Heathcliff and Cathy -- The Bad Boy & Bad Girl In Romance Roots

Heathcliff was my first gothic hero, which I differentiate from the romance hero of today's genre. Traditional gothic heroes are monstrous and angst-ridden creatures, and their fates are usually tied to something horrible about their pasts.
Bronte did something unusual. She made Heathcliff very human and yet, still retain his monstrosity. He loved beyond death, which was ultimately romantic, and his madness for Cathy was both passionate and awesome scary at the same time. Yet, I liked him better than some of the revenge rakes of today's bad boys--"men" who play cards and walk around attended by their servants, the ones that kidnap the heroines and force them to submit to their control. Bah, they aspire to Heathcliff's bad boyness!

Also, Cathy had a power over Heathcliff that rivaled his batshit crazy revenge plan, and she knew it too. She was the ultimate bad girl, a pre-Scarlett O'Hara, always thinking about herself, yet giving in to the wildness in her whenever she was with her Heathcliff.
As you can tell, I'm batshit crazy about Heathcliff :). He had many qualities of the romantic hero--alpha, arrogant, too sure of himself, ultimately brought down/tamed by love of a woman--but being a gothic story, of course, his story ends tragically. But there was hope too at the end, with the love of the "new" young Cathy and the boy Heathcliff brought low, like he was.
Finally, if you look at urban fantasy and paranormal series today, there are seeds of Heathcliff and Cathy in the characters, except, of course, you get more blood and gore, mixed with magic. Angst-filled, anger-ridden powerful hero out to get revenge; super-controlling males who want to bind their women to them; the call of death and loving beyond; the cold power of the heroine capable of killing her man; the inability to communicate beyond verbal fighting--all these themes arose from Wuthering Heights.

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What Is Wrong With Just Feeling Good? Or, Another Long Meandering Post About Those Who Try To Understand Us

GO DUUuuuuuuKe!

Ooops, sorry, if you're a Butler fan. I find many people are Cinderella lovers; even if they don't watch basketball, the story of David (Butler) beating up on Goliath (Duke) has them rooting and cheering for the smaller college. And I don't blame the instant fans because I love a feel-good story myself, and Butler played like a team on a mission through the night, down to that last second heart-breaking Hail Mary that almost, but didn't. However, for once, I was on the side of the Big Bad because Duke has my heart. Unless, of course, if Notre Dame is involved. Then that's another story :).

It's funny, isn't it, that, if you ask everyone, this tale, if it had a happy ending, with that final shot going in and making Butler--a nobody school--the Big Champion would have everyone jumping up for joy. It is some kind of inherent DNA switch that come on, that we humans WANT the smaller to beat the bigger, and when they do, we get a euphoric nod from the universe, as if that win reflects our hope that we too can beat the odds.

Yup, we love us our Cinderella-makes-good stories. When I think about it, the story really doesn't fit the analogy--why is the school compared to Cinderella? After all, the players aren't mistreated by evil step-kin and made to clean the hearth. And there aren't any glass slippers, balls, pumpkins or fairy godmothers.

I know, I know, I take things too literal sometimes, but I really wanted to know why Cinderella. Why not Three Little Pigs, who outsmarted the Big Bad Wolf? Or, Snow White, which also had an evil stepma and lots of cute dwarfs to her get a slam dunk? Further research gave me the answer and it is BILL MURRAY for whom we can blame this odd term. Of course it's from Caddyshack. It's popular college vernacular we're talking about, and of course they wouldn't be referring to any fairytales. Duh, dude.

In Caddyshack, Bill Murray, our favorite half-crazed character, was self-announcing his own fantasy golf: "Cinderella story. Outta nowhere. A former greenskeeper, now, about to become the Masters champion." So, there you have it. College kids think Cinderella is Bill Murray, a greenskeeper with a gopher complex.

Still, mix-up and all, the public roots for the Cinderella team because it wants that happy ending. The TV producers want that happy ending because then people would tune in and watch and give them happy ad revenue, another kind of happy ending. Heck, I'm beginning to think we all want that happy ending for our own selfish happiness ;-).

