Dangerous Books For Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels Explained

by Maya Rodale

  Fortunately, women did talk. And read. And write. By creating stories with an intense focus on a heroine—her choices, her pleasure, her independence, and her rewards—romance novels promoted radical ideas of what a woman could do with her life and inspired women to try to make that dream a reality. Far more than “silly novels by silly novelists,” these books are perhaps some of the most subversive literature ever written, distributed, and consumed.

  And you thought it was all about Prince Charming.

  SIX REASONS ROMANCE NOVELS ARE DANGEROUS BOOKS

  #1 Because women

  “There were knights!” she cried. “I can still be a knight!”

  “No, you can’t,” he said, more patient than ever because she was so sadly confused. “You’re a girl. Girls can’t be knights.”

  She snatched the sketchbook from his hands and swung it at his head.

  —Lord Perfect by Loretta Chase

  So many of the Great Stories in the literary canon, or on movie screens, or in books are about boys, from Virgil and Odysseus to King Arthur, Ulysses, and Spiderman. The girl, when she appeared in stories, was often there because of her relationship to the men: She was the wife, the mother, the girlfriend, the sassy best friend. She was and is the Other. Even today, women have only 31 percent of speaking roles in movies, and many of these are what one writer at Slate deemed “reactress” roles in which female stars play parts that “require little more than glumly registering the drama dished out by their male counterparts.”[12]

  “The romance novel puts the heroine at the center of the book, at least coequal to the hero, or occupying more of the spotlight than he does. Her desires are central,” writes professor Pamela Regis in her book A Natural History of the Romance Novel, one of the early, seminal works of scholarship on the genre. In a romance novel, the heroine is Odysseus, Aeneas, etc. She is the reader’s avatar and her guide on a journey. This in itself is audacious, because it asserts that women are worthy of a reader’s interest, attention, and trust for hundreds of pages, that she is equal to a man (at least in the pages of a book), that she is capable of a transformative journey, that she is more than an empty vessel. She is enough.

  For a woman to star in a novel, with all the conflict, drama, adventure, and romance that implies, suggested that there was more to a woman’s existence than sitting at home minding the babies, the stove, and the sewing. Long before Sex and the City, single women were a source of angst because they don’t quite belong to anyone. Most romance novels focus on the time period before marriage, when she has left the nursery but hasn’t yet gotten married. She’s not a girl, but not yet a woman.

  Romance fiction “tells the story that reflects a woman’s reality as it could be and as it is,” Jennifer Crusie, a bestselling contemporary romance author, writes on her blog. “It tells her she is not stupid because she’s female, that she understands men better than they understand her, that she has a right to control over her own life, to children, to vocational fulfillment, to great sex, to a faithful loving partner.”[13] Romantic fiction relentlessly declares that women are worthy and their interests are valid and it is worth it for them to pursue their own happiness.

  Elyse Discher, a romance reviewer with the romance blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, says romance resonated with her because “I had not been reading a lot of fiction up to that point that was representative of a young woman’s feeling of being valid.”

  Too often, women do not prioritize their own happiness because they are so busy caring for others and trying to have it all. “Well, just reading one is an act in and of itself that demonstrates that you care about yourself,” writes Sarah Wendell, blogger of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books in her book Everything I Know about Love I Learned from Romance Novels. “If you’re like me, there’s hardly a moment in your day when you’re not doing six things simultaneously. If you’re reading, then you’re likely doing that one, indulgent thing.” Readers cite entertainment, escape, and relaxation as the top reasons they read romance novels.

  But it goes deeper than that. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reading was often done as a group—someone might read to the whole family after supper, for example. For that reason, the literature that did best commercially was the literature that was suitable for and interesting to women. “At a time when many books bought individually were collectively read within the family, any books which the reviews declared unsuitable for ladies were commercially sunk,”[14] writes William St Clair in his book The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. In this scenario, a man in the family could still interrupt the reading and pronounce judgments on the characters, their actions, and the story.

  However, as ideas of privacy started to take hold—as physical space for privacy became more common—women began reading alone. The text went straight to her brain and her heart; it was not mediated or interpreted by a man or anyone else. It was just a woman, writing for a woman, about a woman who triumphs over the obstacles holding her back from true happiness.

  This can be a wonderful respite for a woman—but scary if you were counting on her to pick you up after school or greet you at the door with a martini.

  #2 Because the love match

  If one didn’t have love, was it better, then, to be alone?

  —To Sir Phillip, with Love by Julia Quinn

  The hallmark of the romance novel is the love-match marriage. Today we take for granted the idea of marrying for love, but once upon a time, marriage was just about “the merging and protection of assets,” to quote Miranda Hobbs, Esquire, of Sex and the City. Marriage was something you did for land, wealth, status, or more camels. The idea of actually liking the person you were going to spend the rest of your life with wasn’t really an important consideration.

