Dangerous lovers and right wing women

By Jenifer Carter

A few months ago (I think?) I was On One and ranting to My Husband Whom I Love (MHWIL) about the latest Rebecca Yarros entry into the Empyrean series: Onyx Storm. The book is a bit of a mess, as I remember it. The characters have to go on a quest (which ultimately fails) so that our protagonist, Violet, can help find a cure for her lover, Xaden, who has channeled forbidden magic and is now something called a “venin.”

This series is especially goofy because its set in a war college, so everyone is constantly killing a guy, or at least threatening to kill a guy. There’s a strange, slightly comical hyper-violence in romantasy I don’t quite have the words for yet. Seemingly, we’re to take the battle scenes and swordplay as indicators of feminine strength and empowerment. These are qualities by which the protagonist wins the love and respect of Shadow Daddy (the love interest, who can control shadows somehow).

Shadow Daddy is equally prone to violence. He is overflowing with barely contained passion, and is burdened with incredible strength and power that he must use to save his people (Shadow Daddy is also a prince/king). Once the protagonist becomes the object of Shadow Daddy’s desire, he will stop at nothing to keep her safe.

I was ranting about this trope, about the apparent ease with which people will commit war crimes for love. In Onyx Storm, Xaden is explaining to Violet that during the previous novel’s culminating battle, he feared for her safety so much that he was driven to channel the forbidden magic from the earth, and ultimately damned his soul (or something). He says of those moments:

‘It was hotter than rage, and sharper than fear, and cut deeper than helplessness, all because I couldn’t get to you.’ My lips part, and an ache takes root in my chest. I hate that he’s going through this. ‘I would have killed anything and anyone in that moment to reach you. No exceptions. I would have channeled every ounce of power beneath my feet without hesitation if it would have landed me at your side.’

‘You’d never kill civilians,’ I counter with a hundred percent certainty.

He takes another step backward. ‘If I’d been there, beyond the wards, I would have drained the very earth to its core to keep you safe.’ [1]

Xaden would, in fact, sacrifice civilians to save her. He doesn’t deny it! [2] This is not the only romantasy novel that leans heavily on war crime or murder as devotional signifier, and during my tirade, I couldn’t reconcile how needlessly hostile this trope is with the implication that this is an inherently romantic and good trait.

That’s when we started talking about Andrea Dworkin and her essay, “The Promise of the Ultra-Right” in Right Wing Women. Dworkin attempts to explain why women on the Right align themselves politically against their own self-interest. Her theory centers around a specific calculus women on the Right make about power and safety:

The political Right in the United States today makes certain metaphysical and material promises to women that both exploit and quiet some of women’s deepest fears. These fears originate in the perception that male violence against women is uncontrollable and unpredictable. Dependent on and subservient to men, women are always subject to this violence. The Right promises to put enforceable restraints on male aggression, thus simplifying survival for women–to make the world slightly more habitable in other words–by offering the following:

  • Form…The right offers women a simple, fixed, predetermined social, biolgical, and sexual -order.
  • Shelter…The right claims to protect the home and the woman’s place in it
  • Safety…The Right, very considerately, tells women the rules of the gae on which their lives depend.
  • Love…The Right offers women a concept of love based on order and sutability, with formal areas of mutual accountability. [3]

Essentially, to partner with a powerful man is to be protected from other men. He is attractive because his strength is oriented outward, and his rarely seen tenderness reserved for the protagonist.

I don’t mean to claim that romance novels are popular by virtue of being anti-femininst or regressive, but that I think this is power dynamic is worth thinking about when considering:

The Shadow Daddy trope is simply a recapitulation of a character archetype that has been a hallmark of gothic and romance writing since at least the 19th century. In The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative, scholar Deborah Lutz traces the “dangerous lover” archetype as it has appeared throughout mass-market romance publication and its roots in Regency and Gothic Literature. She explains that the erotic draw of the dangerous lover is that he is “set up as dangerous only to then be reformed in the end, brought from the outside into the domestic life of the heterosexual couple.”[4]

Is this so different than the vision of herteronormative, patriarchal marriage Dworkin paints in “The Promise of the Ulta-Right”? It’s not exactly the same, but I feel this is part of the general knot that I’m untangling.

If it weren’t a copyright violation, I’d quote Lutz’s whole book here. I’m still working through it, but have found so many arguments that have helped me to understand our current romantasy moment within the broader history of the romance genre. This is a book I’m going to be drawing from frequently as I think through and unpack why Shadow Daddy characters like Xaden or Rhysand (ACOTAR) have captured the romance reader’s attention so fully.

  1. Yarros, Rebecca. Onyx Storm, 152. ↩

  2. I think at some point Violet threatens to raze an entire city if harm should befall Xaden? But I couldn’t find the citation. ↩

  3. Dworkin, Andrea. Right-Wing Women, 12. ↩

  4. Lutz, Deborah. The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative, 3. ↩