Surrender Fantasy

desire, I want to turn into you...

L: Henry Fuseli's 'The Nightmare'; R: recreating the painting, Halloween 2021. Compliments on my genius always welcome x

I was getting coffee with my friend Eleanor recently, complaining about a piece I’ve been trying and failing to write for a year now — one about romance, as a genre, in the broadest and narrowest sense. I’m interested in what a genre is (historically and culturally contextual, capacious, formally promiscuous, unstable, ever in flux, endlessly contested) and what it isn’t (fixed, universal, a private club with clear and agreed rules and boundaries), and how this shapes feminist and chauvinist ideas of romance, critiquing or defending it. I don’t know how to write about it in any manageable way, because it opens up such big questions about literary history itself.

Besides that, how should I write about reading — how do I balance the obvious, ordinary critical faculties of (predominantly female) readers with the pleasures and perils of losing oneself in the work, in the fantasies it makes possible? Do I really have to pretend I’ve never indulged a benevolently misogynist fantasy when reading novels or watching movies? That I’ve never enjoyed the idea of being rescued or defended or cared for in a way I’d squarely object to in reality? Is it just me?

At coffee, Eleanor and I discussed this video essay by Natalie Wynn about Twilight and romance and desire and psychoanalysis (which, being nearly three hours long, I can’t recommend in completely good faith, though it is very good if you are into that sort of thing). I can’t remember any of our conclusions — it was probably a fairly ambivalent, circular conversation all considered, prodding at the moral panic around romance from various, indecisive angles — but Eleanor did at one point describe (some!) romance novels as a kind of “surrender fantasy”. I’ve been rolling the phrase around in my head ever since.

I enjoy the double meaning: both description (compound noun, “a surrender fantasy”) and imperative (verb + noun, “Surrender fantasy!”). I’m often grappling with my desire to surrender, with all the implications of the daydreams and fantasies I’m most preoccupied with.

I don’t know why I daydream so much about being rescued from disaster, but I know I’ve done it for as long as I can remember. To disclose details would probably reveal more about me than I’d like, but I can give you the greatest hits: car crashes, natural disasters, mysterious illnesses, insanity, all kinds of assault and violence, war, even alien invasions or evil magic forces at times (I’m a vampire girl, ok!). I am under threat, and then pulled from the brink of death, ruin, annihilation. If I suffer bravely, it is always witnessed.¹ These aren’t sexual fantasies; they’re not even necessarily romantic ones. I had these daydreams before terrible things happened to me, and I continued to have them afterwards. I only occasionally wonder if these fantasies made such disasters my fault.

Still, I often feel quite guilty for these daydreams. I feel compelled to disavow any related desires, to pretend that, as a feminist, or even just as a headstrong contrarian, I am above that sort of thing — in life and in literature. Surely these are not the thoughts of a competent, independent, self-posessed and self-respecting woman. Does that mean they reveal a particular inner weakness? Or is it a more mundane than that, a desire to be cared for, a nostalgia for the protection of childhood? Not for the real thing, but for the imagined ideal — a golden childhood that never existed.

women, reading

Romances, love stories and particularly the contemporary literary genre — capital R-Romance, Romance TM, slippery creature that resists definition — are often accused of revolving around “self-insert” protagonists, accusations many writers and readers alike are keen to deny. Contrarian as I tend to be, I do sort of think, so what if they are? I love Dante, and Memoirs of Emma Courtney, and Annie Ernaux. Personal fantasy — or just specific personal experience — is a very generative place for a writer to dwell.

Perhaps it is worth digging into what is meant by “self-insert” anyway. There is often a slippage in this charge of overidentification — is it the reader or the writer being accused? Sometimes the protagonist is read as a cypher or avatar for the writer; at other times, they are deemed guilty of being merely a blank canvas onto which the reader projects themselves.

Many romance readers insist that reading romance is a richer and more complex thing than simple fantasy, but I would prefer to look at the (often misogynist) arguments to this effect and say well, yes AND no, or maybe even just yes, AND. Isn’t identification always a part of reading? Don’t you also, in some sense, live through the protagonists (and even antagonists) in a thriller, a detective novel, or a science fiction epic?²

Handwringing about the dangers of reading, especially the dangers of women reading, has a long history, stretching back at least as far as the advent of the novel itself. Eighteenth-century writers frequently contorted in all directions to disavow the dangerous kind of fiction that their work most certainly was not. Realist fiction that wasn’t a Romance, moral tales that weren’t novels, novels that weren’t that kind of novel. Maria Edgeworth’s 1801 novel Belinda, a personal favourite of mine, begins with a preface that insists the work is a “moral tale” in this way.

