Possession, 1979 Harlequin Romance #2U5S

Possession, a 1979 Harlequin Presents by Charlotte Lamb, is similar in some ways and different in others from last's week's 1979 Harlequin Romance, Sea Lightning. We still have an overbearing hero with a little too much confidence in his personal allure. He is in a position of authority over the heroine (actually her boss...again). He's ridiculously sexist and assumes the heroine is available to him sexually because of her behavior with other men and her attractiveness. If you read last week's post, this probably all sounds familiar.

But we've changed lines now from Harlequin Romance to Harlequin Presents. And Possession, trope-wise, winds up in the arranged marriage/marriage of convenience lane rather than the enemies-to-lovers of Sea Lightning. This seems to be an important distinction in early Harlequins. It raises the possibility of married-people sex, which given the time frame and publisher conservatism at Harlequin in this era, seems infinitely more acceptable than pre-marital sex.

And married people sex is what we get in Possession. While hero Dan Harland and heroine Laura Belsize are not yet quite in love, they do get married and have explicit sexual relations. Now, when I say "explicit" I don't mean the pumping and gasping of today's erotic romance. But it's also a far cry from punishing kisses, a breast grope and a fade-to-black. We'll get to all that in a minute though as it happens about two-thirds of the way through the book.

First, one place where I'm starting to notice a divergence in the way physical intimacy is portrayed in these older categories is in the characters' experiences with people not their potential partners. These days, it seems like neither hero nor heroine is permitted any kind of sexual contact with a different character, while in the older books, I'm not sure I've read one yet that didn't have some element of a love triangle involving at least kissing. In Possession, we get several such relationships. On page 9:

When they returned that night it was almost three in the morning. Max opened the flat door for her and then kissed her hard for a long time, his mouth warm and expert on her own.

'Renata will wake up ... no, goodnight ...'

Reluctantly he kissed her again and walked away, and she closed the door, leaning against it, laughing softly under her breath, because it really had been the most wonderful evening.

So not only does Max, a relatively minor suitor, get to kiss the heroine, the implication is that she likes it. It's "warm and expert". And so in addition to the ratcheting up of sexual content from the Harlequin Romance from last week, in this Presents from the same year, we also get a total absence of guilt. Finally, when the heroine says stop, this guy Max actually stops. He's "reluctant" but he abides by her wishes. We might assume from this that the Presents heroine has a bit more agency with regard to sexual matters?

Well, not quite. As the story progresses, it comes out that hero Dan has virtually taken over Laura's family business. Laura's ne'er-do-well father Jimmy has been in an accident and her grandfather is old and becoming frail. Despite Laura's modern, career-girl notions, her grandfather appears to think that she is too young to take over the business and appoints Dan as trustee. If he could appoint Dan as her husband, he'd do that too and eventually the desire to please her grandfather drives her to agree to wed him. Her father is also pushing her into marriage because it allows her to keep an eye on "the enemy" since he is certain his father wants to cut him out of the business entirely. The daughter is basically sold into marriage to secure the family's business, if not entirely against her will, then certainly against her inclination.

And that brings us to another interesting element of Possession: Laura's disinclination to marry. We are told that she has "a positive phobia about possessive relationships" and "liked to be fancy free, not tied down" (page 51). There are several other instances of Laura thinking or saying similar things and it emerges as the main stumbling block to a relationship in the novel.

We still don't have the hero's perspective here, but a reader familiar with the trajectory of these category romances will pick up on the fact that the hero is emotionally committed long before the heroine. This exchange from page 87 hints at what I mean:

'Arrogant, ambitious men usually get their comeuppance,' she said, turning away.

He followed her over the stony ground. 'And usually at the hands of an even more ruthless woman,' he suggested.

Doesn't that just read like poetry? In the confined space of the best category romances, every word has to mean something and this passage has her turning away and him following her over rough terrain while admitting the power she has over him. The book it put me most in mind of is actually Gone With the Wind: where the hero, reluctant to show his soft underbelly to a fearsomely confident, flirtatious heroine, resorts to sardonic wit and their magnetic attraction to eventually win her. Of course, he's more successful at it than Rhett Butler was.

When Laura's grandfather takes a turn for the worse and her father falls in love a woman who has been nursing him after his accident, Laura finally agrees to marry Dan and they go on their honeymoon. It's here where they eventually fall into bed on page 139.

'I'm not going back to England until you're my wife in every sense of the word,' he said thickly.

Her eyes widened. 'Marcus needs you ... the firm ...'

