I realize that, as a new generation moves into the spotlight and shifts our cultural paradigm, definitions change and new boundaries are formed and genres are tested and reconfigured and so on. During my lifetime, I’ve seen previously rigid formulas become increasingly flexible and I've watched as women and minorities have become quite comfortable in the role of "hero," which used to be reserved exclusively for white men. And with my friends and sisters and colleagues, I danced and cheered and celebrated.
But even as “who” could be a hero has evolved, the quality of being heroic traditionally hasn’t—at least, not dramatically. Perhaps Hollywood and the mainstream media have had an impact that’s finally showing up in our romances (I’ll resist the urge to call it a trend), but I’m beginning to encounter heroes and heroines that do, well, distinctly un-heroic things.
A quick example: in the mainstream romantic suspense novel The First Sin by Cheyenne McCray, the heroine beats the unarmed villain to death while several armed law enforcement agents stand by and watch. It’s brutal, descriptive, and gory, and unfolds, blow by literal blow, over three disturbing pages of broken bones, serious blood-letting, and strangled screams.
And ten pages from the end, I stopped reading a 340 page book.
In the romance genre as I’ve known it from my early adolescent years, our heroes and heroines are supposed to be a little stronger, a little better-looking, a little more successful, and a little more principled than the average person. The heroine doesn’t kill the bad guy, not even from a distance, and not even in self-defense, because regardless of how much he (or she) deserved it, she would always be deeply disturbed by the idea of taking another human life. At the last moment, some other character hits him over the head or shoots him or whatever—it isn’t left up to her to gouge out his eyeballs one at a time, glorying in the sensation of his warm blood flowing over her hands.
At least, not my heroines.
In romances, heroines don’t cheat on their spouses. They don’t get abortions. They don’t gossip. They don’t lie (without a very good reason). They don’t cheat or steal. They don’t use the television as a babysitter. They don’t flip off the guy who cut them off in traffic. They don’t lose their temper with a child or an animal, ever, not even on the worst day of their lives. So don’t tell me that it’s about “realism,” because lots more of us do these things in the “real world” than use a can opener to pluck out a man’s eyeballs.
Perhaps I’m a throwback, an old-fashioned Mrs. McGillicutty, and if so, I’m fine with that distinction. What I find problematic, though, is a world in which our heroines—those whom we look up to, befriend, identify with, and aspire to be like—are not distinguishable from the bad guys in principle, but only in the legitimacy of their organization.
The means do not really justify the end, and justice should always be tempered by principles and reason. That’s why we have a legal system instead of mob rule, and it’s why vigilantes end up in prison just as quickly as the bad guys…
What do you think? What kinds of qualities do you define as being heroic...or not?
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3 comments:
"Where have all the heroes gone?" Wasn't that an eighties song?
It does seem that the qualities that were "heroic" as we were growing up aren't quite the same today. It isn't that our heroes were exemplary people; more it was that we weren't as ready to tear them down. As a people, we didn't want to know every hidden detail. The media (and those that read the crap) weren't as ready to dig into every element of everyone's life. Some things were left unsaid. Is that a good thing? I don't know.
Like you, I find it more disturbing that now, even in fiction, the "sweet" is gone, the hope, the desire that our characters be better, be wonderful, of moral character. Why can we not strive? We are in an age when we are innundated with the idea that we'll never be good enough; is it now so pervasive that our fictional heroes/heroines can't be either...
Or as in the case of the novel you were reading, is there such an acceptance of violence, such permission of violence, that we crave to see them be violent too? Or is this some disturbing trend or reflection of the pervasiveness of violence?
I don't know how to answer the questions you raise. I'm disturbed by our cultural lack of hope (as we speak of often). I'm concerned by the pervasiveness of violence. I concerned by our dimissal and expectation, our ambivalence of violence. I don't know if there is an answer.
I have always had a simple (simplistic?) definition of a hero: someone who makes things right.
How on EARTH killing someone like that can possibly fit within my definition....? It can't!
A book hero/heroine has a cleaner, clearer life than a human one does, without the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. So what's the "excuse" for this behavior in a book?
I don't see it. And I won't buy it.
So there. (By the way, the word verification for this post was STABLESS!) (I didn't even know it as a word.) (But it's a good one.) (As in: I live a stabless life.)
Janet, I agree. I don't know if it's because, as Lisa points out, the violence has become so commonplace in our culture that we don't even really notice it anymore, but for me, two wrongs don't make a right.
The guy was a terrible creep and deserved to suffer, but I didn't feel the need to watch it, blow by agonizing blow, and I certainly didn't want to watch my HEROINE do the honors. It was...disturbing.
And I love "stabless"! :)
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