Paranormal Romance:  Secrets of the Female Fantastic

Fifty-four percent of paperback fiction sold is romance fiction,[i] and paranormal romance—that is, romance including any element beyond the range of scientific explanation, like ghosts or time travel—rivals and often surpasses in popularity fantasy novels containing similar elements.   Beyond its popularity, however, are more reasons this genre bears close examination.   Paranormal romances carry traits of all romance fiction:  texts that appear to shift in relation to different audiences, an oddly collective authorship, and formulae that allow for safe exploration of gender “secrets.”   Additionally, paranormal romances serve particular functions for readers, functions which critics, myself included, have found disturbing.  Romance fiction in general offers a rich, subtle, and safe  portrayal of the complex state of gender relations at the turn of the millenium.  Paranormal romance in particular, because it is uniquely responsive to audience needs and desires, tells us more about women’s needs, feelings, and fantasies than any other genre of the fantastic.

            The few literary critics who have examined paranormal romance have perceived it as regressive and antifeminist.  Sandra Booth looked at various 1990s paranormals and found them to reinforce traditional gender roles.  Diane Calhoun-French examined four time-travel novels from the late 80s and early 90s and found a disturbing valorization of the prefeminist past, particularly in the books’ apparent celebration of sexual violence.  When I began research for this paper, my intention was to prove both of these noteworthy scholars wrong, or at least outdated; this approach fit both my intuitive response to contemporary paranormals and the critical approach I learned in graduate school.   I intended to prove that contemporary paranormals are in fact empowering to women, an approach that came into vogue with the 1997 issue of Paradoxa entitled “Where’s Love Gone?”  However, I soon found myself confused.  Yes, some of the current novels seemed highly empowering, portraying women as heroic, strong, and self-sufficient; however, some still fit Booth & Calhoun-French’s view, and some appeared to empower women while subtly undermining them.  It became clear that this analysis was not going to be as easy as I thought.  Disturbances marred the smooth surfaces of both views.

Critical Schizophrenia[ii]

            My own schizophrenic view of romance fiction stems from my multiple relationships to it.  Since I discovered Gone With the Wind in third grade and got permission to read it, I have been an unabashed fan of the genre.  Years later, when budget cuts threatened my precarious graduate stipend, I wrote a romance novel which appeared under a pseudonym at the same time I struggled—successfully—to write my dissertation.  (It was impossible not to compare the two readerships, roughly 80,000:8.)  I also teach courses on romance and write academically about it, so at times I approach it as a scholar of popular culture.  Thus, I myself have experienced romance at various times as escapism, empowerment, mood enhancement, financial lifesaver, and antifeminist tract.  I can’t take a comfortably distant view as did some of the earliest scholars in the field, nor a cheerleader role like some contemporary writers.

            As Kay Mussell reassuringly informs us, such shapeshifting is common among a new generation of writer-critics.[iii]  It’s surprising how many romance writers have Ph.D.s and have joined the scholarly debate about their genre.  In the meantime, numerous critics have “confessed” their fandom.   Critic Tania Modleski, one of the most thoughtful and interesting scholars of popular fiction, exemplifies how an individual’s views can shift over time.  In her 1982 book, Loving with a Vengeance, she demonstrates how romance fiction leads women into self-betrayal; in the 1997 “My Life as a Romance Reader,” she “confesses” and analyzes her own enjoyment of the more sadomasochistic elements of romance fiction;  and in the 1998 “My Life as a Romance Writer,” she returns to a position of concern about “the erotics of domination” (141)  and criticizes those who write “self-serving defenses of the genre, representing it as the full flowering of feminist consciousness” (134).  As critics’ vantage points shift, so too does the text itself: different readers, or the same readers at different times, experience completely different texts. 

Name that Author

              The multiple personalities of romance scholars and fans like myself has its parallel in the odd beast that is the “author” of romance fiction, for these books are a curiously-modern version of collective fiction.  First of all, they are highly formulaic.  Here I need to point out that this adjective has no negative connotations for me; sonnets and villanelles are among the most highly formulaic and highly respected and challenging literature in our language.  Writing fiction to a formula is, in my experience, at least as demanding as writing personal, expressive fiction.  I point out the formulaic element to indicate that in romance fiction as in the sonnet, the formula becomes, in part, an “author” of the text.  Romance formulae differ from earlier generic patterns in that they change based on intensive publisher research into reader preferences.  For instance, babies and children were taboo in early romances; when readership among single mothers expanded, these women enjoyed stories that reflected women falling in love amidst the complications of raising children.  The formula changed to accommodate them.  Now, if you check out the category romances in your supermarket, you’ll notice a preponderance of booties, smiling infants, and pregnant heroines. 

