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Sep. 20th, 2005 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
molly_oSomeone who watches House: Was that Elvis Costello singing "Beautiful" at the end? I looked on iTunes, and I googled it, and I couldn't find anything.
ETA: It was! http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,271%7C96656%7C1%7C,00.html
Bones was better this week. It still hasn't won me over, but I'll watch it at least once more.
So I had this thought about romance novels:
The satisfactory resolution of a romance novel isn't just about the happily-ever-after. There's almost always a scene in which the heroine is *vindicated*; sometimes the happily-ever-after is almost an epilogue to a climactic scene of vindication. The romances that I think of as Bad Old Harlequins, the ones that feel so unfeminist to me, typically have the heroine vindicated versus the hero. He's made some awful assumption (in the Really Bad Old Harlequins, it's *always* that she's a conniving slut), and treated her terribly on account of this assumption, and at the end she proves herself to be virtuous. When this is done poorly (and sometimes even when it's done well) there's a lingering aftertaste of "if he's such an ass, why does she want him, anyhow?", with just a hint of "Is 'Ha, you were *wrong*!' really a good basis for a relationship?")
Romance writers who aim to be more progressive (I'm thinking in particular of Jayne Ann Krentz, Nora Roberts, and Jennifer Crusie) often solve this problem by introducing jerky family members of the heroine as secondary characters, and having the hero be the heroine's ally in achieving vindication with respect to her family. If I ever decided to finish my thesis on romance novels, and if I ever decided not to examine virginity in that thesis, I'd do it on the introduction of family tensions as a plot device to reconcile the reader's need for vicarious vindication with changing standards for "heroic" behavior.
ETA: It was! http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,271%7C96656%7C1%7C,00.html
Bones was better this week. It still hasn't won me over, but I'll watch it at least once more.
So I had this thought about romance novels:
The satisfactory resolution of a romance novel isn't just about the happily-ever-after. There's almost always a scene in which the heroine is *vindicated*; sometimes the happily-ever-after is almost an epilogue to a climactic scene of vindication. The romances that I think of as Bad Old Harlequins, the ones that feel so unfeminist to me, typically have the heroine vindicated versus the hero. He's made some awful assumption (in the Really Bad Old Harlequins, it's *always* that she's a conniving slut), and treated her terribly on account of this assumption, and at the end she proves herself to be virtuous. When this is done poorly (and sometimes even when it's done well) there's a lingering aftertaste of "if he's such an ass, why does she want him, anyhow?", with just a hint of "Is 'Ha, you were *wrong*!' really a good basis for a relationship?")
Romance writers who aim to be more progressive (I'm thinking in particular of Jayne Ann Krentz, Nora Roberts, and Jennifer Crusie) often solve this problem by introducing jerky family members of the heroine as secondary characters, and having the hero be the heroine's ally in achieving vindication with respect to her family. If I ever decided to finish my thesis on romance novels, and if I ever decided not to examine virginity in that thesis, I'd do it on the introduction of family tensions as a plot device to reconcile the reader's need for vicarious vindication with changing standards for "heroic" behavior.