Transplanting a Seattleite

My husband was under the impression that public school — by which I mean, all children within a society can go to school, without paying (excessive) fees to do so, are expected to do so for at least a few years, and the cost for this education is borne by the local community / country / wtf. He seemed to think that public school had been a Thing locally since the 17th century, and pointed to Boston Latin. I just looked at him and said, okay, let’s go there. You know about public schools in England, right? Yes. Are those “public schools” for the purposes of this discussion?” Pause. No. OK, then. Is Boston Latin a public school? Longer pause. I guess not.

Yeah, I guess not, too. There are a lot of things called public school, but we weren’t talking about everything called public school. We were talking about the definition that I put up front.

Anyway, I’d had a really nice glass of Enroute Pinot Noir (this was Wednesday at the Forge and Vine), which is Russian River, my Second Favorite region, and I was feeling expansive, which is to say, I was being a pompous ass, so if you are reading this and thinking, my, walkitout is being a bit Extra right now, you are not wrong. I explained to him about Dame Schools and Cathedral Schools and abaco and the definition of literacy, and how when the daughters of the NarcoLords of Boston decided they needed to scrub the reputation of their family so their Wealth Could Shine More Brightly and engaged in job lots of philanthropy to do so, they also invented Public School more or less as we know it. Now, they needed this thing to look less rickety and Nouveau than it actually was, so they invented a bunch of traditions and such like so that it looked old and hoary right from the beginning.

Yes, you can blame T-weekend on them, too, feel free.

Mind you, the thing didn’t really take off — like everything else we take for granted — until we nearly lost it all in the 30s because of that never-to-be-sufficiently-derided Herbert Hoover, and everything got industrialized under FDR. At that point, public schooling went from being, OMG, the Poors, We Must Do Something About the Poors, to, Here’s the Deal: Stop Talking Up the Old Country to the Kids, Send Them to Public School Where We Will Teach Them to Be American and by the time they are adults, they will be free of whatever bullshit political garbage you left your country of origin to protect them from and we’ll all go forward from there.

So, what has any of this got to do with the book I’m reading for my planned monograph on how a particular prolific writer of popular romance fiction / commercial fiction manages to be prolific in a way that her audience is willing to consistently pay for? Ah, because of that need to make it look less rickety and Nouveau than it actually was.

And that’s exactly what is going on in all these books about “the Romance Novel”. Everyone wants to say it started with Austen, or Richardson, or Trollope, or Congreve (!!!), or, marginally more realistically, Georgette Heyer (I personally love this theory, but also, I’m not 100% sure I really agree with it). Saying it started Back Then makes the whole enterprise of the Romance Novel instantly more respectable and supplies a lot more territory to mine academically, in much the same way that pointing to Boston Latin and that Massachusetts Bay Colony law that communities were required to establish schools makes public schooling for the masses — a brand fucking new idea in the mid 19th century — seem like maybe it wasn’t that new, or that revolutionary or that crazy of an idea.

I don’t actually have any kind of personal stake in When the Romance Novel Was Invented, because what I’m interested in is How Prolific Authors (Specifically, one particular author of popular romantic fiction) Become Reliable Brands Their Customers Repeatedly Buy. I think the thesis I’m putting together works for the author I have in mind, and talking to people it also works for a number of other authors. It tends to be much harder to spot in authors whose published works number under twenty or so, which more or less purely for technical reasons, limits us to the 19th century and later, and, realistically, to the second half of the 20th century and later.

Nevertheless, I really feel like this backdating of the beginning does none of us any favors if what we really would like is for more academic attention to be paid to what we _actually_ mean when we say, “popular romance novels”. And sure, P&P may be romance, and a novel, and popular, but it is NOT “popular romance novels”. Period.

Also, has anyone seen an analysis of P&P focusing on the mothers? I feel like it comes across super different if you think about it that way. In the normal analysis, Mrs. Bennett (Elizabeth’s mum) comes across as incredibly stupid, dangerous to the chances of her offsprings, etc. Catherine de Burgh comes across as a problem, but not necessary the Big Problem. And we don’t really think about Mom Darcy at all. But what’s actually going on in the book is a chess game of Who Gets the Money — remember, Darcy is _insanely_ wealthy. This is the prototypical Billionaire Romance (see how unappealing it is when you put it _that_ way? Makes P&P look bad, and honestly, makes the Billionaire Romance subgenre look bad, too), but in the modern Billionaire Romance, it is NOT about mothers conspiring to improve the marriages of their offspring, and the success of the family. (In Georgette Heyer, this _is_ foregrounded, and yes, I will be using that as an excuse to reread those some day.)

