Historical Romance Fiction

Heterosexuality and Performativity

Lisa Fletcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754662020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317121770
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The first book-length study of romance novels to focus on issues of sexuality rather than gender, Historical Romance Fiction moves the ongoing debate about the value and appeal of heterosexual romance onto new ground, testing the claims of cutting-edge critical theorists on everything from popular classics by Georgette Heyer, to recent 'bodice rippers,' to historical fiction by John Fowles and A.S. Byatt. Beginning with her nomination of 'I love you' as the romance novel's defining speech act, Lisa Fletcher engages closely with speech-act theory and recent studies of performativity. The range of texts serves to illustrate Fletcher's definition of historical romance as a fictional mode dependent on the force and familiarity of the speech act, 'I love you', and permits Fletcher to provide a detailed account of the genre's history and development in both its popular and 'literary' manifestations. Written from a feminist and anti-homophobic perspective, Fletcher's subtle arguments about the romantic speech act serve to demonstrate the genre's dependence on repetition ('Romance can only quote') and the shaky ground on which the romance's heterosexual premise rests. Her exploration of the subgenre of cross-dressing novels is especially revealing in this regard. With its deft mix of theoretical arguments and suggestive close readings, Fletcher's book will appeal to specialists in genre, speech act and performativity theory, and gender studies.

Part I Defining the Genre

1 Romance, History, Heterosexuality

DOI: 10.4324/9781315586854-1

Fredric Jameson begins his essay “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre” by stating that genres are “essentially contracts between a writer and his readers” (sic). He adds that genres are literary “institutions, which like other institutions or contracts are based on tacit agreements or contracts” (135). He invokes the idea of “speech” to think about the form and function of literary genres and, more particularly, the romance genre:

The thinking behind such a view of genres is based on the presupposition that all speech needs to be marked with certain indications and signals as to how it is to be properly used. In everyday life, of course, these signals are furnished by the context of the utterance and by the physical presence of the speaker, with his gesturality and intonations. When speech is lifted out of this concrete situation, such signals must be replaced by other types of directions, if the text in question is not to be abandoned to a drifting multiplicity of uses (or meanings, as the latter used to be termed). It is of course the generic convention which is called upon to perform this task, and to provide a built-in substitute for those older corrections and adjustments which are possible only in the immediacy of the face-to-face situation. Yet it is clear at the same time that the farther a given text is removed from a performing situation (that of village storyteller, or bard, or player), the more difficult it will be to enforce a given generic prescription on a reader; indeed, no small part of the art of writing is absorbed by this (impossible) attempt to devise a foolproof mechanism for the automatic exclusion of undesirable responses to a given literary utterance. (135–6)

Jameson describes generic texts as “speech acts” removed from the physicality and immediacy of conversation or live performance. He pictures the relationship between the writer and the reader of generic texts as a scene of utterance, in which the writer (“speaker”) seeks to control or order the way their text is read (“heard”). He thus characterizes genres as authoritarian in their efforts to “enforce” certain attitudes or ideologies on readers. According to Jameson’s model of genre, the writer seeks to alleviate or manage the threat of improper interpretation or usage of their text by the mobilization of appropriate “generic conventions.” These conventions or stock devices take the place of the material context and physical gestures which accompany speech acts in their ordinary sense to determine the reception of generic texts. It is not the acceptance or enjoyment of the convention as such that matters. Instead, Jameson emphasizes the “generic prescription” which the devices and mechanisms of generic fiction work to communicate. Genres, that is, have ideological ends. What Jameson’s model makes clear is that these ends are never easily or straightforwardly achieved. Rather, fictional genres are always haunted by the threat of disobedience to their terms, by their capacity to be read differently. Such an idea inheres in the authoritarian model of genre which he uses; to think of rules is also to imagine the possibility of their being broken.

As stated in the introduction, this book uses theories of speech acts to describe the ideological function of a particular genre and to make the argument that this function is never straightforward. To state my position baldly: historical romance fiction is constituted by an awareness of the instability of its narratological and ideological foundations. As the following chapters demonstrate, this self-awareness runs through the popular and literary subfields of the genre.

Jameson’s representation of genres as “speech” occurs in the context of what Linda Hutcheon calls the “revenge of parole.” In A Poetics of Postmodernism Hutcheon argues that theory has turned to an emphasis on the “enunciative situation” in its accounts of the subject’s relationship to and use of language, and of the formation of subjectivity. She cites “speech act theory, pragmatics, [and] discourse analysis” as explicit examples of this phenomenon (Poetics 168). First published in 1988, Hutcheon’s book predates the emergence of a body of theory which further exemplifies the trend she identifies. Most notably in the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, theories of “performativity” bring speech act theory up to speed with accounts of the production of subjects in discourse offered by Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida among others. In Butler’s words, theories of performativity describe and investigate “that aspect of discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names” (“Gender” 112). Hutcheon uses the term “enunciative situation” to name the entire complex of discursive relations within which a text is produced and received—“text, producer, receiver, historical, and social context” (115). While our terminology is somewhat different, I share her interest in the way fictional texts thematize and theorize precisely these aspects of textuality and discourse.