But not so for us poor pitiful romance readers.

We, romance readers get bashed ALL the time because our stories have happy endings. There's Oprah, who thinks romance books are just so damn unrealistic in life. Everything must have a horrific heartwrenching ending to be "realistic" to her. So, I'm going to assume that she's satisfied that Butler's defeat proves her theory, that in real life, everyone must end up unhappy.

It is, as if, we can say Cinderella defeated the evil stepmother and her nasty stepsisters, but what? she married the Prince too? You got to be kidding me. That's just so...unreal!

Many try to shame us into hiding our reading habits. Others call what we read non-books. Even writers denigrate the genre (Nicholas Spark, eyeballing you here) and some previous romance writers run from their roots after changing genres. Somehow, romance readers aren't allowed to have Cinderella-loving DNA without inducing some people into eye-rolling, spotting Oxegen-channel-heebeejeebees who suddenly spout purple prose in haiku.

Also, lately, there's this new phenomena of romance studies, chopping up our love of the genre into feministic labels and philosophizing on topics such as the "hole" that the "magic penis" must enter, or some such deep matters. I kid you not. It's a conference of serious romance studies.

I've always posit that breaking down a novel too much takes away the joy of reading. Even though I love to do it and still think it's an excellent tool to help analysis skills, I also have a secret believe that those who become lifelong experts of a certain novel or author or genre tend to not see the story for the words.

And when I start reading fun romance topics like the Magic Hoo Ha become a literary topic at conferences, on how it relates to feminist studies and whatnot, my eyes start glazing and my brain turns to sticky candy. These topics are brought up as if they're something new and relevant. SERIOUSLY? The Magic Hoo Ha and the Big Penis Savior have been around forever, folks. We romance readers have been bandying those terms on the Net since, oh, I dunno, since before there were such a thing as discussion boards. Mrs. Giggles in the early 90s. AAR and Prodigy Romance Boards in the late 90s. I was there, and we were pure romance readers just happily yakking about our favorite (and not-so-favorite) books.

They were fun labels we gave so we could laugh at ourselves because we enjoyed these crazy romance tropes so much. They do NOT reflect our feministic needs to cure ourselves. Nor do they reflect our being strangled in a phallopaternistic society (not my theory, folks). Sure, we welcome new challenges--the -isms, the anti-this/that, the sexual freedom--but if those authors overpower their stories with their agenda, we turn away from them like a kid from veges. We want our meat.

Romances are feel-good stories. We champion our main characters and want them to win in life. We want our happy ending. That's all. We really don't go any deeper than that.

Perhaps if we drop our knowledge about the real Cindy and just go for the Bill Murray version? Maybe that'd help them understand why we enjoy our HEAs and HFNs without those scary analysis about how reading certain books reflect on our character/culture/knowledge/DNAIQGQBBQ?

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No, No, Nothing Sexay In Here, Mommeeee!

Remember when we strolled down memory lane a couple of weeks back, reminiscing about the different covers?

Doing a quick poll. I stole these covers from the Smart Bitches. These are the original covers of our beloved romance Keepers from the early days. Check out the clinches ;-). Beside each are the modern reissues of the same book, oh, a couple of decades later.

The poll is: Which one would you buy if, let's say, these books are out there today at your fave brick and mortar bookstore? Which one would catch your attention?

This second "rogue" is so gentle I think I'm going to do a reread of Moby Dick to get some macho violence....

See the BIG difference? ;-) What's your initial reaction?

Clinch cover or weird pastel art that conveys nothing about the stories inside?

Whoa, here! Wild couple or wild horsie? Heh.

This last new reissued cover cracked me up. Where is the savageness of that house on the hill scene?!

So, my questions are:

1) which ones of these covers are in your Keeper Shelf?

2) Which covers do you lurv--the old school ones or the newly ho-humed ones? I know, I know, my bias is showing.

