(The author recognises that the phenomenon discussed below is not, in fact, limited to people who are married and in love. I’ll get to marriage in romance novels some other time.)

[TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of infertility and failed pregnancies below.]

[SPOILER WARNING: This piece discusses happenings from the first and third episodes of the new season of Doctor Who, as well as containing mild spoilers for Game Of Thrones.]

Last time on Hopeless Reimantic we talked about virginal heroines, and while I wasn’t totally positive on the topic, I will give the virginal heroine this: at least most of the time, she doesn’t stay virginal throughout the book. That trope has an expiration date, if you will. This next one is actually significantly more irritating to me – partly, admittedly, because it’s outside my experience in a way that I have no particular interest in remedying, but mainly because even if I didn’t feel that way I still think I’d find the topic clumsily handled and often just shoehorned in to make the romance more…legitimate.

Not everything has to be about babies, guys. Image by the illustrious Kate Beaton (http://www.harkavagrant.com), shirt by topatoco.

That’s right, folks: I’m talking about babies. Well, in brief. I suppose more accurately (and more vaguely) what I’m talking about is parenthood.

I suppose putting this column in second is kind of cheating, because it jumps to the end of the standard romance novel narrative – or, depending on how much edginess we’re going for, about three-quarters of the way through – and for that I apologise, but I promise you that the baby trope is all-pervasive enough that it’s not going  to matter. An Extremely Standard Romance Novel, you see, goes something like this:

1. [Play]boy meets [virgin] girl
2. They deny their attraction to one another for a while (usually this consists of Mr Man insisting that our heroine is Just Like All Other Women and although she makes his dick hard he could never actually love her, and our heroine protesting any kind of attraction to Mr Man at all)
3. Inevitably, sex.
4. A brief honeymoon period, usually compounded by more sex
5. Some kind of big misunderstanding that breaks them apart [at this point the heroine may or may not discover that she is pregnant]
6. Reunion. Marriage. BABIES.

The story outlined above is common to a lot of romance novels (including our old friend from last time, Bought: Destitute Yet Defiant) but it is by no means the only sprog-imbued narrative out there in Romancelandia. Nor is it even the most baby-heavy. A quick search on Dear Author for “babies” turned up eight pages of hits and reminded me that Dear Author actually has a tag for “secret baby” plotlines – yes, they exist, and they’re common enough that they get their own category on review sites. These stories might start out with two separated lovers meeting again after many years – but wait! She has a child! The fact that it’s his child is blindingly obvious throughout, but often only revealed at the very end! What could be more romantic?

A nicely infuriating example of this trope on my Kindle is a little tale called Emergency: Wife Lost and Found – a Mills&Boon Medical Romance by Carol Marinelli that, to be fair, I have to admit was less awful upon revisitation than I remember it being the first time around. It’s a reunion tale between two doctors who met in medical school and married young because – shockingly – they got pregnant, but whose marriage then fell apart upon the loss of the baby.

This is not, to be clear, in itself a storyline I take issue with. The loss of a child is a devastating one, and especially to a couple who married essentially because of the child (there are some token protests that it would have happened anyway because they were in Real True Love, but still) – I can only imagine the effects of that on their relationship. It’s no wonder they divorced, and believeable that their meeting again after so long would be fraught with emotional tension (and I don’t wanna go into the whole thing, but there’s a lot of emotional tension for their meeting to be fraught with). And it’s understandable that some of the tension between them also comes from Lorna, the heroine, having since discovered that due to endometriosis she’s unlikely to carry another pregnancy to term. I would actually have been extremely interested in a book that had dealt with those issues – that explored the characters coming to term with Lorna’s infertility, and how that might have changed or strengthened their relationship.

The thing is, the book doesn’t actually deal with any of those issues. It skates over them briefly, and then True Love Sex happens, and Lorna…gets pregnant. Magically. And by the book’s epilogue, she has another child on the way, and her happiness is complete. See, true love fixed her!

Secret babies and miracle pregnancies are not limited to contemporary romance fiction, either, although it’s only here that the total absence (or extremely brief, give-it-one-sentence-and-handwave-it-away mentions of) abortion, adoption (either way!) and foster care are so totally and thoroughly angering. Historicals often feature a heroine whose dark secret is that, for whatever reason, she thinks she can’t have children but then, inexplicably, has at least one child by the end of the book; the widow whose husband never gave her children, but who then meets the hero and gets pregnant so fast you’d think they had some sort of corresponding velcro arrangement, is a particularly common one. Because that is the miracle that true love can provide.

