I have been reading a lot of Romance novels--selectively. This is where you might expect a disclaimer: "But there's a lot of really good writing out there!" The truth is, no. There's not a lot of good writing. There's a lot of really bad writing, really terrible plots, horrible or nonexistent characterization. But there's a fair amount of cleverness, and there is some good writing. I consider myself qualified to tell the difference. Having started with Diana Gabaldon (not exactly Romance) and Gail Carriger (whose books can be categorized to a greater or lesser degree of accuracy as "Paranormal Romance" in a decidedly non-Twilight sense, but are better described in some cases as "Steampunk novels of manners," to borrow a term from a friend) on the more literary end of the spectrum (to be explained later, if I get there), I find that I can read Georgette Heyer (the founder of Regency Romance by many accounts), Julia Quinn (whose Romance novels are much, much better than those she cites as influences), and, recently, Grace Burrowes. Excluding Georgette Heyer, whose novels do not depict sexual acts, these authors all participate in the Romance genre insofar as they do depict the sexual act. But there, I find, the similarity ends, with the possible exception of Burrowes and Quinn, who are both more "typical" of the Romance genre than the other two. So yes. I am not only okay with descriptions of sexual acts in fiction, I rather like it when done well. This is longstanding, since I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon in high school at about 15 or so. I was long curious about Anaïs Nin, but find that her dark erotica is not at all appealing to me now, for reasons I may mention later.
All of this brings me to perhaps a mundane question, which is how the novels of these writers use sex differently in their novels, and how that relates to genre classification, both what Romance novels do with sex, and how more "literary" fiction (a publishers' and booksellers' classification that I am not ready to accept as a genre) differs in its use of sexual acts as part of the action and overall (artistic?--let's call it rhetorical) effect of the novel. Part of the phenomenon can be explained by use of the term "normalization." Critics and fans alike can agree that to some degree, Romance novels normalize sex. You walk in a room. Probably the library, since that's the place where sexual encounters took place in the 18th and 19th Centuries, apparently. There's a desk. And books. And our hero, pushing down the bodice of her dress to grasp... And however it plays out, how scandalous it is to the ladies of the ton, you the reader are left with the committed opinion that it is, at its most basic level, completely normal and natural. Read 20 or so of these, and your ideas of what is completely normal and natural will, in fact, be reinforced with very little variation.** As the novels layer on different kinds of acts in various circumstances, the reader's repertoire might expand with the heroine's--or not, depending. This is why there has been attention given to depiction of contraception in Romance novels--because what better way to normalize safe, at least among readers of Romance?
On the other side of the spectrum is defamiliarization. Now, whenever you have the depiction of a virgin in a sexual encounter, you have some element of defamiliarization, just because the reader has to get the impression of how unfamiliar this is for the character. But narrative defamiliarization would be something like: you think you know something about sex. But I'm going to present sex in this circumstance that makes you question what you know, for good or for bad. Diana Gabaldon is particularly good at this one, especially in the earlier Outlander books, before literally everyone had been raped. And frankly, this is where Anaïs Nin went waaaay too far for me, by telling the reader, "I can arouse and horrify you at the same time, ultimately making you horrified with yourself." Yes. Yes she can. Defamiliarization acts on the reader in certain ways, but this is not just a function of the act itself, but also in its framing, how it figures into the plot, what it reveals about sex in relationships and in society, as a part of civilization or as part of our understanding of the sacred, how it hurts and how it heals. These are not only defamiliarization, of course, but the use of one form of action within the whole thematic and plot structure of the novel, the setting, and the characterization.
I would outline the use of sex in fiction thus:
- Plot action - how it contributes to the overall arc of the action
- Progression - does the sexual act somehow move the plot along?
- Consummation - is the sex act the thing to which the plot has been building?
- Theme - is the reader supposed to think about sex in the context of larger ideas in the text? Does sex itself become a major theme, in that the novel is making a point about sex rather than having it function as part of an everyday routine?
- Characterization - does the sexual act aid in the development of or the reader's understanding of a character?
This all seems pretty basic so far, but what should be clear is my assumption that sex is not gratuitous, or if it is gratuitous, it is gratuitous in a way that makes us seriously consider that gratuitousness (which would render it not gratuitous). In this way, I think sex in fiction becomes different from the depiction of sex in visual media--in television and film. It is easier, I would argue, for sex to be gratuitous in visual media--for it to simply titillate. Which does not at all mean that to titillate is not a rhetorical function, because when words produce a bodily effect, that is absolutely a rhetorical function--with sexual feeling as much as with laughter or visceral horror. I am actually not equipped to say whether this means that there is no such thing as gratuitous sex in print or visual media. I wanted to add that I wasn't implying that gratuitous sex couldn't be a thing in fiction, but I may be. Whether or not you like the function that it performs, whether it adds to or detracts from the purpose of the text or whether it is the purpose of the text, is a whole different notion.
As simple as the basic taxonomy seems, it provides a framework for noting the difference between texts in the same genre or different genres that feature explicit sex scenes--but for what purpose? Perhaps none. Perhaps to help to distinguish the good from the bad or the simplistic from the complex, or perhaps to create some common ground or understanding between people who favor one type of writing vs. another, or to explain the appeal to those who favor none of the above. I haven't gotten there yet. Right now, I am just interested in the difference in narrative functions, and perhaps to see why I gravitate towards certain novels and not others.
Leaving off on such a note of ambiguity, I wonder whether I will continue in another post by giving a brief analysis of the writers I list above (Gabaldon, Carriger, Quinn, Burrowes), who may not be mentioned again by a single author in a single post, or whether I will save this for an unrealized conference paper idea. Or whether, prompted by Amazon's new interface, give up reading Romance novels altogether since the Paperwhite's new interface insists on confronting me with the cheesy embodiment of my prejudices against the genre instead of the relative anonymity of a list of titles...
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**From here, we could get into "heteronormativity," which would be the accusation that heterosexual sex is, overwhelmingly, depicted as normal--as the norm, in fact. Which would make any variations thereof into deviations. This is not a conversation that concerns me, in part because it seems very obvious that most depictions of sexuality geared toward a heterosexual (female) audience would, in fact, depict heterosexual sex as the norm. Heteronormativity in the Romance genre? Check. No dispute. Are there critics and writers who challenge this? Absolutely--both by writing the various options and by making the argument that all options should be provided in equal abundance and as equally normalized.
