A-Z Romances: Milan and the Working Class

A great, great, great many Regency romances take place amongst the gentry--or higher. I think one of the reasons is the success of and liking for Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. Many writers come to romance by way of Austen and Heyer and know how good the material can be. 

I think, too, that there is interest in upper class lives. Many archaeologists and historians have attempted to make working class lives interesting, but the records on that side are sparse, and even HBO's Rome, which produced decent working-class heroes, entwined those working-class heroes with the dramas of their "betters," in the personages of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and Cleopatra. 

However, the endless focus on the upper classes does get a trifle monotonous after awhile. Or, at least, it gets harder for the new novel to stand out from the rest, especially when the milieu seems entirely coincidental. Not there for plot reasons. Just there so people can discuss wardrobes. 

Consequently, I tend to prefer romances that take at least one step down the ladder. Loretta Chase's marvelous Dressmakers Series is a great solution to a reader's varied interests since she combines lords and dukes with extremely witty dialog and, most importantly, the sisters' desire to be the best dressmakers in London. They don't simply want to make money. They want to exercise their artistic abilities and managerial skills. The result is delightful books with strong denouements. (In fact, I wish the fourth book--Lady Clara's book, which focuses on legal cases rather than dressmaking--had concentrated more on the couple getting by in the equivalent of the middle class: not quite at Darcy's level, yet not as poor and struggling as Miss Bates.) 

Courtney Milan's Turner Series is somewhat darker than Chase's. However, it also manages to escape the "then they went to ANOTHER dance" scenes. Unraveled, for instance, deals with Smite Turner as a justice and the woman who becomes first his mistress and then his wife. Part of the book is focused on getting a shipwright apprenticeship for a young man--not getting him into Eton. When Smite moves his mistress into a house, it is a townhouse: luxury for her but not, thank goodness, a mansion.

Moreover, though the Turner brothers have a family home and it is a nice place, scenes from the past indicate that at one point the cellar flooded. Even Darcy's cellar probably floods on occasion! (My Darcy-like father spent most of my childhood trying to figure out how to get rainwater not to drain into our basement: my childhood home was a ranch house on a hill.) 

Without turning into a Marxist tract--because people in every age have survived and fallen in love, whatever their economic status (the micro life choices are considered more important than the macro theoretical meaning)--the book, set in Bristol, manages to capture a gritty reality in which people do exactly that.

 

What Makes This Manga Stand Out: Workplace Romance in On and Off

There are many many BL series now in which work peers fall in love. Sometimes, the couple joined the company around the same time. Sometimes, they are rivals from high school or college. Sometimes, they work in the same department. Sometimes, one becomes a superior. And so on. 

I am not opposed to the same plot concept being used and reused. I admit I don't have much tolerance for endless vampire stories. But even there, I think there are exceptions, tales that are unique. 

By "unique," I don't mean avant-garde or "rule-breaking." 

I want story, not some stream-of-consciousness experiment. 

"Unique," for me, refers to a story that is memorable and engaging. It is different for HOW it handles material, not for trying (impossibly) to invent new material.

In the work romance genre, On or Off stands out. No Love Zone, despite also being a full-color manhwa, strikes me as a bit samey and forgettable (No Love Zone is only recently gaining something like a plot: in Volume 3!). 

What makes On or Off unique is not only that the characters have an actual task/account/app to complete (getting that work completed underpins the volumes so far)--the characters also retain core characterizations. 

As I mention in the post on Semantic Error, a good romance keeps the characters' individual oddities even as they fall in love. The characters don't abruptly turn either coy or flawlessly understanding and affectionate. They continue to be idiosyncratic.

In On or Off, Kang keeps his poignant awareness that romance requires negotiation. He misreads Ahn more than once; unusually for an alpha character, he not only takes responsibility for his miscalculations, he studies his lover, whom he finds endlessly surprising. His older age (by about 15 years) aligns with his ability to assess how he and Ahn are able to become significant others. 

Meanwhile, dedicated, hardworking, charismatic yet guileless Ahn goes at everything in his impulsive yet tactful way (as when he covers for Mina's bluntness). With Kang, he is straightforward yet abashed. Being in love enhances those qualities!

Ahn and Kang don't transform into blokes who react in the "proper" romantic ways. Rather, they react to their relationship as individuals. 

