Jessica Miller had some serious concerns about this article, which are detailed here (in an archived version of her blog). She was in dialogue with me as she wrote it and, at the time, I didn't have a copy of Makinen's book which Hurst was quoting from. I do now so I was able to double-check the quotes. I also discovered that Makinen was quoting an article of Dixon's to which I still don't have access and not, as Jessica and I had assumed, Dixon's full-length book about Mills & Boon. This, however, does not affect the concerns we had about Hurst's troubling use of truncated quotations from Makinen. Here are the quotations as they appear in Hurst and then as they appear in the original (i.e. Makinen's book):
(Page 454 of Hurst): "Merja Makinen describes the Harlequin Mills & Boon novel as ‘one of the last bastions against feminism’ (2001, 30)"
(Page 30 of Makinen): [Note that Makinen has previously been discussing how Mills & Boons have changed over the decades] "While some romance writers saw the genre as one of the last bastions against feminism, others willingly identified themselves as feminists."
(Page 465 of Hurst): "Jay Dixon argues compellingly that Harlequin Mills & Boon and feminism ‘are antithetical to each other’ (Makinen 2001, 37)"
(Page 37 of Makinen): "Jay Dixon's article, 'Fantasy Unlimited: the World of Mills and Boon' didn't quite go so far in its claims, acknowledging that in one sense Mills and Boon and the Women's Liberation Movement are antithetical to each other. Nevertheless, she saw romances as positive fantasies for women, putting women first, celebrating women fighting for what they want, and controlling their own destinies."
and I'm really not happy with the insertion and omission that's occurred in another citation, from Jones. I'll put the quotation in its fuller context:
(Page 458 of Hurst) "Margolies notes another of feminism’s grievances against Harlequin Mills & Boon: the heroine is unvaryingly solitary, ‘there is no sisterhood’ (1982, 9). Jones also observes this absence, claiming, ‘woman-to-woman relationships are [invariably] tangential or fraught’ (1986, 214). As Mairead Owen remarks, the heroine is ‘curiously socially isolated’ (1997, 541)"
Jones is making a rather more nuanced point than it might appear from the way the quote is sandwiched in here, altered and truncated:
(Page 214 of Jones) "Another result of the centrality of the hero is that woman-to-woman relationships are tangential or fraught; although some novels represent strong families, including energetic and capable mothers, the heroine is more likely to be given a woman friend as a merely temporary confidante - or to confront heartless or amoral rivals for the hero's love."
So, in some ways, Jones seems to be in disagreement with the other two authors quoted because, although she agrees that relationships between women are not given a lot of space, she does observe heroines who are not solitary and who do have supportive relationships with other women.
In addition to this selective editing of quotations, it seems a little strange for a paper published in 2009 to state that "a number of recent critiques of the Harlequin Mills & Boon product have employed a reader-response approach" (454) and then cite Alison Light and Janice Radway (via Taylor, 1989). They're obviously not recent. So, with this flexible approach to chronology and citation, it's perhaps not surprising that Hurst then goes on to claim that her paper is "marks a twenty-first-century return to textual analysis of the mass-market romance" (454), a bold claim which seems to ignore pre-existing twenty-first century "textual analysis of the mass-market romance" such as that of Pamela Regis (published in 2003).
Just one last thing, about selection criteria. If you deliberately decide that "In this discussion, comparisons will be limited to titles from Harlequin Mills & Boon’s Sexy range", this being the Modern/Presents line in other places, so the one that's well-known among HM&B readers for being full of tycoon/billionaire/royal/sheikh heroes, it's really not at all surprising that you then find that
In every instance-the title of Sara Wood’s In The Billionaire’s Bed (2003) is particularly telling-the romantic hero is wildly wealthy, a marker of his suitability for the position of husband, father and provider, a signifier of masculine clout. (455)
That is, after all, one of the defining features of that particular line. However, there are and were other lines where heroes were much less likely to be "wildly wealthy."
Jessica Miller had some serious concerns about this article, which are detailed here (in an archived version of her blog). She was in dialogue with me as she wrote it and, at the time, I didn't have a copy of Makinen's book which Hurst was quoting from. I do now so I was able to double-check the quotes. I also discovered that Makinen was quoting an article of Dixon's to which I still don't have access and not, as Jessica and I had assumed, Dixon's full-length book about Mills & Boon. This, however, does not affect the concerns we had about Hurst's troubling use of truncated quotations from Makinen. Here are the quotations as they appear in Hurst and then as they appear in the original (i.e. Makinen's book):
and I'm really not happy with the insertion and omission that's occurred in another citation, from Jones. I'll put the quotation in its fuller context:
Jones is making a rather more nuanced point than it might appear from the way the quote is sandwiched in here, altered and truncated:
So, in some ways, Jones seems to be in disagreement with the other two authors quoted because, although she agrees that relationships between women are not given a lot of space, she does observe heroines who are not solitary and who do have supportive relationships with other women.
In addition to this selective editing of quotations, it seems a little strange for a paper published in 2009 to state that "a number of recent critiques of the Harlequin Mills & Boon product have employed a reader-response approach" (454) and then cite Alison Light and Janice Radway (via Taylor, 1989). They're obviously not recent. So, with this flexible approach to chronology and citation, it's perhaps not surprising that Hurst then goes on to claim that her paper is "marks a twenty-first-century return to textual analysis of the mass-market romance" (454), a bold claim which seems to ignore pre-existing twenty-first century "textual analysis of the mass-market romance" such as that of Pamela Regis (published in 2003).
Just one last thing, about selection criteria. If you deliberately decide that "In this discussion, comparisons will be limited to titles from Harlequin Mills & Boon’s Sexy range", this being the Modern/Presents line in other places, so the one that's well-known among HM&B readers for being full of tycoon/billionaire/royal/sheikh heroes, it's really not at all surprising that you then find that
That is, after all, one of the defining features of that particular line. However, there are and were other lines where heroes were much less likely to be "wildly wealthy."