Colonizing History: Historical Romance

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Short Description

Ever wondered why Regencies became all the rage? Or how historical romances shape and sanitize our perceptions of history? This episode delves into how Regency romances displace inconvenient historical truths. A critical look at older 'problematic' romances like Jennifer Blake's 'Fierce Eden' reveals the complexities of characters and settings, challenging the current sanitized romantic fantasies. This audio essay touches upon how modern Regency romance often overlooks deeper societal issues for the comfort of readers, questioning if this trend truly makes the genre better or just more palatable.

Read the original Substack essay here: https://shelflovepodcast.substack.com/p/colonizing-history-historical-romance

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Tags

romance scholarship, historical romance

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Show Notes

Ever wondered why Regencies became all the rage? Or how historical romances shape and sanitize our perceptions of history? This episode delves into how Regency romances displace inconvenient historical truths. A critical look at older 'problematic' romances like Jennifer Blake's 'Fierce Eden' reveals the complexities of characters and settings, challenging the current sanitized romantic fantasies. This audio essay touches upon how modern Regency romance often overlooks deeper societal issues for the comfort of readers, questioning if this trend truly makes the genre better or just more palatable.

Read the original Substack essay here: https://shelflovepodcast.substack.com/p/colonizing-history-historical-romance

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Transcript

Andrea Martucci: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Shelf Love, a podcast about romance novels, and how they reflect, explore, challenge, and shape desire. I'm your host, Andrea Martucci, and on this episode, I will be talking about how historical romance colonizes history and the inconvenient truths that conflict with romantic fantasy worlds.

This was originally an essay on Substack from October 30th, 2023.

If you are not already following me over on Substack, definitely recommend that you check it out. It's Shelflovepodcast.substack.com. Without further ado, let's get into it.

Popular romance fiction has colonized the colonizer: Regency, England. At the same time, the romance readers' romantic imagination of history has been colonized by the Regency. New readers of romance who are asked to describe quote, unquote, historical romance may automatically find themselves thinking of Bridgerton, Pride and Prejudice and the plethora of books dominating store shelves with covers featuring ladies in empire waist gowns with cap sleeves, falling provocatively off a creamy shoulder.

In other words, you may be picturing Regency romance set in England, which is but one slice of nine years out of the vastness of time in one country, out of hundreds. But historical romance, hasn't always been dominated by books, set in the Regency. Why did the audience gravitate to the Regency specifically? Is it less about what the Regency setting offers lush and plushly confected as it is and more about what can be erased from visibility without readers detection.

Today, I'll explore two related observations. The first is that by reading older historical romances that are often called quote unquote problematic, readers, witness, historical events and contexts that they may find uncomfortable especially when the characters that they're put in the position of inhabiting don't behave in an unambiguously heroic way.

The second is that Regency England as presented romance via collective and evolving world building across romance texts is a colonial project that displaces the original inconvenient histories by occupying the space with sanitized fantasies that can be exploited for modern audiences' comfort.

First let's take a brief history of the Regency romance.

The popularity of the Regency period in romance is usually credited to two influential authors. And I'll throw in a third who should be included due to the sheer number of Regency and Regency adjacent work, she put out in the world. The first is Jane Austen who lived between 1775 and 1817. Austen lived through and set her books in the Regency period which is the period between 1811 and 1820.

So at the time she was actually writing contemporary romance.

Austen is often [00:03:00] credited as writing the proto popular romance novels that contemporary authors use as a model and inspiration. Next. We have Georgette Heyer who lived between 1902 and 1974. Heyer's writing career began in 1921. But she wrote her first Regency, the aptly titled Regency Buck in 1935 and was inspired by Austen's contemporary novels of the period.

Heyer prided herself in her Regency research. And in her time, she also accused other authors, Barbara Cartland of using her books as the source of their own quote unquote research.

