Welcome to Temptation is a contemporary romance written by Jennifer Crusie and released in 2000. The novel explores the love story between Sophie Dempsey, a screenwriter making a movie in the small town of Temptation, and the mayor, Phinneas "Phin" Tucker. Over the course of the story, they solve a murder and deal with conflict around Sophie's movie, which is alternately a documentary or a porn flick. The lead characters appear in supporting roles in the sequel, Faking It, which centers on Sophie's brother, a secondary character in Welcome to Temptation.
Crusie, who has often defended the romance genre against critics, wrote the novel to deconstruct the complaints levied against the genre. The novel examines perceptions of reality versus fantasy and concludes that embracing a fantasy may lead to greater self-awareness. Through imagery and plot points, Crusie shows the shift in the power dynamics between the couple change as their relationship progresses, resulting in a more equal balance of power. Sophie's movie, which includes scenes taken from her courtship with Phin, provides an opportunity to explore the boundaries between private acts and public events. Using a protagonist who is also a con artist, Crusie highlights the inherent con in romance novels - that two extremely different people who have known each other for only a short time could live happily ever after.
The book was well-received; reviewers highlighted its humor, dialogue, and more daring sex scenes. It was a New York Times besteller and was number two on Amazon.com's list of top contemporary romances of 2000.
Background As research for her doctoral dissertation, Jennifer Crusie determined to read 100 romance novels. Crusie had never explored that genre, and she was convinced she would find it difficult to wade through those types of books. To her surprise, she discovered that she enjoyed the genre, so much so that she became a literary critic for the genre and began writing romance novels herself.
During the 1980s and 1990s, literary critics frequently dismissed the romance novel genre, often for contrasting reasons. Janice Radway contended that the genre is bad for women, blinding them to the difference between fantasy and reality. She posited that women turn towards books in this genre to get an emotional release denied to them in their daily lives, where they must devote themselves to caregiving and have little time for themselves. Other critics saw the genre as simply a rehash of stereotypical sexual and marital roles. In the late 1990s, Crusie wrote several essays defending the romance novel against critics.
Crusie was also developing her own career as a novelist. Lamenting the lack of the “edgy, angry feminist love stories" that she most enjoyed reading, Crusie determined to fill that gap herself. After writing several short category romances, Crusie transitioned to writing single-title novels. Her third of these longer works was Welcome to Temptation, which was released in hardcover in March 2000 by St. Martin's Press. It was reissued in trade paperback format in September 2010.
One of the secondary characters, Davy Dempsey, becomes the hero of Crusie's follow-up, Faking It. The protagonists in this novel are secondary characters there.
Plot summary The novel begins as Sophie Dempsey and her younger sister Amy approach the small Ohio town of Temptation. They have been hired by their former sister-in-law, Clea Whipple, to create a movie that will revive her failing acting career. Before the sisters reach the town, they are involved in a minor car accident with Stephen and Virginia Garvey, prominent citizens of Temptation who also consider themselves the moral pillars of society.
The hero of the book, Phinneas "Phin" Tucker, is another prominent citizen; he is the fourth generation of his family to serve as mayor of Temptation.
As the book progresses, there is conflict between the characters on the nature of the film they are making; ultimately three different versions are produced. One is a documentary, Return to Temptation, showcasing Clea and the town's reactions to her return to her birthplace and the making of the movie. The second version, Cherished, is women's soft-core pornography, with Clea and Rob Lutz, the sone of her former lover, as the featured actors. A third version, Hot Fleshy Thighs is a bad hard-corn porn movie aimed at men.
Near the middle of the novel, Clea's husband Zane is murdered.
Style The novel is a contemporary romance. The plot is, at first glance, fairly typical of the genre. The hero is rich and of a high social stature, and his love will elevate a poor, yet honest lower-class heroine. Crusie quickly turns this on its head. The hero dislikes his position and dreams of walking away from his social responsibilities. The heroine dislikes the hero and is actively working to undermine his authority.
Unlike other heroes of the genre, Phin is neither aloof nor a committed bachelor. He is a single father and is portrayed as a loving man who is already comfortable in a domestic role.
Themes Welcome to Temptation is, at its core, a feminist defense of the romance genre. Through imagery, characterization, and plot points, Crusie deconstructs many of the complaints that critics frequently leveled against the genre during the 1990s. In so doing, she also echoed her own journey to becoming a novelist, from skepticism to acceptance to an embrace of that which she was originally prepared to dislike. The heroine is even given a name derived from The Grand Sophy, a novel by highly regarded romance novelist Georgette Heyer.
