Chels

Romance may not be my primary genre, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to slander romance novels. A lot of people seem to pit romance and classics as opposite ends of a spectrum, as if one can’t enjoy both, as if they reach completely different audiences, and I find it all a bit performative and elitist. I don’t dislike romance, I just wasn’t into it in my early teens, and I’ve had a mile long to-read list since I was thirteen, so I just haven’t gotten around to reading many romance novels.

I’m by no means an expert when it comes to the genre, but I certainly think I’m more qualified to talk about it than some of the people that blindly dismiss romance. There’s a horrible sense of elitism surrounding the genre, and I do think it’s because it’s one predominantly enjoyed by women, and as we know, women can’t enjoy anything these days without being criticised. People seem to think that reading romance is not as intellectually stimulating as other genres, and I have two issues with this. First of all, it’s not the case. If anything, just consider the amount of classics that are romances – no one would say that Jane Austen’s works aren’t complex and rich. My second issue is who actually cares? Sometimes you want to read something very complex and difficult – think of all the book clubs that meet for years on end to unpack Finnegan’s Wake – but it’s not essential to the act of reading. Sometimes you just want to read something light and fun. For me, the primary function of a novel is to entertain me, not to teach me something profound. Then again, a lot of the people (read: men) that criticise romance don’t particularly read novels at all – it’s the same people constantly reading self help books about how to become a billionaire. I try not to pass judgement on people’s tastes, but these people make it a big thing, and it’s just thinly veiled misogyny, so I don’t actually mind criticising them.

The other, less loaded criticism of romance novels is that they’re predictable or formulaic, and this is the thing I take real issue with. For some reason, people don’t treat romance as a genre. Every novel that’s part of a clearly defined genre is formulaic to an extent – because to be part of a genre, a work has to employ genre conventions. People rarely label mystery novels as formulaic (although to go back to my previous point, when they do it seems to be aimed at mysteries by or about women). It’s obviously because there’s a hierarchy of genres, which I understand as a concept, but disagree with.

Mysteries are so contained – there is a crime, a victim, a suspect, a detective, and clues – it’s not like you could subvert all of these and still have a mystery. You can be creative within the parameters, but the parameters still exist. With other genres, things are less rigid. Take fantasy, for example. Fantasy can involve a fictional world, but it doesn’t have to – plenty of fantasy works are set on earth in the present day. Fantasy can involve fictional creatures, but it doesn’t have to. There’s typically an element of magic involved, but not always, and the magic isn’t always the traditional waving of a wand. There’s much more room to play when it comes to fantasy because of the elements of invention (perhaps this is why romantasy has become a popular genre mix; the novelty of new worlds and creatures). 

Perhaps to people who aren’t familiar with romance novels, and especially to those who disparage them, the genre conventions seem formulaic, but really, it’s just the same as any genre fiction. The central couple are just the detective or suspects, the meet cute is the murder, and the happy ending is the big reveal. In fact, I remember during one of my speculative fiction seminars, my lecturer argued that romance, in particular Jane Austen’s romances, are essentially mystery novels – in murder mystery fiction, you know one character will kill another, you just don’t know how or why, and in the same way in romance fiction, you know two characters will fall in love, but you don’t know how they will reach that point.

This all brings me to another point, which is still relevant to romance novels, but it’s also a complaint about literary discourse as a whole. Tropes are not inherently bad. The word you are looking for is clichés, and even then, clichés also aren’t inherently bad. A trope is just a recurrent motif in a work, a theme, or a genre convention. There’s no opinion in the word – a trope is not something positive or negative, it just is. A cliché, on the other hand, does carry a negative connotation. Clichés are tropes, ideas, or phrases that are overused, especially if they’re overused to the point of losing their original meaning.

So yes, romance novels are full of tropes, because every piece of genre fiction is full of tropes. That’s how we identify their genre. Some romance novels, yes, are full of clichés. That doesn’t mean they all are, and it certainly doesn’t mean that no other genre has novels that fall into clichés. 

I think we give romance a hard time, for no real reason, and I do think it’s incredibly unfair. It’s undoubtedly because it’s a genre with a predominantly female following, but it’s not just men that I see criticising romance. Perhaps another day I’ll look further into some of the social psychology behind why some women are harsher on genres marketed towards women, but for now, please remember that romance is a genre, and it has genre conventions, and just because the stories themselves don’t interest you, it doesn’t mean they don’t have value.