While as to
why I spent countless hours preparing this presentation -- well, sometimes I find myself so fascinated to be writing in the popular romance genre (such a huge market! so little respect from the outside world! such amazing women writing! about what's so incredibly important!) that I have to take a big bite of literary theory, season it for romance, and chew on it for a while. But if I don't commit to having something to share with a roomful of people (particularly in an attractive conference venue), it's a lot less likely I'll take that first bite.So Brussels sounded like a great opportunity to think hard about something I've been wanting to understand better for a while now: the hot new trend of male/male or male/male/female romance -- written by women for women.
I'm hardly saying this is a majority taste in the genre. But -- hyper-hetero clinch covers notwithstanding -- it is remarkable to contemplate the speed (not to speak of the general humaneness) with which popular romance fiction has come to include same-sex love as a viable and sympathetic theme (and see also Romance Writers of America's "genre overview": the main plot centers around two individuals falling in love...).
My aim in this paper, however, wasn't self-congratulation. Of course the romance genre is smarter than the conventional wisdom would have it (well, it could hardly be dumber than it's generally thought to be, could it?) I took on this project because I wanted to understand more specifically how this new development of male/male love works in individual texts, and most particularly in Ann Herendeen's recent tour de force, Pride/Prejudice.
Yes, that's Pride Slash Prejudice: as in Slash Fiction, longtime home for a cult of fans (largely female) writing fantasy narratives that pair up their favorite pop-culture characters in plots that won't be made into major motion pictures any time soon.
The most popular early Slash Fiction sub-genre portrayed Star Trek heroes Kirk and Spock in hunky, explicit, extra-terrestrial sexual couplings. They got the slash from the one in Kirk/Spock. But when I read Pride/Prejudice, it seemed to me that Herendeen had gone where no one had before (and at warp speed) -- addressing what's always been the vexing question of what Mr. Darcy ever saw in Mr. Bingley, by putting a famous truth universally acknowledged into Darcy's mouth, between kisses (and more) exchanged in Mr. Bingley's bed.
I think it works -- never, of course, as a replacement for the original, but as smart, sly commentary on the beloved and compelling world Jane Austen built (and that along the way made today's popular romance novel possible).
But what is this world that Pride/Prejudice is seeing anew?
To answer t
his question, I need to introduce an area of literary criticism brought to us by another smart woman whose work I'd long been wanting to understand -- the late Professor Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the originators of what's now called Queer Theory. Which body of thought does not say (as some sloppy readers think it must) that every heterosexual love story has a queer attraction hiding, as it were, beneath the sheets. But which does probe the question of what Sedgwick, in her first statement of Queer Theory, Between Men, called "male homosociality," that vast continent of "male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality [...] in an intimate and shifting relation to class..."The boundaries of these loci of interaction are slippery and highly dependent upon context (as when a pat on the butt is legit on the football field and lethal just about anywhere else). The lonely, anxious business of male-dominated society, Queer Theory asserts, is the every-man-for-himself struggle for dominance over this world of shifting context and meaning (can you say tortured hero?). Which struggle is facilitated by competition for money, status, and position in the form of rivalry for women who are necessary for male position and its continuance (and who, through history, have by and large been treated as little more than objects and tokens in this struggle).
Men might or might not be sexually attractive to each other -- sometimes they might not even know if they are, having sacrificed whatever coherent self-understanding they might have had to the struggle for dominance (and self-dominance as well). Queer theory, then is often a matter of untangling the fascinating incoherencies in literary texts about men (Sedgwick is terrific on Billy Budd and Gothic novels).
Of course not all literary texts were written by men, nor are they solely about men. But it's certainly true that men and their fortunes have a certain primacy in very many stories (and particularly in novels, which take as their subject the real world); if this weren't true we wouldn't need the term "women's fiction," to differentiate if from the other stuff which is most usually just called "fiction."