 

Perpetual Bachelors: Trope and Stigma

Nero Wolfe is a perpetual bachelor. Perpetual bachelors are a longstanding tradition in literature, from PG Wodehouse's upper-middleclass men fleeing from marriage to Sherlock Holmes with his bromantic partner. 

Nero Wolfe falls in the subcategory of "perpetual bachelor who has been around the block." Tom Selleck's Frank Reagan also falls into this category. Although Frank is surrounded (quite literally) by family, he remains unattached. He had a marriage. He has kids. He doesn't want to go back or start over or move on to something else. He and Henry, his father and a similar type of perpetual bachelor, have an honest conversation with Danny about their disinterest in marrying again. Danny also lost his wife but he doesn't see his father or his grandfather as people to emulate--in their relationships, at least. 

Regarding Nero Wolfe, hints in the books and shows suggest that Wolfe had passionate causes and relationships in his past. He now wants a life of order and comfort. 

PG Wodehouse's bachelors are less excused. Although the stories applaud Wooster each time he escapes his aunts' marriage plans, Wooster himself is portrayed as a less self-aware Wimsey: a young man with no real objective in life, flying from responsibility. Jeeves is perfectly willing to assist since Jeeves prefers the good life of caring for a single unencumbered individual than for a household. 

The modern, American equivalent of Wooster is the-guy-in-the-basement-playing-video-games-and-still-living-with-his-parents.

So there is a stigma attached to bachelorhood. However, it has never been as great as the stigma attached to "spinsters." Consider Vance's cats. Even the footloose and fancy-free spinster bears a greater stigma than the male variety. So Michael Weatherly's Tony (NCIS) is a fun-loving womanizer who simply hasn't found the right girl yet while some of the characters from Sex & the City strike even me as kind of skanky and stupid. In fairness, Blanche from Golden Girls, though often called "skanky" by others, comes across as a pragmatic woman who enjoys life and doesn't see the need to apologize for her forms of entertainment. (In so many ways, Golden Girls was ahead of its time and today's time.) 

Still--the idea that men sow wild oats while women fail to fulfill social responsibilities lingers. 

Overall, stigmas exist regarding both male and female singles. And those stigmas can increase for men and for women depending on a culture. That is, some cultures will criticize the single male more while others will sneer more at the single female.

Personally, I'm a fan of pluralism. Not "diversity," in part because the term has bullying connotations these days that I don't agree with. I don't agree with people being applauded for their differences. I believe in people being left alone to enjoy their differences. I live in a neighborhood with single people and married people and living-together people and people-with-kids...we get up, we go to work, we go to play, we go shopping. That's life. 

So if people are happy in a basement, why shouldn't they hang out there? 

Wimsey and Harriet: It's About More than Brains

Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are often praised as a pair of intellectual equals. THAT is what makes them so romantic.

I think this description does Sayers a disservice. 

Her characters are more substantial than two people who can exchange ponderances on the news-of-the-world and-or literary analysis. As A.I. has proved, anybody can do those things (or, at least, look like they are doing those things). 

Peter does appreciate Harriet's writerly occupation. And her intelligence is a given. 

What attracts him to Harriet, however, is her fearlessness.

He attends Harriet's trial. In that trial, Harriet tells the absolute truth, even though it works against her and she clearly understands that it works against her. 

Harriet is suspected of murdering her pompous, condescending lover who died from arsenic poisoning. Harriet ended the relationship because he offered to marry her. She had agreed to live with him based on his avant-garde beliefs, including the belief that "marriage is just a piece of paper." In the early 1900s, this decision made her a social pariah in some circles. His sudden offer of marriage made her feel like she is being offered a "bad conduct prize," as if all along she was being tested to see if she was worthy of marriage (based on the lover's character, testing Harriet was exactly what he was doing). For her, the principle of a thing isn't an abstract notion but a reality of day-to-day life. 

She is, in sum, a kind of Nero Wolfe. An almost ruthless brain is at work behind her social poise. And Wimsey--who knows plenty of intellectual women and plenty of female artists (he has slept with a number)--is bowled over. Utterly smitten. 

In Busman's Honeymoon, Peter and Harriet have an exchange where Peter admits, "I can enjoy practically everything that comes along--while it's happening. Only I have to keep doing things, because, if I once stop, it all seems a lot of rot...Now, I don't know." He was always running to keep ahead of his fears and possible depression. 