  Being a person in possession of a vagina meant that you and your hopes, dreams, and wishes weren’t often a consideration either. And why would they be? For most of human history, a woman couldn’t own property, get a divorce, or even have custody over children she conceived, carried and delivered. In the eyes of the law, she wasn’t even a person. Thus, how could a woman have thoughts and desires of her own? If she did, why would anyone care?

  But then the idea of the love-match or companionate marriage began to take off. We can thank the Industrial Revolution and Big Government for this one. In her book, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, Stephanie Coontz writes,

  For centuries, marriage did much of the work that markets and governments do today. It organized the production and distribution of goods and people. It set up political, economic, and military alliances. It coordinated the division of labor by gender and age. It orchestrated people’s personal rights and obligations in everything from sexual relations to the inheritance of property. Most societies had very specific rules about how people should arrange their marriages to accomplish these tasks.[15]

  Building on this in his book The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love, author Ty Tashiro attributes the shift to “significant changes in life expectancy, reproductive health, and wealth.” As more people simply got enough calories in a day and had more children survive to adulthood, marriage could be about something other than finding someone (literally) with the strength and resources to get through the day, plus enough left over to reproduce and nurture children into adulthood.

  As more people had more energy (thanks to getting enough to eat), more money (thanks to increased productivity), and more security (thanks to the government), people simply had more time and energy to focus on other pursuits—like love. Marriage had a chance to be about something else. This is not to say that people hadn’t fallen in love before or experienced deep emotions, but there was now a shift in priorities when one was considering a spouse.

  That romance novels are often understood to be about “getting married and living happily ever after” gets them a bad rap from some feminists. Pamela Regis summarizes this critique: “The marriage, they claim, ensla
ves the heroine and, by extension, the reader...Its ending destroys the independent, questing woman depicted in the rest of the story.”[16]

  But what is really happening, in real life and in novels, is that women were finally getting to make choices about their personal lives. Elevating love meant elevating personal considerations above considerations like wealth or status. It also meant elevating the personal lives of women. “Her choice to marry the hero is just one manifestation of her freedom,” Regis writes. And, I should point out, it is nearly always the heroine’s choice (except in books that employ an arranged marriage or marriage of convenience tropes).

  But just as women were being told that it was okay to marry for love, they also had more practical things to consider, like economic security. The titular heroine of Belinda, an 1801 novel, strikes this balance between the emotional and practical considerations of marriage: “I am not so romantic as to imagine that I could be happy with you, or you with me, if we were in absolute want of the common comforts of life.”[17]

  Of course, it would be convenient if one could fall in love with a wealthy man, but this wasn’t always a case. While speaking about the science and history of love on a panel at a conference on romance at the Library of Congress, scholar Stephanie Coontz told the audience, “As a result of these tensions [between love and economic security], women came to experience romance as a tangled bundle of mystery and unpredictability.” A romance novel was the perfect, low-risk way to explore and negotiate these tensions.

  In reality, marriage for love did not necessarily lead to happily ever after. “The insistence that marriage be based on true love and companionship spurred some to call for further liberalization of divorce laws,” Coontz writes in her book on marriage. “To them, a loveless union was immoral and ought to be dissolved without dishonor. The strongest opponents of divorce in the nineteenth century were traditionalists who disliked the exaltation of married love. They feared that making married love the center of people’s emotional lives would raise divorce rates, and they turned out to be right.”[18]

  The problems with the love-match didn’t stop there. If a couple was able to divorce, how would a woman be able to support herself? She would need financial independence and thus she would have to abandon her station as angel of the house and go out to work, possibly taking jobs from men. Who, then, is minding the children?

  If love is the primary reason to marry, and love doesn’t care about class distinctions, skin color, or even gender, it inevitably raises questions of who should be allowed to marry whom. Many historically set romances derive their conflicts from lovers in separate social classes.

  The widespread acceptance and recognition of love as a reason to marry took a while. Interracial marriage wasn’t legalized in the United States until 1967. We’ve only just begun to legalize gay marriage in the United States and as of this writing, there are still states that arguing against it.

  Over time, love has forced a reevaluation of traditional concepts of marriage. It has led to the transition from an older system of “arranged, patriarchal marriage” to “the love-based male breadwinner marriage, with its ideal of lifelong monogamy and intimacy,” as Coontz writes. And even that is still in flux. But recognizing love has been the first step toward acknowledging the rights and humanity of more than just powerful, heterosexual, white men.

  #3 Because escape

  If adventures do not befall a lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.

  —Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

  Romance novels then and now are all about women getting out of the house. From ballrooms to boardrooms, they declare that a woman’s place is not just in the home. One of the classic early romance novels, Evelina by Fanny Burney, bears the subtitle: A young woman’s entrance into the world. On the flip side, gothic romances are horror stories about a young woman trapped inside a house.

