The Official Essex Sisters Companion Guide (4 page)

November 19, 2006

This is a blog for aspiring writers, and so I wanted to write against something that is often told me by aspiring writers: that their idea is “fresh and new”; that their critique partner said “she’d never heard of another story like it”; and that above all, their book avoids “clichés.”

OK.

That’s how Diana Gabaldon did it, and the author of the
The Time Traveler’s Wife
, and Laura London when writing
The Windflower
, and any number of other authors.

There are many authors who have made respectable careers by paddling in waters explored by others. Shakespeare, for example. He never created any genres or really anything new in format or topic. He even stole most of the plots of his plays. But he sure knew how to have fun with an old plot. How about J. K. Rowling? Academics have had a field day pulling out all the structural references to novels by C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, not to mention the fact that the whole premise of an orphan boy growing up in a boarding school has been done lots of times before.

This particular blog is not about original plots. I happen to have a deep love of hackneyed plots: the marriage of convenience, the secret baby, the surprise return from war (or another unpleasant place), the girl who masquerades as a boy, etc. What I’d like you to think about is how incredibly useful it is to pick up a plot that everyone understands—say, the marriage of convenience. You’re a new author: that means you’re grappling with learning all sorts of things, like pacing, and character, not to mention the difficult chore of writing bedroom scenes. Give yourself a break on the plot. I do it all the time.

Some of you will have surmised that
Pleasure for Pleasure
, the book I have coming out on November 28th, involves a less-than-ordinary marriage. Think of all the benefits: with a forced marriage, you can bring together a couple who might not otherwise do so. You can create all kinds of hysteria and funny situations by manipulating the way in which they end up together. Here’s my version, from
Pleasure for Pleasure
:

                       
“It just doesn’t seem the same level of seriousness,” Josie said with a gulp. “I lied—well, in so many words—I lied to my
husband
. In order to get him to marry me.”

                            
Annabel gave her a hug. “It’ll be all right by tomorrow morning. I promise.”

                            
“I have to make him fall in love with me. By tomorrow morning!”

                            
Annabel sat down on the bed. Tess was curled into an armchair by the fire, but Josie couldn’t calm down enough to sit down. She just stood in the middle of the room, feeling panic roaring through her like a tidal wave.

The forced marriage scenario has given me a delicious launch into the wedding night (obviously, Josie can’t just creep under the covers like a shy virgin—she has a lot to accomplish in the next twelve hours!).

There are a number of challenges one faces in writing genre fiction. For one thing, you are constantly dealing with extremely well-known romance tropes, such as the forced marriage. It can be very difficult to be original within the bounds of a much-beloved plot point. Loss of virginity is a good example. Virgins are very popular, especially in historical novels where most young aristocratic women would have been virgins, but trust me—it’s very hard to write a creative, original version of “Oh, that’s too big! It will never fit!”

The crucial thing about writing sex scenes is that they must reflect the specific characters who find themselves in bed together, and they need to move the plot—not just the sex—forward. Jody turned up a blog entry in which I talk about writing the sex scenes in
The Taming of the Duke
, which we thought might also be interesting.

March 31, 2006

Taming of the Duke
is actually my 10th book but (some of you may be glad to know)
Pleasure for Pleasure
(coming out November 28th) is merrily making its way through copy-editing and proofing.

So I thought I’d blog today on writing sex. After all, this is, at once, often the favorite part of a reader’s experience of a given book—and the hardest part of a writer’s experience of that same book. In fact, in my years in publishing, I’ve heard plenty of multi-published authors explain their change of genre by noting that they were tired of describing Tab A’s exquisite, incredible, screamingly appropriate fit into Tab B. And—make no mistake about this—virgins are hard to write about. Every time you read a good virgin-sex-scene, make me two promises: 1) remember your own experience, and if yours was screamingly wonderful, ask your best friend about hers, and 2) send silent applause in the direction of the author. The truth is that writing variations of “What
is
that? Oh me! It will never fit!” takes a special skill that is akin to rocket science and should never be underestimated.

