Adoring Outlander by Valerie Estelle Frankel

Author:Valerie Estelle Frankel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2016-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

Although there are, of course, countless others, Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts are two well-known contemporary authors of the kinds of romance novels as they are depicted in the above passage.2 “My books,” Gabaldon writes, “don’t fit the standard conventions of the modern romance at all. OUTLANDER alone has some elements of a standard romance—enough to make it appealing to romance readers in general—but none of the other books [in the series] do” (“FAQ: About the Books”). She goes on to characterize Outlander and its sequels as “primarily an adventure story, in which history is as important a player as any of the individuals. To say nothing of which, I don’t have guaranteed happy endings—which you really must have in a romance” (“FAQ: About the Books”). Indeed, for a variety of reasons, the HEA (Happily Ever After) ending is obligatory or a romance is just not a romance. Noted romance author Laura Kinsale claims that romances “have happy endings and the hero never dies in them because literature as represented by the romance genre expresses integration, not fractionalization, of the self” as that integration is symbolized by the union of the hero and heroine (40). Baldly put, no other type of conclusion is possible in romance fiction.

With this information in play, Outlander would be more correctly categorized as a Romance—with an upper-case “R”—or, a “fictional story in verse or prose that relates improbable adventures of idealized characters in some remote or enchanted setting; or, more generally, a tendency in fiction opposite to that of realism,” according to The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Baldick 291). Romances trace their roots to the quest narratives and tales of chivalry that became enormously popular during the Middle Ages in Europe. The anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1375–1400), Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1485), Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1705), Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon (1982), and A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) are only a few descendant examples out of thousands of Romances that may be familiar to many readers of this chapter. As such, Outlander is in very good company in terms of its generic pedigree.

Genre distinctions aside, though, it seems that, at least in the minds of the general public and some critics, Gabaldon’s Outlander and its sequels have been categorized as romances—stories that deal with women and men who meet, fall in love with one another and, by the time all is said and done, get married and set about the business of procreating the next generation in an implied, perpetually-unfolding, happily-ever-after.3 In light of this overwhelmingly heteronormative narrative ethos, and the fact that, as statistical evidence has shown repeatedly, romance readers are, by far, female,4 Outlander should not have had any kind of appeal whatsoever to someone like me—a gay man. But the fact of the matter is, as I read Outlander for the first time in the early 1990s, I found

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