Many Regency romances from our century explicitly draw on Heyer's research and world building, which is not great given how Heyer infused her work with the cultural and personal baggage of her own time, including antisemitism.

Next up the one that I've added here is Barbara Cartland who lived between 1901 and the year 2000. Barbara Cartland was a contemporary of Heyer who was much more prolific. There are claims of 723 books written in her lifetime. And, uh, she was much less fussy about research maybe because she was borrowing from Georgette Heyer. As Cartland was a notorious fame monger in contrast to Heyer's reputation as a recluse who shunned the spotlight, and she also lived a quarter of a century longer than higher, Cartland's influence looms large in romance.

She had lots of opinions about what romance novels should and should not include. And she was famously pro Virgin and anti-sex in romance novels.

 

Andrea Martucci: Let's take a brief tour through the last 50 years of historical romance. Regency's are historical romances, but prior to the last 25 years or so, they were generally classified as a distinct sub genre that was not conflated with historical romance more generally.

The 1970s were a boon for erotic historical romance that solidified the formula that a happily ever after was a prerequisite in a sexy tale, along with monogamy.

I'm trying to keep things moving here but my footnote on this is that I am massively oversimplifying quite a few things here. I'm gesturing at the earlier historical romances that verged on the erotic, such as Forever Amber by Kathleen Windsor published in 1944 and Angelique by a Sergeanne Golan, which was 11 novels published between 1957 and 1985. They often had heroines who engaged in multiple affairs with many men. And they provided many possibilities for titillation as a result. Even if the books ended with the heroines in or pursuing a monogamous relationship with a lover, the driving force of the narrative was not the formation of the couple, which would be expected in today's historical romances.

I've tried reading some of these other historical epics of the pre 1972 era, [00:06:00] but I found them so depressing and cruel that I just tapped out before being able to really construe a proper understanding of what they were doing. So, yeah.

Regencies as defined sub genre had been around since at least the 1930s. But there have been booms and busts. By the 1970s, the genre was considered to be and was packaged as a formulaic commodity.

In the 1980s, there was a surge of contemporary category romances during the romance wars.

So let's look at the periods and places in historical romance and how it used to be. When I peruse my shelves of historical romance, especially the single title paperbacks from the 1970s through 1990s, I find a wide array of historical periods and places represented. Although just as today, explicitly not saying more so here, the majority of places were predominantly populated with white people or privileged the experiences of the white characters in a predominantly non white space.

For example, let's look at some popular and influential single title romance authors publishing in the 1970s through 1990s. Roberta Gellis was known for her meticulously researched medieval romances. Kathleen Woodiwiss tromped through settings from the Antebellum South in the United States to 1066 in England. Bertrice Small wrote about the Ottoman empire and her characters traveled between Turkey and Scotland in the 15th century among other settings. And Johanna Lindsey refused to settle in any particular locale and time to say nothing of the time traveling within books, and wrote 19th century American westerns, Viking romance as well as 19th century British historicals.

And yes, she wrote some books that took place in the Regency, but it definitely wasn't her sole or majority focus.

The breadth of time periods and places was also seen in historical category romance series.

Sunfire was a series of historical romances for teens in the mid 1980s focused on American settings but it's still brought teen lovers together in a variety of time periods, including the 1600s and the Salem Witch Trials, 1912 on the Titanic going to the United States, and New York City in 1888, plus 1867 Alaska.

If you want more info on Sunfire, by the way, there is a series of episodes about Sunfire when I was talking about YA romance.

I could go on, but even anecdotally, you can see great breadth of settings and time periods.

So when did this Regency invasion really happen?

Let's assume that my sense is correct that historical romance in the 1970s and 1980s, probably into the 1990s was generally more diverse in terms of time periods and places represented. Where do we find ourselves today? The current crop of historical romances feels like 75% or more are set in the Regency England.

Feelings or perceptions if you will, [00:09:00] aren't always reliable so I did do a brief quantitative study where I went through the first three pages of digital review copies for romance on Edelweiss. In other words, this is the newest available books.