Even without the virgin issue, sex scenes do dwindle into a question of tabs and moans unless (to my mind) the scene itself is integral to one of the characters’ development. In
Taming of the Duke
, I had it easy. Imogen is a widow, so no size
surprise was necessary. But she was feeling her way into life after Draven, and realizing that she wanted to engage with men in a very different way than she had with her husband. That fact had to become part of any intimacies, or (to my mind) I had lost a brilliant possibility. On the other hand, you can’t simply freeze the picture and have a lot of interior monologue in which the heroine suddenly realizes that . . . whatever. A sex scene has to sweep the reader up and carry her along with feverish excitement—it can’t stop for ruminations!

Here’s how I did it in
Taming
:

                       
“How would a bird of paradise behave?” Imogen asked.

                            
“An old-fashioned term for one as sophisticated as you,” Rafe said, sounding amused. “A bird of paradise would do precisely what would make her partner the happiest: and that would likely include a lively show of enthusiasm.”

                            
“Oh.” It wasn’t very specific.

                            
“But perhaps you’re more interested in a baggage than a bawd? Because a bold girl, a naughty girl, a woman who was in this bed for the pleasure not the profit, would make absolutely certain that she did precisely what she wanted to in order to increase her own pleasure.”

                            
“Oh . . .”

                            
“She wouldn’t give a damn about her partner. Let the man take care of himself.”

That’s the crucial bit of dialogue—for the effect, you have to read the scene yourself *grin*

That little conversation (and Imogen’s thought process) changed the whole complexion of her participation in the evening . . . and made it quite delicious in my point of view!

In the blog above, I’m talking about how to turn a sex scene into more than Tab A and Slot B by having the character actually talk about gender roles. Rafe and Imogen carve a space within the norms of sexual behavior that allows their lovemaking scenes to reflect the two of them.

One of the most popular scenes in the entire series is the chapter in
Pleasure for Pleasure
in which the Earl of Mayne rips open his future wife’s pink, sparkling dress and cross-dresses in order to show her how to attract men. Though it’s fairly common for Regency heroines to dress in breeches, Georgette Heyer established the reverse in
The Masqueraders,
when a Jacobite sympathizer avoids capture due to his command of female dress. As a professor—moreover, one who has published work addressing issues of sexuality and gender—I was fascinated to discover that the scene has attracted academic attention.

Jody and I decided to include this thoughtful, well-written article by Anne Bornschein titled “When the Hero Puts on a Dress,” which analyzes the fan-favorite scene from
Pleasure for Pleasure
. Romance writers think about “gender performativity”—i.e., how a person signals gender to society—all the time, though we may not put it into those words. Our Regency heroines have to act like “ladies,” in the simplest example. In contrast, Mayne’s excursion into a drag teaches my Regency
heroine how to act not like a lady, but like a woman. He teaches her to perform “desirable woman”—because his kiss makes her understand that she
is
a desirable woman.

by Anne N. Bornschein

In her 2008 book
Historical Romance Fiction
, Lisa Fletcher provides an astute analysis of cross-dressing and gender performativity in historical romance novels. According to her research, cross-dressing is almost always limited to the heroine, who wears men’s attire to disguise her female identity and take on a male role, whether as an adolescent gentleman, a cabin boy, naval officer, cowboy, Bedouin, or valet.

In most novels based on the premise, the heroine is truly masquerading as a man, generally for expediency’s sake within the storyline. Cross-dressing offers either protection—for instance, in situations where a woman traveling alone may be particularly vulnerable to kidnapping or assault—or access to exclusively male spaces such as gambling dens or military barracks. Because the hero generally does not immediately realize the heroine’s identity as a woman, secrecy, confusion, and revelation are hallmarks of the cross-dressing romance.

As a trope, cross-dressing also provides the author with a means to subvert the severe delineation of gender roles in various historical periods, allowing heroines greater freedom of movement and experience than their setting might otherwise permit. Fletcher argues that in spite of any transgression the gender politics of the trope tend to reinforce the male-female gender binary when traditional gender roles are ultimately reestablished,
and that cross-dressing heroines “stand
uncomfortably
between conformity and progression.”
¹

Far less frequent in popular historical romance is elective cross-dressing not intended to deceive others, and rarer still is a cross-dressing hero. However, in the past ten years a handful of romances with these features have been published. They may indicate that it is time to revisit cross-dressing in popular romance and assess to what extent Fletcher’s evaluation of the trope still holds true for more recently published novels.

