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Placeholders & the dual perspective

November 28th, 2009 | 12 Comments

After my post yesterday, which linked back to a post on Racy Romance Reviews, there was a comment by AG there that I felt I could respond to more appropriately and more at length here and without getting too far off topic for Jessica’s post:

Despite the definition it kind of feels like placeholder heroine is a term similar to bodice ripper. It’s meant to put the reader of romantic fiction into a position of defense.

Actually, I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. We have to understand that this is something that respected and relatively popular authors within the genre bought into and wrote about – in more than one essay in that Dangerous Men, Adventerous Women collection. Authors who were and still are teaching other authors about the writing process within the community. They accepted it as being applicable to what they were writing then and maybe even still do. I honestly don’t know.

My impression is that it was (is?) more an attempt to explain why the genre moved from mostly 1st person to mostly dual perspective in such a relatively short period of time in what is mostly the post-bodice ripper era. That may sound weird but look at the title of the essay I quoted from “The Androgynous Reader” by Laura Kinsale in the last post. That era is considered to be the 1970s, more or less. I don’t remember dual perspectives showing up en masse until well into the 1980s or later and the book of essays was published in 1992. Do the math and one realizes it’s about a perfectly natural learning curve for the authors.

Then, too, Kinsale was one of the ones who attempted to explain placeholder heroines and reader identification to me over on the AAR forums right after I first read about them and questioned what in world it was all about. She quoted a lot of the same references Jessica talks about in her RRR post. Kinsale had all her own answers down pat, was very eloquent in her responses and it was still about as clear as mud to me in the end.

When you get right down to it, the dual perspective unlike simple third shows a merging of two perspectives into almost one voice and can go very badly if not done correctly, which is what I believe gives a lot of people considerable pause. Unlike 1st person or even limited third it isn’t a very clear-cut perspective to use in writing. Or in reading it, either, for that matter. It’s also a perspective that’s caught a lot of flack as being considered poor writing in many circles over the years, which has not added to the respect romance receives as a genre.

And yet romance readers love it, so are publishers going to desert its use? Hell, no. But why do readers love it? Simple, because it highlights the one thing that they hold sacred above all else – The Relationship. Not the individual elements that make it up, the hero or the heroine, but that ultimate goal of getting them together in the end.

See, that’s the one thing that’s misleading about the hero being all important to the romance, about the stories being written “by women, for women” or even romance being about a women’s journey solely – if any of those things were the ultimate truths about the genre, then dual perspective would never work because it would always be out of balance. Dual perspective would just be the wrong approach. It works, though, even in some of the most badly written stories because it was only with the use of dual perspective that the true nature of The Relationship’s importance in romances came into focus. Blindingly clear focus.

Romance readers loved it and we’ve never looked back. We don’t want to look back. We may occasionally accept and even love some stories told in other points of view but we will never give up dual perspective completely now that we’ve found it because it’s the voice of The Relationship itself.

But the writers and the academics, of course, they had to figure out a way to explain why we as readers were so strongly deserting limited perspectives in our reading choices. Why in the world did we love something that was yet again supposedly bad for our mostly female minds – I mean, we’d been perfectly happy to be the woman in control of the journey before (1st person/limited third povs) so why stop now? Wasn’t the story supposed to be all about us women? Romance = women’s fiction, after all. Why choose something so literarily wrong-headed and maybe even difficult (uncomfortable?) for them to work with? The genre needed the respect, you know.

And the placeholder heroine was born to explain how right everything still was and how everything still worked within the “complicated” female brain. If one just tilted one’s head far enough and looked at it the right way long enough, it would all become clear.

As mud.

One has to wonder if they’d have felt the need to wonder why if it’d been Holmes and Watson thinking and working in dual perspective, though…

Sigh.

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  • http://teachmetonight.blogspot.com Laura Vivanco

    When I read the essays about placeholder heroines, I assumed they were meaning that the female reader puts herself in the place of the heroine so that she can be the one that has the adventures and has the hero fall in love with her. It’s like the reader is a kind of alien that inhabits the heroine’s body for the duration of the book. Maybe that’s not what the authors of the essays meant, but some people do read that way. For example, here’s part of a comment I saw today, at Smart Bitches Trashy Books:

    “I admit it, when I read a book half my brain is imagining I’m standing in for the heroine (I’m never her)”

    That, for me, sums up the idea of the “placeholder” heroine. I discussed it not so long ago at Teach Me Tonight. It’s not how I read myself, though, so I’m only going by what other people have said about their own reading processes.

  • http://bevsbooks.com Bev(BB)

    When I read the essays about placeholder heroines, I assumed they were meaning that the female reader puts herself in the place of the heroine so that she can be the one that has the adventures and has the hero fall in love with her. It’s like the reader is a kind of alien that inhabits the heroine’s body for the duration of the book. Maybe that’s not what the authors of the essays meant, but some people do read that way.

