As an almost exclusively female-dominated medium, the popular romance novel has, throughout its history, allowed women writers to “amplify their political voice” (Teo, 2016, p. 102), especially when they could not actively participate in politics. Commonly, writers fashion storylines that reflect and process concerns from the real world in a fictional context. Using the Regency Romance as an example and based on Jayashree Kamblé’s theory that romance novels have a shared DNA that evolves in response to social and cultural influences, this paper first defines the figure of the romance hero in the pre-Trump era to segue into analysing selected novels published by Tessa Dare in 2011 (A night to surrender) and Sarah MacLean in 2012 (A rogue by any other name). This figure is then compared and contrasted with the incarnations of the hero in these authors’ publications from 2017 (The day of the duchess by MacLean) and 2019 (The wallflower wager by Dare) to map how his phenotype has evolved to reflect a shift in cultural perceptions regarding sex and sexual power dynamics. As I intend to show, in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election and the “#MeToo” movement, the new hero’s phenotype differs specifically in the expression of gendered power and sexuality. He is less forceful than his predecessors and places heavy emphasis on the heroine’s enthusiastic consent and pleasure.
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Naturally, the proposed thesis cannot encompass the entirety of the popular romance genre—the sheer number of romance novels published each year makes it impossible for one person to read even a majority of them. I chose instead to focus on these two authors who express their political views through their work because this means that these views are representative of a meaningful percentage of readers. It should also be noted that, despite the romance genre’s immediacy owed to the very fast publication cycle (a book a year for many authors), four years are not enough to cement a relatively subtle development like this into the genre’s genetic code. Whether or not the changes I point out are part of a fundamental shift or a passing trend born out of a specific moment in time remains to be seen.
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I would argue that since 2016, the baseline for the hero behaviour has changed.
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The idea of a hero who expresses his emotions through violence has been problematic for some time, but especially in the era of increasing awareness of domestic and sexual abuse and the way men use violence to assert dominance, the image of a hero raging in jealousy seems to have lost its attraction.
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Most strikingly, the heroes who were written after the 2016 presidential election treat sex and consent markedly differently than their predecessors. Both MacLean and Dare have gone out of their way to write their heroes asking and waiting for explicit, enthusiastic consent and respecting the heroine’s boundaries. In the last few years, there seems to have been a conscious effort within the genre to emphasise the importance of honest communication, with some authors drawing on the momentum of the MeToo movement and related conversations to process themes of sexual abuse and assault in their fiction.
Here's the abstract:
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