Dark versus Light
Rumors of the demise of certain romance subgenres abound in publishing. The historical is dead, the Western is dead, the contemporary is dead—paranormals killed them! I don’t pay much—if any—attention to such rumors because a downward trend is always revitalized by a well told story no matter the genre. Plus many rumors are wrong. The death of historicals has been predicted for years, but authors keep writing them and hundreds of thousands keep reading them. So this rumor needs a casket so we can bury it in cement.
However, contemporary romance is struggling. How do I know this isn’t just a rumor? Because even editors are talking about it and if I go into a bookstore I see more of the ‘walking dead’ than the ‘boy next door’. I’m not too worried though, it’s just a slow period. Perhaps readers grew tired of cartoony covers and light (light meaning fun not superficial) plot lines. I’m of the belief that a writer who takes a contemporary romance and infuses it with the dark emotion of a paranormal will enjoy a very successful career.
Readers want emotions—raw and gripping—and that is what romantic suspense and paranormal romances give them. Life and death stakes, passion, hunger, primal desires. Can a poor stock exchange hero compete with that? Again, I say yes. With the right plots and characters contemporaries can rise again. It’s the Jane Austen versus Charlotte Bronte debate: Elizabeth Bennett and Anne Elliot versus Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. Darcy or Rochester? Realism versus Imagination.
Jane Austen famously made fun of the gothic novel in her book Northanger Abbey. In this book we meet a young influential girl who has to learn what is fact and what is fiction. And in Mansfield Park she says “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.”
However, one of Jane Austen’s ardent critics (everyone’s a critic) was Charlotte Bronte who wrote:
She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood … What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study: but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death–this Miss Austen ignores….Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless woman), if this is heresy–I cannot help it.
This divide in literature is nothing new. Romance continues to be seen as less than (fill in the blank) because it ends in marriage or commitment and focuses on the good in life while literary fiction deals with its darker side. Horace Walpole said it best, “This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”
However, reason and emotion don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Austen had plenty of emotion in her books—for some—and Bronte’s Villette is full of intellectual insight—again for some. So, in fiction, it doesn’t have to be dark versus light. There can be a nice blend.
Which would you rather be? A Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte heroine/hero? Why? I will do a drawing from those who respond. The prize will be an autographed copy of either my paranormal romantic suspense Illusive Flame or my contemporary Sparks.
Hands down, I’d rather be a Jane Austin heroine but I’ll admit I LOVE Jane Eyre.
Thanks for the neat blog!
which I think is important, being someone who hates pain.
