There are certain things we’re taught to feel guilty for indulging in: reality TV, novels that aren’t packaged as “serious” literature, movies about women’s love lives, and pop songs people don’t want to admit they listen to on loop. Because they’re often created and enjoyed by women and queer people, misogyny and homophobia dictate that they can only be viewed with a healthy serving of sheepishness or irony. Like most cocktails of patriarchal bullshit, this self-conscious classification of lowbrow vs. highbrow culture leaves a sour taste in your mouth should you choose to down it. If you can’t commit wholeheartedly to dancing around to some Carly Rae Jepsen, getting drunk and yelling things at Bachelor contestants through the screen, or celebrating how good Sophia Bush looks in John Tucker Must Die, then what’s the point of engaging with pop culture at all?
I thought I was too enlightened to let myself feel embarrassed about liking something other people might find vapid, but then I discovered the final frontier of my guilty pleasure-dom: historical romance novels. Over the course of 2020, I found myself elbow deep in rakes and wallflowers, scandals and shotgun weddings, and thoroughly enjoying myself. But for months I either hid the sheer volume of material I was flying through or made fun of myself for reading such “trashy” stuff, laughing at the depths to which quarantine boredom had made me sink.
Part of the issue was, for all my scoffing at the concept of a literary canon in college, that kind of learned pretension lingers. Take Jane Austen – canonized, critically acclaimed and practically sacrosanct from her perch as a cultural commentator. She was also a person who wrote romance novels. Before I became a regular reader of historical romance novels myself, I probably would’ve gotten offended at the very idea of Jane Austen’s work having anything in common with them other than being the blueprint for some pale imitations. Roll your eyes at me and call me Rory Gilmore as an insult all you want (I probably deserve it), but years of societal conditioning to view historical romance novels as nothing more than smut dressed up in period clothing is a hard thing to unlearn. And it’s not even like I would’ve been 100% wrong to place Jane Austen in a league of her own – she did inspire copycats, and rarely do they surpass her work – but my knee-jerk disdain for the historical romance genre was something I’d unconsciously adopted from the culture, not an opinion based on my own experience. That impulse to condemn, parody, and never, ever take romance novels seriously is baked into our culture – so much so that sometimes I still feel like I have to issue a disclaimer that I like them despite myself, despite knowing better.
If I asked you to picture a romance novel reader, the associations would most likely be immediate – especially since she (and the expectation is that it’s always a she) has been the butt of jokes in pop culture for decades. On a recent rewatch of 10 Things I Hate About You, Ms. Perky stood out to me for more than just Allison Janney’s scene-stealing excellence. Her only character trait is that she’s not a very good guidance counselor because she’s too busy writing about her romance novel hero Reginald’s quivering member/throbbing bratwurst/tumescent manhood/etc.
The punchline is that her writing is trying so hard to be erotic that it loops back around to goofy – and only someone perversely horny or sexually unfulfilled, who doesn’t care about the quality of the writing, or is unable to even discern what good writing looks like, could possibly be titillated by such formulaic drivel. That gets to the heart of my embarrassment about enjoying historical romance novels – it’s less about the text of romance novels themselves and more about the widespread assumptions about the genre, who writes it, and who reads it.
Romance Writers of America defines the romance novel broadly as “a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.” In A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Pamela Regis characterizes a romance novel as one that centers female subjectivity, an innovation on the Greek comedic form. Regis argues that rather than simply being an object of desire to be fought over and won in the end, as women often are in comedies, the romance novel heroine does the desiring in addition to being desired and occupies just as much as or more of the spotlight as the hero. Regis’s conception of the romance novel is heterosexist and outdated (her book was published in 2003), but I think this insight still applies to the genre in its current form – it focuses on the internal lives of characters who have traditionally been marginalized, fetishized, or flattened into one dimension.
So, how did we get from Pride and Prejudice to the kind of books that Netflix’s Bridgerton is adapting? First, an issue of genre and labels: Jane Austen wrote contemporary romance novels, not historical romance novels, because she wrote about and for the time period she lived in: the Regency era of England (1811-1820), when King George III was declared unfit to rule and his son ruled as regent in his stead. The historical romance novel as we understand it today didn’t exist until over a century after Austen’s death, when Georgette Heyer published Regency Buck in 1935 and created the sub genre of the Regency romance (often used as a catchall for historical romance).
