What White America Reads: The Harlequin Intrigue Series

If you wander down the leisure reading aisle of Meijer's, a Michigan grocery franchise, be prepared to encounter a slice of midsection from good 'ole American tenderloin. As a liberal arts grad, I always thought of romance novels as the only kind of airport fiction worse than chick lit. I didn't understand why the clichés and derivative plot-lines aren't worthy of the kitsch factor, like a dime store novel. I didn't see how there could be nothing funny about a stock character named Desmond who fights fires shirtless. I had to know; who reads romance novels? Does anyone take them seriously?

To figure it out, I cut the book snobbery and decided to spend some time looking at the layout of the Meijer's book display. The selection at the grocery store carried lines of books named Harlequin Intrigue, Harlequin Teen, Harlequin American Romance (above) and even Harlequin NASCAR

I've never seen that much purple vomit in my life. I later learned that there was a reason behind the ubiquity of the covers. Harlequin Enterprises aims for mass series sales, not pushing individual books or authors. Where popularity or talent would otherwise garner the most amount of money the company spends on advertising, Harlequin instead emphasizes lines of titles are emphasized in the book design.

Indirectly, it encourages the writers to aspire to adhesiveness to a genre rather than personal innovation. Buying a romance novel, then, is purchasing an over-arching ideology. It's like identifying with a lifestyle brand. Welcome to the City Generica; how do you take your product placement? Do you want it supersized? Pepsi or Coke?

From the Drug Store to the Subsidiary

During the last seventy-five years, women's erotica has undergone a transformation, which is directly related to the discrimination and challenges women writers faced being published. It's difficult to imagine being a female writer trying to get an advance for a book, let alone one containing an explicit sex scene. No matter how dated they may seem now, writers like Anaïs Nin and Kate Chopin were truly pioneers of this genre. Nin was one of the first women to write about incest with the publication of Winter of Artifice in 1939.

The Awakening might be tame enough to be on high school reading lists, but the fact that it was published in 1899 is incredible. As someone born almost three decades after the Sexual Revolution of the '60s, it's hard to imagine a bookstore or culture without Playboy or the concept of an adult section.

Women's erotica changed with increasing social liberalism and the repeal of censorship laws. Harlequin Enterprises was actually once a publisher founded in Winnipeg in 1949 that didn't even publish sex scenes. The Jane Austen-like plot twists ended modestly, with the couples kissing passionately and promises of marriage. The books paled in comparison to the writing of, say, Nin who was publishing stories about accompanying the equally infamous Henry Miller to Parisian brothels during WWII.

Eventually, sales for Harlequin dropped when they faced the steamier competition from other publishing houses after Lawrence Ferlinghetti's acquittal in the Howl obscenity trial. One of Harlequin's main competitors was a publishing house with the unfortunate namesake of Candlelight Ecstasy. Nomenclature aside, by 1983, Candleight Ecstasy was generating sales of about $30 million. Harlequin eventually acquired the parent company of this line, Silhouette. This meant that Harlequin Enterprise owned 85% of the romance market in the early 1990s. Enter genre fatigue.

With an estimated revenue of approximately $585 million according to an August 2004 New York Times interview, the subsidiary's parent corporation Torstar is Canada's most lucrative publisher. There are over a thousand writers, over a hundred novels published monthly and in almost thirty languages: the Harlequin romance novel might be scorned by literary snobs, but this genre provides a mass market at a time when newspaper media reaches the juncture to either go digital or disappear. No matter how laughable you find romance novels, the massive consumer base and articulation of America within these passages speaks significantly about pop culture.

Stuck in City Generica Traffic

The demand for romance novels is not as gendered as one might think. In 1991 in Hungary, for example, Harlequin sold 11 million books and there are only 5.5 million women in the country. Based on information from the Romance Writers of America site, men make up 9.5 percent of the readership. No individuals who identify themselves as transgendered, apparently, were surveyed. The site also cites, "the heart of the U.S. romance novel readership is women aged 31–49 who are currently in a romantic relationship." The teen novels are basically Twilight knock-offs and all the names sound like characters from Eragon or Lord of the Rings.

Part of the general homogeneity of the genre occurs because geographic location is one of the key factors that allows publishing houses to mass produce their paperbacks. According to Romance Writers of America, the percent of individuals who read romance novels in certain locations ends up breaking down into an sales infograph available on their site:


Like any successful corporate conglomerate, Harlequin also invested in overseas markets. When a book is sold in another country, the regionally distinct elements of a story essential to their branding in America are removed. The formula for addressing cross-cultural boundaries is simply; change location or regional specific names, customs, or metaphors.

