Window undressing
WINDOW DRESSING. This expression’s literal meaning is a display in a retail shop window, like the one pictured below, courtesy of the Instagram account of The Ripped Bodice, a bookstore specializing in romance novels:
A post shared by Bea and Leah (@therippedbodice)
Window dressing also means, more figuratively, something superficial that is only for the sake of appearance. Like the shop window, it’s meant to sell you something, but in this figurative meaning, that’s deceptive.
My search results tell me that this expression also has a finance-specific definition, but it seems pretty similar to the more general figurative use, and I’m not the right person to explain anything financial, so we’ll leave it at that.
Suffice to say that our figurative use of “window dressing” demeans the labor and skill that goes into making an eye-catching display. Think of all the unsung creative efforts in the world, the beauty we consider cheap or frivolous or accidental. So often these dismissed labors are associated with women or femininity—retail windows, interior decor, romance novels.
A couple days ago, Slate ran an article by architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange with the headline “The Unbearable Banality of Romance Novel Décor,” where Lange, an avowed romance reader—an improvement over the morass of journalism about genre romance that treats it as a joke, or a potential contaminant that self-respecting journalists must distance themselves from—argues the following:
Romance has a serious décor problem. Contemporary romance novels, my pandemic escape of choice, provide a wide variety of settings, pairings, relationship dynamics, and even kinks. But the world of romance has settled, it seems, on a default style of interior design for its heroes. Every time I read about yet another “modern minimalist” living room—let’s just say it kills the mood.
As I said, I’m glad to see Lange owning her romance readership, but this thesis identifies a pattern (minimalist interior design) and wrongly attributes it to romance novelists loving modern minimalism. I said this already on twitter:
Felicia "Ray" Davin @FeliciaDavin
when a romance protag has money but hasn't found love with their person, their gigantic rich-person house feels empty/lonely/unlived in. come ON. these descriptions convey exactly what they're intended to convey.
Publishers Weekly @PublishersWkly
The Unbearable Banality of Romance Novel Décor | @slate https://t.co/NCVw3lW90F https://t.co/yOfk6G4FKm
November 28th 2020 83 Retweets 816 Likes
Lange comes close to understanding that these cold interiors are a trope—and thus the descriptions result from romance novelists making deliberate, literary choices—at a couple different moments in her essay:
What Roni Loren’s Kincaid and I see as a deal-breaker, far too many romance protagonists see as a challenge: If his house is chilly, he just needs me to warm up his living room—and his heart.
[…] these examples are all rich men, which makes it difficult not to read the blankness of their houses as representative of the blandness of their souls.
But she never quite gets there. There’s no acknowledgement that these descriptions represent deliberate choices by the writers. The pattern Lange notes does not emerge by accident.
I, on the other hand, read this article in increasing exasperation because even never having read the books she cites, I can tell that she is quoting the first glimpse of a character’s home. I would bet real American dollars that every single one of those books has a later scene or possibly multiple later scenes where the house decor changes to represent an emotional change in the character. Because yes, of course the blankness of their houses is representative of their souls, that is the point. These decor descriptions are not meant to be “seductive,” as Lange asserts at one point; they’re meant to signify that the house is not yet a home. It’s a trope.
Allie Therin 🇨🇺 + 🇺🇲 @allie_therin
@FeliciaDavin I'm expecting a follow-up article, "The Unbearable Singularity of Beds in Genre Romance" with straight-faced discussion of novels where the MCs had only one bed.
November 28th 2020 1 Retweet 94 Likes
If you were drawing conclusions about whether romance novelists like modern minimalism, based on these examples, you should conclude that they don’t. (Why many romance novelists have chosen modern minimalism as a symbol of both wealth and emotional coldness is an interesting question, but it’s beyond the scope of what I’m doing here today.) You don’t have to like the “despite their obscene wealth, this character’s life is empty, as evidenced by their living room” scene, but recognize it for what it is.
The reverse of this trope does exist, and Lange even cites it. Instead of seeing someone’s home and realizing that there’s something missing, sometimes a character sees another character’s home and swoons. As Lange says, it’s the “I must date it from my first seeing the beautiful grounds at Pemberley” moment in Pride and Prejudice. A key difference in this trope—The Pemberley Moment, a good thriller title—and the modern minimalist living room one is that the Pemberley Moment often happens late in the story. It’s a realization that a character is more caring or more careful or perhaps more human than previously thought.
But sometimes we can have little a Pemberley, as a treat, early in a romance novel. In Sierra Simone’s angsty, kinky, queer Thornchapel series, the old manor house Thornchapel is practically a character, haunted with memories and in need of renovations, but still magical and alluring. The narrator, Poe, is an American librarian who is a childhood friend of Thornchapel’s owner—Auden, a Brit, and an emotionally closed-off rich dude, in keeping with Lange’s theme—and in a sort of Beauty-and-the-Beast allusion, Poe moves into Thornchapel to catalogue the house’s ancient book collection. There’s not an ocean view, a white wall, or a leather sectional in sight:
My room is winsomely old.
