The raven-haired beauty suddenly is stolen in the night from her castle. She punches and kicks as the shadowy kidnapper throws her onto his horse. She starts to scream for help, when the moon casts a milky beam across the knight’s face. Enraptured by her beautiful captor, her chest heaves as she whispers, “I love you, you depraved ne’er-do-well.”
And that’s just one of the romance novel plots Sheri Thompson analyzes.
Thompson aimed to show how masculine and feminine roles in society are replicated in the books.
Former director of the Women’s Center, Sheri Thompson delivered a talk titled, “On His Knees: Power & Gender Roles in the Romance Novel” Tuesday at the Women’s Center.
Thompson said the romance novel phenomenon began with the book “Pamela,” written by Sam Richardson in 1740. Thompson said “Pamela” was so successful its plot became the formula used for most romance novels at the time.
After it was published, “all of a sudden there was a big race in Britain to have as many of these novels as possible,” Thompson said.
She said in the 1700s and 1800s, British women of the leisure class wrote romance novels. Thompson said the novels were most popular among women of the servant class, who were searching for an escape.
Thompson said gothic romance novels are a popular type.
Thompson said the main themes of gothic romance novels involved “a dark, dismal world” where women went through life alone and endured tragedy after horrible tragedy.
Thompson said usually the romantic plot involved the sexual tension between the heroine and an “evil man.”
Thompson said women writers sometimes use romance novels as a way to get their foot in literary doors. Thompson said Danielle Steele and Nora Roberts are examples of writers who used romance- novel formulas in their writing to become big-name authors.
“I think romance novels are often soft-core porn for women,” said Meaghen Couvillon, an anthropology freshman. “It’s not my choice of literature, but at least people are reading.”
Thompson also spoke about power and gender roles in romance novels.
One category of gender roles is what Thompson calls “girl versus vixen,” in which the plot involves a competition between a moral “salt-of-the-earth” woman and a highly sexual, mistress-type character for a “grumpy, oversexed, controlling male.” In the end, the man usually prefers the virtuous woman over the vixen.
Thompson said the “girl versus vixen” story was a reaction to a women’s movement in which women began to feel they had more sexual power and liberation. She said books with these themes sought to enforce the idea that women who are virtuous, rather than sexual, always win in the end.
In the 1980s and ’90s women were portrayed as independent “ball-busting career women.” But the heroine is broken down by a male antagonist and she “finds her femininity through his love.”
Thompson’s talk is part of the Women’s Center’s Brown Bag Lunch Series, which invites students to bring a lunch and listen to an expert speak every Tuesday at noon.