Reporting from Las Vegas — For six decades, the Harlequin romance novel cover girl has largely maintained her porcelain skin, saucer eyes, bee-stung lips and a waist as whittled as Scarlett O'Hara's celebrated 17 inches. But, oh, how her dalliances have changed.
In 1952, she was Anna, a femme fatale in a half-buttoned shirtdress, kneeling on hay because (as the book cover tells us) "she lived like a wicked little animal."
In 1960, she was Doctor Sara, a raven-haired ingenue clutching a hunk, the nearby "brewing storm, thrusting lighthouse and swirling vortex of clouds" suggesting (as a placard tells us) the couple's future passion.
By 2007, she didn't need to grace the cover anymore. She was ogling "Flyboy" with the rest of us. Evoking Tom Cruise in "Top Gun," he donned aviator shades and dog tags and unzipped his uniform down to . . . a rocket that's blasting off.
That Harlequin. So subtle.
So goes the publishing company's free exhibit, "The Heart of a Woman: Harlequin Cover Art 1949-2009," which recently opened at Paris Las Vegas. It's a small, intellectually provocative display in a town incessantly struggling with its portrayal of the fairer sex. (The showgirl: empowered or exploited? The exotic dancer: businesswoman?)
As Martha Quinlan, a 28-year-old tourist from Baltimore, observed one afternoon after staring at walls of covers: "Even the most suggestive is nothing compared to what you see on the Strip."
Harlequin -- a Toronto-based company that issues 120 book titles a month, about half of them romances -- commissioned curator Elizabeth Semmelhack to put together its 60th-anniversary show. She had recently written "Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated Shoe," a social history of the high heel.
Semmelhack, who was no reader of romances, pored over a trove of original Harlequin paintings. Her job: to judge the books solely by their covers.
She came to two conclusions: The artwork, which had the richness of movie stills, was of higher-than-expected caliber. And the heroines it depicted lived out female professional -- not necessarily sexual -- fantasies long before they became reality.
For example, the covers of doctor-nurse romances of the '50s and '60s showed workplace lovers chatting as equals, which might be linked (as another placard tells us) to the frustration of women who "felt sequestered in the domestic realm of postwar suburbia." In exotic-locale tales of about the same period, women were the doctors, though only in foreign and often tropical destinations.