Harriet, however, has always been more grounded: "I've always felt absolutely certain [that life] was good. I've hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything. Even when I felt most awful, [I thought] of somehow getting out of the mess and starting again...Things have come straight."

That non-saccharine optimism is a quality that pulls Peter fiercely to Harriet. He would possibly get bored (as would she) if they weren't intellectual equals. But IQ is not the quality that makes the relationship. The ways Harriet and Peter separately tackle the universe are far more impactful.    

Love is not something that can be plotted on a chart.

Frenemies: Uncooperative Parents in Manga

One of the most common solutions in manga to Romeo & Juliet parents--you mustn't date that person!--is....

To bow. 

It's quite different from such romances in the West where the common solution is to walk away from or tell off the parents. Although Shakespeare likely meant Romeo & Juliet as a cautionary tale (along the lines of "teens are soooo stupid"), the plot of Romeo & Juliet has shaped the West's response to romance: when the home life gets rough, elope. 

And it's not an entirely awful solution--depending on the parents and the situation.

It highlights, however, the difference in manga. In Megumi & Tsugumi, when Megumi's father remains unconvinced that his son should be dating Tsugumi, not only does the son try (several times) to discuss the matter directly with him--alongside a bow--Tsugumi responds by saying, "Okay, so what do I have to do to impress you?"

The amusing aspect here is that Tsugumi is the most unrepentant, obstreperous, belligerent young man in existence. But he is honest and sincere. The same quality that leads him to confront fellow students in fights also leads him to say, "If that's what I need to do, fine, I'll do it." Unlike the arguing parents--and even his boyfriend--he stays on-track. Personally, he believes that trying to convince the non-supportive parent is a waste of time. But Megumi wants it, so why not actually do it, rather than arguing about it?

It's a fascinating variation on the "wait for the parent's approval" trope (again, far more common in BL than Western M/M literature) because it is so entirely individualistic. Tsugumi comes across, for once, as the most level-headed person in the room.

Heyer's Instead of the Thorn and Why It Isn't a Terribly Good Book

When she gained clout as a writer, Georgette Heyer had her earlier books removed from publication.

I have mixed feelings about these decisions. In Heyer's case, I put the action down to an excess of writerly fastidiousness. After all, she removed from publication books that are arguably not so good but also books that readers requested be republished once she died and her estate took over: Simon the Coldheart and Beauvallet.

Of course, now, many of those earlier books are in the public domain. I read one of Heyer's earliest contemporary romances, Instead of the Thorn, and I think I know why Heyer removed that book, at least, from publication. 

As mentioned on Votaries, in the early twentieth century, everyone--not just romance writers--was writing books that delved into the psychology of marriage, from Sinclair Lewis's Dodsworth to Katherine Mansfield's short stories.

The problem? Heyer wasn't that smart about marriage. (She was married when she published Instead of the Thorn but being in something is not the same as being smart about something.) 

Now, Heyer is a good writer. She created decent characters who within her travelogue, adventure, comedic shaggy dog stories entirely work! 

Rather than telling a story, however, Instead of the Thorn attempts to describe why a marriage went bad and then how it was repaired. And Heyer seriously has no clue. 

She tries to argue that a prim & proper upbringing equals a young woman being disgusted by sex. I knew WAY too many young women at the religious university I attended in my late teens/early twenties, many with prim & proper upbringings, who greeted sex with immense relief and satisfaction, whether or not they had the "talk" with their mothers beforehand. 

That is, they were more like Samuel Richardson's Pamela--and, for that matter, Jane Austen's heroines--than anything out of...I have no comparison. Anybody who writes realistically about young women would recognize Heyer's portrait as downright bizarre. Elizabeth, the protagonist, might imitate her aunt. She would quickly shed her aunt's influence the moment she went out into society. 

Unless she was inherently turned off by sex. In which case, no amount of "growing up" could save that particular relationship. 

To be clear, I'm not saying the wife or the husband is right or wrong in regards to Elizabeth's "love me but don't touch me" behavior. Nor am I arguing that men and women react the same to sex; overall, I don't think that they do. I am saying that so immense a gap between "I like the idea of courtship and marriage" and intimate congress would spell the end of any relationship (one young woman in college announced, when she broke her first engagement, that physical attraction and desire are important, adding emphatically, "You can't talk yourself into feeling stuff even if you admire someone"). 