True love also, incidentally, provides the incentive for wanting the kids in the first place in roughly half of these cases – there are quite a lot of cases of heroines (and heroes, to be fair) for whom a family was always endgame, but also a depressing number of heroines who get pregnant, having never wanted or thought about children before, and are midway through a totally justified freakout when they realise that the baby must be Mr Man’s and melt into a puddle of warm, maternal goo and aren’t scared anymore. And don’t get me started on the reaction some heroes have to this. I distinctly remember a book I read a few months ago – it was called Momentary Marriage, one of those “we’ll just marry for a year or so to help us both out of a jam that could totally not be solved any other way!” storylines – and the hero of our tale not only makes plans to impregnate the heroine without her knowledge so that she’ll stay with him, but spends about half a page getting turned on at the idea. If art does imitate life, there are a lot more pregnancy fetishists out there than you’d expect. All I’m sayin’.

The thing is, while this trope may be extremely common in romance novels – overwhelmingly, nauseatingly common, even – it isn’t confined to them. Remember Asylum of the Daleks, the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who? That one that came out a few weeks ago? Remember Rory and Amy’s Fifty Seconds Of Conflict, when he shouts at her for leaving him and her response is WELL YOU WANTED CHILDREN AND I CAN’T HAVE THEM, SO I GAVE YOU UP RATHER THAN ACTUALLY TRY TO HAVE A CONVERSATION ABOUT THIS? Yeah. Because in the UK in 2012, apparently adoption doesn’t exist, and neither does speaking to your partner. Later on in the series we have Mad Scientist Alien, who looks at Amy and can immediately tell that she’s had children because she is sad and fierce and caring, as if motherhood is the only experience that could confer these characteristics. Genre-hopping a bit to Game of Thrones, we have Daenerys Targaryen, who becomes a mother to her people because she’s never going to have children who aren’t dragons. (Which I personally don’t see the problem with. I would much rather have dragon-babies than baby-babies, although I suppose feeding them would be something of a negotiation.) And these are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head.

I appreciate that a lot of people do want children. I appreciate that some would even go so far as to say that their children are the best things in their lives, and that is valid and legitimate and completely worthy of representation in fiction. In spite of all that, though,  as you may be able to tell, I have extremely little patience with this trope, and I’m going to try and explain why without sputtering too incoherently. Bear with me a moment.

Okay.

Okay.

First of all, I have a huge problem with motherhood being portrayed as the only really worthwhile thing a woman can aspire to. Motherhood is worthwhile, and it is important, and it deserves to be venerated and respected. But I object to the idea that it is the only thing that is worthwhile and important and worthy of veneration and respect. This elevation to the exclusion of all other things is not, as I’m not the first person to point out, extended to fatherhood, either – a man who never has children may well have been doing other, equally important, things, whereas a woman who’s never had children is often seen as an object of either pity or scorn.

So far, it seems that the only wish-fulfilment medium aimed specifically at women overwhelmingly portrays babies as the reward a good woman gets for being a good person and a good lover and without which no other goodness is really, truly good. Where does that leave women who have real-life style infertility – the kind that isn’t fixed by falling in lasting love – or those who just never had that wish in the first place?

And that brings me to my next point. I’d like everyone to bear in mind, by the way, that I say this next part as a person who doesn’t actually like children that much. I’ve definitely mellowed towards them as I’ve grown older – meeting some actually nice ones that I wasn’t forced to hang out with because I was presenting female at the time has helped – but I’m not a particular fan. They’re okay; I might want my own someday, but right now I’m leaning towards not. (That’s right, Friend Of My Friend’s Family Who Wrote Me That Poem About How Not Having Kids Is A Waste Of My Genes Five Years Ago¹ – the answer’s still no.)

Let’s review, shall we? So far this segment we’ve talked about pregnancy, secret pregnancy, miracle pregnancy, infertility, abortion, adoption and the concept of motherhood.

What have we not – really – talked about?

Any actual babies.

I do understand that it can be difficult to write about the children in child-plotlines themselves, especially if the story in question is actually supposed to be focused on relationships between adults. But there’s a pretty big difference between “this character is important but doesn’t really do much beyond eat and cry and poop, so I can’t write too much about them” and “we need something important in this story! What’s important to women? BABIES! Let’s put some babies in here”.

