A couple of things have conspired to have me thinking about the popularity -- or unpopularity -- of certain time periods in historical romances this week. One was an article in the paper talking about a TV show called Mob Stories II. The executive producer of the show, Peter Gentile, is quoted as saying, "Mafia stories have replaced westerns on television."The other is the commercials for the new movie, Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
I'm not sure about mob stories taking the place of westerns on TV, but I do have a couple of theories about why Westerns became unpopular in romance novels.
One reason also dogs the medievals and Victorian era romance novels, and I call it the Hygiene Issue, aka Reality. A lot of modern readers get their ideas of history not from school or books, but from movies or TV, and for a long time, Hollywood portrayed the old West as dusty, but not filthy. Ditto the Middle Ages. Take a look at Errol Flynn's Robin Hood. Those folks are clean, and so are their castles. But then Hollywood got a little more realistic. The reality of the lack of hygiene came in, along with more violence.
Thanks to adaptations of Dickens, a lot of people think poverty, ignorance and dirt when they think of Victorian England.
I find it interesting that Elizabethan and Restoration England apparently do well as settings for historical novels, but not romances. Elizabethan England also seems to work in movies. (Shakespeare in Love was just on the other night, too.) Actually, in the case of Elizabethan England, I think it works better in movies in part because of the clothes. They can look sumptuous on the screen, but if you try to describe those bloomers in a book? Sounds a little silly -- and that's without the cod pieces. Don't want a hero wearing silly outfits!
Then there's Regency England, the most popular setting for historical romances at the moment. Again, I think there are a few reasons for this, but one is certainly due to Jane Austen, who confined her stories to the upper middle class. That's the level of society most often portrayed in current historical romances, too. Everybody's clean, everybody's polite, and all the factories, child labor, pollution and riots are out of sight.
Do historical romance readers really have a much lower tolerance for, well, history? Are they truly unwilling to face the realities of the past? Do they just want what's basically an adult fairy tale? This is something I grapple with all the time, because I hate to think it's true, even if the market seems to tell me so.
3 comments:
Dallas Schulze wrote a book called Short Straw Bride which dealt with a rather realistic reason for marriage in the West: male children and a housekeeper for a bachelor, no alternatives except whoring or servitude for the lady. (I mention this book because it makes me laugh a lot!) The life of drudgery is quite plainly spelt out in the book, not glossed over. It gives me hope every time I read it that more than one woman found peace and love in their hard lives of that time period.
And then there's a warrior series that a talented lady penned, which manages to cover almost all of the challenges facing the warrior class of nobles. The rather endless training, need for money and position, vying for land and title, marrying for position or circumstance: those all seem very realistic to me. Love is a strange and exotic blossom in that garden.
LW
Historical romances can include history. I've learned so much by reading Jo Beverly. And I hadn't realized about Charles II until I read your Scoundrel's Kiss - then I went off to the net and started reading up more about that era. And I have seen romance authors tackle child labor - though maybe not with the grit or depth it should have been, but then it depends upon just which has the main focus of the story? Would it cross the genre line from historical romance to historical with romantic elements?
(and the mob shows are probably the fall out from the Sopranos, producers hoping to cash in on that phenomenon.)
But in a way the portrayal of the mob on TV is very similar to how westerns used to be. Outside the law, their own code that needed to be followed...or else.
I like to read about different time periods. I get tired of the same old thing book after book.
Post a Comment