(no subject)

[elspethdixon]

The Smart Bitches who Love Trashy Books blog's "Good shit vs. shit to avoid" column this week is on romance novel heroines (and heroes) with disabilities.

There isn't much in-depth discussion there at the moment, but people are offering recs for novels that have disabled heroines with an emphasis on characters not being magically cured by the end of the book. No promises that any given novel mentioned won't turn out to handle the subject matter in a really dreadful way, of course.

The general consensus seems to be that heroes are occasionally allowed to have limbs amputated or be hideously scarred in a romantic, Mr.-Rochestor-at-the-end-of-Jane-Eyre way, but that heroines must only have disabilities that don't prevent them from being conventionally attractive by Hollywood standards. This fails to surprise me, somehow.

Comments

I think Sandra Brown had a heroine that was..

[jazzypom]

well, I don't know the medical term, but she was a deaf mute, so communicated in sign language. Then there was this other novel where this guy was in a wheelchair, but he could walk although his legs were spindly (due to them being wasted away in a wheelchair). There's this romance I read (forgot the name) where the heroine had a limp, and the hero privately called her 'my little wren' which was sweet in a way. But that's all I can remember

Re: I think Sandra Brown had a heroine that was..

[elspethdixon]

The Sanda Brown book got mentioned in the comments -- I can't remember what people's impression of the book was, though. People were mostly just mentioning books and whether or not the heroine was 'cured' by the end. When I last checked, there wasn't much discussion of how disability was handled in various novels, beyond one person's complaint that if she never saw a disabled protagonist in a modern-setting romance try to break off a relationship so that she "wouldn't be a burden to him" again it would be too soon. (Which was something I hadn't even thought of, but I can see how annoying it would be for a reader with a disability to have a character continually going "Oh, I must not burden him with my terrible, tragic [insert condition here] that makes me not good enough for him.")

I'm pretty sure I've read at least one historical where the heroine was blind, and another where the heroine had a limp, possibly by Patricia Veryan but I can't remember the title of either. Oh, and there's another Patricia Veryan where the heroine is in a wheelchair, but I can't remember if she was actually paralyzed or was recovering from a terrible illness.

And of course, there's VC Andrews' Flowers in the Attic trilogy, which has a character in a wheelchair (as does her Rudy/All that Glitter/etc. series - the author used a wheelchair herself after being in an accident as a young woman), but my main recollection of those books is INCESTINCESTWEIRDANGSTINCESTMARYSUEMARYSUEINCEST.

Re: I think Sandra Brown had a heroine that was..

[jazzypom]

Hmm. In that Brown's novel, she and the guy hooked up in the end. The guy might have been a cop, iirc, but there wasn't any hand wringing by the disabled heroine that she wasn't good enough for him. She lived alone, got on well enough, signed ASL.

But romance novels are mostly with mostly white and able bodied protagonists, which is one of many reasons why I don't really read them. Love is supposed to well... not be so stereotypical.