While the world often categorizes women in reductive false binaries—careerist versus mother, feminine versus fierce—romance novels, a unique form of the love story, offer an imaginative space of mingled alternatives for a heroine on her journey to selfhood.
In Creating Identity, Jayashree Kamblé examines the romance genre, with its sensile flexibility in retaining what audiences find desirable and discarding what is not, by asking an important question: "Who is the romance heroine, and what does she want?" To find the answer, Kamblé explores how heroines in ten novels reject societal labels and instead remake themselves on their own terms with their own agency. Using a truly intersectional approach, Kamblé combines gender and sexuality, Marxism, critical race theory, and literary criticism to survey various aspects of heroines' identities, such as sexuality, gender, work, citizenship, and race.
Ideal for readers interested in gender studies and literary criticism, Creating Identity highlights a genre in which heroines do not accept that independence and strong, loving relationships are mutually exclusive but instead demand both, echoing the call from the very readers who have made this genre so popular.
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I propose that a romance heroine is one who seeks the truth of her own unknown, suppressed, fragmented, or embattled self within a universe that privileges pair bonding and other configurations involving intimacy. My definition is partly inspired by Sandra J. Lindow's work on heroines in folktales. She notes that unlike Joseph Campbell's heroes, these characters embark on journeys not to answer a call to arms or for glory but because home is inhospitable; along the way, they become heroic in the pursuit of truth and proceed to slay their own psychological dragons to become better selves befitting the new homes they make.
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Kamblé focuses on
ten novels in this study, Susan Napier's Love in the Valley (1985) [...] J. D. Robb's sci-fi In Death series (1995) [...] Karen Marie Moning's urban fantasy Fever series (2006) [...] Lisa Kleypas's Dreaming of You (1994) and Beverly Jenkins's Indigo (1996) [...] Linda Howard's To Die For (2005) [...] Kresley Cole's paranormal Dark Desires after Dusk (2008), Joanna Bourne's Napoleonic-war thriller Spymaster's Lady (2008), Sherry Thomas's My Beautiful Enemy (2014) [...] and Alyssa Cole's contemporary romance A Princess in Theory (2018).
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My analysis sees the romance heroine's journey [...] as both revealing the contradictions that hedge women in, and imagining actual solutions to them. The heroine rescripts companionate erotic bonds and seeks nurturing human networks in order to gain economic, sexual, gender, and communal coherence. In other words, [...] instead of seeing the genre as a hero/heroine story, it's productive to see it as a heroine/heroine one. The heroine/heroine story locates the tension between the heroine's internalized false dichotomies and her dawning awareness that she contains multitudes and that society wants her to abandon some of her selves. It is to this conflict that romance texts offer the following solution: practice accepting one's desire for sex, love, as well as extra-romantic agency, choose a political ally as your erotic partner, and envision other allies who support policies that are necessary to your future fulfillment and integrated self. This is partly what explains the iterative attraction of romance novels - they stimulate a dopamine response, but one that forges the cognitive pathway to recognizing what a full self looks like rather than the one that causes addictive behavior that prevents revolutionary change.
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the quests undertaken by romance heroines parallel the genre's struggle to control its identity as a specific form of love narrative. In this process, it ignores labels (academic as well as popular) of what it is and is not, and continually recalibrates itself by taking on new elements while shedding ones that no longer fit a contemporary audience's ideas of romance and the erotic. It is congruous that spurning such simplistic binaries by having the heroine question any imposed on her in favor of a dialectical synthesis is the genre's chosen narrative mechanism.
In effect, these are stories of how the romance novel observes itself through others' censorious eyes and how it organizes itself against (often conflicting) public judgments: stereotypical or predictable versus illogical or hysterically unpredictable, seductive versus boring, disabling versus empowering, feminized versus feminist caricature, sexually scandalous versus conservative, consuming versus consumptive, duplicitous versus one-dimensional, revolting trash versus addictive junk. Its heroines echo its awareness of its public reception and are the primary way in which romance authors tackle not just women's issues but reveal their experience of academic and popular judgements on romance fiction.
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The book's five chapters (each analyzing two novels) lay out four discursive spaces (plus their intersections) in which heroines grapple with a dialectical process of identity formation and self-determination: sexual desire or assertion, gender expression and roles, labor and class, and community/nation. In each sphere, they determine who they are by fusing together options that are often presented to them as mutually exclusive or incompatible, such as ideologies of sexual behavior, versions of womanliness, paid and unpaid work or activities, and multiple citizenships. Additionally, the final chapter brings all these spheres together to demonstrate how they operate simultaneously in the narratives of Black heroines.
The primary romance story in all the novels in the study involves cis, monogamous, heterosexual, allosexual characters, because queer and polyamorous romance, while not devoid of the pressures and inequalities of heteropatriarchy, would steer the analysis in a slightly different direction from the operation of the intra-gender power dynamic I am most invested in unpacking.