'Damn the firm,' he snapped, his features harsh. The grey eyes flickered over her hungrily. 'I've played a waiting game for months, but I'm not waiting another day, Laura. I want you, and you're going to let me make love to you before you leave this room again.'

The fierce determination in his voice left her helpless. She weakly closed her eyes. He lay watching her without moving for a few moments, then his hands moved down, slowly touching her, running down over her body smoothly, stroking and caressing. She abandoned thought of everything but the sweetness of the sensations his hands were arousing in her. [...] He drew away and bent to kiss her breast and she buried her face in his throat, kissing it hotly, moaning incoherently, a piercing tension in her body, aching along her taut bones, a frenzy singing in her blood.

The passage goes on for another five pages, alternating between description and Laura's revelations about what this might mean for her and Dan. And while she does say no at three points, the scene plays more like dubious consent than non-consent. Though the point where Dan calls Laura a  frigid bitch is a particularly low one. That said, her nos seem more emotional than physical in context.

That would not have mattered so much since she admitted grimly that she wanted him, too, that he was not going to take a thing she did not want to give him, but in that very fact lay the seed of her fear and panic. [...] She was afraid of her own desperate need for love.

Laura begins to worry that she could care for Dan and, musing on her lonely childhood, recalls the lesson that it's dangerous to care for anyone--that caring results in "rejection, humiliation, pain" (page 143). Now, in a real life encounter, Dan would have clearly stepped over the line. Frankly, anyone who called me a frigid bitch would not be getting into my pants. But within the context of their relationship, the scene, and the childhood backstory IN THE MIDDLE OF THEIR SEXUAL ENCOUNTER, I'm not so sure. The resulting climaxes and denouement are actually tender (page 144).

She fell into a silence, a warm, lazy, languid ease which was like the peace of a summer's day. Dan's head dropped on her body, his breathing slowing, his heart settling to a quieter pace. His hands stroked her body gently. She lay, eyes closed, her arms around his neck, feeling the tension, the panic, drain out of her toes.

Of course, their bliss is short-lived. Dan thanks her for their encounter and she reacts poorly, setting the stage for a third act where both feel betrayed before coming back together again.

Possession was an interesting read for me, mainly because it's the first category sex I've read for this survey (and, not so incidentally, signals a need to back up and read some earlier works), but also because it's the heroine holding up the loving-and-caring show, not the hero. If it's possible to show a hero in hot pursuit without being inside his head, that's what we've got here. It also exposed some of my assumptions about what sexual content in a book this early would look like: that it would involve more love and less direct language. Wrong. Though the couple being already married didn't surprise me at all.

Next week, I tackle Sara Craven's Harlequin Presents Flame of Diablo, which Jenny Haddon suggested might be the first Mills & Boon sex scene. Like Possession, it was published by M&B
 in 1979, but it's actually later by Harlequin reckoning: 1980. So it will be interesting to see whether 1979 was just a turning point or whether I really do need to go back further to see the advent of sex scenes that aren't almost impenetrably vague.

Sea Lightning, 1979 Harlequin Romance #2U5S

So if you read yesterday's post on my Utterly Unscientific Summer Saturday Series Sex Survey, you know that today I'm going to be writing about Sea Lightning by Linda Harrel, a Harlequin Romance published in 1980, but originally put out by Mills & Boon in 1979. One note: when I say Harlequin Romance, I'm referring to the specific line at Harlequin, not a general term for romances or even a general term for Harlequins. Throughout this survey, if it's capitalized, it's the name of the line.

First, a little bit about Harlequin. I'm no kind of expert, but here's what I've been able to garner from Wikipedia and various romance bloggers. While Harlequin as a company started in 1949, their partnership with Mills & Boon, a British publisher of romance novels, didn't start until 1957. My understanding is that Mary Bonnycastle, the chief editor at Harlequin, had a real resistance to printing the more sexually explicit material found in some Mills & Boon titles and would reject reprinting books that didn't meet her decency standards. Here's what I don't know: how long did that control last? And what lines did it cover? I've got a hold on Pamela Regis' book A Natural History of the Romance Novel at the library, but it hasn't come in yet. I have to get the Joseph McAleer Mills & Boon history from interlibrary loan so that will likely take longer.