While as for men and their fortunes, since, as is "universally acknowledged [...] a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife" -- particularly in Georgian landed society, where power, position (and every attribute of upper-class male selfhood) depended upon the perpetuity of family ownership, what of those wives or potential wives? Does the author -- does the reader -- view them merely as objects and tokens?
Of course she -- and we -- do not. And it's part of Jane Austen's genius that the opening words of Pride and Prejudice, though syntactically "about" that "single man,"are quite evidently about the wife he is in want of and how such potential wives must feel to occupy such a contingent position. Tracy recently pointed to the wonderful immediacy of this opening, and I couldn't agree more. Or as I put it in my talk:
...if we smile when we read the words in Austen, I’d suggest that we aren’t merely smiling at Mrs. Bennet’s crude, déclassé overreaching. We’re smiling in rueful recognition of an unstated dynamic in the structure of these sentences and the structure of their society: that even if the man in question constitutes the subject of the assertion, the counter-truth of every ironic syllable in that opening is that the author is always and already engaging her reader with the irrepressible subjectivity of female characters who simply refuse to be relegated to contingency.In the centuries since Austen, the romance novel (and sometimes the literary novel as well) hinged upon a simple, but incendiary, paradox: that a man occupies a primacy of position in the public world, but the power of the female subjectivity cannot be denied.
Until the 20th century, perhaps -- when in romance this changed again. when male power began to be understood as a fraught and painful thing -- with, I think, the tortured heroes of the 70s to the 90s. My own untested theory is that this occurred in a parallel development to Second Wave Feminism. We started seeing tortured lonely hero subjectivities in deep third person (Dr. Sarah Frantz of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance has often written and spoken on this, and I was delighted that she and I were on the same panel in Belgium).
But unlike the big intellects behind Queer Theory, the creative minds writing popular romance did more than let a bunch of fictional heroes stew in their own juicy macho agonies (or, as Eve Sedgwick had it, their texts' "productive incoherence.") Romance fiction isn't incoherent. It's hardworking, pragmatic, empathic -- it sees a problem and it tries to solve it in the interest of a happy ending. AND it draws upon a wonderful camaraderie between authors, readers. and sometimes characters. Committed to pleasure, it wants to share, rather than compete.
So if Ann Herendeen saw the possibility of a love affair between Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, not only did she share the pleasure she took in this fantasy with her readers, but with Lizzy Bennet as well, who -- during her stay at Netherfield when Jane had a headcold -- (in Ann's version) gets a glimpse of other doings through a door to Mr. Bingley's bedroom that won't stay shut. Lizzy is fascinated; she's aroused; and (in a section of the book that follows Austen's happy ending) sees no reason why her husband still can't have the pleasures she's enjoyed witnessing (especially during what bids well to be a long series of pregnancies for Mrs. Darcy and her sister Mrs. Bingley as well). (Sorry for spoiler: read it anyway, for the wit, intelligence, and marvelous writing.)
The idea that male heroes shouldn't have to be lonely -- that their relationships with other men can be more than competition for power and for women -- and that this freedom can be facilitated by the very women who love these heroes (authors, heroines, and even readers) seems to me to be new, fascinating, wonderfully subversive.
And -- outside of the pages of Queer Theory -- the place you're most likely to find it these days is at certain margins of the romance world. Of course it's in the male/male and male/male/female erotic e-books, but you can find it in more mainstream, best-selling venues as well. Because the male/male relationships don't have to be homoerotic (I stand by Sedgwick's term "homosocial," and I take her at her word that it can mean a wide continuum of relationships). Male romance heroes tend to come in big bunches these days, and not only to facilitate the sequels beloved by readers. Think of J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood, bound in fealty to the female principle of the Scribe Virgin. Think even of the power wielded by Julia Quinn's Viscountess Bridgerton...
And do also think of the ways I've doubtless oversimplified these things. Tell me what you think...
...though I have to admit (as an amateur literary critic) to being all theoried out for a while and ready to turn my attention to fiction writing again.
And yes (you read it here), that's a commitment.
No comments:
Post a Comment