I looked at every historical romance, there were 27 in total and I found that 63% were Regency, that was 17 out of 27.

30% were set in the Victorian period, eight out of 27. And then one was in the gilded age and one was from the 16 hundreds. Every single one of them was set in England.

Duke this, Earl that, Baron the other, there is a preoccupation with the most privileged echelons of class and wealth. Although increasingly we're assured that these 0.1 percenters are not just the idle rich: they're also successful capitalists. Yay. But that's a topic for another day.

A survey in 2018 by Jennifer Hallock found that over 90% of romance readers called Regency one of their favorite historical periods with just under 28% enjoying medieval Europe and 5% enjoying the cold war. By the way I'd recommend that you read Jennifer Hallock's three-part series, which is on her blog. She covers the research that she presented at a IASPR conference. That's at Jenniferhallock.com and the posts are from June 27th, 2018. And it's called History Ever After.

Hallock's research explores both reader preferences for the Regency and its commercial popularity, as well as the ahistorical elements of most contemporary 20th century regencies and how they specifically serve to bolster and explain the popularity. She is using chronotope as a way to talk about how the tropes in Regency romance come to represent the actual Regency period for readers.

So in this context, she is defining chronotope as both a term borrowed from Mikhail Bahktin in the 1920s which was a way to describe the manner in which literature represents time and space and then she's also adding on geography and ethnicity to the construct.

Here's a quote from her piece. "The chronotope is selectively inaccurate when realism endangers the happily ever after. Can you have a happily ever after with a slave owner? The popular chronotope of 19th century Britain avoids such issues by erasing these uncomfortable aspects of history from the story. End quote.

I'll come back to the discussion of the specific ways in which the Regency period is made more palatable than it actually was later.

But first, what happened? Why did Regencys set in England edge out most other time, periods and settings.

To answer that question let's look at our problematic past.

look, I am not a history buff. For example, most of what I know about the Revolutionary War comes from popular culture. Books like Time Enough For Drums. Musicals like Hamilton and 1776 plus middle and high school history textbooks.

I'm guessing that I'm not an outlier [00:12:00] here in learning about history, primarily from fiction, movies, TV shows, and now increasingly edutainment podcasts. And I feel historians shuttering here when I say that I quote, unquote, learn history from these sources. At the very least, I'm learning about things in history, meaning I'm hearing about events and time periods' existence, to which I would otherwise be completely oblivious.

One thing I do know is that the past is littered with violence and suffering.

You know, unlike today where we all live in harmony and peace and never hurt our fellow human. Wait a second. Well, I guess history is often framed as a linear progression towards a better future in which we currently reside. Maybe the world isn't perfect, but we're obviously getting better, right?

The atrocities of the past were produced by people utterly foreign to us and through the safe distance of time, we are able to sit safe in the knowledge that we would never do such things. We are fundamentally different having learned from the bad, bad things that our ancestors did, even better if it was someone else's ancestors, adding another layer of blamelessness.

But do we have any right to claim the moral high ground or are we just sitting in a very comfortable position where we aren't confronted with truly difficult choices or can convince ourselves that we aren't making choices. I found myself asking these uncomfortable questions recently as I re-read a romance that I first read as a teen over two decades ago: Fierce Eden by Jennifer Blake, which was originally published in 1985.

The villain hero binary. Fierce Eden begins in 1729 in the area currently known as Louisiana in the United States. It centers on the events and the aftermath of the Natchez Revolt at Fort Rosalie on November 28th, 1729. The Natchez killed the majority of the inhabitants of the Fort, approximately 230 people.

And the book doesn't shy away from exploring, as the story unfolds, the motivations that contextualize the violence against the settler colonial French by the displaced and oppressed indigenous people, the Natchez. Our protagonist is Elise LaFont a beautiful 25 year old French widow, who at the beginning of the story is the enslaver of three black people who are forced to work her small subsistence farm.