            Other aspects of romance fiction give it a sense of collective authorship.  These books are edited according to reader research and preferences in addition to the stylistic editing common to, for example, scholarly texts.   For instance, a romance editor suggested to me that my handyman hero should become, instead, a private investigator (very popular with audiences); another suggested adding a rare genetic condition as scientific background for a sperm-donor mix-up (another popular story line).  Thus, the romance editor too becomes an author.   Some thematically-linked series books have part of their story lines generated by editors and distributed to the authors in what is referred to as the “bible” of the series.   Finally, as scholars like Marcella Thompson and Jayne Ann Krentz have pointed out,[iv] romances reflect mythological and generic structures far older than the present-day romance industry.  My belief is that William Shakespeare is a strong precursor to the present-day Harlequin romance.  Lurking near the keyboard of the hard-working writer of a romance novel, then, are written publisher formulae, reader focus groups, editors, and powerful literary precursors.   This collective authorship suggests that the gender issues raised by romance fiction are bigger than a particular author’s psyche, reflecting instead larger cultural concerns.

Reading as Re-Reading

            Reading a romance, like reading any formulaic literature, resembles the experience of re-reading in that we interpret the words on the page based on what we know is to come.   In the mystery novel, descriptions of horrendous crimes are palatable because we know that justice will be served in the end.  In romance fiction, we watch lovers mistreating each other knowing that they will end up kind and devoted.  Indeed, it is the happy ending characteristic of all romance that enables safe exploration of the painful contradictions and uncertainties of love relationships.  If a book marketed as a romance slips through with a sad or ambiguous ending, as Radway found, readers’ negative reaction at first seems out of proportion to their unmet expectation:  since for them the happy ending defines romance, a book without one does not belong to the genre (Radway 59; 66).  When we realize the betrayal involved, however—readers felt safe probing uncomfortable, painful, and highly personal gender issues because they knew everything would come right in the end—their anger is more understandable.  Reading genre literature is like re-reading literary fiction.  What if you re-read Moby Dick and Ahab lived at the end? 

How Paranormal Romances Fit

            Paranormal romances include all of these complexities and more.  Both their definition and their reception are far from simple.  The paranormal category includes romances with time travel, ghosts, angels, extrasensory abilities, futuristic societies, and even talking Welsh Corgies.  You can find paranormal romances in the romance section of any bookstore, but they are seldom classified in a separate section.  Some have the word “paranormal” on the spine, but most do not and are simply categorized as “romance.”

            As a romance category, “paranormal” is loosely defined.  In my view, some of the best authors writing paranormal now are Emilie Richards, Justine Dare, Jayne Ann Krentz (writing as Jayne Castle), and Susan Carroll; however, there are many more doing interesting work.[v]  For the purposes of this study, I focus primarily on five novels: The Bridefinder by Susan Carroll, This Time for Keeps by Kathleen Kane, Aquamarine by Catherine Mulvany, Heaven’s Time by Susan Plunkett, and Twice Upon a Time by Emilie Richards.  These books are all published during the late 1990s, have been nominated for major romance awards, and represent a variety of paranormal types from time travel to ghost stories to futuristic romance.

Because it is a publishers’ category, “paranormal” as I use it does not adhere to definitions of genre theorists; nonetheless, looking at some genre theory sheds light on the issues of paranormal romance.  We can start with Todorov’s classic definition of the fantastic involving hesitation—the hesitation of reader and character between two worlds, the natural and the supernatural.  Todorov describes both reader and protagonist as unsure about which world’s laws explain some event he or she has just experienced. Paranormal romances usually start in that hesitating area called the fantastic, but evolve into the marvelous (where the supernatural event is accepted as supernatural rather than explained away).  However, paranormal romance readers differ from Toderov’s readers of the fantastic because they experience less hesitation:  most readers know on some level that accepting the supernatural is part of the romance formula.  In other words, this knowledge is a function of the romance itself, the “reading-as-re-reading” discussed before.  The paranormal elements are almost always “really” paranormal in this genre, usually in support of the romance plot and on the side of “true love.” 