My personal experience with the Harlequin Romance line has been mostly kissing with the occasional breast grope all the way up through the late 1970s. The Harlequin Presents line, which started in 1973, I understand is slightly sexier, with Anne Mather, Charlotte Lamb and Violet Winspear particularly having the reputation for books that run toward more sexual tension. But the actual sex acts depicted in the ones I've read have been limited to vague allusions to sex after marriage--basically the romance novel equivalent of television's "one foot on the floor" Hays Code. We get wives in nighties and perhaps some vague post-coital cuddling, but no actual sex, certainly not in the way we've come to expect as modern Presents readers. I've only read about a dozen of each of these lines though from the time period I'm covering now (my reading in the past has run to older titles) and never made a careful or chronological study of them so that's what I'm interested in exploring this summer.

Sea Lightning by Linda Harrel is a good place to start because it's pretty typical of the earlier Harlequin Romances I've read. Heroine Jensa Welles is a professional illustrator sent to Argentina by her former teacher and mentor to work with marine biologist Adam Ryder on a scientific book of whale behavior and migration patterns. Right off the bat, we get straight to the reason I so love these older category romances. On page 28 & 29:

'I shouldn't think you'd be bothered by much human company no matter where you lived--you're not exactly welcoming yourself, you know,' she muttered, holding on to her seat for dear life.

'I could be...if I take into account the purely decorative advantages of your presence.'

The suggestiveness in his voice stiffened Jensa's back and sent a slight prickle running down her spine. She turned her head to one side and stared out at the broadening desert. He was still trying to unnerve her. And she had to admit that he was very close to succeeding.

...

Jensa caught her breath and felt her eyes widen. 'You're an overgrown child, Adam!' she snapped. 'You think all this bluffing is going to panic me, providing you with some petty, small-minded amusement.'

Not only has Adam called into question her professional competence by this point (purely on the basis of her sex--and says so outright), he has ordered her to return home, threatened her with the primitive conditions at the research station, made suggestive comments about her appearance and now these more overtly sexual threats. It's textbook sexual harassment, almost a caricature it's so bad. And it continues through much of the book. As a modern reader, it's unpleasant, jarring and offensive. If it occurred in a contemporary romance novel today, it would likely get an automatic trip to DNF-land from me except for one thing: Jensa stands up to him, verbally protesting his language and behavior. He doesn't change it, but she said something, which is pretty brave considering he already doesn't want her there and she basically has no recourse, legal or otherwise.

Now for the sex. There isn't any. I wouldn't even call the novel particularly thick with sexual tension. It's more thick with Adam wanting, Jensa denying and feeling quite guilty and embarrassed when she does find herself experiencing desire. Adam makes several references to the fact that since Jensa is a beautiful woman, she must have quite a lot of sexual experience, for whatever beauty has to do with desire or promiscuity. For example:

With that cynical announcement, he leaned his body over her and pressed her back on the sofa, covering her mouth with his, brutally forcing it open. When at last he finally released her, he said, 'I did that to shut you up--you push me too hard, you know.'

He withdrew his body from hers, leaving her shaken and unable to reply. But when she looked up into those cold, mocking eyes, her response came in full. She brought her hand across his face with a sharpness that drew colour to his cheek and pain to her hand.

His hand flashed out and caught her wrist, pinioning it to the seat. 'An appropriate reaction, Miss Welles, and well done. But I know women who look like you love such attention...even though they all feel obliged to go through with these little charades of mock outrage.'

There isn't a single word in those paragraphs that isn't horrifying to this modern reader. He physically restrains her. He kisses her against her consent and does so to shut her up. Nor is it a gentle kiss. He's condescending about all of it. Finally, he makes the ridiculous assumption that beautiful women desire that kind of sexual attention, but want to make him work for it. If anyone needs a primer on how rape culture works, this is pretty much it. Oddly though, Adam has a fairly veiled sexual relationship with an Evil Other Woman in the novel, but she remains largely unjudged for her behavior. One assumes that beautiful women who conform to his sexual expectations are excepted from his wrath.

Of course, Adam hasn't really had a female role model in his life. His high-flying society mother left his dull, dreary, scientist father when he was very young. This seems to be held up as an explanation for his behavior, but also a the main sticking point in his personal development as human being. It's quite Oedipal really. Jensa suggests at one point that he should consider reconciling with his mother, which he eventually does, off-stage. And after that, his behavior changes. There's an ethos that even now permeates some romance novels: that the savage, uncontrollable male is tamed by the love of his heroine. That's not quite what happens here, not directly. At least, the change to his behavior seems to come from reconciling with his mother, though of course it's at Jensa's suggestion.

