Realism and Romance

It has often been pointed out that in contemporary popular romantic novels the external world drops away from the text except as a setting, leaving the hero and heroine viewing each other in a one-dimensional universe. If one function of romance is to move woman from her position of heterosexual subordination to one of unified and secure subjectivity, then the romantic relationship is the place where women find their authentic selves and have their identities established, completed and confirmed—in a kind of natural, absolute possession outside of any social, economic, or political context. The narrative leads to resolution through heterosexual union, which closes down the possibility of other desires and other narratives, and relegates women to a position beyond culture and history, firmly placed in the realm of 'nature' and 'eternal truth'.

In the family saga, however, marriage, with its consequent integration into the social order, is never the straightforward means of precipitating the narrative's climax and conclusion that it is in romance. The saga differs from other popular fiction genres in its lack of drive towards narrative closure and in its tendency to begin at the point where romance stops. The romantic fiction is structured into a coherent linear narrative around a few moments of transcendence (the first glimpse of the hero, the first sign of his admiration in the gaze, the kiss), whereas the family saga is, by definition, structured as a long-term process.

This brings me to the relationship of the family saga to realism. Although many of the saga's strategies remain those of classic realism, the form does lack some of the most important conventions of dominant ways of storytelling—the impetus towards the resolution of the plot, the circularity of a narrative that solves all problems it encounters, the successful completion of the individual's quest and, to some extent, the process of identification. Any full identification between reader and character (which has been seen as another of the principal means by which the realist text secures the recognition of its particular representations as 'real,' diverting the reader from what is contradictory in the text to what s/he already 'knows'), tends to be undermined in the saga narrative. Here, three-dimensionality of character is subordinated to the structure of repetition, contrast, variation and antithesis by which the text constructs its cross-generational profile of the family in its multiformity. In this sense individual characters in the saga are merely facets of a collective character constructed at a broader narrative level. The conflicts and problems which propel the saga forward tend to be structured in a series of oppositions, and it is the function of many of the characters to carry one or other of the terms of the opposition, as in the antithetical pairs of rebel/conformist, good mother/bad mother, promiscuous/faithful, rightful heir/rival claimant. In discussing the texts I will be considering how far this undermining of any full process of identification and the lack of drive towards narrative closure combine with other features to interrogate such primary ideological agencies as the family, romantic love and nationalism.

Writing and Reading

As a genre, the popular family saga is remarkable for employing a marketing strategy which appears to be attempting to reduce the sense of distance and difference between writers and readers. Most begin with a detailed potted author's biography presenting writer to reader:

'Danielle started working for Supergirls … when the recession hit, the firm went out of business and Danielle "retired" to write her first book, Going Home. She moved to California, seeking "an easier climate, gentler people and a better place to write."'

'Susan Howatch … was an only child and her father was killed in the Second World War … after working for a year as an articled clerk she was bored with practical law and decided to devote herself to writing….'

'Catherine Gaskin married an American and settled down in New York for ten years….'

Apart from the marked contrast to the anonymity and interchangeability of, say, Mills & Boon authors, what is striking about these doubtless carefully selected biographical details is the implication that the author, despite her glamour, is really not so different from the reader herself—she too has experienced common disasters (the firm went out of business, her father died), dilemmas (she was bored) and delights (she married and settled down). Cosy, intimate, first-name terms are being established.

Furthermore, the process of writing, although documented as being arduous and time-consuming—

'She began The Thorn Birds, writing it at night, after her work as head technician in a neurophysiology laboratory had ended….'

'Writing this book has been rather like writing a real-life detective story, with the facts given in old letters, stories and newspaper cuttings forming the framework around which my tale is woven.'

—is still depicted as springing almost spontaneously from the author's own history and experience. Judith Saxton, for example, dedicated The Pride (1981) to her grandmother and stresses in her acknowledgements that the idea for the book 'sprang from my grandmother's charmingly written memoirs.' This appeal to the unmediated matrix of (specifically female) experience, memory and writing as spontaneous growth, is of course belied by the complexity of the actual texts, but the ideology of the text as sold to the reader is that of oral history: we have all, as women, got such stories to tell, and, given the necessary effort, perhaps could. Look, for example, at the following extracts from the author biographies prefacing each saga:

'Her northern roots are strongly reflected in her work. She is an author who sets her characters against a backcloth she knows well.'