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"Sexuality" demonstrates how romance heroines' bodies are a locus for reframing existing narratives of heterosexual desire through Love in the Valley and Dark Desires after Dusk. In the former, flirtatious young virgin Julia Fry fights to not be treated as a frivolous sexpot by the reserved, priggish man to whom she is attracted. Battling a series of comic misunderstandings about her sexual experience, she proudly declares her sexual feelings and admits both her virginity and carnal needs. In contrast, the academic heroine in the paranormal romance Dark Desires after Dusk is a familiar stereotype - an absent-minded, unworldly scientist who is focused on her work, partly because she is afraid of her sexual needs. Her journey - a literal road trip - overcomes this stereotype of the brainy but physically weak and sexually naive spinster.
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"Gender" explores gender display and its place in maintaining or challenging the normative gender order. The chapter examines how the heroine in the urban fantasy Fever series is literally ground into the dirt for her American southern-belle upbringing and cutesy personal style while an ex-cheerleader and entrepreneur in To Die For faces murder attempts for her contemporary version of southern US womanhood and confidence. The latter heroine is a sexy blonde seemingly targeted by someone who refuses to believe that a former cheerleader could have worked hard for professional success. While she has to deal with this stalker and two exes who dumped her for flaws related to her femininity, Fever's heroine has to fight for the right to define herself outside of the "ditzy blonde who gets killed / butch survivor" binary with which she is presented by an inhuman heteropatriarchy. In both cases, different antagonists conflate the heroines' bodies, appearance, and actions and treat them as deserving of punishment, while they maintain their resolve and resist the criticism of others. Their goal, like that of the genre itself, is to reconcile pieces of their past selves and new identities without succumbing to a society's vision of who they should be.
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In "Work," I examine labor-based identity in the novels Dreaming of You and Naked in Death. These heroines' encounters with the hero and other characters involve their self-reconstruction in relation to their worth as productive actors (rather than passive consumers or laborers). While Dreaming's Victorian heroine combats challenges to being accepted as a popular author of social problem novels, Naked's protagonist never considers giving up being a twenty-first-century data-driven cop to become a full-time socialite wife to her rich husband. While the former novel is a direct allegory for romance authors and the misconceptions associated with the profession, the latter poses an interesting feminist intervention in a masculine profession and stages how class mobility and neoliberal policing shape the heroine's work life and self-presentation. Additionally, the heroines show two different approaches to emotional labor (the labor of monitoring one's feelings and affect in professional settings) and emotion work (doing the same in home settings).
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"Citizenship" examines national identity through the historical romance novels Spymaster's Lady and My Beautiful Enemy. In both, the heroine engages with the public dimension of citizenship, one that is varyingly a source of reassurance or tension to her when she has to deal with other political actors. The Napoleonic era French-Welsh spy in Spymaster's Lady and the Anglo-Chinese wuxia (warrior) in My Beautiful Enemy's Qing China / Victorian period Britain both grapple with their patriotic loyalty and identity as they fall in love with an Other. Asked by powerful state forces to deprioritize their existing allegiances for another polity, both refuse to choose between lover and patria despite its dangerous consequences - loss of liberty, love, and life. Through this identity conflict about one's place in, and loyalty to, a nation, the heroines' allegiances and actions question the false choice between political selves forced on them. As they encounter contradictory evidence, they reassess what they thought or others told them of their national heritage and duty, eventually rejecting some of that doctrine to make room for a new self-conception.
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"Intersections" brings together all the above discursive perspectives to demonstrate how they can operate alongside those of ethnicity and race, most visible in romance novels with Black protagonists and protagonists of African heritage. In Beverly Jenkins's Indigo, a romance heroine on the Underground Railroad in antebellum Michigan upends her contemporaries' (and readers') expectations of class, gender, sexuality, and citizenhood as well as racial identity. As a property-owning, straitlaced, anti-slavery activist who takes control of her sexual and political sovereignty, this heroine refuses several false double binds to construct a free Black female selfhood. In the second example, A Princess in Theory, a working-class orphan learns to write her own Cinderella story as she configures a place for herself outside the limitations that anti-Black racism, sexism, anti-science ideology, and class impose. In this Black Panther-evoking story of a lost princess from an African nation (that is written as having never experienced European colonization), the scientist heroine learns how to accept a retconned heritage, newfound blood relatives, and a chance to apply her public health skills in the service of her new community.
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The romance heroine's journey unfolds amid a community she creates through people she encounters - a community that helps her battle forces that want her to pick between two seemingly exclusive choices (such as mother or warrior).
In the acknowledgements Kamblé writes that "one part of chapter 3, 'Work,' [...] stems from a paper I gave at a conference of the American Comparative Literature Association and which I eventually developed into an article for the 'Capital Crimes in the Americas' special issue of the Forum for Inter-American Research. A special issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies included parts of chapter 4, 'Citizenship'."
Here's the abstract:
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Kamblé focuses on
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