Abstract
The capitalist and the warrior heroes of romance fiction are both desirable and fearsome for what they embody, as is the hero in this chapter, who embodies the sexual norms underlying the bourgeois family and the problematic nature of heterosexism. It is unarguable that the genre’s development shows a distinct correlation (particularly in the sixties and seventies) between the rising demand for gender equality and the machismo of romance heroes. This chapter is concerned, however, with the connection between the adaptation in the hero trait (to manifest machismo) and another disruptive social transformation: the demand for an end to institutionalized homophobia.
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Notes
Sophie Cole’s Blue-Grey Magic (1910)
and Joan Sutherland’s Cophetua’s Son (1914) are two texts from Mills and Boon’s first decade of publishing that addresses the distinction (real or imagined) between homosexual and homosocial attachments. Cole’s novel is notable not only for its parallel narratives that involve a heterosexual and a lesbian relationship but also for its advocacy of the latter over the former. The unusualness of this plot (compared to the ones that will follow) is paralleled by the hero’s complete dissimilarity to the hero who will later become the standard for the Mills and Boon imprint—the hero who is aggressive and sexually dominating toward women. Cophetua’s Son contains a suggestion of homoeroticism as well, and is possibly one of the few texts in the firm’s list over the next eighty years to address inter-male attachments that rival heterosexual ones.
One may also consider the example of another Whittal novel, Man from Amazibu Bay (1980), which shows a new version of the Mills and Boon hero. Scott Beresford begins to openly pursue Anna Lindsey as soon as they meet, and he marries her mid-way into the novel. But she is skeptical of their commitment to the
See Helen Brooks’ The Irresistible Tycoon (2002),
Kim Lawrence’s The Playboy’s Mistress (2002),
Carol Marinelli’s The Italian’s Touch (2003), and
Catherine George’s Sarah’s Secret (2004).
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© 2014 Jayashree Kamblé
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Kamblé, J. (2014). Heterosexuality: Negotiating Normative Romance Novel Desire. In: Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137395054_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137395054_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48413-3
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