See in particular Chapter 2, on "The Romance Novel: Rapists, Heroes, and Formations of Masculinity":
the works I describe in my second chapter reveal how the romance novel has created and upended its own generic conventions regarding the role of the rapist. In this chapter, “The Romance Novel: Rapists, Heroes, and Formations of Masculinity,” I concur with critics such as Janice Radway and Tania Modleski that romance as a genre has historically been preoccupied with anxieties about men, masculinity, and the dangers of heterosexual desire. However, I push further by showing that various waves of romance novels have engaged the concepts of heroism and villainy to define masculinity vis-à-vis the act of rape.
It is true that rape in romance novels has, until recently, fueled feminist arguments that the genre is low entertainment that crudely articulates a patriarchal ideology, but a serious consideration of how rape has been represented and rejected in deliberate ways by romance novelists across the years finds that this feminist critique, as well as the genre’s defensive responses to it, have in fact obscured some of the theoretical work being achieved by early romance. This theoretical work, I argue, has been continued and deepened in productive and sometimes consciously feminist ways by twenty-first century romance novelists who have drawn on romance’s history to write rape narratives. The three historical romances I analyze—Alyssa Cole’s An Extraordinary Union (2017), Courtney Milan’s The Countess Conspiracy (2013), and Lorraine Heath’s Pleasures of a Notorious Gentleman (2010)—skillfully navigate generic expectations about the victimization of heroines and the role(s) of heroes in order to imagine alternative models of masculinity and heterosexuality under patriarchy. (37)
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Cole’s Civil War-era interracial romance exposes the whiteness inherent in romance’s traditional and more recent formulations of rape, heroism, and desirability, offering an explicitly Black feminist vision of love under white supremacy, while The Countess Conspiracy uses rape to reassess the relationship of historical romance to heteronormative futurity and the propagation of the British imperial project, embodied in the figure of the titled aristocratic lord. Finally, Heath’s Pleasures calls on one of the genre’s most sensational tropes—amnesia—to rehearse the very problems and possibilities of writing rape into romance, and how narratives of male heroism eclipse the lived realities of female pain. (106-107)
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In this chapter, I am writing exclusively about historical romance, which refers to any romance novel set in the past, in any part of the world, with common subgenres of the historical being British Regency, Scottish Highlanders, and American Western. I’ve chosen to focus on historical romance because many of the external and internal critiques of the romance genre as a whole have been (sometimes implicitly) lodged against this subgenre in particular; after all, historical romances are the novels primarily associated with the derisive designation of “bodice-ripper,” a phrase that invokes and evokes the idea of sexual(ized) violence. (109)
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although romance novelists have written anti-rape alphas in an attempt to refute feminist critiques and perhaps move the genre toward more admirable heroes, they’ve established a generic norm which, arguably even more than early bodice-rippers, treats rape as a mere bad choice unrelated to masculine ideals or patriarchal culture—or, even more problematically, frames rapists as a species apart, innately cruel, weak, and effeminate. In doing so, such texts also imply that the heroines need no longer fear rape if they make the right choices and partner with an appropriately masculine man. In the Introduction, I mentioned how postfeminist critiques sparked a backlash to stories of female victimhood in the 1990s. As the rise of the anti-rape alpha shows, those same years were characterized by many romance novels becoming exemplary objects of postfeminist pop culture, espousing a vision of sexual “equality” and female empowerment that failed to acknowledge the entrenchment of patriarchy and the impossibility of resolving male violence against women on a purely individual level.
The shift from the rapist hero to the anti-rape alpha has had another troubling effect: a subject that was once understood as a means of exploring (however imperfectly) the experiences of a woman under patriarchy and the dangers, anxieties, and hopes that accompany heterosexual desire has become instead a tool through which to characterize masculinity as positive. The books I look at the for the rest of the chapter, on the other hand, theorize the relationship between rape and romance in more complex terms than simple rejection or denial. In these texts, heroes cannot “alpha” themselves out of their entanglement with patriarchal systems, and rapists are not implicitly exceptionalized as simply lacking “real” masculinity. Most of all, each of the following authors—Alyssa Cole, Courtney Milan, and Lorraine Heath—have their heroes engage with the topic of rape by decentering their own masculinity and instead centering the harms experienced by women desiring heterosexual love within a violent patriarchy. (135-136)
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As I previously discussed, rape rescue scenes in romance novels often serve to emphasize a heroine’s desirability, but this trope, however problematic, loses coherence entirely when its normative whiteness becomes apparent. For a Black heroine in the context of slavery, threatened or attempted rape does not successfully emphasize her as a desirable woman, or even a desirable body, but rather underscores her as ownable flesh. (142)
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In An Extraordinary Union, Cole shows how sexual violence operates as one facet of broader societal injustice, but Courtney Milan’s The Countess Conspiracy positions the heroine’s experience of rape as a kind of refraction point through which to interrogate, explore, and experiment with some of the most calcified tropes within the genre, especially in terms of the hero. These tropes include: the narrative focus on the aristocracy and upper classes of English society, as seen in the publishing toward novels about earls, viscounts, and especially dukes; the primacy of phallocentric vaginal intercourse as a mode of intimacy; and the treatment of reproductive futurity, seen in the continuation of the paternal family line, as perhaps the defining feature of a happy ending.
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One key expectation of amnesia romances is the full recovery of memory, which is why Heath’s decision to leave the holes in Stephen’s memory deserves closer attention. Although a popular trope within the genre, amnesia in romance has received curiously little critical attention. (163)
See in particular Chapter 2, on "The Romance Novel: Rapists, Heroes, and Formations of Masculinity":
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