The Complicated Truth: Why Romance Still Struggles to Fully Embrace Feminist Literature

Rewriting romance through a feminist lens.

During my student days, I stumbled upon Saki’s witty short story, "The Open Window." The tale is a masterclass in mischievous storytelling, culminating in a deliciously ironic twist. It’s revealed that the character Vera’s elaborate, tear-jerking anecdote — her “romance” — was nothing more than a fabrication. It was pure imagination. This introduction to the word hinted that, in its essence, romance actually means lies or exaggeration or storytelling based on the imagination.

This initial, cynical definition of “romance” sets the stage for a much more complex discussion about the literary genre of Romance. While it is immensely popular, the genre faces significant challenges when attempting to fully align itself with the principles of feminist literature, which advocates for women’s rights and the discarding of societal oppression.

The Roadblocks to Romance Becoming “Feminist Lit”

A focused analysis of the relationship between the Romance genre and feminist literature reveals a complex picture. While Romance is arguably the most popular fictional genre, encompassing storylines that exhibit strong values, it is often confused with simple “love interest” narratives in popular culture, which can limit imaginative scope.

The notion that the genre is inherently feminist is a misconception, and a deeper understanding shows it is not a feminist genre at all. The following problems, as addressed in the research article, significantly hinder the genre’s full incorporation of feminist ideals:

1. The Trigger for Unrealistic Relationship Fantasies

  • Diverse Partners and Aftermath: Novelists often trigger women to imagine themselves in a variety of relationships with diverse, attractive male characters. This can subject women to the fantasy that getting married to different men would somehow be devastating or lead to complex aftermaths, potentially creating unrealistic expectations for their own relationships.

  • The Pursuit of “Perfection”: Many middle-class women working as teachers or nurses, or lower-income women working as housekeepers or factory workers, are pushed towards greater fantasies to meet a “perfect man” as a form of escape or solution to their real-world economic pressures.

2. Portraying and Punishing Transgressions

  • Offensive Consequences for Social Transgressions: In more sentimental or emotional storylines, social matters such as involvement in an extra-marital relationship are often portrayed. The genre has a tendency to portray the consequences of such sexual and social transgressions in a particularly offensive or punitive way.

3. Balancing Control with Societal Constraints

  • Clever Judgments and Dissatisfaction: The unprecedented premise of much tender fiction is that women not only anticipate taking greater control of their lives but also making clever judgments on all the men who enter their lives. However, many storylines acknowledge the fact that married life can be aggrieved, dissatisfied, or unhappy.

  • Propelling Alternative Solutions: This implicit or explicit dissatisfaction propels women to find another way around to avoid disaster, sometimes by allowing other prospect men to enter their lives to create a balance not only for them but also for the whole society.

4. The Objectification Issue: Women as Objects, Not Heroes The central problem in the genre’s quest for feminist legitimacy lies in how women are often portrayed. For a romance novel to function successfully as feminist literature, more women-centric storylines must be developed where they are not portrayed just as objects.

  • The Domesticity Trap: The research cites an example like Shay Savage’s book “Transcendence”, which was appreciated by many but advocates domesticity with lines like, “She is so beautiful-her smooth hair and her deep eyes and her creamy, pale skin. I don’t like the noises she makes, but she looks to be able enough, even if she is small. I briefly wonder if she is fertile and if she would bear a child who looks like me.” Such representation of women as primarily fertile and physically beautiful objects for male desire is a significant hindrance.

5. Questionable Narrative Choices

  • Erotic Concepts and Questionable Feminism: While Romance differs from other genres by breaking some gender and sexual norms through erotic concepts (allowing sexual engagement beyond monogamy or heterosexuality), the feminist representation in these narratives is often questionable.

  • The Issue of Forced Seduction: Forced seduction is a popular element in some subgenres, but many readers find such manifestation very unromantic or disturbing, directly contradicting the idea of female agency and consent central to feminism.

Making Romance a Feminist Piece of Art

The problems women face in their relationships, as negotiated in both sentimental fiction (18th-century American women) and modern Romance, suggest that romance does not currently offer fully realized feminist platforms.

To make a romance novel coherent to both its genre success and feminist literature, more innovative ideas are required. These new ideas must reiterate the women as the heroes and not some objects fighting for their own identity. We need women-centric stories where:

  • Women are the Agents of Change: The heroine must be the subject, not the object, of the story. Her choices, career, and identity are paramount.

  • Consent and Equality are Unquestionable: The narrative must treat consent as sacrosanct and depict the happy ending as a partnership built on genuine equality and respect for the woman’s full humanity.

A Good Ending: The Truth in the Imagination

Perhaps the true value of Romance, going back to my student days, lies in the part of its definition that states it is storytelling based on the imagination.

While the genre must confront its objectifying tropes and unrealistic premises to truly be considered feminist literature, its power lies in its capacity for radical imagination. It offers us a glimpse of what relationships could be — equal, respectful, and fulfilling — even if the path to getting there in the current narratives is often messy and problematic.

By demanding better, more complex, and more empowering stories, readers and writers can push the Romance genre to fulfill its ultimate, revolutionary potential: to be a space where women are the absolute heroes of their own lives.


 

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