Chick-lit, Romances, and Soap Operas - oh my!

[shipperx]

My thoughts have sort of spun off on a tangent after reading gabrielleabelle's poll, thoughts and comments asking whether the Buffy/Angel romance was subversive. My answer leaned heavily towards thinking they weren't subversive. There are aspects about the story which may be (or at least could have been), but more of their story conforms to genre than deviates from it. And discussing the genre had me tripping down memory lane, mentally reviewing the frightening number of genre stories that I've read and assembling an odd assortment of loosely related thoughts.

As a teen I had a particularly avid taste for Gothic fiction. It may even be possible to say that I grew up with the stuff. I mean, as a small child, my favorite cartoon was Scooby-Doo and I was watching the soap opera The Edge of Night at far too young of an age to defend. (Alas, I was too young to have seen Dark Shadows [v1.0] when it was on air. Had I been older, I probably would have devoured it as well).

Anyway, my ADD brain somehow leapt from those thoughts to a vague memory of some discussion years ago where thedeadlyhook mentioned a dirth of heroines in the media during our childhoods. I remembered thinking at that time that as a kid I hadn't actually thought about there being dirth of heroines. Looking back, that may well have been because I gravitated towards much maligned but heavily female-generated media. I raise my hand as a childhood addict of Nancy Drew's less glamorous, tom-boy counterpart Trixie Belden Mysteries, which may have started with a pretty good mystery about a 'haunted' house, but devolved into Headless Horsemen and Sasquatch hunting monstrosities.

And I'm not sure whether it was baby-sitters or having a sister 12+ years older than myself, but when reviewing stories I remember, I seem to remember soap storylines (or at least characters) dating back to my pre-school years, and soaps used to be a uniquely female medium. I don't mean just in terms of viewers. Female writer/producers had a foothold in -- hell, were in fact the primary creators soap of -- soap operas long before they were allowed power positions in other forms of television or movies. There was Irna Phillips (creator of Guiding Light, As the World Turns, Another World, and Days of Our Lives, Betty Corday (executive producer and owner of Days of Our Lives and creative consultant of The Young and the Restless), and Agnes Nixon (creator of All My Children and One Life to Live). I would even argue to include Gloria Monty who, although she didn't create General Hospital can easily be credited with re-making the show and turning it into a phenomenon in the early 1980s. Some of these shows were heavily dominated by female heroines -- the multi-marrying Erica Kane who always embraced her maneater diva hood, hell-kitten growing up into book publisher Rachel Cory, the frenenemies Viki and Dorian Lord (in the 1970s, Viki ran a newspaper and Dorian was a doctor), etc. The shows may have had low production values, melodrama out the whazoo, and a preoccupation with dysfunctional relationships, but women -- from the meek and traditional to the bitchy and fabulous -- were widely represented both in front of and behind the scenes. (Unfortunately, it is perhaps a sign of and a reason for soaps' current death spiral when you consider the fact that all of ABC's and NBC's soaps are now entirely run by men... all the way up the foodchain. And I'm not saying that men can't produce good soap. I am saying that these particular men have managed to make them all inescapably male-dominated and downright {at times disturbingly} misogynist.)

So how exactly did I skip from discussing Gothics fiction to soap operas? Well, other than their both being melodramas, both have a tendency to be categorized as 'female fiction'. Gothic didn't necessarily start with female authors (is Mary Shelly considered a Gothic author or a sci-fi author? I know when I was listening to the Michael Drout's lecture series on fantasy fiction then the one on science fiction, he categorized Frankenstein as science fiction. But that may be an esoteric distinction) but with Anne Radcliffe, Gothics became associated with female readers (as Jane Austen affectionately mocked in Northanger Abbey {which really is one of my favorite Austen novels. It's not particularly serious and the heroine borders on being dim... but it is amusing}. And who could ever leave out Charlotte and Emily Bronte when the subject of Gothic fiction comes around? Much the way that soaps provided a female foothold in a predominately male dominated field of television writing and producing, Gothic fiction was a foothold for female authors in the late 18th and 19th century, and these Gothics also seemed to have morphed into the wider 'romance' genre... another female dominated genre.

And somewhere someone is going "why are female genres crap?" (And somewhere else fanboys are bemoaning fangirl cooties tainting their manly-man genres with icky relationship issues). However, I don't think that female genres are crap. Yeah, a large percentage of it is crap, but that's true of all genres. There's always more crap produced than good work. And even if a story doesn't necessarily appeal, that doesn't make it crap. I adore Wuthering Heights, but not because the characters are remotely likable and certainly not because I find the dysfunctional clusterfuck to be 'romantic'... but because of poetic prose and a compelling (if destructive) passion. I can understand hating it as a 'romance' but it is a time-tested work of fiction.

So where does the 'Buffy/Angel (or even Buffy/Spike) are they subversive?' question tie into this? It's an observation that I read on the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog regarding the explosion of romantic vampire fiction. Specifically:

There’s much casual contempt for literature that deals with the emotional and the female, and I see it as a logical extension from a culture that devalues female experiences in general; that teenage female romantic experiences in particular are singled out as being especially frivolous and assumed to be Not Worthy of Serious Thought isn’t anything new, but it still chafes at me when I see it pop up.

I thought the blogger had a point (even as I agreed with the blogger that, teenage female sexual awakenings aside, Twilight isn't actually good). I also liked the blogger juxtaposing a lifted quote from a publishing employee defining the vampire genre as:

women committing every imaginable act of lust and perversion with vampires, werewolves, demons, Lovecraftian tentacled rape gods, basically anything you can imagine as long as it’s not a normal human man

With the blogger's own point of:

My theory is: it’s also about women, and putting women in control, and how we’re still not comfortable enough to put it in real-life/realistic fiction terms yet. The surge of demand for women in a dominant role—as pursuers and protectors and warriors—has been a long time coming, and I think it says something interesting about us and our level of comfort with and/or inability to suspend disbelief about women owning a certain sort of cultural power that most of the asskicking happens in Not Quite Earth

I also found a different post by the same blogger regarding beastial alpha-male 'heroes' to be an interesting read, partially because, dude, I read, The Flame and the Flower when I was something like thirteen years old and have never wanted to revisit it. I wasn't permanently scarred or anything, but it most definitely is a rapemance. I remember hating the alpha hero lead and desperately wanting the heroine to run away with his far more likable brother. (On the other hand, I've revisited Woodiwiss' bitch-queen Shanna multiple times. Shanna in no way deserved the hero, but dude! The book has murders, pirates, and a hurricane... and sex with a faux-pirate during a hurricane. It's cheesy, purple-prose awesome!) And, while I think that the generally floated theory about mid-20th century sexual mores influencing mid-to-late 20th century bodice rippers with an underlying taboo of

"Nice girls don’t seek sexual pleasure. But if the sexual pleasure was forced on them…well, that’s a different matter, isn’t it?"

I think the Smart Bitches blogger may also have a point regarding there having been a small, hidden side-dish of 'irresistible woman' fantasy mixed in with it. (An ugly thought? Yes. But... perhaps true.)

Anyway, I've rattled on enough. It's late and I'm heading to bed. Hope some of this made sense.




ETA: Gods, y'all. This cartoon is spot on accurate and awesome cakes!