Not only are the plots formulaic, but the books exists within a derivative structure that promotes the ultimate ubiquity. While this arguably can be seen as a promotion of cultural monotheism, it is mostly the result of the burgeoning international market for Harlequin Enterprises. After all, the subsidiary has offices on nine continents and is published in 29 different languages, according to the Harlequin Enterprises' Wikipedia.

The Harlequin American Romance Series and Wanted: One Mommy

Wanted: One Mommy hearkens the values of capitalism with an oil tycoon and part-time single dad not actively looking for love. The cover for this book (top left) is pretty much what all the covers looked like. To briefly judge some books by their covers:

• Ninety-nine percent of the covers of the books featured lovers that were white
• None pictured any interracial pairings or anything not one-man-one-woman
• The men in the books are homogeneously 'tall, dark and handsome'
• The men on the covers usually had less clothing on than the women
• The women were usually Nordic-looking with few brunettes

Considering this novel is part of the Harlequin American Romance series, the America it portrays is everything that's wrong with this country. Wanted is really no exception to this and the actual content of the book is more depressing. It follows the exploits of a Texan billionaire and a young woman who sounds something like a stock Bridget Jones character that never received a high school diploma. The largest faction of romance readership, at 32 percent, has terminal degrees in high school according to one industry rap sheet.

When one considers that the amount of education a person has is largely proportionate to income stratification, the majority of this audience is likely working or lower-middle class in terms of the income brackets. The whole marketing scheme of the industry is designed to 'speak to' and reach this demographic, which much like the Republican party, caters to the social values of Americans with low socioeconomic status while subsuming them in fantasy, taking their money and creating something like Capitalist Stockholm Syndrome.

One enumerating example of this can be found on the back blurb for Caroline Mayer's Wanted: One Mommy. The jacket reads,

Caroline Mayer has made a successful career out of planning everybody's wedding but her own. But this is the first time she's been asked to stop one!

Jack Gaines is certain his mother's impending nuptials are a big mistake. The take-charge CEO is too smart to believe in happy endings. His matchmaking mom and young daughter don't agree! And his instant attraction to Caroline is making the single father wonder if he's really a romantic at heart after all.

Caroline never planned on falling in love with Jack's family. And now his lively little girl is making her think twice about putting her own dreams of motherhood on hold.

Chemistry aside—is Caroline ready to trust her future to one stubborn, overprotective, utterly irresistible Texan?

Jack Gaines (Gaines, like money, get it?) is white, southern and a Texas oil tycoon. The construction southern American identity, here, is interesting. Gaines is a mythical figure who strikes it rich mining by the natural resources of the south. The regional lore reaffirms southern identity, but at the cost of maintaining a world that is racially exclusive and restricted by traditional gender roles.

The heroine in the novel, Caroline Mayer, is underemployed and working as a wedding planner. Her job is to essentially be responsible for crafting and celebrating the continuance of marriage within the community. The oil tycoon is a widower who is too pragmatic for romance, but Sweet Caroline prevails by her skill at homemaking. This book is not about infidelity, but the preservation of marriages and traditional mores. If Sweet Caroline excels at domesticity, then she gets her guy and the unstated benefit of that is the implied financial security.

It was actually painful to write that synopsis.

A Nod to the Culture Industry

Literotica reaffirms the class and regional customs that ultimately damage those who believe in them the most. The 'money shot,' if you will, of a romance novel is not the sexual gratification of the protagonists. It's the fantasy that sexuality allows the characters to achieve class mobility during the middle of an economic depression when this specific audience faces the most hardship.

While teaching the mass public how to be model citizens and consumers in a parasitic society, the Harlequin American Romance series does nothing to humanize America's untouchables: the working class. They do nothing to lend credibility to the people featured in succinct publications like Time magazine that constitute a populace comprised of 'Main Street' and 'Wall Street.' The Harlequin American Romance series is part of a larger problem within the literary and news world.

In a culture where the upper classes create the highest amount of media due to their greater amount of leisure time, those portrayals of working class Americans are as stereotypical as these novels. American accounts of the Iraq War or 'life at home' are nothing more than a voyeuristic exploitations of the lives of the socioeconomically less privileged. The spatial and ideological separation of American social classes means that we learn about the lives of other people through the box, the print and the camera lens. The structure that produces this information is biased because the perspective of art is intertwined with money.

Gimme free culture.

Jennifer Sussex has been featured in The Village Voice, The Chicago Tribune, PBS Student Voices: Washington Week, Our Young Art, The Gargoyle and The Michigan Daily. All material on this site is subject to licensing under the Creative Commons.