Historical Romance Novels: Should Violence Be Purged?

Anyone who has surfed the aisles of their local Borders bookstore, or who has toured Amazon recently, may be shocked to find there are any taboos left to be violated in the world of historical romance. Every kind of sex seems to be acceptable. Language, attire, religion or lack thereof . . . but violence, especially between men and women, is almost never found. For some writers this makes historical romance seem almost impossible to write, for some readers it makes historical romance completely non-historical. Other writers firmly believe that books were meant to please readers, and many readers think that mixing romance and history, even three hundred years in the past, is obscene.

Violence is such a divisive issue that most mainstream publishers have sanitized their offerings to exclude plots where the heroine is intimidated, imprisoned, or raped. Even today's more daring writers steer clear of these devices because they drastically limit the number of publishers that will consider a book. This explains the thousands of historical romances that use misunderstanding, mistaken identity and evil twins to throw lovers together or tear them apart.

Why would anyone want violence in a historical romance? After all, is it really romantic for a heroine to be taken captive? Are aggressive or brutish heroes really attractive?

The truth is, to some of us, violence is an essential element of a good romantic novel. In fact, we read historical romance instead of contemporary romances because the past was a violent and dangerous place.

Historical romances are usually defined as being written in any period before 1900. Some time periods and locations are particularly well-represented. For example, most historical romances are written for the period between 1400 and 1870 and placed in either Europe or North America.

Why are these periods and locations so popular? After all, the average man living in these times and places existed in practical, sometimes absolute, slavery. Under feudalism, for example, a man was his lord’s property, just like the horses, cows and sheep that grazed his land. The vast majority of men were chattel, there to work and serve until they died.

It took centuries for common people to liberate themselves from servitude, give themselves the right to own property, assume the freedom to move about as they willed, and to assert that they owned the product of their labor. The American Revolution in 1776, French Revolution in 1789, the American Civil War in 1861 and even the Russian Revolutions of 1881 and 1917 were all battles in a larger war over human rights worldwide. As you can see, freedom took a long time coming in some places.

Research shows that violence was omnipresent in the times and places most historical romance fans like to read about. People just like you and I were beaten, tortured, starved, hung, burned, guillotined and destroyed in a thousand other ways with such frequency that it was a part of common life. Even the nobility, usually responsible for dishing out misery to others, occasionally found themselves on the wrong side of the executioner’s axe. They, after all, belonged to their King.

In general, women enjoyed even fewer freedoms than their men. Rape, incest, forced prostitution and similar misfortunes were frequent occurrences for women without money or family to protect them. Even rich, well-born women suffered. They paid the price for the political mistakes of their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons. They died in child-birth bearing heirs, were imprisoned in nunneries for failing to conceive, died spinsters for unfortunate family connections.

So why does anyone want to read romance novels that take us back to those dark times? In an enlightened society, where women can prosecute men who abuse them, where we can marry when and whom we will, why is there any interest at all in historical romance?

It is specifically because every romance novel, even those with carefully sanitized plots and characters, reminds us of the brutal past. We understand, even without being told, that a woman ruined by a man may never marry. A home of her own, children to love and security in old age may all be stripped away by the cruel act of an unthinking man. We know that a girl without a good family may become a governess, and then end up starving on the street if she is turned out without a character reference. Historical romances are populated with heroines who have fallen on hard times, who are on the cusp of slipping into a darker, more terrifying world than we can bear to imagine

Many of us read historical romance because intimidation, fear, assault, abuse, rape and murder are not confined to the past. They still exist in the world. Despite substantial improvements in human rights and global wealth, we see them every day. Some of us are even survivors. We want works of fiction that relate to our reality and not the world the way it is supposed to be and never was.

So for many of us historical romances are more than merely soft porn or erotic fantasies. They are works of literature where men and women confront the brutality and injustice of a wider society. It is no surprise that our heroes are more violent. They come from a world where humans are owned. They come from a time when war meant lopping the heads off peasants from the seat of a horse and justice meant stringing up people who stole bread. These men must be measured against the people of their time, or at least the other folks in the book, if they are not to be found wanting. Often it is our heroines that must teach them to be wise and gentle, kind and strong.

What is most interesting about the topic of violence in romance is that, in many cases, both combatants are on the same side. Both say that violence is abhorrent and should be abolished in the real world. Some want their romances to forget that it ever existed and describe what characters would be like if they were unaffected by it. Others want to see how characters conquer violence within themselves and change the world around them.

Anyone who has read this far knows on which side of the issue I stand. While I enjoy the occasional romantic farce and can accept an honest mistake from time to time as a plot device, I prefer to read romances that deal more directly with the truth of our past.

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