Anyway. P&P thus becomes: Mom Darcy does not want all this money to go to waste. She is trying to increase the respectability index, since the Darcy clan has maxed out the money index. She is friends (more likely frenemies, if we are being honest) with Catherine de Burgh, and cuts a deal: I’ll cut you in on the money, if you cut me in on the respectability. Mrs. Bennett is an interloper on this deal. _And Mrs. Bennett wins!_ What’s really amazing is, I don’t think the Lydia / Wickham thing was anywhere near the Bad Judgment Every Critic Ever presents it as! There was _such_ a history of honey trapping money, and really, this is just a much more sophisticated way of honey trapping Darcy. Darcy has a loooooonnnng history of bailing Wickham out and covering for him. Mr. Bennett likely knew — and dialogue in the book indicates Mrs. Bennett definitely knew. I doubt Mrs. Bennett really thought Elizabeth could snag Darcy himself — that was a reach, but for sure, she was fishing in that pond when it showed up in town. _That’s what the first sentence of the book is!_

Under this construction, Mrs. Bennett becomes a really complicated protagonist, fighting via various proxies against Catherine de Burgh, the ghost of Mom Darcy, and Elizabeth is a huge problem for Mrs. Bennett. Elizabeth threatens her stable perch at home by refusing Mr. Collins, and then gets into a fight with Darcy disrupting Jane’s chances. Occasionally, Elizabeth’s actions aid Mrs. Bennett, but more often than not, she busts up Mrs. Bennett’s plans. _Elizabeth_ is the main plot impediment to Mrs. Bennett accomplishing her goals. And then, deus ex machina, Mrs. Bennett gets all she ever wanted and way more, when this main obstacle pulls Darcy out of a hat at the end.

Look, I’m not saying that’s what this book is about. It’s obviously not! But there are tons of litcrit analyses that are _definitely not what the book is about_. I wanna read someone write this one in a respectable fashion with relevant quotes. I will not, however, be writing it.

ETA:

Oh, yeah, more to say!

First, SMH at the belaboring (by this author, and by the authors quoted, all academic assessments of P&P of one sort or another) the “poverty” of the Bennett family. LOL. But then this! “Given the possibilities open to women, marriage is her [Elizabeth Bennet’s] best choice. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, it was still women’s lot, still a fact of female life. We can regret this fact, but expecting Austen to do so as well is both unreasonable and anachronistic.”

!!!

Austen never fucking married! Come on!

If we _really_ want to treat P&P as a forerunning of romance novels, then _this_ _is_ the Billionaire Romance, V1. Nothing about a Billionaire Romance is realistic. The richest dude in WTF radius / the planet / the known universe has nothing better to do than to verbally spar with the comfortable, intelligent, sparkling witty woman who wants nothing to do with him and/or marriage. _This_ _Is_ _Not_ _Realism_. This isn’t about best choices. This is what _Mrs. Bennet_ wants. This is what a lot of readers want. “Unreasonable” and “anachronistic” are NOT relevant commentary on Elizabeth marrying Fitzwilliam.

I’ve been reading Kamble (NOT recommending this book! Altho I actually am pretty sure that the author is a really intelligent, really good human being, who is capable in many ways, and that this book was probably pretty difficult to make happen in any form, and none of what I am saying here should be construed as in any way negative about the author), in particular, the chapter about the trajectory of gay rights in culture and reading romance novels against that backdrop. This is a chapter where the relevance of the Marxist critique is comparatively low (vs. the first chapter, on the economic status of the hero and heroine, or even the second chapter, which was about warrior/soldier/spy heroes and was a critique of imperialism), and the chapter (so far — I’m not done with it) is largely a close reading of some romances that I mostly feel like could be read better as part of a general exploration of Orientalism in popular romance fiction, and how those themes evolved over time. I feel like that line of thinking would have more power to explain some of the weird dynamics between the hero, heroine, and the hero’s wife (!!!), but could also fold back to show how women participated in imperialism, not just men.