The book follows her romance with Reynaud Chevallier the son of a French nobleman and a Natchez princess. Reynaud or Reynaud (without the d), I don't know how to pronounce it, is also an enslaver, both in his French context as a land owner of a prosperous Louisiana estate, as well as in the context of the Natchez with whom he and Elise live for at least half of the novel.

Holy shit. You, modern romance reader, maybe saying to yourself. These characters are [00:15:00] irredeemable. And the only useful function for this book is as kindling.

And at first glance, one could and should question why this story centers the perspective of Elise, a French woman who begins the novel believing in some pretty stereotypical ideas about the indigenous people, even if she is more respectful of the cultural differences compared with her fellow colonizers. Let's be real, it's a really low bar.

Reynaud had tried to warn the arrogant commander of the Fort of the imminent uprising. But of course this warning was ignored. Elise manages to narrowly escape becoming a casualty, but witnesses, the death of many of her neighbors as she flees to the woods.

Reynaud takes on a small group of survivors in exchange for the nightly bed warming favors of the beautiful widow, which he primarily puts forth as the condition to spite the assholes in the party who continue to cast aspersions on his motives and character, despite him planning on helping them with no expectation of payment in return.

Now Reynaud isn't a rapist, which is refreshing. He knows that her fellow survivors coerced her into accepting the stated conditions of his help. And he quickly realizes that Elise is scared to death of any sexual advances. A turning point in his gentling towards her is realizing that her aversion to him is not because he's a racialized other despite his French aristocratic father, but because of her own trauma at the hands of men.

Let's talk about Elise for a little bit, because she's problematic.

Why would we want to inhabit her perspective throughout the narrative? Why should we feel anything but disgust for Elise? She's a colonizer and Yes, she is both of those things. Therefore it should be very easy to place her in the villain category because she's clearly a monster, right.

But Elise isn't here by choice as a way to enrich herself. The binary of villain or hero presumes that people are either all good or all bad. Or that there's no nuance in considering the motivations and alternatives available for people who do objectively bad things. Elise was falsely imprisoned in France by her jealous stepmother. And is transported at 15 to the Louisiana territory as a bride with other quote-unquote criminal women.

This really happened by the way. And if you want to know more, I have a link in the Substack.

Not only is Elise a literal child, she doesn't even get to choose her husband once they arrive. Her beauty is considered a liability as she's handpicked, as the wife, AKA sex slave for a violent drunk, who is owed political favors. We know that he violently rapes and assaults her for years prior to the beginning of the story.

She's still a colonizer. That's unambiguously wrong. But what is she supposed to do? She's a victim of circumstances, way beyond her control. Once [00:18:00] her husband dies she can't go back to France, even if she could afford passage. She has no means to survive in France and could also be thrown back in jail for escaping her sentence in Louisiana. She's still an enslaver. That makes her evil right? The discomfort is accelerating here. Okay.

There's definitely a way to read this book as slavery apologia. You can in, should read it that way. It's told from the perspective of the enslavers and there is zero problematizing by the text about the enslavement of black Africans in a system of chattel slavery, and there is minimal examination of the enslavement of indigenous people by both the French and the Natchez.

We can't pretend like the author isn't playing a part in shaping the narrative and our perception of the choices made by the main characters. The book positions Elise's treatment of her quote unquote servants as different from the more villainous characters within the narrative, ignoring the inherent violence of chattel slavery, and encouraging us to read her as a benevolent boss.

But what do we want Elise to do to show that she's not a villain here? Can we acknowledge that while she maintains privilege in this situation as a property-owning white woman that she's also kind of a victim?

Elise inherited the farm and the enslaved people when her husband died and it is not a flourishing estate. I'm not sure if Elise even has the power to free the enslaved people, but if she did, she would certainly be consigning herself to death and likely them as well.