3) Do you feel better now that your romance reading is hiding behind such safe looking covers? Garnered a bit more respect? :big evil grin:

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Uberly-Used Romance Terms

I've been having a weird puter issue for a few months now, but have managed to ignore it because it was bearable. For some reason, every time I access a few websites, e.g. Romancing The Blog, I get an error page. Or that the page doesn't exist. So far, this phenomena has happened with six or seven sites I've wanted to visit.

I have tried every way I could to see whether there is some kind of problem affecting my puter--trojans, Viruses, something--but to no avail. The only way I can access these sites is through an anonymous proxy, meaning the target sites then don't know it's my ISP that's dropping by. It's not as if I'm trying to hack into a non-public site; I'm talking about Jaci Burton's blog or Nalini Singh's website. Every time I type their URL, I get an error page.

It's a mystery to me why those sites are blocking me and what's causing it. I know it started happening around May 10, when I was in Colorado. Before that, I seemed to be able to surf anywhere I want.

Being me, as long as I could still get in through an anonymous proxy, I just continue my merry way. But the mystery of it all still bugs me. Computers--the most frustrating things in the world when they don't do what you want them to do!

If you have any idea how to solve this issue, please help!

**************

While traveling around the romance blogosphere, I notice some readers not familiar with the terms being tossed around by others while discussing romance books. So I thought it would I'd make a list of them here today. Most are self-explanatory.

1) HEA: Happily Ever After

This is the Must Have for all romances. If they end with a break up or a divorce, it is not considered a romance. The romance genre is often sneered at because of this one rule. HEA, according to sneerers, is just unrealistic crap, and that's why romance readers are stupid and naive. By the way, sneerers are usually bad logicians and have very odd stereotypical ideas about what romance readers/writers look like (hausfrau with no life).

But I digress ;-). Back on topic, HEA is definitely uniquely romance genre.

2) TSTL: Too stupid to live

Let's face it. Some of our heroine's decisions make them TSTL. This happens in movies too, like the heroine who decides to stay overnight in the house that starts talking to her. And hey, walk down into the dark basement in your see-through nightie, will you? Granted, I am more forgiving of those movies because most of them are written by males suffering from the delusion that half-naked damsels in distress screaming and being chased around is something sexy. In Romancelandia, however, not so much, since I expect a woman writing my kind of book would know better.

Unfortunately, there are many, many heroines who had been given TSTL status. Do you remember the one who insists on doing something dangerous on her own when she has been told to stay put? What about the one who calls the murderer to arrange a meeting behind the backs of those who protect her? And hey, let's not forget the one who keeps insisting on going after the bad guy without any weapons.

3) POV: Point of View

We are so used to reading the hero's and heroine's POV these days that we feel cheated if a book is just from one character's POV. Most romance readers, for some reason, hate first POV books. Urban fantasy, the latest hottest trend, is all about first POV. And romance readers as well as fantasy readers are scooping them up like hot buttered rolls from Ryan's. Huh. Go figure.

4) Mary Sue

When a book is obviously a wish fulfillment fantasy of the author's. The term started in fanfiction forums, in which you find the writer incorporating his/her fantasies through his/her character with a character from a favorite TV show or book.

5) H/H: Hero/Heroine

5) Duke of Slut: You know, that lord of everything, who just sexes up the entire London ton before the appearance of the heroine in his life.

6) Fake Rake: the opposite of the Duke of Slut, just all reputation, but really, he's not like dat.

7) The Big Misunderstanding: Obvious insertion when conflict is needed.

As in the scene when the hero walks in and sees the heroine drinking tea with his rival, he snarls out "Whore!" and stomps out, vowing vengeance, and promptly goes out on a date with the booby bimbo that has been hanging around the story waiting for this cue.

8) Purple Prose: very flowery and stilted language found in all kinds of books

In romance, though, there is a lot of eye-rolling when we read phrases like "purple helmeted warrior of love," "dragon of lust," "hot pocket of love," "dewy mound of heat," and "raging staff of desire." Wonder why? ;-)

Any other terms you need clarifying?

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