Popular romance novels taking place on Caribbean cruise ships work through the two main elements characterizing the cruise industry: ever bigger ships and their movement across the Caribbean sea’s paradise locations. Size and mobility matter for romances such as Caribbean Cruising, Santa Cruise and Onboard for Love, which offer a unique vista to the Caribbean seascape from the deck and the cabin of the luxury cruise liner sailing usually from the US to places like the Cayman Islands, Puerto Rico and St Kitts. Popular romance is produced for readers’ escapist pleasure needs, not to preach or politicize. But it is clear, that they must contain elements that readers want from their books, such as value consistency. Beyond the paradise discourse lies the industry’s sustainability dilemma: factors like climate change and overtourism force sustainability front and centre. There is every reason to believe that these values might also seep into romance literature, as the texts suggest that the environment matters for romance. This scrutiny into the conjuncture of the literary and cruise industries, through a consideration of cultural sustainability, suggests multimodal and mobile readers with their value-needs could ultimately influence industries across the board for more sustainable literary futures.
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This article looks at the curious subgenre of shipboard cruise fiction set in the Caribbean and geared towards Western readers. These novels use the cruise ship, water and the seascape and movement as their key components. Titles such as Caribbean Cruising (2004/2009), Onboard for Love (2017) and Santa Cruise (2021) offer a unique vista to the Caribbean seascape from the deck and the cabin of the luxury cruise liner. Cruise ship fiction serves as an example of how (e)motions figure in popular literature to move readers, titillate them and offer relaxation like the luxury cruise. This conjuncture of mobility and intimacy in these novels showcases how the romantic, cruiseboard experience is tied to a particular pattern of mobility. The way we humans move leaves its mark on the kinds of literature we produce (Davidson 2017), something mobility studies have traced in recent years. (383)
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Popular romance fiction depicts good people living good lives, as best-selling romances have to follow codes and formulae in order to work. As is obvious, undesirable elements do not enter commercial fiction because without those carefully curated ingredients, the novels would not sell. The narratives are guided by audience expectations and often co-created by authors and readers together, making romance the primary innovator in publishing (Brouillette 2019: 456, 454). Part and parcel of this maxim of the romance genre catering to its audiences is the potential male love interest’s make-up: he may be edgy at times, but he has to be a good man, like the environmental lawyer whom Nina meets while speed dating onboard the cruise ship in Santa Cruise: “He was one of the good guys who went after the bad guys. The ones who polluted the rivers and groundwater” (Michaels 2021: 24). The good men in romance must be environmentally friendly, and as we can see from the example, go after those who pollute our waterways.
The overt detail in which the carefully constructed romantic hero in popular romance is depicted shows that the environment and environmental issues matter for romance. Similarly, the romantic heroine may have her moment of environmental consciousness, even if she by and large remains oblivious to the jeopardized Caribbean ecosystems she roams. (395)
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