Following on from our discussion on the importance of location in romance fiction, all that was missing was a selection of examples and a thorough examination of those books. Thank goodness, therefore, that we have been reading Mills & Boon novels these last few months. It is time we put this research to good use and perhaps even learn something. Many Harlequin subgenres have a clear location implied by their category. Medical Romance must, by its definition, involve places where medicine is practised, unless the doctor is possibly on holiday at a beach and must administer CPR on a beautiful widow's heart, resuscitating his own capacity for love in the process. Well, look at that. One paragraph in and we already have a great idea.
Here at Bewildered Heart we don't read Medical Romance, of course, because we crave relatable characters in habitable locations and sick people alarm us. So instead we read the likes of Learning Curves by Joanne Rock, Roughing It with Ryan by Jill Shalvis, and Finding Nick by Janis Reams Hudson (Heh heh heh). These are all Harlequin entries involving quaint examples of small town Americana, in states such as Arizona and Texas that may or may not exist. Learning Curves concerns a college graduate and a garage owner-cum-lecturer. Neither location speaks volumes for glamour, although a garage offers a little raw masculine sexuality if the reader ignores their own experiences of visiting garages. Can love blossom in the most unlikely of places, Joanne Rock does not have to ask, because on the pages of a Harlequin novel is the most likely place for love to blossom.
Finding Nick is a fish-out-of-water tale with a stylish New Yorker slumming it in a friendly, carefree Texan town. These tales don't use location as prominently or successfully as they might have had the authors been interested in heightening or contrasting their romances with a wider picture. Roughing It With Ryan is more urban, but revolves exclusively around the nondescript apartment building in which the heroine lives, relegating the drama to the instantly forgettable. In The Rugged Hero's Beautiful Blonde Chick the leads rarely leave the bedroom, but we agreed we wouldn't speak of that title again.
In fact, there is little evidence to back-up Julie Leto's argument that romance writers give much attention to their backdrop. There certainly appears a lack of contrast or embellishing. Even the clichéd history of exoticism and glamour seems to be disappearing from the pages. These stories are decidedly middle-class and domestic, serving to illustrate the obvious characteristics of the leads. The single Romance Romance example we have, The Dad Next Door, gives the reader the barely glimpsed shores of Squam Lake. The emotionally-wrought arguments take place in kitchens, on porches and in the back of a shop. When you have characters who are living and not looking for love, the author never forces her leads out of their physical comfort zones. The romance evolves while day-to-day life goes on.
This is a modern development, because in previous years Mills & Boon was dedicated to aspirational wealth and glamour, a genre of escapist fantasy in location as much as story. The 1965 Kathryn Blair novel, appropriately named Bewildered Heart, is set in the sultry jungle of Murabai, Nigeria (Please note, Murabai does not exist). The protagonist is truly out of her depth, an unconventional face in a strange, beautiful, but scary country. The reader is introduced to the heroine through her descent into this unrecognisable world, which is sketched out through the heroine's intrigue and neuroses. The exotic location is unimaginable to the reader, and becomes a selling point for the book in itself.
Nowadays, we have The Playboy of Pengarroth Hall, where the location is used with a typical heavy-handedness to shade in the cold, distant hero, his house and grounds representing his wealth as well as his fastidious personality. Susanne James' story is as archetypal a Mills & Boon as one could hope to read, if one would ever hope for anything such as that. Our heroine falls in love with the location first, and then slowly warms to the hero once she realises he owns the land. Their first kiss takes place in a darkened bedroom, an intimate moment of empathy in a church and his marriage proposal in a small park in central London.
Cindi Myer's Wild Child's filthy parade of childishly-described sexual acts all occur on a beach and the usual locales that surround a beach, such as beach-side houses, beach-related shops, beach-huts and the ocean. The author makes no attempt to imbue her prose, setting or characters with any originality and so Wild Child ends up as a substandard postcard written by a fourteen year old boy. This is a shame because while a beach is one of those stereotypical, unimaginative locations Julie Leto warned us against using, its tropes are open to such subversion that a writer could fill a beach with the most unlikely elements and invent something creative.
Recently we read One Night with the Rebel Billionaire and with this still fresh in our memories we can examine scenes on an individual basis, because as we have seen there appears a general ambivalence toward a single location, but rather the writer prefers to have her characters constantly roving to new and exciting exteriors with views. In MacKenzie's Promise, for example, our leads run from beach house, to restaurant, to hotel, to different restaurant to secret island getaway and on, all places shot through with a sense of luxury, in frothy contrast to the events of the book, which involve kidnap, murder and bad dialogue. It is difficult to know whether this contrast was intentional, but let's sleep tonight assuming it wasn't.
The location for Trish Wylie's One Night with the Rebel Billionaire is the Martha's Vineyard mansion where the majority of the events take place. The book opens on the mansion's beach and ends in the guest house. This is indicative of the titular billionaire, a sign that our characters need not worry about their finances, and can instead focus solely on their emotional retardation. On the way to love, key scenes take place in office buildings, supermarkets, grassy patches of land and in a small aeroplane. As aspiring Mills & Boon authors, how do we make sense of this seemingly arbitrary use of setting? Julie Leto told us to think carefully about where to set our scenes and then use words to describe how they look, but what we have seen so far seems thoughtless. After all, it is impossible not to set them somewhere.
As romance continues its stunted growth toward being the runt of the literature, location has lost that desirable, thrilling aspect that once marked Mills & Boon as the leader in escapist entertainment for women. This change in writing and location is consistent to the changing attitudes writers have taken towards their characters. Men are no longer mysterious, brooding, potential rapists controlling large portions of African jungle or mountain ranges in Wyoming. Today men are capable of marriage, domesticity, cooking, fixing sinks and raising children without the support of whiskey. For the reader to be satisfied by the happy ending she must see the hero in his element, doing manly things such as love-making and being sexist, while believing him capable and content to wash up the dinner things and watch whatever is on Living for the rest of his life.
Mills & Boon exists to publish female-driven plots. We no longer live in a man's world (although we still live in a man's world) and it is deemed sexist for the heroine to submit to the love and lifestyle her man is accustomed to. The popularity of such books as Pleasured in the Billionaire's Bed and The Brazilian Boss' Innocent Mistress challenge this. Does the virginal girl end up moving to the rainforest to become a reclusive Brazilian billionaire, or can she retain the dignity of women somewhere by claiming the parts of her single life that made her she? Are we to believe innocent girls await demanding billionaires with really luxurious beds, ready and willing to give up their old lives for all the man has? Romance writers can't think much of women if that is the case.
Once you marry a billionaire playboy what does he become? A millionaire husband? If a hero is defined by his bachelor status the story has its work cut out to convince us he will be ready for the tribulations of matrimony. Therefore location moves into the home, and while these men live in mansions, beach villas and country estates in Cornwall, their glorious houses still have faulty plumbing, dirty crockery and extra bedrooms for the inevitability of offspring. Is there a place and an inclination for the likes of Jack T. Colton in modern romance? Surely his swagger, quips and facial scarring can find a way back into Harlequin's pages and its readers' hearts? Just because he doesn't strike us as the type who would give up his dangerous quest-filled existence for a life in suburbia it doesn't make the moment where he kisses the girl any less romantic.
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