A few large rugs are scattered over wide wood planks, and there’s a canopied bed piled thick with blankets and snowy pillows. A small stone fireplace has a wood-burning stove fitted in, and there’s a low bench before a row of arched, mullioned windows. A small desk, large dresser, and end table complete the furnishings, along with two small tapestries covering the stone and plaster walls. (A Lesson in Thorns)
Poe has difficulty getting close to the mysterious Auden, but she’s drawn to him, partly because of their childhood friendship and partly because his family home is cozy, enticing, and revealing—and not just because the library is full of ancient secrets. Auden is an architect, and he’s returned to Thornchapel to redesign it, and in doing so, he hopes to chase out the lingering memory of his abusive father. So much of this series is about digging up the past, often quite literally, and learning to live with it, and the house is a huge part of that. Poe finding her room “winsome” is just the beginning of falling in love.
There’s a different approach to the Pemberley Moment in Ruby Lang’s contemporary romance novella Playing House, in which urban planners Fay and Oliver fall in love while touring old brownstones in Harlem. They’re friends, but they attend open houses together and people assume they’re a couple, and things spiral from there. After going on a tour with Oliver, Fay returns to the apartment she just moved into and fantasizes about Oliver seeing it:
She could’ve asked him to walk home with her, maybe invited him up, messy and unfurnished as the place was. He was a planner. He’d love the neighborhood. He would see the possibilities of the place that she’d seen—and needed to be reminded of. She’d read up on the history and architecture of this part of Manhattan. Maybe she would have taken pleasure in showing him the slot in the bathroom for razor blades, the old penny tile, a stove that came straight from the seventies, an ugly slab of a fridge from the early 2000s. The apartment was like an old Gothic cathedral that had changed styles midway through building because the construction had outlasted the lives of the people putting it together. But instead of a place of spiritual worship, it was a place of common living, every decade of its existence evidenced by an outdated appliance, or a piece of cabinetry or wallpaper.
Let’s pause for a second over that stunning comparison between the apartment and the Gothic cathedral, a comparison that elevates “common living” to something that inspires spiritual feeling, a sentiment that both Fay and Oliver—who geek out over newel posts and brick fireplaces and who work hard to make the city an affordable, functional, happy place to live—would share. This comparison is a microcosm of what contemporary romance often does, which is to find worth in the everyday, the personal, the interpersonal.
The apartment is a new beginning for Fay, who is divorced, but she’s still living among her moving boxes. When she contemplates fixing it up alone, she feels overwhelmed. This fantasy of Oliver touring the apartment with her and appreciating the slot for the razor blades and the penny tile makes Fay see “the possibilities of the place” again. Imagining Oliver in her space is a way of imagining him in her life. If he could be charmed by the details and the potential of the apartment, couldn’t he be charmed by her, too?
This example—not quite The Pemberley Moment, but an imagined echo of it—is also important because Fay imagines Oliver contributing to the apartment. Alexandra Lange writes “Why does all the charm, at least design-wise, have to be one-sided?” and by “one-sided,” she means, as she says earlier in the piece, “the ‘female’ redecorating role.” But that’s not what’s happening in Playing House or in the Thornchapel series cited above—two very, very different works. It’s easy to find men in romance who care about domestic aesthetics and comforts. Perhaps not in the subgenre of “emotionally closed-off rich dude lets love into his life at last,” but the genre is vast. You want it, we got it.
I am by no means an expert in Beverly Jenkins’s work, since she has written many, many novels, but the ones I’ve read feature the male protagonist materially providing for the female protagonist. This sharing of shelter, comfort, and protection is especially moving given that Jenkins is best known for historical novels about Black Americans, characters who have had to fight hard against brutal systemic oppression for every freedom and pleasure they possess. In the last Jenkins novel I read, the Revolutionary-War-set Midnight, the female protagonist has been treated like a maid by her own father. She lives in a tiny, ill-furnished room and wears old clothes. When the male main character offers her a choice of rooms in his own house, she cannot imagine picking the largest, most luxurious one for herself—but he insists. In Midnight, the hero’s house is unquestionably part of what makes the heroine swoon. Pemberley Moment, eat your heart out.
In Kate Clayborn’s contemporary Beginner’s Luck, the house belongs to the female protagonist, but the interest in design is not “one-sided.” The male protagonist works at an architectural salvage yard and he shows his care for her by bringing her period-appropriate door knobs, hinges, and other findings for her fixer-upper. This isn’t exactly an example of a Pemberley Moment. It’s more like the “cute old bungalow” version of the empty modern minimalist living room: she needs help making her house livable, and he provides. In the process, they make a life together.