Fantasy vs reality By having the heroine frequently quote movie lines, Crusie initially implies that Sophie has difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy. The initial movies that she quotes, Tootsie, Psycho, The Manchurian Candidate, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, all involve characters whose reality is twisted in some way. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes clear that Sophie is one of the only characters who is fully grounded in reality. The supporting characters have each embraced their own fantasies, causing them to misread their realities and make poor choices. Crusie even explicitly tells the reader that the Garveys do not approve of any type of fiction, yet their characters deceive themselves with fantasies. By contrast, Sophie, the character primarily associated with fiction, both in quoting it and writing it, is shown as more perceptive.
Sophie embraces fantasy when she begins her liaison with Phin. While describing the first sexual encounter between the protagonists, Crusie alludes directly to Radway's conclusions in Reading the Romance. Radway wrote that women are attracted to romance novels "because the social role with which they identify themselves leaves little room for guiltless, self-interested pursuit of individual pleasure”.quoted in Moore and Selinger. Cited to Radway, Reading the Romance, pp. 95-96. As Phin coaxes Sophie to allow him to pleasure her, he uses similar language: "pleasure with no guilt", "no responsibility", "be selfish". As the relationship progresses, Crusie shows that Sophie more fully embraces her sexuality and becomes even more self-aware; this physical and mental transformation is a direct repudiation of the contemporary critic's insistence that reading a romance or embracing the fantasy, "renders women more passive and invisible".
Crusie uses Sophie's boyfriend, Brandon, as a representation of the romance critic. When Sophie confesses to him that she has engaged in sexual acts with another man, his immediate response is to insist her perceptions of the event are invalid, and, according to Moore and Selinger, reinterpret "her behavior in psycho-political terms", as Radway did in Reading the Romance when she did not accept her subjects' reasons for reading in the romance genre.
Liminality In a nod to eighteenth century British amatory fiction, 'Welcome to Temptation explores the boundaries between public and private life, using gossip and the protagonists' seemingly private sexual interactions. The original amatory novels, such as those by Delarivier Manley, contained erotic scenes of seduction, often framed in a voyeuristic way (looking through a window), but also a retelling of gossip or scandal, primarily "salacious scandal about real political figures of the day". Critic Kimberly Baldus refers to this shifting between the public and private as liminality. Crusie's heroine embraces this; entire scenes of the screenplay she is writing are based on, or entirely taken from, conversations or sexual interactions she has had with the hero. The protagonists' first sexual encounter occurs outdoors, with the possibility of discovery. Sophie "willingly exposes herself on screen" by including the event in her film. When the scene is filmed for the movie, the characters realize that someone else is watching the scene through binoculars, illustrating "the difficulty of completely controlling visual display". Inclusion in the script turns a private interlude between two individuals public, yet the binocular-holding character turns a relatively private moment of filming into a more public event. When the more erotic version of the movie is stolen and shown on local television, the characters must confront the knowledge that their most private moments are now essentially public property.
Both Manley and Crusie's novels use gossip to demonstrate the fluidity between private actions and public perceptions. After other characters paint Sophie in a negative light, she uses the perceptions revealed in their gossip to reinvent herself. Familiarity with all of the local gossip helps one character solve the murder mystery. In exchange for keeping her private acts (the murder) from becoming public, the villain agrees to change her stance on the censorship ordinance; her no vote keeps private opinions private.
Heterosexual power dynamics In the late 1990s, romance novel heroines were usually the "good girls"; while the hero may have a fling with a woman who is highly sexually active, he generally married a less sexual, more sedate woman. This reflected the general socio-cultural norms against a woman's blatant display of sexuality, which were also displayed in other mainstream media. Flashbacks reveal that Sophie experienced this societal backlash in high school; she was humiliated by a classmate ridiculed her for having sex. In the early part of the book, Sophie agrees to a purely physical affair with Phin, who resembles the boy to whom she lost her virginity. He seduces Sophie by offering to pleasure her with no expectation of reciprocity, inviting her to explore her sexuality without fear of societal punishment. As Sophie begins to explore her sexuality, she compares their affair to a sexual school and casts Phin in the role of teacher. Critic Kyra Kramer points out that because Phin is also the object of her sexual exploration, he becomes an ally instead of a master. In one scene near the end of the book, Crusie describes Sophie sitting on the hood of Phin's car, knees apart, leaning back on her hands. This is a stereotypical scene of female submission to male fantasy, yet the scene ends with Sophie pushing Phin down and straddling him. She now has the position of power. Sophie's negotiation of the boundaries of the lessons, her sexual assertiveness, "reverses normative female sexuality". As the novel progresses, Sophie begins to trust Phin, and she shifts her focus to fulfilling his fantasies. This signals that their relationship is reaching a state of equality. Crusie has allowed the bad girl to get the hero.