Beach Reading: The Guilty Pleasure of Romance Novels |
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| Written by Hannah McGregor |
| Sunday, 01 June 2008 19:00 |
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I have a confession to make. I am a feminist. I have an honours degree in literature. But I love romance novels. They are ideal beach reading, it’s true, but I don’t just love them on the beach. I love them lying in a warm bed on a cold winter morning, or staying up until 3am even though I have class the next day. I love them on a bus, on a plane, on an endless ferry ride from Dubrovnik to Split with nothing in sight but blue sea and green coast.
I don’t feel guilty about liking poorly written books, or books with Fabio on the cover, or with elaborately cooked up schemes of mistaken identity, secret pasts and hidden treasures. What makes me feel guilty is the very simple message at the heart of romance: the love of a good man can fix everything. The origins of this much-maligned genre are various. The original emergence of fiction as a genre was itself highly gendered. Requiring, as it did, less education and obvious skill than writing poetry, and appealing to an audience of literate but informally educated middle-class women with a whole lot of time on their hands, the novel quickly became associated with the fairer sex. Jane Austen’s first novel, Northanger Abbey, explores the seductions of gothic romances for a passionate young woman, who escapes the confines of her regular life by imagining herself into the sorts of plots she reads. The Brontë sisters are another example of women who helped to create the novelistic clichés of dark, mysterious heroes, beautiful and feisty heroines, and the elaborate plots that contrive to keep them apart. Novels that are now undeniably classics were once dismissed as readily as Harlequin is today.  I am not trying to imply, however, that the romance novels of the 21st century have any connection to early women’s fiction, dismissed only because of the rampant sexism of Western society rather than any inherent defect in the literature itself. Modern romance novels, the kind that are so cheaply bound that, when I read them on a beach, the glue melts and all the pages fall out - these romance novels have all sorts of defects that cannot be blamed on sexism. The reason for this is the other predominant origin of romance novels, i.e. the pulp fiction and romance comics that emerged in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Those oft-parodied stories of young women foiled by love, their unrealistically huge eyes leaking unrealistically blue tears, their hair remaining perfectly coifed through endless heartbreak, combined the social reiteration of gender roles with the exploitation of increasingly disposable income and leisure time. In the wake of World War II, when women donned men’s clothes and went to work in factories as part of the war effort, the proper place of the woman was confused. Romance reestablished that. Women, the genre stated unequivocally, were interested in men. Or, more specifically, in one particular man. They desired nothing more epic than a monogamous relationship with a square-jawed heart-throb. There ought to be something liberating about an entire genre written But even as I write this, my inner feminist is shrieking, “Essentialism! Predefined gender roles! Hetero-normativity!” I would like to block her out, slap on some SPF 60 and head for the beach with a stack of paperbacks, but she has a point. The basic premise of the genre remains the same. Every protagonist, no matter how strong, no matter how smart and independent and beautiful, secretly longs for a man to step in and do those things men do – namely, be possessive, forceful, aggressively sexual and violent towards interlopers. Which brings me to my question: does a guilty pleasure need to be a bad thing? Or can an intelligent woman take genuine pleasure in the story of a man, a woman, and an ancient curse that turns her into a wildcat at the full moon and can only be broken by true love?
© 2008 Hannah McGregor; licensee (Cult)ure Magazine.
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The romance novel is, in my mind, the perfect escape. I favour those with unlikely settings - a distant past minus the poor hygiene, rotting teeth and diminutive height, or a slightly alternate universe where vampires battle valkyries addicted to Nintendo and nail polish. Everyone is beautiful, every problem has a solution, and every sexual encounter ends with multiple orgasms. Within the code of the romance novel, the happy ending is like an Etch-a-Sketch, erasing all the pain and confusion and messiness that came before.
by women, for women, about women. In recent years, characters have gotten stronger, more independent, and more resistant to the ubiquitous alpha males trying to control their lives. Readers have seen the birth of romance series, in which novels can end without the main characters getting together - in one series by Katie MacAlister, the spunky heroine continually rejects her anthropomorphic-dragon paramour because of his insistence that she give up her career in order to become his full-time mate. With each passing year, the books become more Sex and the City and less 
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