(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.

“You were a virgin, Jess.”

“Yes.” This time she didn’t deny it. “And the reason I was still a virgin was because you’re the only man I’ve ever wanted. I was never interested in anyone else. Even when I thought I hated you, I still didn’t want anyone else.”

– Bought: Destitute Yet Defiant, Sarah Morgan (Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd, 2010)

I pretty much picked that first reference at random. Bought was the first Mills & Boon I ever actually purchased (I say purchased; at the time of writing it was still a free download on Amazon) and it was absolutely everything I thought a contemporary romance would be, so it holds a special, slightly nauseated place in my heart. It was a lucky choice, though, because a great deal of what I want to say about this trope is contained in this book.

My first romance novel. I promise it’s cheesy in a whole different way than it looks.

There’s a lot of – entirely justifiable – outrage over how prevalent the virgin heroine is, even today. I am not going to go into the whole problematic mess that is the idea that a woman’s ability to love truly and purely is somehow connected to her physical “purity”, or the idea that a woman can only give herself fully to a lover – as if that’s a healthy focal point for a relationship anyway – if she’s unclaimed territory when the book begins, so to speak. (You would not believe how many romances I’ve beat myself over the head with in which the hero cries “I can’t take this anymore! I don’t care if you were a dirty slutty hobag before we fell in love! I love you anyway! …wait, you were a virgin? OH THANK GOD YOU BELONG ONLY TO ME NOW”.)

This’d be pretty much the standard response to non-virgins in many romance novels. Source: Smart Bitches Trashy Books, link at end of post

Nor am I going to touch on the huge double standard that is the the common pairing of the virginal heroine with the Virile Manly Man, who has explored delightful bedroom adventures with many a lady fair – but still takes the heroine’s virginity as proof that she’s someone special. (But of course has nevertheless been totally respectful of all of his previous partners. Of course.) I may write about them sometime, but this is an overview with a word limit, so I’ll put some further reading links at the bottom of the post and we can call it even for now.

She spans all genres, does the virginal heroine (insert your own pun here. Yes, I said insert. No, I didn’t mean – look, just go and sit in the corner, okay?), and some are easier to deal with than others. The historical probably has the most easily explicable virgin heroine of all; it’s history! We know what women were like in history! Virgins were the most highly prized of all the ladies, weren’t they? Non-virgins were cast out and shunned and other antisocial-type punishments as well, and they would never marry, so any heroine worth her salt is going to have to be a virgin, or she’s not going to be good enough for the hero. Duh. It’s historical accuracy! Everybody’s actions always correspond perfectly with prevalent attitudes of the time, didn’t you know that? The paranormal and fantasy genres get away with it pretty easily as well, often with some kind of mystical bond that predestines the two central characters for one another – although that doesn’t necessarily preclude one of the characters having had sexual relations beforehand. Sound like a contradiction? I don’t think it is – more on that in a moment.

Which brings me neatly to the virgin heroine who gives me the most trouble; the contemporary one. This lady can be anyone, you guys. She’s a businesswoman or a hairdresser or a secretary or a recluse. She’s shy, or she’s loud and brash. But she always has this part of her that is…untouched, as it were, and I’ve seen authors who will write themselves around some pretty amazing corners to keep that so. She’s never found the right guy. She’s never experienced sexual desire before, or if she has it’s been fleeting or fumbling enough to ignore – this is overwhelmingly common. Which brings me back to Bought, with its heroine who waited through an entire book for a hero she was never even really sure she wanted, because the true and deep love she felt for him superceded all other possible emotional connections.

In some ways, it’s not just the heroine who gets this. A discussion on I (Heart) Presents brought me this, from an interview with romance author Julia James:

I must say, I’ve done this several times, when the hero, realising the heroine is a virgin, goes to great lengths to ensure her first experience is really special, and, of course, in doing so, makes it really special for himself as well. In a way, she gives him her physical virginity, and in exchange he gives her his emotional virginity.
[Source]

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has its own epithet for the hero’s “emotional virginity”; they call it his coming into contact with the Magic Hoo-Hah. (The hero’s counterpart for this is the Mighty Wang, if anyone was interested.) The principle is pretty much the same; somehow, during sex, the hero and heroine exchange a piece of each other that nobody’s ever seen or touched before. And, because of the underpinning idea that men are physical creatures where women are emotional ones, that usually translates to the heroine being physically untouched before she meets the hero, and nobody ever having touched His Heart¹.

In a lot of ways it is this, more than a heroine’s physical virginity, that worries me about the trope as a whole. Because it’s been occurring to me more and more often than the virginal heroine does not necessarily need to be a virgin, per se; the second most commonly occurring version of this trope that I’ve read, usually in contemporaries, is one in which the heroine has had sex. Not, in most cases, often – maybe once or twice, and always with the man she fancied herself in love with before she met the hero. But she didn’t really enjoy it; it was uncomfortable or even painful, and after that relationship ended she never really thought of doing it again, and she figured she’d never really understand what about it was so much fun.

