Besides the obvious and credible reasons to hate Romance Fiction there are several less obvious, but equally credible, reasons to hate Romance Fiction that defenders of the genre rarely attempt to dismiss. Lynley Stace, weblogger and co-creator of Slap Happy Larry, has collected ten reasons and displayed them helpfully as a list for easy reference. If your aversion towards Romance stems from out-dated gender roles authors and publishers are eager to explain that much work has been done to contemporise misogyny so it feels fresh and recognizable to women living and suffering billionaires today. If upon learning this you remain disinclined to read a Mills & Boon, or any novel with love or shopping in the title, there is no need to panic or embarrass yourself at a dinner party. Here are several more excuses for politely refusing a reading suggestion.
Numbers one to three fall under the same umbrella of disappointment, language skills. ‘Liberal splatterings of adjectives and adverbs, and in romance it’s okay to make use of adverbs in dialogue tags as well. This often leads to sloppy dialogue.’ Unintentionally comical euphemisms for body parts are considered proof of Romance’s ineptitude, but this does a disservice to the hundreds of sentences that are not sex-related. Adverbs tend to add clarification, but are often redundant and slow the story. Literary giants avoid them, but they remain tempting to romantics, unschooled in the craft of economical writing. Adjectives should be used sparingly. However, when struggling with a lack of momentum, Romance writers bulk out their books with scenes of staring and description. Tales of happy love are told at a leisurely pace, stopping on occasion to smell roses and have sex. As a result, the prose becomes personable and relaxed. Readers are not interested in skillfully edited examples of Raymond Carver-style writing. They wish to enjoy the journey. They know the destination before they start.
Due perhaps to the simplified nature of the readership, romantic prose rarely demands cognitive scrutiny. Why use subtlety when the repeated use of emotional exposition is so much more understandable? By constantly describing the unchanging thoughts of the heroine via an omnipotent third person narrator the characters are saved from doing things and making decisions as a means of revealing personality or developing plot. Instead the story can concentrate on aspirational affluence and handsomeness until enough words have been written. Speaking of Hugh Jackman, chiseled features are Stace’s next object of hatred yet criticising Romance novels for idealizing physical appearance is unreasonable. ‘The leading man must be attractive to female readers,’ says Stace. Would female readers, or romance readers as they are also known, find the same satisfaction in a disfigured or grotesque billionaire hero? How many copies of The Greek Tycoon’s Really Great Personality would sell?
Bearing in mind that hero and heroine must be married by the book’s conclusion physical attraction is a requirement, but Stace may be right to condemn the stock standard form of beauty Romance rarely deviates from. Yet given the worldwide appeal of the genre there is no longer a dependence on, ‘Well-known Western Beauty Ideals.’ Characters come from every corner of the globe, the men always muscular and tall, the women always attractive to the men. There have been unconventional heroines in recent years, from the overweight to the over-thirty, but as Stace notes, the female lead, ‘must have something wrong with her, but nothing that would put a potential suitor off.’ Secrets Uncovered taught us why hair frizzes on sunny days, as an easy means of humanizing a character who might otherwise be perfect with her life only about to become more perfect. Continuing on a theme, has Romance Fiction ruined itself by insisting that the eyes of its handsome heroes always match their suit, tie or the sky? This cliché might say more about a heroine whose attraction causes her to see such complements, rather than the idea that gorgeous billionaires know what colour nature is. We will perhaps never know the truth, at least until Lynley Stace has to chance to ask a few gorgeous billionaires.
