We romance lovers like our heroines brainy, don’t we?
There are many reasons to watch Fox’s new show Glee and high school heroine Rachel is just one of them. Rachel is the classic socially awkward over-achiever and – hello, romance stereotype it may be – a heroine who I’m rooting for. Big time. Rachel has a thing for popular guy Finn who also has a thing for Rachel, despite the fact that his pregnant cheerleader girlfriend has him believing that he’s the father of her baby. Which is a pretty strong indication that Finn’s bulb is a bit on the dim side since she also convinced him that her pregnancy resulted from a hot tub ejaculation incident. I really hate it when that happens.
I’m nattering on about Drop Dead Diva and romance again. That show is my drug.![who are you jane - picture[1] (2)](http://www.likesbooks.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/who-are-you-jane-picture1-2-300x228.jpg "who are you jane - picture[1] (2)")
Drop Dead Diva is a new series on Lifetime which follows the life of an aspiring model called Deb who is killed in an accident but comes back in the body of a successful lawyer called Jane. In episode 1, Jane is shot and is close to death. The audience knows that Jane did actually pass away in the end and Deb has taken her place but the people in the show’s reality do not. That said, this past Sunday marked the show’s 10th episode, and we have yet to see Jane receive a visit from any close friend or family. It appears Jane was a workaholic with no friends and not much of a life.
I’ve often felt that romance readers are unduly harsh on heroines. If my literature professor could talk about hero complexes and hubris and approach their ginormous issues rationally and analytically, why can’t we do the same with heroines? The answer is obvious, of course, (no grand insight here), and refers to what I call the body-snatching part of reading. This is where the reader drops their invisibility cloak, stops wandering around the people looking at them, and invades the heroine’s body to be her. Because body-snatching occurs every time we read a romance novel, there’s little chance we’d wish to inhabit a body and spirit that we like. And so we body-snatch with the governesses who get the rakes, the family-oriented defence attorneys in Washington D.C., the jaded bad girl who comes home – whatever hits the spot.