Even LGBT romance has its own version of this, in the form of the straight-person-turned-gay (rarely if ever is there a story of a straight person turning bi), who had sex – even lots of sex! – with the opposite gender, but never really experienced attraction before meeting their same-sex true love. Which is a plausible enough narrative, in fairness, but loses something in that the true love in question tends to be the only person our straight-turned-gay hero/ine experiences any kind of attraction towards at all.

I’ve seen justifications of this, and I can see why it’s popular. If romance is fantasy-fodder, what creates a more perfect fantasy than two people exploring new emotional ground together so that you, the reader, can vicariously experience all of that awe-struck joy and wonder? You only fall in love for the first time once, after all, and this creates a world in which the first time you experience this all-consuming emotion is also the only time. You wander into this amazing place, all innocence, and you are thrilled and delighted – and then you never have to leave again. What could be more perfect than that?

Okay, who here has witnessed somebody they’re close to fall in love for the second (or third or fourth) time? And – and I’m aware that not everybody does this – who’s also seen them perform this amazing feat of selective memory, where suddenly their past relationships no longer really “count”? Oh, sure, they’ll say, we had some good times, it was fun while it lasted, but it was never really all that – I always knew something was missing. And now I’ve found it, because this – this – is the real thing.

Who’s seen that repeated over and over again through a cycle of partners?

Because watching that happen? That’s the kind of feeling this trope gives me. I want to be happy that this kind of “mine is a love that I’ve never yet loved” tabula rasa brings happiness to people, but – I can’t. It kind of depresses me, if I’m honest. I’m more a believer in there being A One (or more than one One!) than there being The One, but I wasn’t always, and even when I wasn’t I’ve always kind of thought – so what if somebody’s not The One? Do they have to be secondhand? Even in Fantasyland, is it so important that every single other relationship a person has before they meet The One be denigrated like this? Even stories about a person loving again after they’ve lost a partner to death suffer from this kind of “it was never like this before, this person is touching a part of me that has never been touched” thing, bar a very rare few.

There are exceptions to this, of course. I’m desperate to get my hands on A Gentleman Undone by Cecilia Grant, which unfortunately is only out in print, but features a courtesan heroine who actually enjoys sex, even before she meets the hero. I recently read a pretty damned excellent book by Molly O’Keefe called Can’t Buy Me Love, whose hero and heroine are many things, but untouched ain’t one. In LGBT-ish fiction, and incidentally also one of the “very rare few” widower-whose-previous-relationship-meant-quite-a-bloody-lot books, Deirdre Knight’s Butterfly Tattoo has two people loving again without discounting their prior experience. And the hero’s bisexual. Right on.

So that’s Virginal (Emotionally and Physically) Heroines (with the occasional Hero). Next up, I…haven’t actually decided what I’m covering yet! Enjoy the mystery.

Further reading:

• Recap: Virgin Heroines in Harlequin Presents
• Virginity as Shorthand: the virgin and the playboy strike again (ClitLit)
  
• Virginity Cliches In Romance (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books)

1. Anybody ever saying this sentence out loud is required by law to finish it up with a single emo tear.

I’ve been weirdly obsessed with romance novels for about the past two years. I read my first one a lot longer ago than that – I abducted and read, over a period of about three weeks, a romance with a name I can’t remember about a Japanese lady falling in love with an American man just after World War II during my breaks in volunteering at a nursing home – but I didn’t really think all that much about them for a while afterwards. Then I stumbled upon Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and started following it because, damn, those ladies are hilarious, and from there started following Dear Author as well, who focus on snark a little less (although they can also be pretty funny) but who are nevertheless thoughtful and insightful in their reviews. For a long time, I was an avid follower of the romance industry without ever actually having picked up more than two romances.

And then I got a Kindle for Christmas.

You guys, for the reluctant obsessive, ebook readers are poison in super-convenient button-clicky packaging. Thanks to its extreme user-friendliness and the large number of freebooks available on the Amazon website (in case anybody is worried that I’m being paid for advertising, the wireless keeps breaking and sometimes the thing refuses to charge) I have something like one hundred romance novels on my Kindle now – a conservative estimate, not taking into account non-category romances and books debatably qualified for the title. I can’t stop reading them, and I can’t stop talking about them; I am fascinated by romance novels, in spite of the fact that more often than not picking one up guarantees that I will spend half the book with my jaw clenched to the point of pain. It’s a guilty pleasure, if by “pleasure” you mean “bafflement-inducing” and “guilty” you mean “thing that I am liable to be judged for”.