This situation isn't purely confected. It is a historical fact that throughout history people found themselves in situations where through no deliberate action of their own, they became enslavers. Every point after that they are making choices. But it is naive to position these choices as, without harsh consequences.

Which kind of begs the question, what would you do? Maybe a better question: what would I do?

Fiction that transports us asks us to put ourselves in the shoes of the protagonist and experience the world through their eyes. On the one hand, it's quite easy to immerse myself in Elisa's perspective and see the world through her eyes. I see the complications of the world. I understand how she's come to believe what she does about the world. And I understand the choices she makes within her understanding of what choices are available to her.

But when I come back to the world that I live in, the world in which I would never, as if that speaks to an inherent goodness or moral rightness on my part, instead of a result of the fact that I live in a world in which I don't have to make those choices. Uh, yeah, it's like pretty uncomfortable.

It's horrifying. Not because I read about Elise doing it, but because I'm no longer sure that I wouldn't do it too if I was in her situation.

So let's think about old school problematic romance. I feel like I [00:21:00] have to be 800% clear that I am not trying to argue that Fierce Eden is not problematic. It is problematic to the hilt. It is also a very compelling romance. It's very transporting and I came away with a much deeper understanding of a time period and culture that I knew nothing about.

The book goes deep into the culture of the Natchez and presents Natchez characters as individuals with their own differing motivations and characteristics. i.e. The opposite of a stereotype.

Despite the Natchez killing literally an entire fort of French people, including children, literally on page, Elise and the narrative does not demonize the indigenous people as a group. While Elise is realistically traumatized, she does not turn that trauma into an excuse to dehumanize them based on their race or nationality even before she spends an extended period of time living in the Natchez community.

And I enjoyed this problematic book.

There. I said it. I enjoyed it, both the first time that I read it 20 plus years ago. And also as a 36 year old woman in 2023, who has learned a lot more about critically engaging with texts.

I know I'm not supposed to like it. I am supposed to shudder at this book's existence. I'm supposed to brand it as racist, consign it to romance's problematic past, and talk about how, oh, I'm so glad romance is better now. Because after all we are on that slow march of progress towards everything, getting better, a linear path up into the right.

The thing is, I'm not sure that stripping away the problematics is making historical romances in this case better so much as it's allowing readers to look away from history and allow us to maintain that comfortable fantasy that people who do bad things are evil monsters, and therefore we would never.

So let's come back to the Regency.

Is it a safe space for escape? If we want to avoid having to look at any problematic history, why not create a place where that unpleasantness doesn't exist? Or at least where we can pretend it doesn't exist. Our idea of the Regency is mostly made up hence Hallock's use of chronotope.

But we imagine that we understand what it was like, because the texts that we consume repeatedly erased the inconvenient truths that would disrupt the fantasy of unproblematic wealth and privilege.

It helps that our education system aids and abets this agenda by woefully neglecting to educate most of us about how closely colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy are tied together. And if you want more info on that, definitely check out the episodes with Dr. Margo Hendricks who writes as Elisabeth Grace.

Hallock covers some of [00:24:00] the historical inaccuracies that get brought up the most in romance discourse. For example, everyone who's worth talking about is titled or will be by the end of the story. About half of the top selling romances in a six month period in 2017 to 2018 had Duke, Duchess, Marquess, or Earl in the title.

Nobody heroic has syphilis despite eight to 15% of the general population having it at this time and romance heroes being notorious for sleeping around indiscriminately. I've also seen discourse about how convenient it is that the protagonists have a potentially ahistorical view of and access to bathing and they often have straight shiny white teeth despite eating lots of sugar in a time before modern dentistry and orthodontics.

Everyone is handsome and beautiful. The idle rich aristocrats have six pack abdomens as a result of riding horses and taking nice little walks, and their worldviews are decidedly modern. These are the innocuous inaccuracies.

The more insidious inaccuracies have to do with what is hidden from view completely, not just what is improved upon.

