The romance author insistence that nobody every thought to make a woman a sympathetic and empowered heroine before [year that they published a book], or that no other genre can be used to show how bourgeois patriarchy hurt women!
Barely related, other than singing in the BDM key, but this project of looking at the 20th century's perception of women in genre fiction and how flatly we talk about them now is leading to one conclusion: I got to read Barbara Pym.
"Hint for my next big project: legal history of pornography and romance novels for romance readers." the way I RAN to the comments to tell you how fucking excited I am for this!!!
We're doing Constitutional Law and Civil Procedure 101 because I can't keep seeing (well-meaning) Canva designed instagram post explaining book banning that get the law wrong! It'll be fun.
Also, thank you for writing about this, generally speaking — I read TFATF a year or two ago and I was really surprised at how much care Woodiwiss took to make it clear that what happened to Heather was rape and that it traumatized her. You'd really never guess it from just reading how people talk about the book (as in the pieces quoted).
I was scared off by bodice rippers when I started reading romance because I couldn't imagine enjoying a book that romanticized assault, but so many of them I think are interested in processing what coming back from that could or can look like. And I don't think having the assailant be the eventual love interest means these books are intending to be models for what should happen in real life after an assault. Assuming that any genre fiction intends to be or must be didactic is really patronizing.
And I think later published historical romances (I'm going to talk about this in the next part) move away from naming violence and power dynamics as reader and publishing taste move away from bodice rippers, but that doesn't mean that the dynamics go away, we just lose the venue for potential processing. Something may be gained in this shift in language and characterization, but something is also lost!
This was so, so good. I remember being convinced by the “good girls couldn’t ‘want’ sex” explanation for bodice rippers when I first heard it, and this series totally flipped my perspective back when it was first published, and even more so now!
Thank you! I totally see the appeal of the conventional wisdom reasoning, intuitively, but I also always want to be skeptical of anything that fits neatly into preconceived notions.
"Even books where a woman is punished for her sexuality, literature is often the venue for condemning a world that rejects these women." YES.
and! I may have screamed at the hint of the new project.
The romance author insistence that nobody every thought to make a woman a sympathetic and empowered heroine before [year that they published a book], or that no other genre can be used to show how bourgeois patriarchy hurt women!
Footnote number two is singing my song!!
Barely related, other than singing in the BDM key, but this project of looking at the 20th century's perception of women in genre fiction and how flatly we talk about them now is leading to one conclusion: I got to read Barbara Pym.
omg yes. You do! Start with Excellent Women.
"Hint for my next big project: legal history of pornography and romance novels for romance readers." the way I RAN to the comments to tell you how fucking excited I am for this!!!
We're doing Constitutional Law and Civil Procedure 101 because I can't keep seeing (well-meaning) Canva designed instagram post explaining book banning that get the law wrong! It'll be fun.
Also, thank you for writing about this, generally speaking — I read TFATF a year or two ago and I was really surprised at how much care Woodiwiss took to make it clear that what happened to Heather was rape and that it traumatized her. You'd really never guess it from just reading how people talk about the book (as in the pieces quoted).
I was scared off by bodice rippers when I started reading romance because I couldn't imagine enjoying a book that romanticized assault, but so many of them I think are interested in processing what coming back from that could or can look like. And I don't think having the assailant be the eventual love interest means these books are intending to be models for what should happen in real life after an assault. Assuming that any genre fiction intends to be or must be didactic is really patronizing.
And I think later published historical romances (I'm going to talk about this in the next part) move away from naming violence and power dynamics as reader and publishing taste move away from bodice rippers, but that doesn't mean that the dynamics go away, we just lose the venue for potential processing. Something may be gained in this shift in language and characterization, but something is also lost!
This was so, so good. I remember being convinced by the “good girls couldn’t ‘want’ sex” explanation for bodice rippers when I first heard it, and this series totally flipped my perspective back when it was first published, and even more so now!
Thank you! I totally see the appeal of the conventional wisdom reasoning, intuitively, but I also always want to be skeptical of anything that fits neatly into preconceived notions.