot girl hobby becomes a myth in a romance novel when it has a cache of symbolism, like those mother-novelists being congratulated for having it all, attached to it that been made to seem like the natural progression of its very inclusion. A culmination perhaps of this arc is the trend of romances with suffragette heroines, where the enfranchisement politics are toothless and antiseptic (and willfully ignore the racism and ableism of the suffragette movement), where even a political endeavor for equal rights functions structurally more like a paleontology hobby. Under Barthes’ myth model, the HGH itself can become political again when we point out that it is not intrinsic to the genre to have heroines who dream of professional passions, but don’t have to worry about their wages.
some recommendations
Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes: My favorite of Barthes that I have ever read. I read Mythologies in a English theory class and Camera Lucida is a History of Photography art history class and I’ve probably thought about one or the other every other day for over a decade. Camera Lucida is about photography, but it is also about the death of Barthes mother and was his last major work before his death.
Forever and Ever by Patricia Gaffney: I can’t imagine a better or more cutting labor focused romance. Sophie Deene is a character plucked from the Regency romance commedia dell’arte canon (benevolent bourgeoisie) and she is paired with late-Victorian radical, Connor Pendarvis, who won’t let her get away with condescending largesse that easy.
The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan: Violet, Countess of Cambury’s interest in plant genetics has the structural tics of many a HGH. But because of her gender, she has to keep her research a secret in order to publish, using her best friend, Sebastian Malheur as her cover. Milan pokes and prods at the structures that keep Violet’s passion a secret hobby instead of a profession, instead of dancing around them. (I think it is notable as well that Forever and Ever and The Countess Conspiracy, which expand and subvert the way a woman’s professional passions can look in a romance from the HGH model also deal with reproductive health much more directly than an offhand reference to pregnancy and future children in a final chapter).
Midsummer Moon by Laura Kinsale: Pure, unadulterated HGH. Kinsale can be silly, which I had forgotten because the book I read immediately before this was Shadowheart. Probably the most absurd hobby in any book I have read, but it is a hoot. Reformed Rakes episode coming soon!
A Bride for a Prizefighter by Alice Coldbreath: Maybe the first romance that I read where both members of the couple were working class (I think Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas technically is? But Derek Craven is not a friend of the worker.) Coldbreath writes partnerships so well, where the couple has to make their way in the world together. I think Chels described it as characters you can imagine meeting in another romance novel at a posting inn, but here, they get their own novel!
Delicious by Sherry Thomas and Forbidden by Beverly Jenkins: Two books that provide an alternative to the economic model of HGH. Both heroines work in domestic service as cooks/chefs and before the unions of the couple, both are working toward some sort of financial independence based on their work.
A New Leaf dir. Elaine May (1974) and The Piano dir. by Jane Campion (1993): Two films there the heroine is closely linked to an hobby, botany and piano, respectively. Both films have a Gothic threat of violence as an undercurrent that I think most histroms miss when depicting women’s leisure/work being circumscribed by a male partner and men at-large, as described in Barthes’ essay. Two of my most romantic movies of all time.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World dir. Peter Weir (2003): Perfect example of a HGH in Maturin’s side project as a naturalist. It even fits structurally because the HGH causes Maturin and Aubrey to have a fight about priorities, but also leads to a grand gesture of reconciliation AND the precipitating event that solves the external conflict. Let your wife look at the beetles and iguanas, Jack!
The Married Women’s Property Act was passed in 1870 that allowed married women to own their own money and property within a marriage. Any “independence” from wealth here most generously ascribed to the married couple as a unit, more specifically to just the husband.
I was raised Presbyterian, so I had to look up what Jesuits had to do with this. Barthes seems to be using the word metaphorically—from the OED “depreciative. Resembling or reminiscent of behaviour or practices stereotypically ascribed to or associated with the Jesuits; behaving in this way or engaging in such practices; esp. dissembling, using hair-splitting and equivocating arguments, casuistical; (sometimes more generally) sly, untrustworthy.”
I was thinking about historical fiction/historical romance and read a bit of Barthes this morning for school so this essay appeared to me at the exact right time
(also I loved this, you are so articulate!)
I can't stop thinking about this essay. Thank you so much for creating this and sharing it