'The desire to write, she says, has been her one and only lifeline during a tumultuous and changeable life.'

'Her work with "wayward" girls and her own family has increased her interest in the female situation, present and past.'

The implication is that anyone could have a go, as it is too in a Guardian interview with Colleen McCullough (15 April 1977) which stresses her rise from ordinary student nurse to world-famous novelist.

In this sense, the marketing of the family saga produces significantly different implications from the escapism generally attributed to romance. The ideology of authorship in saga publicity appears to be directing the reader back into the potentialities of her own experience, into her family history as potential saga, to writing as a 'natural' product of living, achievable through application, strength of will, a harnessing of the general capabilities that women display in their everyday domestic and work situations. This universalisation of the potential power to write such fiction is matched by a universalisation of the fiction's material—despite the variants of geographical, historical and class settings, the saga families' fictionalised lives are nevertheless structured around a number of dilemmas which can be essentially similar for women of entirely different national, social and economic groups.

The construction of the family as a universal form, then, produces a series of crucial mediations between writer and reader, writing and reading, the production of a text and the pre-text of 'experience.' Linked through the shared experience of the family, the writer is merely a reader who has got her act together. Reading can be a rehearsal for your own transition to writing, and experience, through the family's historical dimension, is already on the way to becoming text. Far from being positioned in a simply passive, powerless relation to the text, the reader of the saga, in order for the text's central terms of family and experience to function, is established in a curious space of creative potentiality; poised between her personal experience, which is being valorised as potential 'material,' and a writing which declares itself as the 'material-ised' experience of someone not unlike herself. For sagas to work the reader must be, at least potentially, the next bestseller herself.

The Family

The great subject of the novelist, as Stephen Heath has suggested, has been crucially the family—the family as bridge between the individual and society, the private and the public. It has been posited as the site of the conflict and resolution of these terms in the world apart which it purports to offer: marriage and the family, a firm social unit offering a privileged mode of individuality and a haven of personal happiness. In this sense, the modern family saga explores the same terrain as the realist novel of the nineteenth century: the family and its dynastic considerations such as inheritance, the continuation of the male line, family duty, and alliances with outsiders and rivals. In the nineteenth century novel what is often at stake is the integration of a male pattern of inherited social power. Novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, which are concerned with the specifically female relation to this system of social power, have tended to represent women settling within that system through a struggle towards marriage, which once again occupies a decisive position in the 'individual and society' organization, proposed as a mediation between the two.

Where the contemporary popular saga differs, as it differs too from popular romance, is in its exploration not of the achievement of that state but of the maintenance of it. Although the saga undoubtedly works, on one level, to reinforce prevailing ideological definitions of the family, in other ways it challenges the concept of the family as definable purely in terms of blood relations and kinship, and moves towards a redefinition of the meanings of the primacy and exclusivity of the family. The 'family' in Catherine Gaskin's Family Affairs, for example, consists of an all-female group of two sisters, a woman who was briefly married to their father, her stepdaughter and a friend, all living in a house split into separate flats.

It is partly this redefinition and extension of the family in the saga that allows its representation as a highly sexualised site, a representation which (apart from guaranteeing a good read!) resists western industrial society's conceptualisation of the family as at once legitimating and concealing sexuality. The question of what actually constitutes the family is repeatedly stretched and renegotiated in the saga, activating conflicting discourses which are not easily contained by the text. Ideological contradictions within the family are opened up and then an attempt is made to sidestep them by the imaginary resolution of the redefined, expanded and sexualised family.

The Thorn Birds: Historical Process and Common Sense

An issue which continually resurfaces when thinking about the popular family saga is that of the contradictory effects of the narrative's extended time-span, with its invocation of historical process. Lillian S. Robinson, in her discussion of historical romance, argues that this kind of text obliges the reader to entertain some definition of history. By her account, the family saga, in its representation of history and women's lives over time, would necessarily show to some extent the overlapping and contradictory ways in which sexual differences are instituted under different conditions at different historical moments, with the sense of historical process working to interrogate exiting power relations and ideological definitions of sexuality and the social. And yet, as this analysis of The Thorn Birds attempts to show, it is precisely this historical materiality and the extended temporal perspective of the family saga which serves to make the social and sexual order appear as the natural state of things.