Next, ‘In these times of premarital sex and mobile phones, it’s harder and harder to contrive a reason why the two of them shouldn’t just get together from the off.’ Any author dedicated to a semblance of reality will struggle to keep the inseparable pair of beautiful, single people from either God-bothering intercourse or texting. Thus the reader is treated to a series of contrivances that Stace calls conflict. All stories require conflict to be stories, but hackneyed excuses, lazy plotting and unoriginal obstacles are a curse to every genre, and should not be tolerated in Romance just as they should not be tolerated anywhere else. When a concept is fundamentally flawed, and Romance novels are guilty of starting on shaky footing, no amount of emotional conflicts will convince the reader that the characters are acting realistically. Yet to make the Happy Ever After convincing the reader must see the couple interact, develop feelings and reveal true selves. Mills & Boon insist that the hero and heroine cannot be parted physically, meeting two or three times a chapter in expensive locations to gaze upon one another’s beauty and marvel at one another’s intelligence, wit and kindness. Without credible antagonism or human frailty the books end up as an interminable succession of inevitability delays.
To conclude Stace relies on what many romantics will have expected from the beginning. ‘Heteronormative, matrimonial ideals are somewhat outdated.’ Nothing says your characters lived happily until death quite like marriage and procreation, except perhaps saying they lived happily until death. Nevertheless, until the majority of humanity stop with heterosexual, committed relationships publishers will continue pushing conservative values that have remained unchallenged for centuries. As for describing intimacy, ‘Sex scenes can feel cringe-worthy or wrong, because everyone’s sexual response is different.’ This is a subjective view of subjectivity. In the hundreds of thousands of sex scenes that appear in every romance novel an understanding of sensuality should materialise, suggesting that humans are animals and all of them are essentially the same. Still, there are worrying elements to these scenes, as Stace points out. ‘In romance we’re fed this idea that the way a woman looks to a man is the most important thing in the sex act. Her sexual response depends on the approval of a man.’
The article goes on to criticise an example told in third person but from the man’s perspective for the cheesy, pandering way the virginal heroine is represented by the author and the hero. Of course, Stace could have picked numerous scenes from any number of novels where the sex is described from the heroine’s point of view had she any inclination to read them. These would have shown the other four senses all receiving a mention, although not many would have portrayed women as sexual beings with their own desires and confidence. Lynley Stace makes a handful of valid arguments, as well as several that do not hold up to close examination, but those who do not enjoy Romance Fiction and do not read it are not required to justify why. There are plenty of Bewildered Hearts, such as Bewildered Heart, who read a great many titles, research the subject thoroughly and hate with an overabundance of information to back them up. Disinterested critics who believe Elizabeth and Darcy made a mistake in marrying should leave the rejection of Romance to the fans of the genre who have worked hard to earn their bitter cynicism.
Numbers one to three fall under the same umbrella of disappointment, language skills. ‘Liberal splatterings of adjectives and adverbs, and in romance it’s okay to make use of adverbs in dialogue tags as well. This often leads to sloppy dialogue.’ Unintentionally comical euphemisms for body parts are considered proof of Romance’s ineptitude, but this does a disservice to the hundreds of sentences that are not sex-related. Adverbs tend to add clarification, but are often redundant and slow the story. Literary giants avoid them, but they remain tempting to romantics, unschooled in the craft of economical writing. Adjectives should be used sparingly. However, when struggling with a lack of momentum, Romance writers bulk out their books with scenes of staring and description. Tales of happy love are told at a leisurely pace, stopping on occasion to smell roses and have sex. As a result, the prose becomes personable and relaxed. Readers are not interested in skillfully edited examples of Raymond Carver-style writing. They wish to enjoy the journey. They know the destination before they start.
Due perhaps to the simplified nature of the readership, romantic prose rarely demands cognitive scrutiny. Why use subtlety when the repeated use of emotional exposition is so much more understandable? By constantly describing the unchanging thoughts of the heroine via an omnipotent third person narrator the characters are saved from doing things and making decisions as a means of revealing personality or developing plot. Instead the story can concentrate on aspirational affluence and handsomeness until enough words have been written. Speaking of Hugh Jackman, chiseled features are Stace’s next object of hatred yet criticising Romance novels for idealizing physical appearance is unreasonable. ‘The leading man must be attractive to female readers,’ says Stace. Would female readers, or romance readers as they are also known, find the same satisfaction in a disfigured or grotesque billionaire hero? How many copies of The Greek Tycoon’s Really Great Personality would sell?