Toward the end of the novel, Adam's gives Jensa full credit for her contribution to both his conference presentation and an enormous win in his efforts at whale habitat conservation. Though they part on bad terms shortly before the end of the novel (yes, of course they get together in the end), Adam includes Jensa's business contact information on his conference materials even though he isn't obligated to. He and other men are depicted as having quite a lot of respect for her professional abilities. It was just as satisfying for me as a reader that Jensa earns professional respect in the end as it was that she earns the sexy scientist's love.


There's some more fairly uncomfortable kissing that ranges from violent and expressly unwanted by Jensa to merely forward and only reluctantly abandoned by Adam (a total of four at my count). And yet, the last kiss in the novel tells a different story.

He looked at her expectantly. Slowly, tentatively, he reached out to her again, and this time she did not resist. 'I love you, Adam. I love you so very much,' she whispered as he pressed her to him. He kissed her then in that way that brought her breath in short, exquisite gasps.

...

He brought her to him once again. There was silence in the room for long moments after that. Finally, as Adam withdrew his lips from a hungry caress of her neck, he whispered, 'You and I must go and do that sightseeing. A hotel room is decidedly not the place where we should be right now! Our time will come--and soon, my darling.'

Yes, she thought, looking up at hi in wonder and in joy. She knew that neither he heart nor her body had betrayed her, after all, in urging her to love this man. With him, she would be safe and cherished, always.

So here's the thing: despite Adam's horrific attitudes early in the novel and the brutal kisses he inflicts on her (which of course she sort of likes even if she's loath to admit it even to herself), Sea Lightning was quite a good novel. Even though Adam's redemption happens very quickly, it's sufficiently complete (and has the additional factor of reconciling with his mother) that I actually sort of believe that they might really be alright together. There's also an amusing discussion of potential future children and how Jensa will continue to work while the kids are educated in a very the-world-will-be-your-classroom manner.

In other words, Sea Lightning answers both sexual and professional questions for women in ways a modern reader, thanks to a broader acceptance of feminist principles, would never even think to ask them. While the perspectives on sex aren't modern ones by a long shot since the "loose woman" doesn't get the guy and the virtuous heroine does, and Jensa feels guilty about any desire she experiences throughout the novel, at least by the end the hero is respecting her sexual boundaries and acknowledging her professional competence.

I'll be reading in chronological order throughout the summer so the next book on the list is Charlotte Lamb's Possession, a Harlequin Presents from 1979. Let's see if changing lines makes any difference to social mores or sexual content.

And don't forget that readers can contribute to both my 2U5S spreadsheet in a public Google doc and the link party on the 2U5S main page. Come, share the old category love.

Utterly Unscientific Summer Saturday Series Sex Survey #2U5S

It's Memorial Day weekend here in the States which means the traditional start to the summer season is upon us at least culturally if not meteorologically. I haven't done so many essay-type posts lately, mostly because I've been trying to concentrate on improving my photos and recipes, but I sort of miss doing those more free-form pieces. And so when a question I asked on Twitter earlier this week seemed to spark some interest, I decided to go ahead and make a summer project of it.

The question went more or less like this: When did sex start becoming a major feature of category (aka series) romance? I'd just read and reviewed Roses Have Thorns by Karen Leabo, a Silhouette Romance from 1989, and there was hardly any sexual contact it in at all--just a few kisses and one over-the-blouse nipple pinching. It just got me wondering how we got from there (if there is really where it started, which we all had our doubts about, as you'll see below) to where we are now, which has some kind of sex from fade-to-black to explicit in most major category lines.

According to a number of folks who have been around the romance business a lot longer than I have, it seems that the sex-on-page turning point happened long before 1989 and that the Silhouette Romance line or even that particular author chose to add none. Editor Jenny Haddon suggested that perhaps Sara Craven's 1979 Mills & Boon title Flame of Diablo had the first on-page sex while Sarah Frantz Lyons recalled that a significant first might have been a Violet Winspear book. I have the Craven on order and it should be here next week. I'll have to look into the Winspear thing though as the one I have of hers is from 1981.

But it got me thinking on a larger scale about the sexual content of category romance novels and how we got from a few chaste kisses in the Harlequin Romances of the early 1970s to the current situation that can allow for anal sex in some racier category lines. And not just penis-in-vagina (PIV) sex--what about oral sex, masturbation and other forms of sexual touching? Since I love old category romances and have a bunch of them already laying around my house unread, I thought, well, wouldn't it be fun to do an utterly unscientific summer Saturday series sex survey (2U5S)?