The Thorn Birds (1977) chronicles three generations of the Cleary family and their relation to the family home, Drogheda, a sheep farm in southern Australia. The narrative follows, in social terms, the advance from the slavery of frontier womanhood to the emancipation of the modern woman on near equal terms in a man's world. The Clearys are a non-dynastic dynastic family, the third generation consisting only of one daughter, Justine. Her grandmother Fee had eight sons (girls didn't count), and her mother two children, but Justine is able to repudiate the whole breeding business—'Not bloody likely! Spend my life wiping snotty noses and cacky bums?' Femininity is placed in the text as a site of social change and it is made clear that the pull of the homeland must be resisted to achieve this change. A critical point occurs at the end of the narrative when Justine has to choose whether to return home to Drogheda or to continue her career in Europe. She is on the point of flying back to Australia ('I want something safe, permanent, enduring, so I'm coming home to Drogheda, which is all those things'), marrying a local boy and retracing her roots after her European flutter, but is stopped in the end by the letter from her mother advising her to stay away for the sake of her career and happiness. Justine in the penultimate climactic scene is shown rejecting Drogheda and the bondage it represents to her.

Superficially, then, the moral trajectory of The Thorn Birds is towards the acceptance of a necessary distancing from tradition, the land, the home, one's country (all signified by the property Drogheda) in order to create space for individual growth. The bonds of the family are denied (Drogheda can give Justine nothing), yet at the same time sanctified (it takes her grandmother and mother, blood relations, to know her well enough to realise that Drogheda can give her nothing). What is more, Justine is able to move decisively outside the family circle only by moving into another stable, approved societal unit—that of marriage.

This last point suggests another discourse at work in the text alongside that of women's 'emancipation,' and which undercuts and problematises it. This is the discourse of common sense—'that's life'—the stoic acceptance of fate. The text is threaded through with the lugubrious insights of now enlightened characters—'we can't change what we are … we are what we are, that's all … what must be, must be … it is the way things are … it's just common sense.' This discourse produces the idea of a human essence which exists independently of the social, bringing with it the category of an essential femininity.

The appeal in the text to fate, common sense and an essentially masochistic female 'nature' are all synthesised in the legend of the thorn bird which prefaces and completes the text and is invoked at one crucial moment in the narrative. The thorn bird, following 'an immutable law,' spends its life searching for a thorn tree and having found it 'impales itself on the longest, sharpest spine' and dying sings 'one superlative song, existence the price.' The suggestion of feminine masochistic surrender to the victimising phallus is transparent, and is made explicit in Meggie's final-page reverie when, in epitomising her life-long frustrated love for Ralph, she reflects, 'I did it all myself. I have no one else to blame.' The final words of the text reach out to implicate its readers in this masochism:

The bird with the thorn in its breast … is driven by it knows not what to impale itself and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come … but we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it.

In Meggie and Ralph's retrospective discussion of their relationship, the legend is invoked by Meggie to exonerate Ralph for his sacrifice of her to his clerical ambitions. For Ralph, the 'thorn' can be that of ambition, the will to power, but for women it is necessarily that of love and sexual experience. Female subjectivity is constructed within sexual categories, and even the shift from this with the third generation makes it clear that the thorn is only slightly less sharp for the autonomous, career-oriented modern woman.

There is then a contradiction in The Thorn Birds between the opening out with the third generation to a more independent, self-determining lifestyle for women (albeit within marriage) and the undercutting of any idea of social change by the discourse of fate and cyclical repetition which frames the text and operates powerfully within it—a contradiction which is clearly played out in the final few paragraphs of the text, which consists of an evocation of 'the same endless, unceasing cycle' and yet simultaneously asserts that it is 'time for Drogheda to stop' in order for progress and change to be made possible. This contradiction is common to most popular family sagas and can be explained further by reference to the double temporal structure which they are based on.

