Human in Death

Morality and Mortality in J. D. Robb's Novels

Kecia Ali

• Éditeur: Baylor University Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781481306294
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Ethics & Religion

Kecia Ali's Human in Death explores the best-selling futuristic suspense series In Death, written by romance legend Nora Roberts under the pseudonym J. D. Robb. Centering on troubled NYPSD Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her billionaire tycoon husband Roarke, the novels explore vital questions about human flourishing. Through close readings of more than fifty novels and novellas published over two decades, Ali analyzes the ethical world of Robb's New York circa 2060. Robb compellingly depicts egalitarian relationships, satisfying work, friendships built on trust, and an array of models of femininity and family. At the same time, the series' imagined future replicates some of the least admirable aspects of contemporary society. Sexual violence, police brutality, structural poverty and racism, and government surveillance persist in Robb's fictional universe, raising urgent moral challenges. So do ordinary ethical quandaries around trust, intimacy, and interdependence in marriage, family, and friendship. Ali celebrates the series' ethical successes, while questioning its critical moral omissions. She probes the limits of Robb's imagined world and tests its possibilities for fostering identity, meaning, and mattering of human relationships across social difference. Ali capitalizes on Robb's futuristic fiction to reveal how careful and critical reading is an ethical act.

1

Intimacy in Death

Lieutenant Eve Dallas is a loner. A New York City homicide detective with a troubled past and few close relationships, she disdains romantic entanglements and keeps her colleagues at arms length. She stands for the dead, bringing perpetrators to justice.

Roarke, a self-made billionaire with a shady past, rose from Dublin’s alleys to dominate the global business world. Suave, sophisticated, and always in control, he has everything—except a woman he can love and trust. When their paths cross during a murder investigation, their connection threatens to topple her carefully constructed barriers and throw his ordered world into chaos. Will the potent chemistry between steely-eyed cop and reformed criminal suffice for the much more difficult work of making a life together?

A slow motion one-two punch

Shortly after the reader meets her, Dallas stands over a prostitute’s corpse. Sharon DeBlass, a twenty-four-year-old woman from a wealthy, prominent family, has been shot three times. Dallas, “barely thirty,” has been working for the New York Police and Security Department since her graduation from the academy a decade earlier.1 Her single-minded devotion to the job took her rapidly from uniformed officer to detective to lieutenant. Like many of her hard-boiled predecessors, her professional success does not betoken a vibrant, well-rounded personal life. She works hard. She does little else. Despite her years as a murder cop, Dallas had never seen a gunshot victim. This victim’s manner of death is shocking because, unlike in early twenty-first-century America where guns are legal and prostitution proscribed, in 2058 sex work has been legalized while, in the wake of the vicious Urban Wars that roiled cities worldwide beginning in the second decade of the twenty-first century, firearms have been outlawed.2

From the first pages of the series, as Dallas tracks a murderer who kills licensed companions (LCs), sex and violence intertwine. In addition to the focus on loving sexual partnership between the main characters, and brutal sexual violence as a trauma, sex work is a recurring thread in the novels. Sex clubs and strippers appear regularly, and the government regulates male and female licensed companions—serving men, women, or both—running the gamut from street level to pricey and exclusive. Licensure screens out the unsuitable and allows prosecution of the unlicensed. Sexual violence, sex work, and sexual connection appear often in the background, and sometimes in the foreground, of the novels’ plots.

