Where the Modern Romance Genre Goes Wrong

 

For many years now I neither read nor attempt to write romance novels. But I read quite a few as a child and teen, and was fond of the novels of Victoria Holt aka Jean Plaidy. I even thought of being a romance writer. A bit later in my life I read some lesbian fiction and wrote about 75 pages of a lesbian historical romance featuring a lady pirate who passed herself off as a man. (I was not a Christian at the time, and certainly wouldn't have written the 'naughty bits' of that novel since becoming a Christian.)

But since my NaNo novel is a gothic romance/sci-fi mashup, I've begun to read romances, and think about the differences between the old romances I loved and the new romances I can't stand.

The modern romance, with modern career-woman heroines a requirement even in historical fiction, looks at a love relationship (since marriage is no longer a goal) as a woman seeking a fulfilling, equality-oriented love relationship with Mr. Right, a man who meets her romantic and feminist requirements. (These Mr. Right characters can seem awfully wimpy and effeminate to the male reader--- a tamed man, not a realistic masculine man.)

If you look at what the modern romance heroine is seeking, it comes uncomfortably close to a woman who is saying that she wants a man she can use to fulfill her romantic, emotional and sexual needs. The romance heroine does not think of herself as a user--- she is a feminist after all, even if she lived in an age before feminism (as Ayla in Clan of the Cave Bear).

In an early age when Western Civilization still remembered being a Christian civilization, the ideals of Christian marriage had a greater influence. Christian marriage involves finding a person of the opposite sex and then sacrificing yourself for that person, even if that person is unworthy of your sacrifice. The model is Christ and the Church. The Church that Christ sacrificed His life for was at the moment of the crucifixion composed entirely of grubby, unpromising filthy sinners many of whom were shouting 'Crucify Him!'.

The Biblical text related to that is Ephesians 5:25-33, which begins 'Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it...' You will see that finding a person to use for your personal and sexual fulfillment is not part of it, and that's a good thing. But it's a tough job and not a win-win, equality situation. Christ was sinless, the Church is composed of sinners, and that's the model. So if you are a (relatively) moral person and your spouse has grave moral flaws, the Christian answer is not to find a better spouse as a replacement but to rejoice that you are being called to imitate Christ and make sacrifices.

While these ideals of marriage have never been lived out fully in the world of poor, flawed mortals, it had an influence on many of the older romance novels. Consider Jane Eyre. Jane is a poor girl, who takes a post as a governess and does her best to serve well in that position. Mr. Rochester is scary, rude, and fails to tell Jane, during his proposal of marriage, that it would be a fake marriage since he would remain legally wed to the madwoman in the attic. Only chance prevented Jane from giving herself to a man that she thought was her legal husband but was not.

But when Mr. Rochester was freed from his marriage by the death of his mad wife, Jane had not moved on to someone more worthy of her. She came back to him, not screaming anger at him, but serving him in his weakness and neediness.

Another flaw of the modern romance is that it is claustrophobically focused on the romantic/sexual relationship. In many an older romance novel--- say, Gone With the Wind--- you could pull out the romance scenes and there would be a good story left. In a modern romance, all of the other stuff--- the interesting stuff, back when I was a child and first began to read romances--- is excised.

Which explains why the romance is more limited in its appeal. The German writer Hedwig Courths-Mahler had her little 'fairy tales for grown-ups' published in special editions to be given out to the men fighting World War One. Today's romances have far less appeal to the male reader. (Unless they are the sort with explicit sex scenes. One of my favorite novels in my old romance-reading days was a bodice-ripper historical romance which a teen boy of my acquaintance was using for 'entertaining impure thoughts' material, a more-available substitute for actual porn.)

Conformity to feminist dictates also weakens the modern romance. In Jane Eyre the heroine is a poor girl who must earn a living, but who can be saved from her poverty by a good marriage though she never becomes a husband-hunter. Feminism would demand that Jane Eyre have access to a good career to which she becomes sufficiently devoted that she would accept Mr. Rochester only if her relationship with him didn't interfere with her career. And her Mr. Rochester would have been a tamed down, feminism-obedient poor thing that would be hardly worth having, anyway. So the modern writer would gift him with a bodybuilder's body without the obsessive gym work that requires, and a really impressive set of genitalia. Ugh.

To write a romance that is more endurable for the woman of taste, this is what I would do--- take the best of the older romances as a model. Ignore the modern trends. Write as if the romance side of the story were more like a slightly overdeveloped sub-plot rather than making it the whole story. And question any ideas in your head that are 'what the feminists say a relationship should be' or 'what the romance publishing industry say a relationship should be', and find your own path.

Have you ever read romance novels? Do you love them or hate them? What are their good points and what could use improvement? Could a man write a good romance novel? If you are a man, would you consider it?

Some Blog posts by Mike Duran about the Romance Genre
Author Mike Duran is not a big romance fan, nor is he thrilled by the dominance of romance novels in both the Christian and secular book marketplace. But his opinions on the genre--- and the blog comments they generate--- might be of use in forming ideas of where the modern romances have gone wrong and what can be done to set things write. Or it might just make you angry enough to have the energy to write the Great Romance Novel that will prove Mike Duran WRONG.

What Do Jane Austen and Contemporary Romance Novels Really Have in Common?
Why Men Don't Read Romance
How Paranormal Romance Killed the Undead

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