Over the years, I've taken a look at criticism leveled at romance. For example, people couldn't wait to pile the nasty notes all over the Twilight series. In response, I created a serious of articles on the phenomena and this was one of them.
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Today, I'm going swipe ideas from one of my favorite books about romance -
Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, edited by
Jayne Ann Krentz.Several
themes emerge from the essays in this book. First is the one discussed a
couple of days ago: Twilight and other romances are fantasies. To quote
Krentz's introduction:
[T]he readers are no more
confused about this fact, nor any more likely to use their reading as a
substitute for action in the real world , than readers of [Robert]
Ludlum, [Robert] Parker, [Dick] Frances, and [Anne] McCaffrey. (p. 5)
'Nuff said.
The
second theme of the book is a shameless song of female empowerment. In
a romance, the woman lives. How many times do women die in male
action movies because she found a man attractive and acted on it? How
many great female characters in literature are punished for daring to
act on her own ideas?
Not only do the women live, all of them win. Again, Krentz:
With
courage, intelligence, and gentleness, she brings the most dangerous
creature on earth, the human male, to his knees. More than that, she
forces him to acknowledge her power as a woman.
A cursory glance at the statistics of the causes of female death reveal the radical nature of these ideas.
Finally,
for me, the most outrageous theme of romance (and Twilight) is the
discussion of Male and Female. Long before Twilight came out, Laura
Kinsale discussed the real truth of romance.
[For] a
woman, a romance may be a working-through of her own interior conflicts
and passions, her own 'maleness' if you will, that resists and resists
giving in to what is desired about all, and yet feared about all, and
then, after the decisive climax. arrives at a resolution, a choice that
carries with it the relief and pleasure of internal harmony. (p. 39)
Long before Edward came along, Linda Barlow described the romantic hero. Sound familiar?
Dark
and brooding, writhing inside with all the residual anguish of his
shadowed past, world-weary and cynical, quick-tempered and prone to fits
of guilt and depression. He is strong, virile, powerful, and lost.
Adept at many things that carry with them the respect and admiration of
the world (especially the world of other males), he is not fully
competent in the arena in which women excel- the arena of his emotions,
which are violently out of control.
Is this the sort of woman
most women want? Of course not....[A]lmost from the beginning, I
identified with the hero. I saw him as Self, not Other. And I dimly
recognized him as one of the archetypical figures in my own inner
landscape.
The romantic hero is not the
feminine ideal of what a man should be. The romantic hero, in fact, is
not a man at all. He is a split-off portion of the heroine's own psyche
which will be reintegrated at the end of the book. (p. 49)
This
is why Twilight is popular. We are endlessly attempting to claim and
integrate our power. It's not about falling in love with the endless
git that is Edward.
It is about understanding the parts of ourselves that are dark, angry, and dangerous.
