{"id":1608,"date":"2009-07-12T12:07:47","date_gmt":"2009-07-12T17:07:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=1608"},"modified":"2025-07-31T12:16:29","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T17:16:29","slug":"the-zeitgeist-of-a-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/the-zeitgeist-of-a-story\/","title":{"rendered":"The zeitgeist of a story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Romance novels are mocked all the time everywhere. That\u2019s not news. What was surprising to me upon my reentry into reading and writing romance, which necessitated entering Romancelandia, the world of romance reader blogs, was that they\u2019re also mocked by people who love romance novels.<\/p>\n

Some books deserve it, but some that might seem to deserve it \u2026 don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Those are books from the history of romance novels that are mocked for their fashions and specific song references and other tidbits of culture that date them and, quite often, the covers that were made for them at the time. In particular, very often the sweeping scope and larger-than-life characters and plots are mocked. The people doing the mocking, I find, are young and\/or young to the romance genre.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know quite what they expect when they read a book from the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s that would rightfully be fodder for mockery if written now, but the fact of the matter is, they\u2019re not meant to be timeless in every respect. If one puts oneself into the study of romance novels, to be intellectually honest, one must also be able to sift the culture of the time and how these novels work within that.<\/p>\n

\"Original
This is where I got my fascination with blond heroes and redheaded heroines AND got Bryce\u2019s name.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a host of \u201crape romances\u201d that are routinely sneered at by younger romance readers and\/or people young to romance reading. The device is that the hero is cruel, arrogant, and (as I saw in a comment about my favorite one, written in 1974) he \u201crapes her until she loves him.\u201dSounds harsh now, right?<\/p>\n

Let me put this in some context. In the early 1970s, a lady named Nancy Friday<\/a> interviewed women on the subject of their sexual fantasies and published them in a couple of books: My Secret Garden<\/em><\/a> (1973) and Forbidden Flowers<\/em><\/a> (1975), just at the cusp of the \u201crape romance.\u201d Without taking Friday\u2019s scholarship into account, I find it interesting that many women\u2019s fantasies at that time featured rape prominently. I also find it fascinating that these books were published nearly simultaneously with the early rape romances and thus, probably didn\u2019t inform each other.<\/p>\n

And then came the soap General Hospital<\/em><\/a> in 1979, with Luke and Laura<\/a>, which is, as far as I can tell, the most famous rape romance ever.<\/p>\n

Mind, this definition of \u201crape\u201d is not a legal one; it\u2019s a highly stylized one in which it allows the female to retain her Good Girl status while still A) having sex and B) enjoying it because the hero is a different<\/em> kind of rapist: One who is attractive, who is uncontrollably attracted to the heroine, and who gets her off after he\u2019s made it possible for her to have an out, i.e., \u201cI was raped.”
\nWhy did she need an out? Because, at the time, a woman\u2019s enjoyment of sex (especially outside of marriage) was still taboo.<\/p>\n

(In The Proviso<\/em>, one couple\u2019s, uh, courtship [heh] is an homage to this era of genre romance.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"Original<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

As an another aside, there is the shifting definition of \u201cgenre.\u201d In the aforementioned 1970s and 1980s, many heroines typically had more than one lover throughout the course of her story, but ended happily with one. This would not happen in genre romance now unless it is a m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois erotic<\/em> romance.<\/p>\n

Now, the heroine who has more than one lover during the course of a genre romance novel would not be meeting the expectations of the average genre romance reader, which is to say, sexual involvement between one man and one woman throughout the course of the book, with a happily ever after ending. (This does not speak to the fact that the male occasionally has other lovers, but in context, and with the understanding that that\u2019s okay because a man has his needs. We haven\u2019t come all that far, baby.)<\/p>\n

In fact, in a Twitter conversation with (among others), @mcvane, @victoriajanssen, @redrobinreader, we decided that those romances would now be classified as women\u2019s fiction. Naturally, our word is law.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I\u2019m not sure why there\u2019s this unwillingness to go along with the zeitgeist of the time in which the book was written, but instead to apply today\u2019s standards of fashion or technology or pop culture as markers of timelessness. We don\u2019t expect that of our historical novels, so why do we expect it of \u201ccontemporary\u201d romances that cease to be \u201ccontemporary\u201d the moment the galleys are finalized?<\/p>\n

Me? I like reading the zeitgeist. I don\u2019t miss it if it\u2019s not there, but if it is, it\u2019s a lagniappe for me. It gives me a feel for the time period and takes me back. Perhaps the difference is whether one is too young to be taken back or not. I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

However, in reading some earlier novels, I find this especially important because a lot of the plot devices realistically used then could not be used now because of advances in technology. If one can accept that it was 1979, and the heroine didn\u2019t receive a letter that the hero had sent and he had no other way of contacting her or finding her to clear up a misunderstanding, one should also accept the blue eyeshadow and feathered hair.<\/p>\n

I date my novels for a reason, which is to commit the zeitgeist of the moment in the mind of the reader, leaving no question as to its pop cultural references. In 10 years, no one can say, \u201cThat feels so dated.\u201d They\u2019ll have to say, \u201cThe author is very explicit about these events occurring between 2004 and 2009. If it feels dated, well, that\u2019s because it is. It says so right in the chapter headings. Go with it.”<\/p>\n

The expectation that one should be able to pick up a romance novel (or any other novel) from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and either not be reminded that that was when it was written, or not be offended by some of the themes in the novel borne of the time it was written, seems to me that we wish to either forget that part of our history or cover up the history. More likely, however, is that we may live (and read) in the moment and may be either unwilling or unable to reference the history of the time in which the novel was written.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a shame, really, because a lot of stories\u2019 richness and layering gets lost without the proper historical context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Romance novels are mocked all the time everywhere. That\u2019s not news. What was surprising to me upon my reentry into reading and writing romance, which necessitated entering Romancelandia, the world of romance reader blogs, was that they\u2019re also mocked by people who love romance novels. Some books deserve it, but some that might seem to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[531,594,539,532,540,95,551,593],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-forced-seduction","category-genres","category-reading","category-romance","category-sex","category-tropes","category-womens-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1608"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16882,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions\/16882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}