Because everybody is rich, but nobody wants to talk about where the money comes from.

Slavery was outlawed in England in 1807, just before the Regency period. Coincidence, I think not. But that doesn't even mean that people in the Regency had clean hands when it came to the exploitation of people, of all races. Wealth accumulated in this period was likely to be the result of investments in colonial activities, such as the subjugation of India to control trade and resources. There were plantations in the west Indies that exploited, enslaved people to harvest sugar in brutal conditions. And people often profited directly from the Atlantic slave trade.

This doesn't even get into exploitation on British soil of tenants under feudalism and harsh working conditions and coal mines or the Highland clearances in Scotland.

Also side note, sorry if I'm the one to inform you of this, but the new vogue of Victorian industrialists don't get to wash their hands of the problematics either.

There's recent research that shows that many of the advances in technology and necessary resources that fueled the industrial revolution are tied to slavery. Quote, the forces set in motion by the slave and plantation trades seeped into almost every aspect of the economy and society. That's from a book called Slavery, Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson.

Land owning Regency heroes are diligent landlords who put the good of their tenant farmers above their own pleasures, who work just as hard at their desks dictating correspondence to their secretaries as the workers do in the fields, who deserve seats in parliament, deciding the fate of an entire country, not due to the nature of their birth, but because they too understand the plight of the common man. And on and [00:27:00] on and on.

We are never confronted with the inconvenient truths of how the Regency sausage is made because the meat grinding room doesn't even exist. The sausages just appear.

And, you know, what, an unproblematic space doesn't exist. There are a million ways in which the collective world building of Regency romances create a supposedly safe space in which we never have to stare too long into the abyss. And we certainly never find ourselves uncomfortable.

I think the gradual invasion and reshaping of Regency England to be a historical space that can be deemed unproblematic shows our discomfort with the inconvenient truths of history. As the Regency era was invaded by our romantic fantasies, romance readers, and writers have colonized the historical space to become a sanitized and confected playground.

Its purpose is to meet our need for an unproblematic space to play out the conflicts that are central for white women while marginalizing any conflict that could center the conflicts for other people.. This is why most regencies focus our attention on gender inequality and the unfairness of marriage as the sole choice for economic security for women.

It narrows the scope of the story to the focus on the impacts of the CIS hetero patriarchy on white women but often sidesteps attempts at intersectional understandings of oppression.

There's so many suffragettes and so few abolitionists.

And yes, you can certainly find outliers.

I'm speaking in comically broad strokes, because I think it's disingenuous to shield the majority behind a few unrepresentative examples that allow us to preserve the fantasy that we're getting better.

It's kind of the idea that if I close my eyes, the monster disappears.

I'm not saying that you can't have your escape, that we should wallow in misery. But let's be real: looking away is for our own comfort and we don't get to pat ourselves on the back for it. We don't get to say that the stories we consume are getting better and less racist or less problematic, just because we've stripped them of anything that makes us uncomfortable.

I think I'd much rather read about characters who are existing in a more complicated world because their worlds are complicated in ways our own worlds are complicated.

We want simple worlds because we'd like to believe that we are blameless in our own worlds. We are all casually cruel in our self-serving focus on our own concerns and our indifference to problems that are too big for us individually to make a dent in.

This allows us to maintain the fantasy, not just that we're the heroes but that it's impossible for us to be the villains. When we look away, it doesn't make the bad things stop. It just allows us to stop caring.

Hey, thanks for spending time with me today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate or review on your favorite podcast app [00:30:00] or tell a friend. Check out Shelflovepodcast.com for transcripts and other resources. If you want regular written updates from Shelf Love, you can increasingly find me over at Substack.

Read occasional updates and short essays about romance at shelflovepodcast.Substack.com. Thank you to Shelf Love's $20 a month Patreon supporters: Gail, Copper Dog Books, and Frederick Smith. Have a great day.