The books effectively recreate the world of high school romance, when every nuance contained volumes. In grade twelve, there were girls who, simply by saying hello, could make me mute with joy, whose touch on my forearm was electric. There were always misunderstandings and misinterpretations and sexual dramas. Even the breakups had terrific appeal, those first forays into angry soliloquy. The chief attraction was its all-consuming aspect, that you felt so vivid and so adult. Meanwhile, the adults were settled in the suburbs, battling mortgages, complacent or murderous in their marriages. And that’s why so many Harlequin books end where they do, at the moment that all the drama and misunderstandings and the guilty/fulfilling sex are over. Because after that moment, you step into Updike territory, the land of ennui and bitter divorce.
In Tycoon’s Valentine Vendetta, there are quite a few moments when you wish you could sit the two ex-lovers down and straighten it all out. And yet if you stick with the book — if you plow past the manufactured crises; accept the implausibilities; overlook the fact that the resolution is clear by page eight; and forgive that there really aren’t any other characters in the entire book, and that these two are one-dimensional and coincidentally almost identical to the hero and heroine in thousands of other Harlequins, you get swept up in the emotional payoff that comes at the end.
Worse, by far, was when I got a bit weepy as Jake united happily with the son-he-didn’t-know-he-had at the end of Surrender to Marriage. Emotion is a poor critic. I have cried at lame, nakedly manipulative movies I’ve seen on airplanes in that odd, muffled state of suspension and wouldn’t have otherwise watched with a gun to my head. If you know you’re being bluntly manipulated by what is effectively a marketing team even as you’re watching and building up a vicious resentment, then what do those tears mean? At this level, we’re like those laboratory monkeys that will trade food for cocaine. We know it’s bad, but we like the feeling.
According to Jayne Ann Krentz, a romance writer who champions the genre in the collection Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, “For those who understand the encoded information in the stories, the books preserve elements of ancient myths and legends that are particularly important to women. They celebrate female power, intuition, and a female worldview that affirms life and expresses hope for the future.”
Little of this was evident in the books I read. They celebrate handsome men with limited communication skills and a somewhat steely emotional core. The male characters are rich (usually self-made) and powerful and athletic, and have thick, tousled hair and strong jawlines. They can sail, drive fast, cook. In Tycoon’s Valentine Vendetta, Jack throws several condoms on the bed and declares to Lily, “I have more.” This comes only minutes after they’ve had sex. So, a tireless stud in the bargain.
The women in both Surrender and Tycoon, meanwhile, are either poor or become poor, and in the end are taken care of by men. In Surrender, Shaine has been celibate for the thirteen years she and Jake have been apart, while Jake has had empty sex with an army of supermodels. In Tycoon, Lily is “whimpering with hunger” upon getting into bed with Jack, and worships him as he tosses fresh scallops on the grill. “‘You amaze me,’ Lily said as she watched him, mesmerized by the play of muscles in his forearm as he flipped the spatula again…’You’re so capable. Is there anything you can’t do?’”
You might think the passivity of the women and the Bond-like qualities of the men would work as male fantasy. Yet they don’t. That’s likely because Harlequin narratives are driven by misunderstandings and foggy interior monologues that express, more than any other feeling, doubt. “Why did she want him so? Why? Her brain told her to walk away. To walk away and not look back. But her body whispered something else.” And all this uncertainty is wearing.
How is it, then, that these quaint, patriarchal tropes work so well on a female audience? In 1984, Janice Radway published Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, at the time the most comprehensive study of romance novels and their readers. When she interviewed women for her book, it wasn’t the content of the novels they talked about, but the act of reading them. She argued that though the books may be meticulously unsubversive, reading them can be a subversive act. When the reader picks up a romance novel, she is spending time on herself, escaping the very thing that may be giving her her social identity. For those few hours, she is getting rid of her children, and ditching her husband for a masculine icon who loves her deeply (though he may have difficulty expressing it).
Radway’s study was conducted twenty-five years ago, in the pseudonymous Midwestern American town of Smithton, presumably a fairly traditional society. A majority of North American women were married then, and still worked in the home. So the fantasy offered was essentially quantitative; readers were presented with a fictional husband who was richer and sexier than the one they had. But now most women work outside the home, and a smaller percentage are married. The stated target market for Harlequin Romances is someone in her forties with a college education and a career. What’s in it for her?
It may be that as society drifts further from the norm of a happy, stable marriage, the books have more currency as fantasy. The idea of surrendering to a gravely rich man whose forearms ripple sexily every time he picks up a spatula has appeal in part because it is so far removed from actual aspirations (getting a raise, a promotion), and from the actual middle-aged men women know (paunchy, anniversary-forgetting toads for whom a handful of condoms is a year’s supply). Women can even read the books with a sense of irony, dismissing the stock characters and plots while still indulging in the emotional jolt. Harlequins succeed, in this light, because they are brilliantly forgettable one-night stands that blur, slim 178-page companions that vanish by the next day. Each morning, you wake up a virgin.