I once thought I was gonna have a real #bookstagram account and produced this image with the cover of Beginner’s Luck, because I loved the book so much, but that led to me discovering that doing fancy compositions for book photo shoots—window dressing, you might say—is hard fucking work, so my #bookstagram career was brief. RIP.
And of course, not all romances have female protagonists. (Lange does acknowledge this in her piece.) In Iona Datt Sharma’s Division Bells, which stars two men, when we finally get to see the inside of a protagonist’s home, there is a window with a view of a body of water, but no modern minimalism:
Ari couldn't process the out-of-contextness of it, of having Jules there amid the detritus of Ari's home life, such as it was these days. The house plants – of which he had plenty; he'd been lying to Jules the other night about the yucca – were recently neglected but not quite wilting; the books were in their familiar rows on the shelves; the violin in its case propped by the window glass. His working papers were spread over the dining table and spilled haphazardly across the floor. The upper part of the house had been converted into a separate flat years ago, but Ari had never felt the lack; he liked this room with the front door opening right into it, the Thames creeping beneath the windows. His bedroom had the same view, plus more books, plants and papers. The place was his and part of him, and Jules was standing in it like a foreign body or a ghost.
Ari and Jules are co-workers with a contentious relationship, one in which hypercompetent workaholic Ari has been hard on Jules, who’s new to the demanding work of getting bills through Parliament. This description of Ari’s home is a Pemberley Moment with a twist: instead of seeing Ari’s home through Jules, we see it through Ari, who is totally discombobulated by the realization that Jules now knows Ari is a fallible human being, neglected house plants and all. Ari’s apartment shows that he has a life outside of work and that he’s not perfect, and both revelations endear him to Jules.
And then there’s Alexis Hall’s Boyfriend Material, which I’m including here (1) because it’s a delightful book and (2) because Alexandra Lange cites another Alexis Hall novel in her article, and it’s doing Hall such a disservice to act like he’s not a writer who cares deeply about setting, including design details. I’m only offering the tiniest fragment here, but we learn a great deal about Luc, the narrator of this passage and a total disaster, and Oliver Blackwood, whose home is described:
Inside, Casa de Blackwood was everything I’d expected in some ways and nothing like I’d expected in others. It was tiny and immaculate, all white-painted walls and stripped wooden floors, with flashes of jewel-bright colour from rugs and throw pillows. Effortlessly homey and grown up and shit, leaving me jealous and intimidated and weirdly yearny.
I don’t know if this is exactly a Pemberley Moment, even though Oliver’s home makes Luc “weirdly yearny,” because the “immaculate” state of Oliver’s home confirms our previous notions of perfectionist Oliver, rather than revealing some unforeseen emotional side. But it’s close. Luc himself lives in a horrible depression-nest of dirty clothes and dishes, so Oliver’s home necessarily strikes him as a vision of a better life. And in the pages that follow, Oliver cooks for Luc, so the scene does bring them closer together.
I just want to add one last scene of a male character revealing something about himself through his dedication to interior design. It’s an unusual passage compared to these others because it has very little actual description, but I think it’s still worth looking at. This passage is from Holley Trent’s wonderfully messy polyamorous contemporary Three-Part Harmony, about two men and a woman falling in love, and it’s an early scene where prickly marketing professional Raleigh is going home for a one-night stand with a sexy and eccentric stranger who has given his name as “Theo.” (His real name is Bruce.) They enter “Theo’s” home and then:
“Not up here. Too open. Too many windows. Can’t stand the windows. Makes me feel like they can all see.”
Raleigh didn’t have a chance to see the windows or much of anything, really. Theo had led him to a carpeted stairway leading downward. Normally, he might have thought, danger, dungeon down there! but his overactive curiosity had diluted whatever sense of self-preservation he might have had. He was spawning more and more questions about Theo by the minute. He’d never been so curious about anyone—not even the mysterious authors he worked for without ever meeting in the flesh.
“I did this one myself,” Theo said.
“Did what?”
“The room. They wouldn’t let me do the others, but I did this one. They didn’t care because no one could see it.”
“Hell, I can’t see it.”
Raleigh fell over what must have been a sofa arm because he landed on soft cushions with pillows tilted on his face.
Suddenly, a lamp clicked on nearby. “Better? I got that lampshade in Marrakesh. Held it on my lap the whole flight home. They wanted me to stow it, but after all I went through to get...” Letting the story trail off, Theo perched on the coffee table in front of Raleigh and carelessly wriggled off his boots.