But this hierarchy is complicated by the readers within the novel: heroine Belinda is practical, intelligent, emotionally balanced, nourished by a varied and respectable literary diet (including novels!), while her foil, Virginia St Pierre, is an incurious, obsessive reader of romances.³ An orphan adopted for romantic hero Clement Hervey’s sort of grow-your-own-wife project⁴, Virginia is (re-)named after the heroine of Bernardin St-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie, and cosseted away in a forest cottage with an elderly caretaker. Hervey forbids her from reading “common novels”, but with her broader education neglected, she takes to reading “romances” and becomes a hopeless romantic in the most vacuous sense. She has been raised to become Hervey’s perfect wife, but she has no scope of the world beyond him; he finds her tedious compared to the more challenging, exciting partner he sees in Belinda, a woman more his equal.

For Edgeworth, not only a novelist but a children’s author and educationalist, concerns about women’s reading were also about women’s education in general. Edgeworth was writing in a moment of debate around education and gender, less than a decade after Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication on the Rights of Woman. Edgeworth believed women needed a rigorous education to shape them into rational and intelligent minds with mastery over their emotions — an argument that accommodated women writers like herself, but still emphasised a need for enlightened women in their domestic roles, to better raise children, tend to their husbands, and mother the nation in general, even if hopefully equal within that marriage.

By the early nineteenth century, literacy had grown significantly in Britain, but around fifty per cent of the population were still illiterate (slightly higher for women, lower for men).⁵ The panic about women’s reading was at least a little bit about how a relatively new (and quickly improving) technology might disrupt patriarchy. I’d be interested to trace this panic through the 19th and 20th centuries, as education became compulsory through the Elementary Education Acts, as public libraries were established, as cheap mass production of books became more possible and as literacy became widespread.

fiction and fantasy

The paradigm of the good, analytic reader vs the bad fantasising reader is definitely one that demands a critical eye. But I’m not always convinced by the defence of Romance and fantasies I often encounter. Fiction is not real, of course, but while that’s something I’ve long known, I can’t deny that I have learned so much of what to expect from the world — and if not what to expect, what to desire, what to wish I could expect — from fiction.

Plenty of handwringing about reading-as-fantasy is concerned with this gap between expectation and desire. Fiction can be an encounter with as-yet-unrealised possibilities, expanding readers’ views of what their life could be. For women, whose lives have historically been so shaped by their domestic circumstances, it makes sense that romance and marriage are the foundation of such possibilities. Fiction can allow readers to imagine radically different kinds of interpersonal connections: sex, romance, family, friendship, cohabitation, and so on.⁶ In this way, I think it can often be a space to explore queer desire and identity, even in narratives that are at face value, extremely heterosexual: I’m reminded of Laura Kinsale’s essay, ‘The Androgynous Reader’⁷ which makes an interesting case that the reader of a Romance novel identifies not with the heroine, but with the hero.⁸

That is not to say that romance, as a rule, imagines radical alternatives to heterosexuality as it currently exists. I keep thinking of a tweet by Eli Cugini, about hetero-optimist work that frames “feminist men” as desirable to women, but “really wants them to stop precisely at the point before the bounds of ‘doing manhood’ would become too blurry”. In this way, plenty of romances feature benevolent patriarchs, whose more troubling behaviours — violence, possessiveness, controlling tendencies — are or become acceptable because they align with the heroine’s desires, and reinforce her own womanhood and sexual identity.

As such, I’m not particularly interested in the (IMO pretty condescending) claim that romance is an inherently radical genre because it centres female desire. Women want bad things all the time. I certainly do; I’m only human. It troubles me, AND it excites me. But ambivalence is always the most generative state for me, one where I find myself most challenged and transformed. I do believe in that classic therapeutic adage that feelings are morally neutral, but I don’t think that means we shouldn’t prod at the difficult things we find within them.⁹ I want to understand the context of my desires, their foundations, their mechanics. I don’t want to let myself off the hook.

Part of the appeal of fantasies of surrender — even at their most extreme, e.g. rape fantasies — is disavowing desire or agency while maintaining narrative control. (In a fantasy, every detail is under your control. Desire in total safety.) It can hardly be surprising that women find themselves disavowing their desires when owning them is so fraught and comes with such unpredictable consequences. A surrender fantasy — especially one driven by powerlessness — is the perfect excuse.