The commingling of sex and violence echoes the series’ genre blending. In addition to setting the stage for this brave new world, the first novels in the series interweave a courtship plot with the procedural. Both have their own logics and narrative conventions.3 Plot points do double duty. The romantic hero comes to the heroine’s notice as a murder suspect: Roarke had gone on a date with the victim shortly before her death. Dallas researches him. She learns of the suspicions of criminal activity that have dogged him as well as the global corporate empire he has built. His legendary physical attractiveness is matched only by his phenomenal wealth; one character, admittedly prone to exaggeration, estimates that he owns “approximately twenty-eight percent of the world, and its satellites.”4 While learning about his business activities and dodgy past, Dallas is, to her chagrin, immediately attracted, later recalling “that she’d started falling for him the moment she’d seen that face.”5

The meeting—a requirement of any romance—fits into her homicide investigation. Roarke attends DeBlass’ funeral as a family friend. Dallas seeks him out to interrogate him about his connection to the victim: he is a suspect, not a potential romantic interest. The meeting is all clichéd attraction. They are palpably drawn together. She looks at him. He reacts: “her gaze, as physical as a blow . . . had coiled his muscles, tightened his gut.” When their eyes meet, “another blow. A slow motion one-two punch he hadn’t been able to evade.”6 When he learns that she is a detective, Roarke, who has not lived a precisely law-abiding life, finds his attraction to a cop disconcerting.7

The procedural plot creates the barriers to union that the romance structure requires. Although their early interactions are charged with distrust, Dallas quickly rules him out as the killer. Their mutual attraction steadily increases. As long as he remains under formal suspicion, personal involvement breaks the rules. The regulations preventing Dallas from dating a person of interest in an open investigation are less of a hindrance than their divergent perspectives on the merits of strict adherence to the law. They have other differences: she is brash, he is smooth. Still, like recognizes like. Both had difficult childhoods, are passionate about their work, and ruthlessly pursue their objectives. They have chemistry. Ultimately, they cannot withstand their attraction for each other: though Roarke takes the initiative, Dallas participates enthusiastically in their physical encounters. She does not, however, wish to take it any further than sex.

Dallas’ unromantic, utilitarian approach to sex had been foreshadowed at an early murder scene. The officer standing guard is clearly shaken up by seeing a gunshot victim. Dallas asks if he’s involved with someone; when he says he’s engaged, she remarks on cops who have had a difficult experience “losing it in a warm body.” It is, she says, better than drinking. Her crude remark portrays an unhealthy ethic of sex: using another as a means to an end.8 She thinks of sex as either violence or a simple release of tension.

Dallas’ reluctance to involve herself emotionally with Roarke stems from wariness of his reputation and wealth as well as of intimacy more generally. She is emotionally closed off, in part because of childhood trauma revealed over the course of the series. As she much later confides to her detective partner, “He’s the only man I’ve ever had a real relationship with.”9 Where Dallas is skittish, Roarke is intrigued. He is emotionally more self-aware than she. He must confront his own uncertainties, but the barriers to intimacy that she erects are the first and main obstacles to be demolished for them to become a couple and begin to build a life together.10 She resists; he pursues.

A woman wants glitter

Roarke’s pursuit of Dallas illustrates retrograde gender dynamics. He is persistent, even pushy. He wields power effectively, sometimes in worrisome ways. Using the skill in reading people that has made him professionally successful, he tailors his overtures. He entices her with real coffee, an expensive luxury in a world of soy substitutes, first in his car leaving the funeral, then when he sends her a gift. Mavis Freestone—Dallas’ only close girlfriend at the start of the series—assumes he has sent diamonds. Learning otherwise, she rants, “The man’s got more money than God, and he sends you a bag of coffee? . . . I don’t care what the damn stuff costs a pound, Dallas. A woman wants glitter.” She replies, “Not this woman. The son of a bitch knew just how to get to me.”11 His gift illustrates that he knows her. She is no anonymous cipher of femininity but a person with tastes and preferences.12 Yet even as the coffee thoughtfully reflects her individuality, Roarke makes a power play: he owns her building and has the package delivered to her apartment though she has never told him where she lives. Thoughtful shades into creepy.13