I am committed to locating what Sedgwick calls “the performative aspects of texts” (Epistemology 3). Taken performatively, texts are sites of definition, redefinition, and disruption—both in relation to readers and institutionally. That is to say, fictional texts are intimate participants in the production and reproduction of the logical (or illogical) systems and matrices through which we are defined and define ourselves. This approach to the analysis of an enduring popular and literary genre assumes that the importance and value of generic texts resides not just in their capacity to bear meaning, but also that the force of genres follows from their role in the ongoing construction of the various meanings by which we both make sense of and create ourselves and the “world.” The three terms at the centre of this book’s investigation of genre and its meanings are “romance,” “history,” and “heterosexuality.”

Throughout this book, I employ speech act theory and theories of performativity to define and interrogate the parameters of the historical romance genre. In her concise history and study of romance, Gillian Beer argues that it “can be distinguished from other forms of fiction by the relationship it imposes between reader and romance-world” (8). Like Jameson, Beer draws an analogy between generic fiction and, to use his words, a “performing situation” when she compares the experience of reading a romance to that of a child listening to a storyteller. Whereas Jameson characterizes genres as authoritarian in a general sense, Beer suggests that the extent to which the romance seeks to determine reader responses sets it apart from other fictional genres. For Beer, in order to enjoy reading romance, in order to read it properly, we must “surrender” (8) to its demands by accepting first and foremost the fictional world it compels us to inhabit; reading romance is a question of being commanded rather than seduced. Nevertheless, what is implicit in her description of the romance genre is the idea that this genre may be constituted as much by the difficulty with which it achieves obedience to its terms as by any apparent success: “The absurdities of romance are felt when we refuse to inhabit the world offered us and disengage ourselves, bringing to bear our own opinions” (8). Beer’s focus on the reading position assumed and produced by the romance leads to an emphasis on its “imaginative functions.” She argues that this approach helps to overcome the difficulties of defining a term and of classifying a literary genre which has as broad a compass as “romance.” Beer suggests that whereas the romance’s “literary properties” have been too inconstant and too diverse over the centuries to provide the basis for meaningful classification, its principal “imaginative functions” persist. These are twofold: “escape” and “instruction.” She explains that romance is instructive because in its construction of a fictional world for readers to escape into, it represents an “ideal” against which we can measure and assess our own experience and the world.

Beer’s and Jameson’s approaches to thinking about romance are valuable because of their emphasis on the way in which generic fictions might be said to function or act. However, both critics are preoccupied with talking about “writers” and “readers” rather than the wider enunciative context within which any given text circulates. Theories of performativity facilitate exactly this kind of broadening of focus. They also enable a greater emphasis on the extent to which romance fiction incessantly thematizes the very reading practices it engenders.

In all of the novels I discuss in this book, heterosexual love is precisely what exceeds history just as it enables a certain telling of history. Broadly speaking, the performative force of the romantic speech act (and of romance) depends on both a denial of its historicity, of the fact that it has always already been said before, at the same time as it relies on this fact for its familiarity and sense. In these terms “I love you” invokes a kind of continuous present. More particularly, there are two somewhat contradictory but mutually reinforcing aspects to this claim which are brought to the fore by my focus on heterosexual love stories set in the past: “I love you” is always said anew, but over and over again these texts insist that whenever and wherever it is said it means the same thing. The utterance “I love you” is not only the key to the plotting of historical romance novels, as it is to romances generally, but is also crucial to the link which they strive to draw between the present and the past. Bringing an idea of “history” to bear on performativity theory’s insistence on the necessary iterability of language reveals how this fascinating speech act encapsulates heterosexuality’s (impossible) claim to universality, timelessness and truth. Butler defines performativity as “the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed” (“Gender” 112). Historical fictions of heterosexual love are performative to the extent that they participate in the establishment and maintenance of prevailing ideas about the links between sex, gender, and sexuality. This book charts one of the many ways in which romantic love is persistently and aggressively heterosexualized in Western culture and begins to consider the extent to which this campaign of normalization and exclusion is endlessly covered over.

Diane Elam writes that “the founding trope of historical romance is anachronism” (35). From the outset, a whole series of apparently oppositional discourses lock horns in historical romance, not least “history,” in its promise to tell the truth about the past, and “romance” in its endeavors to offer a fantasy of an elsewhere. A whole series of complex binary oppositions lie, as on a palimpsest, beneath the term “historical romance”: fact/fiction, truth/lies, real/false, past/present, here/there, linear/spatial, universal/contingent, mind/body, masculine/feminine, and so on. One of the pleasures and challenges of studying this genre is tracing the connections between these troublesome pairs. However, the binary which causes the most trouble and therefore demands the most urgent attention is homosexual/heterosexual. The link between historical romance’s inherent anachronism and homo/heterosexual definition comes into clearer focus when we look carefully at the genre’s organizing utterance, “I love you.” The romantic speech act operates through an evacuation of “history,” through an implicit denial of its historicity. This point has been indirectly made in theoretical accounts of the intersection of postmodernism with romance. However, while influential studies of postmodern historical novels have articulated the bond between two of the terms which entitle this chapter, “history” and “romance,” they have largely overlooked the importance of the third term, “heterosexuality.”

