Despite the title, this isn’t a Hallowe’en essay, though it’s certainly suited to the season.

My current bus reading is A Monster’s Notes by Laurie Sheck. It’s a strange and difficult book full of partial memories and complicated allusions; a number of critics describe struggling to get through it. On the face of it, A Monster’s Notes is not a book that should bear much relationship to genre romance. However, I find that it presses many of the same buttons as do paranormal romance and heroine-centric urban fantasy, albeit in a very different style.

A Monster’s Notes is the backstory—and frontstory, and sidestory–of Frankenstein’s monster and his loves. In Sheck’s telling, an eight-year-old Mary Shelley encounters the monster at the grave of her mother, the late-eighteenth-century feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps drawn to the young Mary’s loneliness, the monster spends hours reading to her from behind a screen of bushes near the grave. His reading choices are bizarre, including Marco Polo’s travels, the letters of Abelard and Heloise, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings. Over the years, the monster thinks of Mary with tenderness and is wounded and puzzled by her later depiction of him as a creature of horror. Reading her letters and journals, he attempts to reconstruct her life and her feelings, never positive that any particular phrase refers to him, but desperate to interpret anything that might pertain.

Alienation

I see a number of connections to romance, but the most important is in the monster’s affect. His notes are full of both tenderness and alienation, and in holding this book side by side with paranormal romance, I wonder whether this could be the monster-hero’s side of the story.

Many romances center on a woman searching for her place in the world. Some romances show the heroine isolated and friendless, like so many questing heroes of science fiction and fantasy–and so many young adult characters too. Some romances cast the heroine’s dilemma in terms of social expectations, for example discussing sexism in the workplace, having a bride run from a wedding or quit a job, or quoting Mary Wollstonecraft to give context to the alienation felt by the heroine.

Similarly in A Monster’s Notes, alienation connects being a “monster” and being a woman. The monster’s memories are full of loneliness and longing, and often in those passages Sheck explicitly connects the monster’s alienation with that described by Mary Wollstonecraft. For example, the monster reads from Wollstonecraft’s book Maria or the Wrongs of Woman:

Looking down at [Mary Shelley’s] mother’s pages, my eyes, by chance, landed on these words:

”Treated like a creature of another species, I began to envy and at length to hate.”
…
”I had not even the chance of being considered as a fellow-creature. I had no one to love me. I was an egg dropped on the sand. I belonged to nobody, despised since my birth.”

And:
”To be cut off from human converse was to wander a ghost among the living.”

I felt she knew me, but how could she know me? I was reading the words of a dead woman
(Metropolis/The Ruins at Luna/p. 391)

A number of these passages remind me of heroine-centric urban fantasy series (e.g. those by Laurell K Hamilton and Kim Harrison). These series cover similar ground, describing a world shaped by alienation–including quite literal alienation between species–and the search for love. Reading A Monster’s Notes makes me wish for a hybrid form: a heroine-centric urban fantasy explicitly grounded in feminist philosophy, with a deeper exploration of alienation and romance.

Perhaps what I’m looking for is a variation on Kit Whitfield’s Bareback or Benighted, which portrays a society that institutionalizes bigotry, speciesism and classism around genetic mutations. Meanwhile, I find myself looking again when I see absurd titles like Hungry for Your Love: An Anthology of Zombie Romance. I haven’t tried that one, and I’m sure the silliness quotient is high, but the concept is coming to make a strange sort of sense to me.

This entry was posted by RfP on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 10:18 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.