Anyway. That’s all largely irrelevant, however, to what I’ve been trying to figure out for days now (look I’m not backing away from the above line of thinking — it forcibly sprang to mind as I was reading, and more evidence in support keeps accumulating), which is: Kamble is Not Wrong to point out that romance fiction heroes have gotten to be More over the decades: taller, lower body fat/leaner, more muscled, more skilled at fighting, richer, better in bed/greater sexual repertoire and history and usually with an intense focus on evoking pleasure in the heroine not just assuming that she’ll be all hot if he forces himself /attentions on her. He dresses better, has better hair, is less likely to have facial scars (altho potentially more likely to have scars elsewhere), has a bigger and more impressive dick, has more friends, much more likely to be a leader, often has a massive kinship network that relies upon him extensively. More. More. More.

Some of this feeds into Kamble’s theory of needing to really hammer on He Is For Sure Het And Isn’t Gonna Waste Your Time. However, some of the specific more is directly opposed to her theory of how the genre accomplishes this. For one thing (and she may yet get to this), men in romance novels over the last couple decades are far more likely to have significant friendships with other men. (Probably this will be explained as: once the arc of gay rights was largely completed, everyone calmed down? *shrug*) I actually think a lot of what happened is that the audience for romance novels for a long time was women who were raised in a culture in which the Husband Was In Charge and must be Respected. We’ve been past the Whether Obey Should Be In the Vows thing for a while, but the Defer to the Man thing hung around for a really long time. If you are a woman who is successful academically / professionally / wtf, if you are a smart, successful, capable manager, if you are a highly sought after employee because your skills are valued — you don’t even have to be rich or powerful, per se — lots of women in the world of work learned that they are fucking amazing and that men would ask them how to do stuff because they knew, the men didn’t and the men were going to fail (and the business might fail) if the men didn’t find out from the women. You can bully a woman into going along with this whole Defer to the Man thing if her world is constrained (kitchen, church and children) and everyone is busy telling her that He Knows About the Real World. Once she’s out in the real world, she’s bound to figure it out.

The More hero, I would argue, is an effort to reconcile Defer to the Man / Respect the Man with the But Wait I Actually Know What I’m Doing Better Than He Does Problem. No matter who you are, there are people out there who know better than you, at least within some areas. Outside the Defer to the Man dynamic, this is solved with a collaborative approach and if a hierarchy is desired / required, then using mechanisms of transparency, accountability and consulting stakeholders in advance of a decision and considering their input carefully as part of the decision process. But the Defer to the Man nonsense never included any of that and what a job lot of old romance novels are about is the man learning to consult the stakeholder in advance of a decision and considering their input carefully as part of the decision process.

None of that, however, addresses the psychodynamic (I cannot believe I just used that word) problem caused when a highly competent woman participates in the Defer to the Man dynamic. It’s _really_ _important_ to separate this from when highly competent women opt out of the Defer to the Man dynamic. All the really delightful Beta Hero novels involve dyads which are operating in a Defer to the Man world and explicitly NOT participating. That is _why_ we love them. That is _why_ they are not particularly common, alas. (I’m overstating this, and if you have a Beta hero novel that doesn’t fit this set of statements, please tell me about it in the comments because I would like to know more.)

An audience of increasingly competent — and self-aware of their competence — readers who retain a commitment to a Defer to the Man dynamic is going to _require_ escalating competence from the Hero, in order to retain suspension of disbelief. The TSTL heroine is a dodge that _can_ work, but reader responses over the years in many forums indicate that it is only satisfying for an increasingly small component of the buying audience.

Anyway. TL;DR: as more women participated broadly in the world of paid employment and moved up status ladders in that world, they needed Heroes in their fiction that they could plausibly defer to. They had learned at work that they didn’t have to defer to Just Any Man, so why would they do that in a relationship.

ETA: I’m not the first person to observe the “Problem” of Het Relationships for Powerful Women. I know that. Believe me, I know that. I will note that anyone wandering around thinking that this thing is Solved so why is it still hanging on in Romancelandia is pretty delusional.