Obviously, feminists have been problematising such fantasies for decades. In a noteworthy Nora Ephron essay, ‘Fantasies’, Ephron ponders the politics of her central sexual fantasy, one about “being dominated by faceless males who rip [her] clothes off.” It’s a brilliant essay, one that approaches ambivalence about desire and feminism with humour, without reaching for the excuses and validation I’ve grown used to within more recent mainstream liberal feminism. If anything, I think Ephron is too hard on herself — she considers her fantasy a difficult thing to reconcile with her commitment to women’s liberation, even as she states that she has “no desire to be dominated” in reality.¹⁰ Fantasy is not real desire, as she knows — what is there to reconcile?

virtue in victimhood

Surrender can be a distinctly non-sexual fantasy, too. I thought about this a lot while reading Angela Carter’s chapter on de Sade’s Justine in The Sadeian Woman. Justine is a woman whose “reluctance to take control of her own life” makes her the “perfect woman”. She endures near-constant abuse and torture, but makes little attempt to resist. She is obedient, always “at the mercy of any master, because that is the nature of her own definition of goodness”.

Carter ties de Sade’s diptych (of Justine and her wily, amoral sister, Juliette) to the great icons of American culture; she disrupts the cliché of pitting Marilyn against Jackie or Audrey as archetypal examples of the madonna/whore dichotomy. Instead, in her analysis, Monroe is a Justine, the “good bad girl”, a sexual object but never a sexual agent, a clown too naive to be in on the joke of her own magnetism. Her opposites are the Jane Russells of the Golden Age, “earthy” instead of “fragile”, quick to acquire “the toughness of [de Sade’s] Juliette and put their bodies to work actively for them.” For Monroe, as for Justine, “her innocence is her own excuse for her own object status; she cannot solicit because she does not know how to desire.”

Justine surrenders to victimhood and learns that “[w]hen she suffers, she exists”. Her suffering gives her a “sense of being”, a virtue thrust upon her through victimhood, without ever requiring integrity or any morality of action. Carter, herself a socialist, calls it “the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology”. Notably, Justine does not identify with other victims or act to help them. She doesn’t want anything, doesn’t care for anything, except to be good, which means not wanting anything at all. She suffers, but this suffering gives her a path to moral superiority without the weight that would come from seizing any agency — moral, sexual or otherwise — of her own. This is her “ambivalent triumph”.

It’s a tendency that troubles me, one I recognise in the parts of myself I dislike the most, in my most shameful fantasies. What if I actually do want to be let off the hook, after all? I think I learned a lot of formative lessons about love, care, and attention from the cancer years of my childhood. Sickness is a very lonely thing, especially as a child, pulled into a dull and terrifying world. On the one hand, so much of what is hard about my life now has roots in that experience. On the other, the attention — sometimes tenderness, mostly pity — was a nice consolation. I always wanted more.

I often joke that I can understand where Munchausen’s comes from. If your most powerful formative experiences of care are wrapped up in some experience of helplessness, it seems like a necessary condition for care and attention. What is agency and action then, but committing to a lonelier, more thankless path?

And of course, there are all the ways girls and women are praised for submission, both in tending to the needs of others and in approaching suffering bravely (and quietly!). It was barely a year ago that I had the strange revelation, making new friends while deep in a depressive episode, that relationships did not have to be built on foundations of pity or usefulness — that I could just show up as myself, and that was enough.¹¹

absolute power / absolute vulnerability

Autonomy might be one of the hardest parts of being alive. I’ve been thinking about self-sovereignty since passover, when I attended a beautiful seder hosted by my wonderful friend, Cora. It was a lovely night, one accommodating such a wide variety of beliefs,¹² and allowing those of us who weren’t Jewish to ask any stupid questions we had. Someone talked about self-sovereignty, comparing Moses’ initial reluctance and self-doubt to Esther’s. I was reminded of Diane di Prima’s ‘Revolutionary Letter #1’: “I have just realized that the stakes are myself”; “I have no other/ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life”; “this flesh all I have to offer”. It’s a call to action that I think about all the time.

I think fantasies are generally morally neutral. We can’t police our thoughts away, but perhaps it is worth finding a balance between non-judgmental acceptance and a curious kind of critical attitude. Forget what it means to fantasise about surrender. What does it do, in the rest of our lives?