Open male cross-dressing occurs memorably in Eloisa James’s Regency historical romance,
Pleasure for Pleasure
(2006). It is an isolated event in the story, but critical nonetheless in configuring the relationship between hero and heroine.

Author Eloisa James (
alias
Shakespeare scholar Mary Bly) states in the novel’s afterward that the principal intertext for
Pleasure for Pleasure
is Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, with its device of love-in-idleness. In the play, love-in-idleness is a flower (specifically, a wild pansy) made into a potion to incite love; when Puck mistakenly applies it to Lysander’s eyes, a romantic entanglement ensues. While cross-dressing is not a major motif in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, its aesthetics of enchantment and transformation play out during two important chapters in
Pleasure for Pleasure
.

In the key scene, the hero, the Earl of Mayne, is attempting to convince his friend’s ward, Josie, that her curvaceous figure is sexually appealing to men. Josie, in the wake of some cruel and very public taunts about her weight on the part of a spurned suitor, has resorted to wearing a draconian corset to squeeze into smaller dresses. In an
act of defiance against both Josie’s detractors and her own insecurities, Mayne unbuttons her dress and unhooks the corset, exhorting her to remove both.

He then dons her dress and styles himself Miss Lucy Debutante to model self-assured femininity: “He put a hand on his pink-clothed hip and began to walk across the room toward her. Somehow, like magic, his walk took on the sleek stroll of a female predator, a woman so confident of her appeal that her hips swayed like a ship encountering a swell of water” (94).
²

It is only in observing the movements of Mayne’s body that Josie gains an inkling of her own sensual appeal. By watching him move in the guise of a woman, she comes to perceive her own potential as an object of desire, and as a subject capable of wielding power through the desire she inspires. In a double-gesture, Josie is attracted to Mayne for his masculinity, and to her own erotic potential through the vehicle of Mayne-as-woman.

When called upon to follow Mayne’s lead, however, Josie initially reacts with skepticism; she is convinced that what appeared graceful on him will only seem ridiculous on her. As she attempts to copy him, she has a flash of insight that underscores the complex dynamic of gender performativity and essentialism in the scene: “She was trying not to think about how wide her hips would look, going back and forth like that. And then she realized that what she’d really like would be Mayne’s body in a female form, because his hips were absolutely flat and of course that was why he looked so sensual when he pretended to be a woman” (94). To Josie’s mind, Mayne makes a better woman than she does.

Eventually, and inevitably for romance convention, Mayne decides that Josie must be kissed to gain true confidence in her sexual appeal. Critically, their first sexual
interlude is complicated by the fact that Mayne is still wearing Josie’s pink dress: “Then he was there, in front of her. He was wearing a pink dress with cap sleeves. The glass beads painstakingly sewn on by Madame Badeau’s seamstresses glittered in the moonlight. He should have looked absurd, but instead, Josie felt as if Bacchus himself had indeed wandered into this strange little turret room and was there, with a deep wild invitation in his eyes” (95).
³

What strikes me as critically innovative in this passage is the use of the straight hero modeling female sensuality, then channeling that sensuality into a sexually charged encounter. During the kiss, Mayne’s performance of femininity remains visible to both heroine and reader, continually pushed to the forefront so that the kiss also seems to constitute a kind of transaction: a transfer of feminine confidence from the hero to the heroine. It is only after the kiss that Josie is able to master the strut that previously made her feel like a waddling object of ridicule.

To be clear, I am not intimating that Mayne confers femininity upon Josie, or that the scene promotes such a reading. Rather, the romantic interlude allows the heroine to become aware of her appeal and direct it outward. After the kiss, it is as though “she were seeing herself from the outside,” at last able to recognize the grace and attractiveness that have long been apparent to Mayne (100); Josie can both “[listen] to her body” and command it in new, thrilling ways (100). She begins the scene enamored of a single feminine ideal but ultimately learns that there are multiple ways to enact femininity, and how to embrace her own body’s potential.