In fact, weirdly enough, Heyer resorts to a kind of sitcom explanation of the central relationship in Instead of the Thorn: Elizabeth, the protagonist, cannot feel desire until she feels true love. 

Really? Because the history of teens and STDs and pregnancies also pretty much disproves that idea to the nth degree.  

Heyer's approach here can't be blamed on the romance novel genre. In one sub-genre of the romance novel, even from 100 years ago, the female protagonist would sleep with her husband and have children before she ever figured out that she actually liked him, let alone loved him. That is, many many romance heroines--including Austen's--have been perfectly capable of feeling attraction/desire as well as an emotional connection without knowing exactly what they feel. 

Heyer's approach--pairing sexual interest with so-called grown-up insight into "the other"--is an attempt at psychology, not practical observation (see Christie's novels for innocent young women who gladly leave their family homes to marry attractive ne'er-do-wells because, well, that's life!). Arguably, women are less likely to enjoy "friends with benefits" than men, but a young woman like Elizabeth would be FAR more likely to convince herself of an attachment than to run screaming to the hills because her husband wants to have sex. (And if she did run screaming, I'm not entirely convinced she would come back.) 

In fairness, Heyer makes solid points about the difficulties of a young person moving from a "helicoptered" household to one where she has to behave like an independent-thinking adult. Nevertheless, the book doesn't have enough substance to stand beside similar books from the time period.

It's entirely possible that Heyer came to despise her "modern" psychological novels for exactly the reasons I've detailed above. She was married for 54 years, had a son, who married a divorced woman, and three grandsons. As mentioned above, people can do something without understanding it. However, Heyer's own experience may have come to bear some weight in her assessment of what she wrote when she was much younger. 

And it's possible that Heyer never liked the book. She wrote Instead of the Thorn in the first place to make money/break into an industry, fiction, that had become fascinated with the problem of marriage.  

In the end, Heyer was a smart writer who ultimately figured out her genres--Georgian and Regency travelogue romances plus murder mysteries--and stuck to them.

Figuring out one's gifts: THAT is impressive.   

The Snarky Boyfriend in Manga

On Votaries I discuss the archetype of the Aloof Hero. 

A variation of the Aloof Hero occurs in manga, mainly The Aloof Hero Disguised as the Snarky Boyfriend. His aloofness allows him to stand outside of society's norms and comment on them. 

Below is a repost about snarky boyfriends. 

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The snarky boyfriend is common in both shojo and yaoi. Think Kurosaki in Dengeki Daisy. He teases Teru, behaves like a taskmaster--then rescues her, comforts her, turns to her when he is sad.

Likewise, Dee in Fake is Mr. Flirty/Playboy/Snarky Guy with everyone, yet opens up about his life and needs with Ryo.

On the surface, the snarky boyfriend is simply a sub-type of the rake: the angsty guy who is only vulnerable and open with the "one" romantic interest.

However, there is a slight (and rather fascinating) variation on the snarky boyfriend. The variation snarky boyfriend is not only sweet and vulnerable with the "one," he is often only snarky with the "one."

This is especially true of high school romances where the secretly snarky boyfriend is the aloof school idol: to his admirers, he is handsome, kind, thoughtful, self-sacrificing, never sarcastic, always on a pedestal, plays sports, gets good grades...

He never lets anyone entirely close (though he sometimes has one good childhood friend). The arrival of the one-and-only in his life is a relief, an opportunity to be his true self, especially since the one-and-only is usually the type to eschew pretense; unlike the snarky boyfriend, the one-and-only always behaves in accordance with his or her true self.

In Only the Ring Finger Knows (manga and light novels), snarky boyfriend Kazuki is only sarcastic with guileless and forthright Wataru. In His Favorite, snarky boyfriend Sato is only his somewhat sadistic self with bemused, straightforward Yoshida.

Only Kasahara can entirely provoke the cool-headed Atsushi Dojo in Library Wars. While Paul from Lies are a Gentleman's Manners is singularly capable of drawing the reserved Jonathan into snarky shouting matches.

It's like the Hulk in reverse. And can occasionally go too far. When done well, it showcases the "realness" of the relationship. Whatever outside facades or demeanors the members of the couple give to the rest of the world, to each other, they give their true faces.