    That’s pretty much how I’ve heard it described before, in various and sundry ways. Thing is that at times it sounds like a stand-in to me and, at others, it sounds like reader identification that could apply to any type of character and that’s what’s always confused me. If the reader feels like they’re having the adventure, too, isn’t that simply identification?

    But whatever, it’s not the “definition” per se that I have a problem with, and really never has been, it’s the focus of it only being on female readers that bothers me. Has anyone ever brought up hero placeholders for male readers of romances? Has anyone ever analyzed how males react to the two primary characters in a romance? To the dance that they do? (Like, relationships don’t happen in other male-dominated genres even?) Maybe they have been analyzed, but it sure would be nice to hear about it instead of this always seeming to be some type of ongoing psychoanalysis of the female reader brain. ;-)

    I guess a large part of my resistance comes from being exposed prior to hearing about the placeholder concept to the Mary Sue/Gary Stu phenomenon in fan fiction where fans put themselves into the stories they write and usually into relationship situations. Meaning romances of some kind. So I know both males and females play with this “stand-in” idea. Quite literally.

    This is human nature we’re talking about. We all playact our romantic stories in our heads at one point or another. It’s call imagination and it can get very carried away at times. How excusable is it to pretend this is only something the female heart and mind does because these books are primarily marketed to women?

  • http://www.laurakinsale.com Laura Kinsale

    See my comment on your previous post.

    I think, maybe, we are saying the same thing from two different directions?

    You do need to accept that my original essay was written in a reactionary mode against the monolithic concept of “the romance reader solely identifies with the heroine” prevalent at the time. I really wanted to knock that one down, hard.

    Weirdly, what people seem to have come away with, instead of that, is primarily the placeholder concept. That’s frustrating to me. As I said, as a writer, I consider a placeholder heroine a failed heroine.

  • AQ

    See, that’s the one thing that’s misleading about the hero being all important to the romance,

    Since the male lead tends to the protagonist doesn’t that typically make him the most important character of the story. Holmes is more important than Watson because Holmes could get a different sidekick and we’d still have a Holmes story. If Watson worked for a different investigator we’d have no idea what to expect.

    …about the stories being written “by women, for women” or even romance being about a women’s journey solely

    I’m not buying that women’s journey bit. Oh, there can definitely be a woman’s journey but it’s secondary to the protagonist’s arcs followed by what you call The Relationship plot.

    Sorry, I’m not sure exactly what you’re arguing for or against in regards to Dual POV.

    One has to wonder if they’d have felt the need to wonder why if it’d been Holmes and Watson thinking and working in dual perspective, though…

    I suspect you wouldn’t like Holmes at all and that eventually you wouldn’t want to read stories about him except for the “gawker” effect.

  • http://teachmetonight.blogspot.com Laura Vivanco

    But whatever, it’s not the “definition” per se that I have a problem with, and really never has been, it’s the focus of it only being on female readers that bothers me. Has anyone ever brought up hero placeholders for male readers of romances?

    My suspicion is that the various theories about how people read romances have been built up

    (a) from assumptions made about romance readers and their psychological needs – I’m thinking in particular of Radway and her theories based on Nancy Chodorow. She thinks readers (and she does seem to be assuming they’re all female, I think, because male readers are not mentioned in her book) are looking for the experience of maternal nurturance, provided via the hero. Some other analysis of romance readers has been similarly psychoanalytical in orientation.

    (b) from romance readers’ personal experiences of reading and/or from what other readers tell them. So if the person writing the essay hasn’t come across any male readers, she’s a lot less likely to come up with a theory about how they read romances. And to give another example, I know that Modleski commented on reading romances from a lesbian perspective, and said that she put herself into the hero’s position during the sex scenes. That’s not something that I’ve seen mentioned by analysis that seems focussed on how heterosexual female readers feel attracted sexually to the hero.

    (c) responses which feel that (a) and (b) are either inaccurate or incomplete. As Laura Kinsale just said above, her essay was ‘written in a reactionary mode against the monolithic concept of “the romance reader solely identifies with the heroine” prevalent at the time’.

    My conclusions, after writing the TMT post I linked to, are that

    (a) there are many, many different ways in which readers read romances, with varying levels and kinds of distance, identification, sexual interest etc.

    (b) other people’s ways of reading will always remain somewhat mysterious to me. Psychoanalysis and reader response theories are not things I have been trained in and it’s probably for the best if I stick to analysing texts rather than trying to work out what readers feel about them and how the readers read.

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  • kaigou

    Why in the world did we love something that was yet again supposedly bad for our mostly female minds – I mean, we’d been perfectly happy to be the woman in control of the journey before (1st person/limited third povs) so why stop now? Wasn’t the story supposed to be all about us women?

    I think that’s slightly backwards. I think it’s possibly more of “how could women’s teeny brains handle multiple POVs and/or protagonists!?” glossing over a “how dare women try to think outside their own limited female-defined POVs?”