If the early stages of Eve and Roarke’s relationship reflect a pursuit dynamic premised on (ambivalent) male dominance and male agency, the relationship quickly arcs toward egalitarianism with a feminist bent. Robb inverts expected nurturing patterns and centers the wife’s rather than the husband’s career. Partly, this focus reflects the importance of the detective stories in the series: solving crimes is Dallas’ bailiwick. Mutuality comes to the fore for two additional intertwined reasons. One is external to the story: from the 1990s onward, romance heroes moved further away from the model of controlling males prominent in the 1970s and into the 1980s. What is considered romantic shifts quickly, and gender norms become dated fast.14 The second factor is internal to the series: courtship is one thing; marriage, another. After they have been married for some months, she reminisces about his “exciting” actions during their courtship: “wanted,” “pursued,” “demanded,” “taken.” Shifting registers, she ends with “cherished.”15 Social norms surrounding dating (who asks, who pays, who tags whom via link) shift but still presume men’s power in a way that is increasingly outdated for marriage.16 Thus, both because marriage means the end of pursuit and because of changed notions of what is romantic, this imbalance fades in later novels.

Popular romances convey ideas about love and sex as well as gender and marriage.17 Male dominance is a major theme of romance novels, both longed for and contested. Authors and heroines alike express deep ambivalence about certain elements of normative masculinity. Emotionally inscrutable, implacable, and capricious heroes have fallen out of fashion, but novelists still write taller, older, stronger, wealthier, virile heroes who can provide for and protect the women they love. Yet heroines’ independence and ability to hold their own in all realms of life is a precondition for their worthiness to receive love from these reformed but still capable and masculine heroes.

Though Dallas and Roarke have an egalitarian relationship, he dominates elsewhere. He lives by his own code of honor rather than strictly by law. He has the “killer instinct,” and “though he’d never taken a life without cause, he’d killed.”18 At the same time, his attempts to control Dallas involve not attaining his own interests but fulfilling hers, at least as he perceives them. He wants her to accept gifts, nurturing, and eventually his love. She does not fall neatly into line.

Their road from attraction to involvement to marriage is bumpy. Emotional involvement follows physical intimacy, as does the increased intertwining of Roarke with Dallas’ professional life. During their courtship, he is tangentially connected to a series of crimes, not only because of his suspicious connections, which he has been slowly shedding, but also because with “his clever fingers in too many pies to count . . . it was inevitable that his name would pop up in connection with so many of her cases.”19 As the series proceeds, he becomes an occasional and then a frequent civilian consultant, routinely helping Dallas and her colleagues solve crimes. Personal and professional merge, if not seamlessly then inextricably.

The romance element, at the fore in early volumes, alternately surfaces and recedes. Even when no real drama happens in their marriage, Roarke and Dallas’ relationship occupies the emotional center of the series. In an online fan poll of favorite couples in Roberts’ books, Dallas and Roarke received more than half the votes. Roarke handily won a similar poll for favorite Roberts hero, scoring 35% of the votes shared over ten candidates; Dallas did similarly in a poll about heroines. One fan’s list of the top ten reasons she loves Roberts includes three references to Roarke. Asked why In Death novels are shelved with Roberts’ romance fiction, a bookstore clerk explained, “At heart, they’re romances. After all, without Eve and Roarke, you wouldn’t have a series.”20

Still, the courtship proceeds over the course of only three novels, mere months in the compressed series timeline.21 After Eve and Roarke meet and become involved in Naked in Death, they date off-page for several months. (This is the only substantial gap between novels, which otherwise begin within weeks or days of the previous installment’s ending.) When Glory in Death opens in late May of 2058, they are involved but struggling over commitment and love. Declarations, recriminations, and reconciliation occur mid-book; at book’s end, Roarke proposes and she accepts. They are engaged and planning a wedding during Immortal in Death, in which she half-heartedly p...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Reading in Death
• Chapter 1. Intimacy in Death
• Chapter 2. Friendship in Death
• Chapter 3. Vocation in Death
• Chapter 4. Violence in Death
• Chapter 5. Perfection in Death
• Conclusion: Ending in Death
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index