            In Possible Worlds of the Fantastic:  The Rise of the Paranormal in Fiction, Nancy H. Traill describes the paranormal mode somewhat differently.  In it, she maintains, no opposition exists between the supernatural and natural worlds; instead,

 “the word ‘supernatural’ is merely a label for strange phenomena latent within the natural domain.  Clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition, for instance, are taken to be as physically possible as any commonplace human ability.  In the other modes, such extraordinary faculties would be properties only of supernatural entities; where humans possess such abilities, they are usually the gift of deities or demons.  In the paranormal mode, a structural change occurs:  the natural domain is enlarged and encompasses a special region accessible to those with extraordinary perceptual capacities” (17).   

This enlarging of the natural domain is common but not universal in paranormal romance.  What is universal  is the way that, in all romances, human hearts expand to extraordinary feats of love and kindness.  In essence, Traill’s definition of the paranormal shows us why this subgenre is so suited to romance fiction.

Nonetheless, publisher, bookseller, and reader response to the paranormal subgenre is odd, hard to quantify.  Some publishers experience success with the genre and frequently develop new sub-lines like Berkeley’s “Time Passages,” (a time-travel line) and “Haunting Hearts” (a ghost-centered line).  Some booksellers cannot keep paranormals on their shelves and beg publishers to produce more of this subgenre. Other publishers and booksellers refuse to buy paranormal romances.  It’s a truism among authors that paranormal elements usually make a book a “hard sell” to traditional category publishers.  So while readers of paranormals are impassioned, many romance readers avoid this type of book.. 

            In my experience and research, romances with alternate realities serve two particular functions for readers, one rather clear and logical, and one more uncomfortable and disconcerting.  It is these two levels of response to the paranormal that cause mixed critical reader responses and relate these novels to the collective analysis of gender problems subliminally performed in all romances. 

Level One:  Believable Transport and Healing

            On one level, paranormals do what all romances do, only better:  they transport the reader into an alternate, idealized, fantasy world.  I learned about the importance of such “transport” in the spring of 2000 when, with a psychologist colleague, I conducted a focus group of romance readers.[vi]  Our goal was to learn something about women’s responses and reactions to reading popular romance now, romances having changed dramatically since the days of Janice Radway’s important reader study.   While our study focused on “realistic” romances, one finding applies to the paranormal sub-genre.  The group generally liked the fantasy world of contemporary “realistic” romances, but some were jarred by its unbelievability:  what are the chances in today’s world, they wondered, that you would visit your grandfather’s remote cabin only to discover your grandfather dead and a gorgeous, available man living there?  What are the chances that a perfect partner exists?  Paranormal romances step over this plausibility barrier because what is unbelievable in our world might work in another world:  in the future, the past, on a psychic plane, or in the spirit world.  Real men aren’t perfect . . . but maybe ghosts are.[vii] 

            Most paranormal romances describe real problems in today’s world before moving into the alternate universe where such problems don’t exist or can be easily solved.  For example, in Heaven’s Time by Susan Plunkett, a female astronaut has cordoned off her emotions after an abusive childhood with foster families.  When she travels back to the  19th century, she meets a similarly-abused child and saves her, actually killing the child’s abuser.  In Aquamarine, a woman is sexually harassed and loses her job.  She takes a trip to a mysterious island where possession by a powerful female ghost gives her needed strength of character; she can then take charge of her future. 

            At this level, two things happen.  First, the reader finds the healing in the alternate world more believable, and can thus “get into” the book without the interference of disturbing questions about plausibility.  It goes further than the willing suspension of disbelief—Coleridge’s term applies to realistic as well as speculative fiction—and into the sort of special realm that Tolkein explains in his discussion of fairy stories: 

What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’  He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter.  Inside it, what he relates is “true”:  it accords with the laws of that world.  You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside (60). 

Because it is believeable, the healing “works” better than it does in a non-paranormal, realistic romance novel, leading to more reader satisfaction.

            Second, the experience in the book echoes, or  may echo, the reading experience.  Like the heroine, the reader lives in a world where things like child abuse and sexual harassment are unpleasant realities.  She escapes into another, Tolkienesque world—the world of the novel—where such problems can be solved.  It is true that the romance characters normally stay in their paranormal world, while the reader must exit it at book’s end.  However, she may emerge changed, having made her decision that a positive world filled with love (which can seem “fantastic” to the cynical realist, or delusional to the psychologist) is in fact, the world in which she wants to live.[viii]  Such responses to romance fiction are common despite readers’ simultaneous awareness that romances are “not supposed to be realistic,” as a member of our focus group said.  A particular and appealing characteristic of paranormal romances, then, is that the journey of the heroine is the journey of the reader. 