    Women, traditionally, have been encouraged to write the local color and the domestic stories, small-scope stories that revolve around womanly things: the dual POV really goes directly against that, because it’s a woman’s story that co-opts a male POV in the course of telling the story. On one level, it may seem as though it’s just a change in storytelling-style; it’s not like the hero hasn’t been an obsessive point of any romance regardless of the main POV — but under that, there’s the gender-issue of a woman writing for female audiences who also co-opts the male character (and in what I suspect is the biggest part), and presumes to speak for him.

    That’s not the most eloquent explanation of what I think is going on under there, but that’s the gist of it, and why I suspect any gasps over the dual-POV might be characterized as “being bad for female minds” but only in the way that some folks will tell you that women shouldn’t ride motorcycles — because that’s not what good girls do, or some such equivalent of goose-but-not-gander. I find it strangely ironic that the “bad for female minds” really boils down to a shift in the storytelling side that invariably reveals that what’s in the hero’s head is… the heroine. That, in fact, the hero — previously a cipher — is revealed to consider the heroine the focus of *his* story, as much as he’s always been the focus of *her* story.

    It seems to me a natural evolution of that to see stories now that have hero-POVs enthralled from nearly story-start with the heroine, while the heroine disses and ignores the hero for a good chunk of the story. I guess that would be like if Holmes’ POV were written parallel to Watson’s narrative, and we discover Holmes is fascinated by Watson, focused on Watson in some way. Suddenly the story isn’t about a brilliant detective solving mysteries but is instead becomes a story of a bumbling but good-hearted man who just happens to work for a brilliant detective. Watson is no longer only the narrative; suddenly the narrative and focus merge to make Watston the literal and true focus of the story.

    The dual-POV trend didn’t make stories less about women; it made them *more* about women.

  • AQ

    Okay, I think I’m getting confused with the dual perspective because I read multi-pov stories in other genres. Stories that do actually have multiple protagonists.

    So if I remove the placeholder concept from the equation and just concentrate on dual perspective: Is it that for story construction purposes the hero and the heroine (typically a protagonist / ally relationship) are actually a single story role?

    In a sense that the obstacles are thrown at the ally half (we get to see how much she can take) and that protag half is the one who moves through the heroic side, fighting the villain (story role) in a logical, heroic manner. So he’s not really “saving” her but himself because they are actually one story role within the story. Then the HEA in a romance novel isn’t really the joining of separate individuals into a relationship but rather rejoining fragmented pieces back into a single whole. Much like soulmates are two pieces of one whole but in this case it’s fitting the story roles back together much like a werewolf must accept both sides of its nature to be whole.

    Okay, the above was completely fraked.

    BevBB, am going anywhere in the direction you meant me to go? If not, could you restate to help me out.

  • http://bevsbooks.com Bev(BB)

    Just a quick note that I didn’t drop off the planet but that a family birthday commitment kept me busy yesterday and I’m just now getting caught up on all the great responses. Hope to start responding back sometime this afternoon. ;-)

  • AQ

    The dual-POV trend didn’t make stories less about women; it made them *more* about women.

    kaigou, when you say that these stories are about women what exactly does that mean?

    That, in fact, the hero — previously a cipher — is revealed to consider the heroine the focus of *his* story, as much as he’s always been the focus of *her* story.

    Okay, I can definitely buy this statement.

    My counter as a woman who does enjoy the dual perspective: I generally don’t feel like I’m getting a “real” fictional representation of the male character’s mind. Not just a male mind but specifically the male character’s mind. In general I feel like it’s been filtered through a female perspective to make it “acceptable” within the confines of genre expectations. Not always but more often than not.

  • http://bevsbooks.com Bev(BB)

    Okay, I think I’m getting confused with the dual perspective because I read multi-pov stories in other genres. Stories that do actually have multiple protagonists.

    Working a little backwards here just to clarify a definition for AG. Hopefully.

    What *I’m* not talking about when I say dual perspective is fairly large narratives like chapters in one character’s pov and then shifting to the other person’s. Yes, that can be used to show both points of view in romances but it’s not technically what I mean by dual perspective.

    Now, for what I do mean. Ever hear of head-hopping? Quite literally jumping from the hero’s pov to the heroine’s pov, paragraph to paragraph, more or less, many times on the same page, back and forth, back and forth? That’s pure and unadulterated dual perspective to me. That is when one knows one has left first person narrative so far behind that it might never be found again. ;-p

    As I said, it’s traditionally considered bad writing practice but it’s also a beloved form by many romance readers nowadays. There’s a rhythm to it that can’t be matched when done correctly, too. Thing is, some authors can do it well and some authors literally stink at it.

    And some readers just don’t get it, either. ;-)

    Does that help?

  • AQ

    A 3rd person pov that is masquerading as an omni pov?