Cross-dressing when used in this way opens up onto larger notions of transformation and performance, particularly when we take into consideration the fact
that the novel’s primary Shakespearean intertext is not one of the cross-dressing comedies (
Twelfth Night
,
As You Like It
) but rather
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.
⁴

The clothing swap and kiss takes place in a turret tower in Mayne’s home. The ceiling has been painted with stars, and eight high-placed windows—one on each wall facet—allow moonlight to enter the room, making it “utterly magical” to Josie and evoking the woodland setting of
AMND
(66). Throughout the interlude, words associated with enchantment such as
mysterious
(66),
witch
(74, 75, 94),
magic
(81, 94),
transfixed
(92),
moonlight
(95),
wild
(95),
bewitching
(97), and
spell
(97) reinforce the setting as one in which uncanny transformations might take place. Under a simulated night sky, with moonlight pouring in, the two protagonists allow themselves to gradually fall under the room’s spell.

Alcohol helps; Mayne and Josie finish one bottle of champagne and start a second. The drink makes Josie feel “brave and reckless,” and while Mayne is not visibly intoxicated he declares himself “three sheets to the wind” (76). The champagne may serve as a substitute for the love-in-idleness used in Shakespeare’s play to transform the protagonists’ perceptions.

As noted above, Josie likens Mayne to Bacchus while he is wearing her dress. The designation actually appears three times during their interlude. In the first, as the two are sharing their champagne, Josie reflects that Mayne “looked like nothing in the world so much as a slightly wicked Bacchus crafted by a master sculptor” (74). And just before Mayne dons
the pink dress, she reflects that he “looked wild, like Bacchus,” and that he would be “perfectly at home in a shadowy wood, vines wound in that mop of curls, a sleek mat of curls beginning at his waist” (93). This last reference again seems to evoke the woodland setting that was home to Puck, Oberon, and Titania in
AMND
.

The name Bacchus is fitting on multiple levels. Bacchus (or Dionysus) was the Greco-Roman god associated with wine and intoxication as well as ritualized abandon and excess. In sharing his champagne with Josie, Mayne fulfills this god’s role as a provider (and partaker) of libation. It is also worth noting that Mayne’s lithe form that Josie so covets is in keeping with many portrayals of Bacchus as a youth embodying both feminine and masculine traits; Michelangelo’s sculpture
Bacchus
is notably androgynous, as is the second-century Roman sculpture shown below.
^5
,
6
Either might serve as the inspiration for Josie’s musing that Mayne resembles a sculpture of the god.

And so Mayne is transformed, albeit briefly, into both a debutante and an androgynous god, while Josie makes a more lasting change from insecure girl to confident woman. Mayne’s spontaneous cross-dressing is only one piece of the scene’s richness, but it allows us to delve further into
Pleasure for Pleasure
’s intertexts and allusions. By channeling Shakespeare and Bacchus in this scene of abandon and transformation, James prepares both her protagonists and her readers to fall under the spell of a little of love-in-idleness.

Footnotes

[1]
Fletcher, Lisa,
Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity
, Ashgate Publishing, 2008, p. 74. Emphasis in the quote hers.

[2]
James, Eloisa,
Pleasure for Pleasure
, Avon Books, 2006. All of the passages quoted occur in chapters 7 and 9.

[3]
This is the second reference to Bacchus in the interlude. Josie and Mayne have consumed a bottle of champagne at this point and are ensconced in a beguilingly fanciful turret.

[4]
The cross-dressing trope does occur later in
AMND
, as secondary characters discuss the staging of
Pyramus and Thisbe
within the play. Quince tells Flute that he is to play the female lead while wearing a mask and speaking in as high a pitch as possible. And, of course, Mayne wearing a dress in
Pleasure for Pleasure
echoes the Elizabethan convention of requiring that male actors play all female parts; it is nearly impossible to separate Shakespeare from men in dresses.

[5]
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Michelangelo_Bacchus.jpg

[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus#mediaviewer/File:Dionysos_Louvre_Ma87_n2.jpg