In Reflections on The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco uses a variation of the romantic speech act to exemplify “the postmodern attitude.” He writes:

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.” At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony … But both will have succeeded once again, in speaking of love. (67–8)

This passage offers a beautiful illustration of the contradictory status of “I love you”: its simultaneous circulation as both a confession and a cliché; its capacity both to hold the promise and betray the lie of the humanist subject; and its necessarily fraught link to history, to the “already said.” Further, “I love you” encapsulates the key paradox of the referential concept of language or the “descriptive fallacy” (in the words of J.L. Austin): it is not enough to assess simply whether this statement is true or false. As Eco’s hypothetical scene of utterance illustrates, a more critical criterion is the success or the “happiness” of a declaration of love.

The principal obstacle to the man’s desire to confess his feelings is his (and his beloved’s) knowledge that “I love you” is always a citation; it can never be owned by any individual speaker. The problem of proving his sincerity is compounded by this speech act’s drive to conflate fiction and reality: “I love you” marks the imposition of romance on history. Eco draws attention to the performative force, not just of direct speech, but of the associated fictions and narratives which speech acts always carry with them. Reading this passage prompts consideration of the very questions which are my focus throughout this book. The joint problematics of referentiality and sincerity, citationality and history, fiction and reality which “I love you” registers for Eco—although he doesn’t state this explicitly—are at the center of my analysis of its ubiquity and force in historical romance fiction.

For Eco, postmodernism demands “not the negation of the already said, but its ironic rethinking.” It is for this reason, he explains, that modernism and postmodernism can “coexist, or alternate, or follow each other closely” in the same artistic work (68). In the short tale of postmodern love cited above, Eco equates the “already said” with the “past”: “Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony … But both will have succeeded once again, in speaking of love.” In these terms, saying “I love you” is a question of “history.” Eco’s conflation of citationality with history has two aspects. First, to say “I love you” is to recall the innumerable times it has been said before. It is also to cite an imagined (and impossible) past when saying “I love you” simply meant you were in love. Eco explains that the man’s qualifying clause, “As Barbara Cartland would put it,” allows him to say “I love you madly” without claiming the “innocence” of another “age.” The man thus imagines a time when it was possible to say “I love you” with simple sincerity—a time before the excesses of twentieth-century popular culture had turned his speech into a cliché. Of course, he does not do this without irony, as is made clear by his reference to Cartland: a romance writer whose novels famously use an historical setting to picture an age when we believed in love, and when our dreams for a happy ending always came true (Brunt). That he manages to say what he wants despite (though with the help of) Cartland makes it clear that the romantic speech act has not been exhausted by its overuse; the language of heterosexual love persists and continues to be meaningful even when (or because) it is acknowledged as the stuff of formula fiction.

The man and the woman in Eco’s story are distinguished from Cartland and the mass culture she represents by their “cultivation.” At the same time, however, they desire precisely what fictions like Cartland’s are most driven to represent: a happy ending for heterosexual love. That they “[succeed] once again, in speaking of love” is Eco’s main point. That they manage to “revisit the past” with both irony and sincerity explains his use of this story as a parable for postmodernism as he understands it. Eco’s short (and entertaining) love story describes not just the possibility that apparently opposed discourses (modernism and postmodernism, high culture and popular culture, history and romance, reality and fiction) can coexist without cancelling each other out, but it also demonstrates their primary interdependence. That he uses “I love you” to clarify and prove his point is germane to my study of this utterance as the ontological and narrative turning point for heterosexual romance. My analysis of “I love you” extrapolates on Eco’s recognition of its duplicity to argue that this utterance indexes the ambivalence at the heart of fictions of heterosexual love (by writers shelved with Cartland at your local bookstore and those shelved with Eco). More broadly speaking, and as I argue in the next chapter, each and every reiteration of this utterance represents a moment of crisis for heterosexual hegemony and not just because it points to the foundational anachronism of heterosexual romance: “I love you” does not conceal its contradictions with ease. Instead its compulsive reiteration is symptomatic of its inability to do so in any lasting way: anxiety engenders reiteration.

The self-consciousness which characterizes Eco’s man and woman in love is not the preserve of “cultivated” or educated lovers. Instead the very fictions to which they refer, but by implication do not read, themselves betray an awareness of the difficulties attendant on saying “I love you.” At the least, Cartland’s novels—their hi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Defining the Genre
• PART II Popular Historical Romance Fiction: Cross-Dressing Novels
• PART III Literary Historical Romance Fiction: Victorian Romances
• Works Cited
• Index