I'd love to find some more books outside the Harlequin Presents line, but currently I have a selection of 16 books with publication dates from 1979 to 1990. The reason I chose those dates is that it encompasses both Craven's 1979 book and a 1990 Anne Stuart book that lots of people seem to have found memorable for a particular oral sex scene. Though if I hear of a category/series romance with "full docking procedures" (Haddon's term, which cracked me up and that I will use ad nauseum so fair warning) that has an earlier publication date, I'll be happy to revise my criteria. Speaking of full docking procedures, I decided to define "sex" as orgasm achieved via manual, oral or genital stimulation. This may not be a good definition for sex in general, but it seemed a good enough definition for romance novel sex. If this were a real survey, I'd have to go into more detail about that and come up with a more clinical definition. But whatevs. Utterly unscientific.

Thus far I have books published by Harlequin Presents, Harlequin Romance, Dell Candlelight, Loveswept and Silhouette Romance. I think many of the Harlequins I have are actually reprints of Mills & Boon titles so those would also qualify. I just don't often see them here in the US. I have two books each by Charlotte Lamb, Anne Mather and Iris Johansen, but the other authors are all unique.

I have set up a spreadsheet to track my reading and the sexual content therein. In addition to basic identification data, I developed a few categories of sexual content as well as some additional data that seemed tangentially related like whether the characters are explicitly named virgins and the type of language used to describe sexual acts and body parts (vague: he entered her, euphemistic: his sword entered her sheath, and precise: his penis entered her vagina). The spreadsheet is public, meaning anyone can edit, so if you want to read along and have books that would qualify, feel free to add them. I just ask the following: no historicals, no single title romances, no books outside the prescribed time period and if you add a title from a line not named above or have a category romance with sex and an earlier publication date, please email me so I can add it to my own to-buy list. All the books I intend to read are on the spreadsheet though I may revise if I can balance out the publisher & author distribution via new purchases. Our weekend forays into the Virginia hinterlands tend to yield some pretty good category hauls.

So...it's not completely unscientific, I guess. I'm a Virgo after all. I really can't help it.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll post my first 2U5S book, Sea Lightning by Linda Harrel. No food, just romance. And my weird musings about the sexual content of 1980s-ish category romance.

Finally, if you want to read along or pick up some other early-ish category romances (again, not single title, not historical, not books outside the date range of 1979 to 1990), I've included a blog link-up thing below. I'll link here from each of the review posts so if you want to read just one or a bunch over the course of the summer other folks interested in this stuff can find your post too. Feel free to link up GoodReads reviews, blog posts or articles. Just be sure only to link content written by you. Sorry, but I'll delete posts that don't conform to the guidelines above.

An InLinkz Link-up

Happy summer!

A little pinch

Let’s talk about sex. Specifically, sex in romance novels. Can someone tell me what’s up with virgin heroines' first times being, well, awesome? And not painful at all? I get a little annoyed by historicals where the heroine feels “a little pinch” and then goes on to have an awesome time. Is this realistic for some people? Truthfully, I prefer it when things don’t go all that well. I can’t suspend disbelief long enough for the little pinch.

My own first experience wasn’t classically awful. But it hurt. Enough that we had to stop. I get that every girl is different, but I’ve never been the type of girl that had a lot of girlfriends so I don’t know: is no pain the norm?

The reason I ask is that I recently read a fairly silly contemporary vampire romance. It wasn’t the best book, but there were aspects of it that were compelling. The most interesting thing is that because the vampire hero is so very drawn to the virgin heroine’s blood, they’re concerned that the small amount from breaking her hymen might set him off so she goes to a doctor to have it broken. The author described the process in some detail, which was odd for the context, but interesting from a social perspective.

All I could think was, “Well, shit, why didn’t I do that?” The reason is that no one ever offered. It never occurred to me to ask for it. In all of sex ed (and I grew up in a liberal college town in California so we had a lot of it), the topic never came up. I was talking about it with my husband and we both agreed that it’s probably the archaic vestiges of men desiring virgin brides and girls unwittingly buying into the ridiculousness that virginity is a gift. If it were up to me, it would be a standard part of the sex ed curriculum. Let's all go get our hymens broken! Like scoliosis screening.

Okay, maybe not. It's should obviously still be the girl's choice. But it sure would have been nice to have understood that as a rational option.

What do you think? Is the little pinch a realistic depiction for more people than I'm aware of? Did anyone go the doctor route? Did it make a difference?