The saga is structured upon two parallel temporal axes, the one short, the other extended. The shorter axis produces a dramatic structure of various episodes, incidents and climaxes which revolve around and are supported by concepts of progress, the individual and (given that the text foregrounds female experience) the feminine—in The Thorn Birds, the life histories of Fee, Meggie and Justine. The extended axis, however, works to defuse this structure of individual drama, experience and change by overlaying it with a discourse of the 'long view' which speaks in favour of tradition, the family, the heritage, the dynasty. This is the ironic overview at work in The Thorn Birds' evocation of destiny, common sense and time as healer. The text itself has an investment in this ironic overview—it is after all on this axis that its key terms of family and saga are situated.

The tensions I have pointed to in The Thorn Birds stem not merely from the long-term/short-term antithesis, but also from the contradictions inherent in this ironic position itself. For irony, while declaring itself as an analytical, 'deconstructive' mode, is also classically conservative in its operations. It implies that if a long enough view is taken, all current events and individual dramas are insignificant in the face of the immensity of life ('the rhythmic endless cycle'). But individual histories can be swallowed up and individual experience ironised only because the longer timespan they are being set against is itself subjected to no questioning. The text rests on an unchallenged basis of tradition, history and family continuity, and in the end takes up a position entirely identified with these concepts, although of course some interplay between the two temporal perspectives is necessary for the narrative to function.

This then is the structural contradiction at work in the family saga. What The Thorn Birds in particular makes clear is that the ironic, male, long-term overview which is ostensibly in conflict with the specifically female short-term perspective does in fact hold some positive uses for women. The ironic 'life's like that' philosophy becomes a way of validating the suffering and frustration that Fee and Meggie's lives bring them. This is acted out in a great number of small details and incidents throughout the text, particularly in the scenes depicting their later relationship as two ageing women. Meggie as a girl was ignored by Fee precisely because of her femaleness, and the development traced in the narrative of their relationship, culminating in Fee's admission that 'I used to think having a daughter wasn't nearly as important as having sons, but I was wrong … a daughter's an equal' constitutes a powerful representation of female bonding. Like Justine's life story, it would seem to gesture towards an ideal of progress, towards social change making personal change possible. Yet this representation is critically undermined by the discourses which I've shown as clustering around the extended, ironic temporal axis; nothing really changes, everything comes full circle, 'history does repeat itself.' Meggie and Fee are constructed as women bound together by the inexorable patterns and cycles of nature, fate, family and love, agreeing, when looking back over their lives, that 'memories are a comfort, once the pain dies down.'

The mother-daughter relationship echoes the rest of the text by interrogating female subject positions in the framework of short-term drama and incident, while in the same breath recuperating any disturbance by setting it in the safer context of the 'long view.' This is how history in the saga works as a double-edged discourse; it is at once the sharp nudge of awareness of historical process—the 'vision of historical possibility' discussed by Lillian S. Robinson—and the soothing balm of an ideology of stoical acceptance which naturalises the social and sexual status quo, and is ultimately dependent upon essentialist categories of femininity….

I have tried to show how the popular family saga attempts the representation of ideological contradictions in a form which provides their imaginary resolution, and that this takes place through a fiction which entertains and exposes contradiction on one condition, that of final unity and reconciliation. This process is both aided and impeded by the double-edged discourse of the family, tradition, heritage, the 'long-view,' which on the one hand provides a secure foundation from which to interrogate short-term practices, and on the other renders any attempt to follow the reassuring pattern of classical narrative (that of an original settlement disrupted and finally restored) deeply problematic.

The analysis of romance fiction has happily moved beyond that earlier phase in which the genre was righteously denounced for its facile and yet (strangely) coercive ideological effects, an analysis which brought with it the image of women readers as the passive consumers of a discourse which could only further their oppression. The necessary rereading of romance has produced an understanding of the genre which exposes the crudity of that earlier model and its underlying assumptions about the relationship between texts and women reading. If the implications of this process of re-definition are to be drawn out fully, it needs to extend outside romance to those associated but distinct genres of which the family saga is one important instance. By attempting to situate romance within the broader field of women's reading, we can move towards not only a clearer definition of romance in its relationships of affiliation and difference with other genres, but also an understanding of the range and variety of the interactions between texts and women readers.