The heroines and heroes of contemporary popular romance are constructions meant to validate women's embattled virtue rather than, as some critics contend, reflections of reality. The method of validating changes from decade to decade, and this thesis focuses on the shift from the traditional 1970s romance to the non-traditional romances of the 1980s and 1990s. The dominant strand of the traditional romance of the 1970s includes an increased use of sexual violence on the part of the hero and conformity to the cultural stereotypes of "angel" and "monster" on the part of the heroine. These elements (including the exclusive use of heroine viewpoint) emphasize the hero's role of "other." The non-traditional romances of the 1980s, in contrast, validate the heroine not through conformity to the "angel" and "monster" roles but through the use of the dual perspective (and a "mutual gaze"). Moreover, for the first time the hero is presented as a moral being and the heroine is offered real moral choice. The strands from both decades are reflected in the romances of the 1990s, which have fragmented into a proliferation of sub-genres, in particular, the paranormal (a regressive formula), and the humourous feminist romance (a progressive formula). Although a particular pattern has dominated most decades, there have always been romance authors who create their own images of gender, often challenging the status quo in the process.
Sandra Marie Booth has just completed her Interdisciplinary M.A. in Humanities at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. This article was originally a chapter from her thesis "Remaking the 'Angel' and 'Monster': Ethical Shifts in the Contemporary Romance." (106)
Here's the abstract:
At the end of Sandra Booth's article in Para.doxa (1997), it is stated that