Is it possible that such fantasies foreclose possibilities of care and connection? That by disavowing our desires, we siphon them out of us, contain them away from the real world? How many women fantasise about salvation, but continue to martyr themselves in their personal and domestic lives? What would happen if they asked for help?

At what point must we surrender to our desires? Claim them, own them, nurture them? Take the risks they bring and take responsibility for their consequences? At what point must we surrender to reality, for that matter, where we cannot have everything we want, because we cannot play God, but we certainly can have some of it, in terrifying, permanent, world-making ways? Have you realised yet that I’m asking these questions over and over and never learning my lesson?

Ultimately, I think I am drawn to surrender fantasies because I have an aversion to any real surrender. It scares me! I’m scared to surrender to consequences I cannot predict, to futures I cannot see, to the fickleness of other people. Gillian Rose says “there is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy”. I think I’m with Diane Seuss on that: “I didn’t want it./ Believe me, I didn’t want it anymore. Who in their/ right mind?”

In fantasy, surrender is a kind of oblivion, a holiday from subjectivity.¹³ The great cliché of the Gothic novels I love so much has heroines losing consciousness completely. The Mysteries of Udolpho’s Emily faints 10 times, and that’s not counting episodes of mere light-headedness. But for the fantasist, the scenario continues beyond this moment of surrender; they never yield narrative control.

In real life, surrender is a more active choice. You have to return to it daily, make yourself vulnerable again and again. Live through it. Look it in the eye and hold its gaze. Life will not force you to surrender to what you need.¹⁴ You can’t dissociate or pass out or skip ahead; there’s no getting around it — the only way out is through. You have to reach for what you need and want. Ask for it. Fantasy can be useful if we can draw from imagination into our reality. To end on another di Prima line: you can have what you ask for, ask for/everything.¹⁵

1. Am I, as John Berger describes in Ways of Seeing, “watching [myself] being looked at”?

2. The answer here is surely yes AND no — we identify with these characters, but we are also experiencing art as something different to life. Pretty foundational stuff, really.

3. Here, romance does not mean romance novel, but the hard-to-define genre distinct from the realist novel, partially descended from medieval chivalric romances. Walter Scott defined the romance as “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", which is a good entry-point into a fairly unstable category. (Though isn’t my point that all categories are?)

4. This very insane subplot is actually inspired by a real ‘experiment’ by writer Thomas Day, a friend of Edgeworth’s father, in which he adopted two pre-teen girls from the Foundling hospital and attempted to raise them according to the principles of Rousseau. The details are weirder and darker than Edgeworth’s fictionalisation — you can read about them in Wendy Moore’s How to Create the Perfect Wife.

5. The history of literacy is a complicated thing to dig into — I can’t find my notes to do this justice, but I got a lot out of reading David Vincent’s Literacy and Popular Culture some years ago. If I remember correctly, he spends a fair bit of time on how difficult literacy is to measure, and how many statistics are based on data that may only denote limited literacy (e.g. signing names in marriage licences etc).

6. Something my lovely friend Olli (

delarsea

) said to me after reading my draft was that some of this handwringing is about “the romance fantasy as a release of women’s desire from its patriarchal control, at least in the anxieties of men, thus making the image of a “women reading romance novel” a kind of cuckoldry” — an interesting angle I had not thought about!

7. Introduced to me by

Chels

!

8. Having finally read this, I need an age to properly digest it. It makes a really interesting argument around the form of the Romance — one in which the reader plays within the experience of a courtship between “myself and myself”, always (or usually!) ending happily because the genre “expresses integration, not fractionalization, of the self”. I don’t know that I agree with all of it — I think this smoothes out some interesting contradictions and inconsistencies within the genre — but I loved it anyway. Lots to chew on!

9. If anything, doesn’t curious investigation complement that refusal of judgment and shame pretty well?

10. She continues: “And yet I find myself becoming angry when I’m not [dominated]. My husband has trouble hailing a cab or flagging a waiter, and suddenly I feel a kind of rage; ball-breaking anger rises to my T-zone.” I’m not convinced what she is describing is a rage at her husband’s failure to dominate her so much as it is rage at his incompetence, but I digress.

11. Radical stuff. Like actually, though!

12. Cora’s Haggadah had sometimes four or five different versions of each prayer!

13. I have shamelessly stolen this phrasing from

noli me tangere

, who recently described dance as a “holiday from language”.

14. Though it’s early days for me, isn’t it? Perhaps it will, yet.

15. First and foremost, that means revolution, in the context of the poem!