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Thursday, September 14, 2006

Can men write romantic novels?

Thursday, September 14, 2006 12:53 am by M.   2 comments
The Telegraph publishes an article where two Telegraph writers try to answer that recurring question:
Can men write romantic novels?
TV presenter Daisy Goodwin sparked a storm by claiming they can't. Here, two Telegraph writers, Ray Connolly (yes) and Liz Hunt (no), lock horns over the issue
We summarize the articles just by their Brontë mentions. It's quite enough to get the point:

Ray Connolly argues
So now it's clear. The reason Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary were such unromantic flops is because both books were written by men. Big mistake. (...) And how do we know this? Because Daisy Goodwin, the presenter of Reader, I Married Him, a new BBC4 series on the novel, which will be transmitted this autumn, just about tells us so.

"You can't have a really seriously romantic book written by a man," she says, dismissing in a sentence the murmuring hearts of half humankind. If you're a male writer, Daisy goes on, you lack insight into the ways of women.

Oh dear! Presumably the converse is true, too, which explains why Emily Brontë was so useless at creating a believable male character. Sorry, Emily. Wrong sex. What was the name of that brooding, revengeful bloke in Wuthering Heights? No wonder he never caught on.
Liz Hunt replies
Ask any woman to name her favourite romantic novel and the likelihood is that she will mention one of two titles: Wuthering Heights or Pride and Prejudice.

No matter that the hero of one is a psychopath, given to roaming the moors in a frenzy of rage, despair and sexual frustration, while the other stands around in drawing rooms being superior. (...)

Women also identify with heroines who are the source, rather than the object, of the brooding, obsessive, all-consuming passion, albeit cunningly disguised, as in the case of Jane Eyre.
And this half of BrontëBlog that happens to be a man and loves both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (and many other standard-male and non-standard male things) is a little bit sick of so many clichés, prejudices and maximalists discourses. There's no such a thing as THE men or THE women... there are SOME men and SOME women.

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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous9/14/2006 02:58:00 am

    The article was interesting and I liked hearing both writers' sides of the issue.

    I am female and I agree with Connolly. I don't agree with Hunt. Some of my favorite writers are male: Hardy, Donne, Frank O'Hara and many more. In fact, I prefer Byron's or Keats' poetry to anything by Felicia Hemans or Mary Robinson.
    I think it is impossible and unfair for anyone to condescendingly pin down what is exactly "male" and what is "female".

    Also, they should have prefaced the article by defining, and coming to an agreement if they could, the word "romance".

    Furthermore, Hunt seems to think that just because she was interested in the romance between the leads in The Da Vinci Code, other women are prone to do the same. This is simply not true. The romance was the least interesting part of the book. After all, how many people would actually find the romance engrossing given what little there is we know about it, when there is so much else going on in the novel, a shocking conspiracy of religion of all things! Women are capable of delighting in a detective story, if she hasn't noticed!

    Also, this the poorest piece about Hunt's argument: "But my 15-year-old self wasn't interested in the historical context, I just wanted to know if Scarlett would ever understand that Rhett was the only man who understood her and truly loved her".

    We are not all 15 years old, even if her interests haven't changed over the years.

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  2. Anonymous9/14/2006 06:50:00 pm

    Hello mysticgypsy!

    Very interesting comment. Thank you.

    First of all, I agree that they should have made clear what they understood by "romance". Many connotations there.

    I don't dislike the fact that there are romantic relationships as backdrops in novels, though I would never go for a Mills & Boon book. But I am getting a bit tired that nowadays most novels have a romantic relationship. It gets too predictable. In The Da Vinci Code for instance it felt like some kind of imposition on the author rather than an original idea.

    My favourite writers are mostly women - not because they are women but because they just happen to write stories that I like. Many of them - by the way - do NOT include romantic relationships.

    On the other hand I have read a good few novels by men where there was a romantic relationship (developing naturally) and it was just as moving as any other.

    We are not all 15 years old, even if her interests haven't changed over the years.

    *claps* :D

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