Level Two:  The Unspeakable

            At a second level, paranormal romances allow exploration of unspeakable elements of contemporary gender identity and relationship.  A few I have marked out—and there may be many more—are gender reversals, anti-feminism and masochism among women, female issues with domesticity versus professionalism,  and infantilism. 

            Because paranormal romances include characters distanced in time and space, and sometimes endowed with psychic abilities, they provide a safe place in which to explore gender role reversals: women’s aggression, power, and attraction to men who have taken on traditionally-female attributes.  Surprisingly, in contemporary time-travel novels, there are numerous “soft” heroes identified by their emotions.  For instance, the hero of Heaven’s Time runs a home for children, and is a fine nurse, cook, and seamstress.  In addition to his taking on traditionally-female activities, he is sexually passive; the heroine is the commitment-shy sexual aggressor.  In The Bridefinder, the hero’s bravado quickly dissolves into pain of an almost gothic female sort:  traumatized by a past incident in which his mother rejected him for his psychic abilities and emotionalism, he is trapped in his castle, tortured by visions and ghosts.  His salvation comes in the form of a logical, matter-of-fact heroine  who, although ostensibly weaker due to societal roles of the 1800s, actually takes charge and rebuilds the hero’s life.  Anxieties about women’s growing earning power surface in books like Kathleen Kane’s This Time for Keeps, where the ranch owner is the heroine, the sexy hero is the handyman, and power is equally shared.   All of these books address a secret question:  what does role reversal do to, well, the romance of love relationships, and do we really want our men feminized?  Those described above answer the question positively, showing how gender relations can flourish with the woman in a position of power.

            Other paranormals answer the question differently, and these are the books that disturb many readers and critics, though they are undeniably popular.  They resemble the old “bodice ripper” historical romances, in which macho heroes force themselves on heroines who protest, but end up loving it.  In “regular” historicals, such books went out of favor in the mid-eighties.  They were reviled by Janice Radway’s well-studied group of readers, who perceived male mistreatment of women as a direct contradiction of the reading experience they wanted, namely one where the hero loves, cares for, understands, and bonds emotionally to the heroine.  In fact, Radway’s readers  “found Harlequin’s new, more explicit preoccupation with male violence nauseating, and several even admitted that they stopped buying them to avoid being subjected to this form of male power” ( Radway 76).[ix]  It is rare to find a bodice ripper now . . . except in the paranormal genre.  Increased sexual violence, either implied or actual, is what disturbed romance critics Booth and Calhoun-French.  Although we’ve seen that this pattern is not universal in paranormal books, it still exists.  It’s not just minor authors either; although they avoid actual violence, popular award-winners Justine Dare (in Firehawk) and Jayne Castle (in Orchid) use heroes who are throwbacks, primitive, and almost mythical in their macho power.  What is the meaning of such books’ continued popularity? 

            Early scholars of popular culture had a field day analyzing the neuroses that make books about abusive heroes appealing.  Germaine Greer, for instance, maintains that this type of hero has been invented by women “cherishing the chains of their bondage” (176).  Tania Modleski believed (in the early days) that romances help women “adapt to circumscribed lives and to convince themselves that limitations are really opportunities” (“Disappearing Act” 23).  In other words, romance readers who live with abusive mates desperately hope that, like the abusive hero of her favorite romances, her husband really loves her and will someday become kind.  Such books are thought to help women talk themselves into liking their submissive roles, or at least medicate themselves into accepting them.  Another theory put forward by romance writers (obviously more predisposed toward a positive view of the books) is that bodice rippers appealed to women troubled by the new sexual freedom of the 60s and 70s.  Forced or coercive sex allowed these readers to vicariously experience pleasure without guilt—because they identified with the heroines who had no choice but to be dominated.[x] 

            But now that the sexual revolution is old news, now that women’s lives are not as circumscribed and limited—and historical romances have correspondingly become less sadomasochistic—why would the paranormal subgenre bring back the bodice ripper? 

