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Abstract
Romances have existed as long as there have been stories. While the definition of romance has changed over time from the ancient Greeks and bildungsromans to the courtship novels of the 19th century and today, romances are still, and possibly even more, popular. Through this they are a superb medium to promote ideals of female empowerment, since the majority of the audience who reads them is female. While it’s impossible to define every book from the history of the genre as female-empowering, through an examination of the few works I have chosen it is possible to identify patterns and characteristics that have persisted over time. Also, not every reader is going to be affected by the message the romance author is trying to convey, but because of its popularity this genre is one of the single most effective ways to get large numbers of readers to ponder the values and ideas embedded within and have fun while doing so.
One problem many critics have with romance novels is that in the end, all of the women end up married or betrothed, and thus in the power of their husbands. However, every romance novel ends that way, so readers know what they are going to get in the end, and expect it. If all romances contain the same ending, then it is the journey to that point that is really being read (Regis). Many ideas and values can be conveyed through that journey, which usually depicts the heroine coming into her own and achieving a marriage where she is on equal footing with her husband, and so are therefore are stories of empowerment, and in some ways still bildungsromans.
To illustrate how popular romance empowers women, I will use a section of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Foucault discusses that instead of seeing the nature of power as one dominant group over one oppressed, we must view it as a series of dynamic relationships. “Where there is power,” Foucault writes, “there is resistance…resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, rampant, or violent” (1630). These “pockets of resistance” occur irregularly and are “spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way…producing cleavages in society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, cutting them up and remolding them…” (1630). In my paper I will take Foucault’s description of power and apply it to romance novels, explaining how popular romances read by women, through their depiction of women’s journeys to freedom, provide pockets of resistance where women can think and eventually act on changing the dynamics of power relationships. This is not a rebellion of the oppressed overthrowing the powerful; rather, it is a gradual reworking of the social structure, bringing women closer to equality with men. I will examine how, over time, the heroines in romance gain more power and freedom, and how their stories of independence further this process.