Through meticulous research into the details of the Regency period, Heyer created a fictionalized, fantasy version of Austen’s universe that would serve as the template for generations of romance writers to come. You can thank Heyer for enduring plot devices like running away to elope at Gretna Green, riding horses in Hyde Park, or parading about Almack’s in hopes of catching a suitor’s eye. But just because the setting was mostly historically accurate doesn’t mean her characters were. By placing heroines and heroes with distinctly modern values and sensibilities in Regency society, Heyer made them remarkable for their time while indulging in the period-specific details that readers swooned over. Basically, Heyer used Austen’s Regency setting as an alternate universe with specific customs and its own internal logic, similar to the way fanfiction writers today use Hogwarts or Westeros as AU backdrops for characters that don’t exist in the universe originally. Heyer’s formula had readers hooked, and publishers – especially those in the mass-market paperback business – wanted to cash in.
That brings us to the biggest culprit of the broad cultural disdain for romance novels and, in particular, historical romance novels: the covers. Judging a book by its cover, as we all know, is an inevitability. Think of the much-mocked image of a typical historical romance, featuring a bare-chested hero, a heroine in the throes of distress and/or pleasure, and stylized, Old English font emblazoned across their passionate embrace.
And for some slightly more innovative variations on this theme:
How much of what you know or assume about romance novels is based on this type of cover? If the answer is a lot, you’re not alone – mass media coverage has focused on the imagery and visual markers of romance novels to the exclusion of all else, including the actual content, since at least World War II. In The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction, Jayashree Kamblé explains how the romance publishers Mills & Boon, Harlequin, and Avon Publications fed the flames of this type of critique by adopting a marketing strategy starting in the 1960s and 1970s that would “erase any suggestion of story-telling differences or authorial specificity, and use familiar packaging (such as the ‘clinch’ image) to move its ‘product.’” The stuff on the outside of romance novels, in other words, solidified their reputation as tawdry, indistinguishable products, regardless of what was written inside.
Once you manage to get past the covers, we can actually discuss the content of romance novels. Love and desire aren’t frivolous, nor are the stories we tell about these topics unworthy of analysis and critique beyond what cover we slap on them. Issues like gender, sexuality, race, class, and consent are often at stake in romance novels and the romance writer community. Yes, there are poorly plotted romance novels that don’t deal with much of anything other than bumping uglies, but so what? Every literary genre has its conventions and tropes, yet rarely is one as broad and varied as romance so consistently typecast to embody its lowest common denominator. While substandard mysteries or science fiction novels are allowed to be viewed as exceptions, not the rule, romance novels get painted with the same broad brush.
Some argue that the romance novel itself is an inadequate vehicle for exploring such themes because everything must ultimately be subordinated to the sovereignty of a Happily Ever After (HEA). This analysis is especially trenchant when applied to the historical romance novel, in which the heroine’s HEA almost unfailingly occurs within the bounds of an oppressive patriarchal system. I’m all for interrogating how romance novels can reinforce reductive binary gender roles or valorize marriage as the true purpose of womanhood, but I have a harder time swallowing the critical feminist take that the genre suppresses readers’ radical impulses – it smacks of condescension, simultaneously overestimating female readers’ identification with the heroine and underestimating their capacity for critical thinking. The stories we love can influence what we believe or how we act, but romance readers aren’t so impressionable that a direct correlation can be drawn from reading about a character getting married to dragging the first man you can get your hands on to the courthouse so you can live out the self-insert fantasy of a romance novel heroine. If that were the case, I would’ve been arrested on more charges of bigamy than I can count this past year.
A quick Google search of the phrase “no more guilty pleasures” returns pages upon pages of results, from think pieces published in the New Yorker to blog posts from the early 2010s, all arguing in favor of eliminating the phrase “guilty pleasure” from our vocabularies. Many pieces put forth the idea that the self-consciousness you feel is self-imposed – refusing to indulge the phrase will empower you.
Here’s the thing: I can stop calling my romance reading habit a guilty pleasure, but it won’t actually stop me from feeling like it is. I’ve only just begun regularly making a record of the historical romance novels I finish on Goodreads, and I still wince when I imagine what someone who catches a glimpse of a corny cover will assume about my taste level or intelligence. It feels less risky to write about it here, where I can claim romance novels as part of my pop culture diet without equivocation or remorse.
I read romance novels. They’re fizzy and fun, committed to giving their protagonists an abundance of chemistry and orgasms, optimistic about second chances, and, above all, an incredibly effective escape from reality. Entertainment for entertainment’s sake isn’t inherently worthless or invalid as an objective – not everything has to shift the paradigms by which we understand our relationships to power and each other. Why do we think something has be an uphill battle for it to be valuable? It’s a nice change of pace to not have my world rocked off its axis for once and know that I have a happy ending to look forward to, even if it’s only on the page.