I suppose my overwhelming thought is that if it’s so difficult to write about pregnancies or children in a well-rounded way that makes them more than plot devices (or Plot Moppets, as the good folk over at Smart Bitches refer to them) writers should maybe think more carefully about including a pregnancy storyline, and how to treat it if they do decide to put one in (as, er, it were). Babies are the tiny humans that shape the future of our world. They deserve more respect than that.

That’s it for today! Next time on Hopeless Reimantic…either marriage or playboy heroes, I haven’t decided yet.

See you then!

• Kate Beaton’s “Shut Up About Babies” shirt available here.

1. True freaking story.

Design by Faber, Illustration Neil Gower

It’s difficult not to take this book as something of a betrayal. Not of principles or community, but of me personally, and the fact that I’ve always admired P.D. James as someone who really understood Jane Austen. (By which I mean, agreed with me. Naturally.) When I was an undergraduate I went to see P.D. James speak about detective fiction, and she said one of the most brilliant things I have ever heard anyone say about literature. She declared calmly that Austen’s Emma was the most perfect detective novel in the English language. It gave the reader all the information, she argued, in a perfectly fair way and just let them come to exactly the wrong conclusion for themselves. At the twist, you can look back and see where you went wrong, and how obvious the answer was if you’d only thought it through. And then you can read the novel again, enjoying your awareness of the double tracks the story moves along – knowing about the other story half-submerged in the surface narrative, and switching your attention between them when they come into contact.

I loved this statement so much because it showed a respect for Austen as an artist, and a recognition that her works are deliberately crafted and not simply cleverly observed portraits from life or timeless insights into human nature. They’re literary artefacts with their own integrity and internal structures, something which often gets missed by both detractors and enthusiasts. The former castigate her for not including economics, the Napoleonic Wars or shifting models of gender relations, because no one ever stands up in an Austen novel and tells everyone how worried they are about economics, the Napoleonic Wars or shifting models of gender relations. This is treating her like a newspaper, not a novelist, as if it was Austen’s duty to set down the events of the day in order of importance, and by not explicitly tackling the aftermath of the 1789 revolution she has relegated herself to the Lifestyle supplement.

In order to see the economics and politics in the novels, you have to first take them seriously as works of art whose stories and shapes have some sort of weight, not naive diary columns to be discarded if they don’t trumpet their opinions on current affairs. At which point you notice that the legal arrangements which tie up Mr Bennett’s estate in Pride and Prejudice prevent his daughters from inheriting it, meaning that their survival is dependent upon marrying relatively soon, particularly as the eligible young officers of the militia may be posted to another camp at any time. The entire Lydia-Wickham subplot takes place at the intersection between the legal instruments of primogeniture and the troop movements of the Napoleonic Campaigns. But we can only see this if we stop reading the novels as a transparent window onto the period they were written in, and respect them as novels whose internal structures give them meaning.

Design by Headlinel, Illustration Roxanna Bikadoroff

Exactly the same mistake is made in the opposite direction, I think, by Austen enthusiasts and the outlets of the Dating-Industrial-Complex. The Jane Austen Dating School, Jane Austen’s Guide to Romance: The Regency Rules, The Jane Austen Guide to Living Happily Ever After and all the rest seem to assume that the value of these novels about courtship in the Regency lies in how similar they might be to courtship in the second Elizabethan era. The blurb of one suggests that “we might have just lost touch with the fundamental rules” of dating, and offers “the only relationship guide based on stories that really have stood the test of time…full of concrete advice and wise strategies that illustrate how honesty, self-awareness and forthrightness do win the right man in the end and weed out the losers, playboys and toxic flirts.” For this attitude, Austen was the Monet of prose fiction – only an eye, but my God, what an eye. The novels can offer us nothing but a meticulous copy of reality, which we can superimpose over our own lives and shuffle around the pieces so they match. It lacks a sense that the works might not be porous and amorphous, that we can’t simply dip in and haul up a ladle full of “Austen”, but might have to investigate where that particular ladleful came from and what relation it bore to the bucketful around it. For the dating guides, the stories lack individual integrity and shape, they can just be copied and printed across any surface like a Cath Kidston pattern.