            Perhaps a part of the audience for these books is those women, blessedly fewer than in the bodice-ripper boom times, for whom life has not gotten so much better; who still suffer with abusive mates, domineering or harassing male colleagues, and limited opportunities.  Yet I am troubled by the “us-them” nature of this argument, which has always struck me as patronizing.  Many successful women with non-abusive mates enjoy stories of distressed damsels overcome by masterful men.  Authors regularly debate the virtues of “alpha-male” (dominant) heroes versus “beta” (sweet and sensitive) heroes, and the consensus is that alpha-types generate more reader enthusiasm.  Guidelines for Leisure books remind authors that “the popularity of the dark hero [is] again on the upswing,” and that heroes of historical romances are often appealingly “arrogant” and “overbearing.”[xi]  Author-scholars like Jayne Ann Krentz have attempted to explain such stories’ appeal in terms of fantasy or an attraction to risk and danger.[xii]  Even so, enjoying so-called “super-alpha-male” books can connote anti-feminism or masochism, both unacceptable to many women and thus unspeakable in everyday life.  The paranormal romance provides a location for these secret pleasures.

            Secret pleasures are well and good, but many women suffering from the supermom syndrome, seek not advanced pleasures, but simple relief from their multiple obligations.  Paranormal romances also attempt to address this need.  Sometimes the resolution is disturbing to a feminist reader, sometimes not.  The logical astronaut of Heaven’s Time had been totally preoccupied with her career and uninterested in family before she was hit by a meteor; after she lands in the nineteenth century, she learns from her feminized hero to play a more domestic role.  It’s nice that she gets emotions, but I wanted to spend a little more time with the astronaut fantasy, or at least not to have it dismantled by the heroine’s frequent assertions of how much happier she is after giving up the high-stress career. Kane does it better in This Time for Keeps:  her modern heroine didn’t much enjoy her career in advertising, and when she travels back in time, she gets to be the scandalous, liberated, and wealthy lady boss.

            I can comfortably say I prefer the equality books, but the “carry me back to domesticity” stories have an undeniable appeal to contemporary, harassed women.  It may not be admissible, but many women (many people?) do have the “save me from the world of work” fantasy.  In some sense, wouldn’t anyone like to marry a millionaire?

            Another fantasy that can be addressed within the freedoms of the paranormal genre is the bad-girl fantasy.  Emilie Richards does it well in Twice Upon a Time, a book whose heroine is two women at once:  the wholesome, perfect, do-gooder, soon-to-be-nun Mary Kate, and the sexy Gypsy Dugan who takes over Mary Kate’s body after she is knocked on the head by a wayward teen she was helping.  Slowly, Mary Kate starts remembering Gypsy’s memories and experiencing Gypsy’s emotions.  She curses.  She lusts after men.  She acts nasty toward the troubled teens she’s supposed to be helping.  She has good sex.  Mary Kate after the accident gets to do all the things romance heroines (and many real-world women) aren’t supposed to do . . . and none of it is her fault.  Interestingly, all the other characters prefer the new Mary Kate, as do, I’m sure, most readers.  She’s more authentic, more appealing, and more earthy.  And she gets the happy ending:  a romantic husband and a baby to love.  Richards lets conservative romance readers experience the fun of “bad” behavior without guilt or negative consequences, due to the freedoms offered by the paranormal genre.

Conclusion

            In the end, I was unable to categorize paranormal romances as good or bad medicine for contemporary women, which seems the usual debate about romance fiction.  Paranormals, like all romances, are more complicated than that.  These books, often perceived by non-readers as being the most formulaic of stories, are thought to contain fewer interpretive “gaps” and “spaces” than literary fiction, and to present only a positive, idealized, and conservative world.  I find, however, that some romances, especially a sometimes-bizarre sub-genre like paranormal romances, do not eliminate confusing or disturbing aspects of women’s real lives.  Instead, they not only incorporate such elements but may encourage psychological work around them.  Because of the collective authorship and enormous readership of the books, we can guess that romances help us deal with questions and anxieties that go beyond personal problems—one woman cringing away from her abusive husband.  Instead, they illuminate complex and widespread gender role issues of our culture.  So scholars of the fantastic, accustomed to heading straight for the Science Fiction aisle of the bookstore, should detour to the romance section and pick up a paranormal; these books tell us more than any other branch of the fantastic about the real fears and secret desires of women now.

Endnotes

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