Postfeminist virtues

I just finished reading Quicksilver, Callie Hart’s 2024 contribution to the Shadow Daddy romantasy genre. This book has it all:

• a scrappy young thief from the slums of an oppressed kingdom, who is very good at sword fighting despite her constant dehydration;
• An angry fae with dark hair, a tortured past and guilty conscience, shadows (in this case, smoke) that are used toward sexy ends;
• Fated mates, whose bond is the strongest bond of all time and allows them to communicate telepathically;
• And also vampires.

This particular book features so many romantasy conventions that I want to talk about, so I’ll probably come back to this a lot. The thing that really stuck in my craw as I read this was the very antagonistic stance against one of the few other women characters, Danya.

Aside from our heroine, we meet four other women in this world. Danya is, from the get, positioned as someone we should strongly dislike because she is violent, angry, and brash.

There is no sympathy for Danya after she sustains a brutal injury and loses her sword hand. Fisher responds to this incident:

“Maybe she’ll stop punching people in the face now.” There wasn’t a scrap of sympathy in Fisher’s voice. He went and stood over Danya, his eyes glittering and cold as ice.

Our heroine also reflects:

Her theatrics had reached a point where she deserved to live with the consequences of her shitty temper. That wasn’t a charitable thought on my part, but I was well and truly over her attitude. She’d been a bitch ever since Kingfisher had shown up back at the camp. We had more important things to worry about than a petulant warrior who threw a temper tantrum every time she showed up in this fucking tent. ^[1]

I don’t really understand how we’re supposed to differentiate Danya’s behavior from the heroine’s. As soon as Saeris arrives in the fae realm, she is angry and stubborn, picks fights, punches Fisher in the face, and thinks violent thoughts toward people who annoy her.

Why is the heroine a scrappy and strong woman, but Danya is a bitch?

Virtue, rewarded

The romance genre follows a formula, and the romance heroine embodies virtues that will ultimately allow her to win the hero’s love. If we accept Jan Cohn’s idea that the fantasy of the romance novel is, ultimately, power redistribution within the heterosexual relationship, then romance fiction becomes a site responsive toward social change and reflective of feminist attitudes toward sexual and economic liberation. ^[2]

She says:

The fact that the emergence of the women’s movement in the late 1960s marks the beginning of the meteoric rise in popularity of Harlequin romances strongly suggests that these fictions serve to negotiate for their readers the dilemmas of social change. For many women, feminism exacerbated the contradictions in gender roles by threatening to undermine traditional rules for female behavior and the rewards anticipated for following those rules . ^[3]

Cohn’s idea makes sense to me, especially when considering the history and evolution of the genre.

Samuel Richardon’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) is considered one of the first romance novels ^[4] and is very much a conduct novel extolling a very specific moral position for young women of the 18th century. Pamela wins the sincere love of her very wealthy employer by protecting her chastity despite his multiple solicitations and assaults. ^[5]

Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice, 1813) similarly is not swayed by Darcy’s first proposal, despite his immense wealth and social standing. Her goal is a love-match, and she instead attracted to Wickham despite his poverty. Elizabeth’s moral virtue is thus rewarded with a marriage to Darcy that is both based on true affection and economically beneficial.

What then are the virtues of the modern romantasy heroine? The romantasy heroine is set apart by her stubbornness and conviction, her ability to handle herself in combat alongside men, and her nurturing, caring attitude toward her lover and friends. It’s her boldness and ability to deftly kill in battle that sets her apart from other women; it’s that she’s still feminine that captures the attention of the centuries-old fae.

I would argue that what we are seeing now in the romance/fantasy genre is an articulation of specific postfeminist values with an “emphasis on individualism, choice, and agency, a resistance to interrogating structural gendered inequalities, and a renewed focus on a woman’s body as a site of liberation.” ^[6] The supposed independence, resiliency, and sexual empowerment these characters display are the legacy of second-wave feminism, brought into the mainstream through third-wave activism; while not explicitly labeled as feminist, the values and character traits our heroines embody represent a mainstream, popular conception of feminist politics. ^[7]

Notably in Quicksliver, we only meet four ^[8] other women against whom Saeris is measured:

• Everlayne, Kingfisher’s very feminine and sensitive sister.
• That old woman at the festival who is maternal and exists to prove Kingfisher is a nice boy.
• Te Léna, the beautiful healer who Searis jealously suspects is in a relationship with Kingfisher (until later learning Te Léna is happily married to someone else)
• Danya, the warrior fae that everyone hates because she’s such a bitch.

Danya is positioned as A Bad Female because she dislikes Fisher for abandoning the frontline and Saeris for destroying a family heirloom. However, I would argue Danya and Saeris are more alike than not, and I think this is exactly why the narrative takes such a hostile tone toward her. Danya is not old, married, or otherwise related to Fisher. In a way, she’s the only sexual competitor Saeris encounters in this world. Further, Danya is unsympathetic because she doesn’t exhibit the same fawning loyalty toward the nexus of masculine strength that is Kingfisher.^[9] She must, then, be reviled for exhibiting the same stubbornness, anger, and strength we’ve seen from Saeris for the entirety of the novel, and for lacking faith in Kingfisher’s moral superiority.

Personally, I think that attitude is troubling if we accept romance fiction as representative of the postfeminist values that we, as consumers of popular culture, accept as feminist representations. Postfeminism, as Banet-Weiser explains, is “not only a shift from the collective mobilization to an individual subjectivity, but the abandonment of feminist politics and the embrace of neoliberal capitalism.” ^[10] There is no sympathy extended for Danya, whose presence doesn’t serve Saeris or Fisher in any meaningful way.

Like Quicksilver, the lazier romantasy novels that wind up on the NYT best sellers list are reflecting back to us an ersatz feminism that is depoliticized and toothless, measured by its ability to serve the individual rather than the collective.

I would like to keep thinking about how neoliberalism, identity formation, and postfeminism are playing out in specific romance subgenres. So far I feel like I’ve mostly seen this attitude in the fantasy/paranormal sphere^[11], but I can’t imagine this is the only place it lives.

1. Hart, Callie. Quicksilver. (First Forever ebook edition. Forever, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, 2024), 474. ↩

2. Cohn, Jan. Romance and the Erotics of Property : Mass-Market Fiction for Women. (Duke University Press, 1988), 5. ↩

3. Cohn, 10. ↩

4. Lutz, Deborah. The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 2006), 30. ↩

5. Mr. B is another Dangerous Lover archetype. I’ll probably have to reread Pamela which I had vowed to never do again. But alas, that’s literary canon, baby! ↩

6. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. “Postfeminism and Popular Feminism.” Feminist Media Histories 4 (2): 152–56 (2018), 153. ↩

7. Mißler, Heike. The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism and Representation. (Routledge, 2017), 18. ↩

8. I guess I’m not counting the queen (Madras?) in this because she’s one of the primary villains of the story and is by nature comically evil. ↩

9. She doesn’t even do anything traditionally feminine, like healing! ↩

10. Banet-Weiser, 154. ↩

11. Maybe I just read too much bad paranormal romance and need to branch out into bad contemporary romance…. ↩