We later find out that “Theo,” real name Bruce, is a brilliant musician who is made miserable by his career as a rockstar, where people are always managing his image (“They wouldn’t let me do the others … They didn’t care because no one could see it”) and he deals with pressure from the public constantly (“Can’t stand the windows. Makes me feel like they can all see”). Bruce is neurodivergent and rarely allowed agency, so he is proud of the one room in his house that he was allowed to decorate. This room is windowless and private, the one place in the house that really belongs to him, and it’s where he chooses to bring Raleigh for what should be a somewhat impersonal one-night stand. After all, Bruce gave a fake name. But he can’t stop himself from revealing this little glimpse of his real self, and he does so not only by showing Raleigh the room, but also through his characteristic, somewhat meandering conversation. The lampshade story encapsulates who Bruce is—a person dedicated to his aesthetic vision, whether musical or decor-related, who has no interest in following rules or norms, and who is fiercely protective of what he loves. “Held it on my lap the whole flight home.” Now that’s a man who cares about interior design.
I cannot finish this newsletter without mentioning Diana Biller’s ghost-story historical The Widow of Rose House—honestly startling it’s taken me this long to get to it, since the house is its own character and the female protagonist, Alva Webster, is writing a book on interior design. Multiple characters scorn or mock her efforts, and even her publisher expects that her book will sell not because she’s a good writer with expertise in her field, but rather because she’s “the infamous Mrs. Webster.” Her name is in the gossip pages and unforgettably linked with salacious scandals.
One of the ways we know that the male protagonist, Sam, is a good match for Alva is that he doesn’t reduce Alva to her bad reputation or dismiss her subject matter as feminine frivolity. Sam understands that making a house feel like a home is an aesthetic labor that results from deliberate, thoughtful choices. Alva has barely experienced acknowledgement of her work as work, and here’s someone—a scientist, widely recognized as a genius—who sees her and offers her accolades. Sam doesn’t even need to see the estate in its full glory to recognize Alva’s brilliance. She walks him through the crumbling, derelict halls of Rose House and explains her vision; he listens and swoons. For my purposes, that counts as a Pemberley Moment.
This is a scattered collection of examples from a variety of subgenres of romance—and I’m only stopping here because this newsletter is longer than 3,000 words and it’s almost 11PM, believe me when I say I had more—but I think it demonstrates that romance is not dominated by the modern minimalist aesthetic when it comes to interior design description. Furthermore, if you want characters who go weak in the knees over each other’s homes, or male protagonists who care about decor, we’ve got ‘em. And, lastly, when romance writers deploy a modern minimalist aesthetic, we do it meaningfully and on purpose, the way we do everything else.
Speaking of romance novelists doing meaningful work, here’s a piece from Jezebel on the Romancing the Runoff auction that just raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for get-out-the-vote organizations in Georgia, including Fair Fight, run by Stacey Abrams, who writes romance under the pen name Selena Montgomery. I’m not saying a figure for the fundraising because I’m sure whatever number I pick will be out of date by the time this email gets sent.
This week in small-r romance, I read
Field Guide: Love and Other Natural Disasters (het m/bi f, both cis, contemporary) by Six de los Reyes. This is a romance between a marine biologist and a TV reporter focused on the climate crisis, and they meet because the reporter’s crew is filming life on her research vessel in Manila Bay and the Philippine Sea. Talk about forced proximity. They go scuba diving together and, naturally, a rescue is necessary. This book is very sweet and deals with both protagonists’ anxieties about the pressures of their jobs and their places in the world. Plus, the parts that aren’t on a boat are set in Manila, so for me it was almost like getting to travel. Content warnings: anxiety/panic attacks, risk of drowning, sex.
Let Us Dream (m/f, both cis and het, historical, novella) by Alyssa Cole. This is a story about a Black suffragette and an immigrant from Calcutta meeting and falling in love during the Harlem Renaissance and it is so fantastically rich in character and historical detail. I really am just bowled over every time I pick up anything by Alyssa Cole—the prose, the tension, the lush setting. These two dance together and he cooks Bengali food for her and the whole thing is wonderful. Content warnings: anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, fear of getting deported, sex workers getting threatened by clients and police, pregnancy, birth.
Empire of Sand (m/f, both cis and het, fantasy) by Tasha Suri. This book is more properly classified as a fantasy novel, but it has a great romance in it and this is my newsletter so I do what I want. Empire of Sand is set in a fantasy version of the Mughal Empire, and the protagonist, Mehr, is the illegitimate daughter of a Governor. Her mother was part of a persecuted ethnoreligious group whose use of magic is feared and revered all over the Empire, and it turns out that the Empire needs Mehr because of her particular heritage. Forced into marriage, she finds herself at the heart of the Empire, where, obviously, some real bad shit is going down. I loved the slow and fragile trust between Mehr and her husband, and all the descriptions of the rites they danced. Content warnings: murder, violence including self-harm, blood.
Whew, okay, I think this newsletter’s long enough. See you next Sunday!