  Getting out of the house symbolizes stepping away from a dull, predictable life of low expectations and choosing to go on a risky journey that might lead to unimaginable happiness or utter ruination.

  It is when Cinderella goes to the ball. It is when Cornelia Litchfield Case ditches the White House in Susan Elizabeth Phillip’s First Lady. It is when Miss Olivia Wingate-Carsington and Peregrine Dalmay, Earl of Lisle, embark on outrageously grand road trips in Loretta Chase’s novels Lord Perfect and Last Night’s Scandal. It is the heroine who agrees to the sham marriage, just one kiss, just one night of pleasure, just one adventure.

  Mobility became a key feature in the early novels, whether in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) by Henry Fielding or the physical and symbolic journey undertaken by the titular heroine of the novel Clarissa by Samuel Richardson, in which she goes from being locked in her parents’ house to being locked in a house of ill repute. We see it in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth goes to traveling with her aunt and uncle. As her physical location changes and she sees more of the world and the man, her feelings for Darcy are transformed.

  At a time when most people never traveled farther than the local village and women weren’t allowed to travel alone, this mobility was momentous. In later romance novels, heroines are kidnapped and dragged all over the American West (Sweet Savage Love), or they gallivant between continents (in Shanna, the heroine is in England, the Caribbean, and America). In paranormal romances, characters exist in or travel between fantastical worlds. Mobility was employed as a “teachable moment” for geography, other cultures, or character development.

  This became a point of concern for critics of the novel. Since novels were supposed to be realistic portrayals of life, readers were in grave danger of being misled by a lady novelist who wrote about faraway lands she’d never traveled to and about people, the likes of whom she’d never meet—all from the safety of her drawing room. A female’s sheltered existence was why these novels written by ladies were discredited. But they were an appealing escape for young ladies stuck in the drawing room.

  Even more troubling to critics was the portrayal of social mobility portrayed in romances. The Industrial Revolution and the rising middle class blurred the lines between High and Low/Us and Them. With an increasing number of people with money and the elevation of love as a criterion for marriage, the idea of marrying outside of one’s social class became increasingly acceptable.

  The classic example is Samuel Richardson’s epic bestseller, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), in which a virtuous housemaid eventually married the lord of the manor. Even though they are married and in love, the novel continues for another hundred pages in which we see Pamela struggling to win over the local high society. The idea of a housemaid rising to the status of lady of the manor was so shocking, nearly a quarter of the book was needed to explain it. Many, many romances, then and now, feature impoverished women landing a wealthy spouse, from Pride & Prejudice to 50 Shades of Grey.

  This is an example of why the critics were upset with these novels and the women who read them. They gave a girl ideas about she might expect from her life that were contrary to what everyone else was telling her. In a mid-nineteenth century essay “What Girls Read,” Edward G. Salmon writes about the dangers of women reading these cheap stories:

  We do not often see an account of a girl committing any very serious fault through her reading. But let us go into the houses of the poor, and try to discover what is the effect on the maiden mind of the trash which maidens buy. If we were to trace the matter to its source, we should probably find that the high-flown conceits and pretentions of the poor girls of the period, their dislike of manual work and love of freedom, spring largely from notions imbibed in the course of a perusal of their penny fictions. Their conduct towards their friends, their parents, their husbands, their employers, is colored by what they then gather. They obtain distorted views of life, and the bad influence of these works on themselves is handed down to their children and scattered broadcast throughout the family.[19]

  With these pleasant and affordable—but highly s
uggestive—novels, women were able to read about the world beyond their immediate experiences. They could see more than the view from the drawing room window and encounter more types of people than the folks in the village.

  These different types of mobility portrayed in novels send the same message to the reader: Your here and now is not your forever. Your situation on page one is not where you’ll end up in the epilogue. The narrative arc, in which a character grows and transforms, drives home this idea that your birth is not your destiny.

  These books broadened the reader’s understanding of what the world was and could be, and then suggested, with every grand adventure and happy ending, that their lives could be so much richer and more fulfilling...if they only just venture out of the house.

  #4 Because women become the author-ity

  Upon the demise of her first marriage, Julianna turned to writing. She wrote for money. She wrote for her dignity. She wrote to keep a roof over her head, to feed her belly and fire up her soul. She wrote to pay for her late husband’s indiscretions. She wrote so that she would be beholden to no one.

  —A Tale of Two Lovers by Maya Rodale

  “Women...are the chief readers of novels; they are also, of late at least, the chief writers of them. A great proportion of these authoresses too are young ladies,” William Rathbone Greg writes in 1859 in an article for the National Review on the “false morality of lady novelists.”

  That women read and write these novels has lead to the notion of romances being “women’s work” and it has been devalued accordingly, in the same way as teachers, nurses, and other “typically female” dominated industries. But there are a few additional reasons why lady novelists are of particular concern to the critics.