Both attitudes are obviously, as that Tumblr would say, PROBLEMATIC. The first tends to deny that women writers writing about women’s lives can have any significance beyond their literal content. It’s the attitude that provides us with a women’s supplement in newspapers because everything else in the paper is assumed to pertain to men. It reinforces the supposed distinction between a private female sphere, in which dating and clothes are the ruling topics, and a male public sphere where politics and economics takes place. The second underpins the male/female spheres in a slightly different way, encouraging us to think that one of the great female writers is mostly interesting because of what she can tell us about Catching A Man. It takes Austen’s insights into the inequalities of social life and the power imbalances between the genders, and calcifies those inequalities as the fundamental “rules” of dating. More generally, the lack of concern for the specific form of the works seem to risk playing into a long-standing tradition in Western thinking to associate men with “form” and women with “content”. I may be over-reading that last point, but the line from Plato to Augustine to critiques of women’s fiction as interchangeable “slush” provides a definite context for thinking about attitudes to Austen which assume her writing is an undifferentiated and unstructured mass.

P.D. James seemed to be standing out against both these approaches, insisting that books like Emma or Sense and Sensibility deserved respect as consciously crafted artefacts, whose meanings couldn’t be reduced to their surface in either direction. Along with that came a respect for the distinction between “Jane Austen’s world” and the books which Austen wrote – that the novels were neither a photographic copy of Regency life, not were they series of episodes in a world-building project which could be placed end-to-end to produce a fictional universe across which characters could wander. On the contrary, each one had its own concerns and perspective.

Or so I thought. When she wrote Death Comes To Pemberley it seemed that James had displayed the same attitude as the dating guides and the Austen pastiche industry: that her novels could be regarded as creating “Austenworld”, which anyone could stroll in and out of at will. Slightly ironically, it was her comments about Emma as the most perfect detective novel in the language which made me think that writing an actual detective novel set in Pemberley demonstrated a cavalier disdain for the integrity and form of Pride and Prejudice.

• In Part II I’ll discuss Death Comes to Pemberley itself, and the apparently patronising way it treats feminism (someone really does have a speech to the effect of “But have you not heard of a book which has been written by one Wollstonecraft?”) Then, putting my own massive sulk aside, I’ll explore the possibility that the problems are not with the novel’s attitude to feminism, but its attitude to history.
• EDIT: Read Part II of this post!

In the meantime, here’re some relevant links, some of which throw the baton to you. If you’re feeling like revolting, now’s the time…

• Block The Bridge, Block The Bill, 9th October: “On Sunday October 9th, join UK Uncut on Westminster Bridge and help block the bill. On one side of Westminster Bridge is Parliament. On 7th September, MPs in the Commons voted for the end of the NHS as we know it. On the opposite side of the bridge is St Thomas’ Hospital, one of Britain’s oldest medical institutions. If the bill passes, hospitals like St Thomas’ will be sold to private corporations, the staff put on private payrolls and beds given over to private patients. Despite the government’s lies, this bill represents the wholesale privatization of the NHS and, with it, the destruction of the dream of comprehensive healthcare provided equally to all. We will not let a coalition of millionaire politicians and private health lobbyists destroy our NHS. Be on Westminster Bridge for 1pm on October 9th and together let’s block this bill from getting to our hospitals.”

  I work at one of the hospitals UKUncut are talking about. It looks no better from the inside. We’re having our birthday party < 48 hours before (you're totally invited! see below!), but I will be hauling myself out of bed for this. Readers, join Team BadRep as we revolt against both Torygeddon and our inevitable shared hangover in one giant last stand.

• TUC March For The Alternative: 2nd October
• All Out: our new favourite campaign. “We are organizing online and on the ground to build a world where every person can live freely and be embraced for who they are. Gay, lesbian, bi, transgender or straight, we need you to go All Out to build this historic movement for equality.” The page on Alice N’Kom, Cameroonian attorney and activist, is particularly inspiring: “I’m 66, and in ten years of defending LGBT people in Cameroon, it has never been this bad.”
• WomanKind Worldwide’s Overseas Aid Mythbuster: “Print off this page, put it in your bag and next time you hear someone complain about the UK giving money overseas challenge them with the facts.”
• Say Yes to Gay YA: authors Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith on young adult fiction and sexuality: “The overwhelming white straightness of the YA sf and fantasy sections may have little to do with what authors are writing, or even with what editors accept. Perhaps solid manuscripts with LGBTQ protagonists rarely get into mainstream editors’ hands at all, because they are been rejected by agents before the editors see them. How many published novels with a straight white heroine and a lesbian or black or disabled best friend once had those roles reversed, before an agent demanded a change? This does not make for better novels. Nor does it make for a better world.”
• COME TO OUR BIRTHDAY PARTY ON OCTOBER 7! We wanna meet you! Find out more and RSVP here!