Bearing in mind that hero and heroine must be married by the book’s conclusion physical attraction is a requirement, but Stace may be right to condemn the stock standard form of beauty Romance rarely deviates from. Yet given the worldwide appeal of the genre there is no longer a dependence on, ‘Well-known Western Beauty Ideals.’ Characters come from every corner of the globe, the men always muscular and tall, the women always attractive to the men. There have been unconventional heroines in recent years, from the overweight to the over-thirty, but as Stace notes, the female lead, ‘must have something wrong with her, but nothing that would put a potential suitor off.’ Secrets Uncovered taught us why hair frizzes on sunny days, as an easy means of humanizing a character who might otherwise be perfect with her life only about to become more perfect. Continuing on a theme, has Romance Fiction ruined itself by insisting that the eyes of its handsome heroes always match their suit, tie or the sky? This cliché might say more about a heroine whose attraction causes her to see such complements, rather than the idea that gorgeous billionaires know what colour nature is. We will perhaps never know the truth, at least until Lynley Stace has to chance to ask a few gorgeous billionaires.
Next, ‘In these times of premarital sex and mobile phones, it’s harder and harder to contrive a reason why the two of them shouldn’t just get together from the off.’ Any author dedicated to a semblance of reality will struggle to keep the inseparable pair of beautiful, single people from either God-bothering intercourse or texting. Thus the reader is treated to a series of contrivances that Stace calls conflict. All stories require conflict to be stories, but hackneyed excuses, lazy plotting and unoriginal obstacles are a curse to every genre, and should not be tolerated in Romance just as they should not be tolerated anywhere else. When a concept is fundamentally flawed, and Romance novels are guilty of starting on shaky footing, no amount of emotional conflicts will convince the reader that the characters are acting realistically. Yet to make the Happy Ever After convincing the reader must see the couple interact, develop feelings and reveal true selves. Mills & Boon insist that the hero and heroine cannot be parted physically, meeting two or three times a chapter in expensive locations to gaze upon one another’s beauty and marvel at one another’s intelligence, wit and kindness. Without credible antagonism or human frailty the books end up as an interminable succession of inevitability delays.
To conclude Stace relies on what many romantics will have expected from the beginning. ‘Heteronormative, matrimonial ideals are somewhat outdated.’ Nothing says your characters lived happily until death quite like marriage and procreation, except perhaps saying they lived happily until death. Nevertheless, until the majority of humanity stop with heterosexual, committed relationships publishers will continue pushing conservative values that have remained unchallenged for centuries. As for describing intimacy, ‘Sex scenes can feel cringe-worthy or wrong, because everyone’s sexual response is different.’ This is a subjective view of subjectivity. In the hundreds of thousands of sex scenes that appear in every romance novel an understanding of sensuality should materialise, suggesting that humans are animals and all of them are essentially the same. Still, there are worrying elements to these scenes, as Stace points out. ‘In romance we’re fed this idea that the way a woman looks to a man is the most important thing in the sex act. Her sexual response depends on the approval of a man.’
The article goes on to criticise an example told in third person but from the man’s perspective for the cheesy, pandering way the virginal heroine is represented by the author and the hero. Of course, Stace could have picked numerous scenes from any number of novels where the sex is described from the heroine’s point of view had she any inclination to read them. These would have shown the other four senses all receiving a mention, although not many would have portrayed women as sexual beings with their own desires and confidence. Lynley Stace makes a handful of valid arguments, as well as several that do not hold up to close examination, but those who do not enjoy Romance Fiction and do not read it are not required to justify why. There are plenty of Bewildered Hearts, such as Bewildered Heart, who read a great many titles, research the subject thoroughly and hate with an overabundance of information to back them up. Disinterested critics who believe Elizabeth and Darcy made a mistake in marrying should leave the rejection of Romance to the fans of the genre who have worked hard to earn their bitter cynicism.