So what brings me to all the jaw-clenching? Well, I’ve been a reader ever since I was a kid – I’ve tried pretty much every genre of fiction, from fantasy to crime to sci-fi to sci-fi fantasy crime – and category romance is, without question, the most formulaic genre I have ever come across. It’s baffling. I mean, every genre has its stock characters and tropes, but while there are things that crop up a lot in, say, fantasy, as far as I can see the only thing really required to write a fantasy novel is the strong enough conviction that what you’re writing is fantasy. Write a category romance, and your story is pretty much plotted out for you. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the submission guidelines for Mills and Boon Modern Romance (the UK version of Harlequin Presents):

Readers are whisked away to exclusive jet-set locations…When the hero strides into the story he’s a powerful, ruthless man who knows exactly what – and who – he wants and he isn’t used to taking no for an answer! Yet he has depth and integrity, and he will do anything to make the heroine his. Though she may be shy and vulnerable, she’s also plucky and determined to challenge his arrogant pursuit.

Modern Romance explores emotional themes that are universal. These should be played out as part of highly-charged conflicts that are underpinned by blistering sexual anticipation and released as passionate lovemaking…

Got that? So, your story has to be somewhere “exclusive and jet-set” (what does “jet-set” actually mean in this context? I sort of expect the entire thing to be set in the Business Class lounge at Stansted) and your hero needs to be a Romance Novel Hero, you know, hot and alpha and, well, willing to be kind of creepy if he thinks it’ll help. (Bonus points if he’s so manly that his manliness bursts out of the cover – for reference, please see the pictured-below edition of The Very Virile Viking, one of the most beautifully alliteratively-titled works of romance that I have ever come across.) And your heroine needs to challenge him but also be vulnerable to him. And they need to clash and eventually express that clash through a lot of hot sex.

Yes, there are a lot of variations you can play out on that theme – which I suspect is why publishers like Mills and Boon are a long way away from getting stale – but ultimately this frame is pretty limiting, and it makes it easier to see why romance novels are stereotyped as all the same. And this moulding of the romance novel storyline doesn’t stop with the publishing guidelines; the romance novel review websites I follow do downgrade books that fail to deliver on agreed-upon “romance trademarks”, although in fairness the only one that seems to need strict adherence is that of the HEA (that’s Happily Ever After, to those of you who use their time much more wisely than I do). Even that strikes me as strange, because while I can understand it as a trend – if, as common theory purports, romance novels are wish fulfilment fantasies, why wouldn’t they have a happy ending? – I can’t wrap my head around it as the thing which makes a romance novel romantic. More on that later.

Which brings me, finally, to this: Why do I think it useful to subject romance novels to feminist analysis? Aren’t they just, as a friend of mine once put it, “granny porn”? Is there any mileage in analysing such an outdated form of trashy entertainment from a feminist perspective?

I obviously think so, or I wouldn’t be writing this. And here’s why: most romance novel writers are women, writing for a female audience. I’ve read some (very good) romance novels written by men geared towards women, but only a very few, and they tend to focus on gay male couplings – in other words, not part of the main body of mainstream romance publishing. (LGBT people in romance novels is a whole ‘nother article.) More troubling is that most of the flaws and foibles of romance tropes that persist even today – virginal women, marriage and babies or nothing, and the time-honoured classic of “forced seduction” – are overwhelmingly shrugged off as “it’s just wish fulfilment”.

Is it?

As a lifelong avid reader, I’m no stranger to escaping into a good book. And I have no doubt that there are people out there who don’t really want a relationship in which the man takes charge, sweeps the lady off her feet, and loves her with a love that’s never been loved before until her resolve melts into baby-making funtimes, but can still get into a traditional romance plotline just for kicks. But is this still (or has it ever been) so overpoweringly The Female Fantasy that it’s the go-to, the default, the only world a romance fan wants to escape into? Why are these elements so built into “women’s” fiction? And what, in the end, does that tell us about the cultural narrative that has been built around us?

Those are the questions I want to answer; they’re the main thing going around in my head every time I pick up a new romance, and they are what keeps me reading whenever I finish one that has made me want to drill a hole through my skull. (Which isn’t all of them! Some are quite good. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about them.)

To get us started, though, over the next few weeks I’ll be doing a rundown of what I think are the five most central tropes or stock characters in romance novels. It’s going to be difficult to whittle the list down that far, but I’ll power through it. Honest. I don’t really need this university education.

Over the course of the series, I’ll look at the trope itself, where, when and how it shows up in different genres, and how I think it’s been adapted for the modern romance novel, because if there’s another thing that seems to be true of romance? It’s that they never throw anything away. I…am no one to judge on that, as anybody who’s seen my living space will be able to attest, but there’s an impressive level of trope-hoarding that goes on around here, and I’m going to show you why. I’ll also be probing a bit into what that means for romance storylines as a whole.

So stay tuned for Instalment One, which is going to be the aforementioned Virginal Heroine! Are you excited? I’m excited.

See you then!

• Rei (not to be confused with Rai, who writes our Gamer Diary!) is a small but strident university student who is from London but primarily based in Cambridgeshire, except for when she lives in Japan. She is reluctantly obsessed with romance novels, and is starting to think that it is they who are addicted to her; she also likes general reading, general writing, martial arts and acting in pantomimes. In her spare time, she tries to come up with things to do in her spare time. She is often spotted hanging around the tea-and-coffee-making facilities, looking impatient. And we are very pleased and proud to welcome her to Team BadRep!