The Evil Women of Romance

I came of age during the heyday of the nighttime soap opera, with its opulent display of wealth, power, and above all, desperately scheming women. Just like their counterparts on daytime soaps, Dynasty's Alexis Carrington and Dallas's myriad angry villainesses hatched plan after devious plan to seduce unsuspecting men, win back long-lost lovers, and generally spoil any happy endings for all the "good" girls who served as their real rivals. Millions of viewers tuned in every week to watch the evil doings of these villainesses of the night, eager to both condemn their actions while taking surreptitious pleasure in their rule-breaking actions.

Who needs a knife, when you have pointy earrings?

In Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (1982, 2008), Tania Modleski suggests that soap opera villainesses function as the "negative image of the spectator's ideal self," the symbolic representation of the spectator's "resentment at being constituted as an egoless receptacle for the suffering of others" (88-87). The anger a good girl feels at being endlessly told to be nice, to be good, to sacrifice for others, returns in the form of her repressed opposite, the egotistical, greedy, evil woman. Cunning, powerful, and sexy, the evil woman proves adept at using what Modelski terms the "aspects of a woman's life which normally render her most helpless"—pregnancy, motherhood, loss of a child—and use them to manipulate the hapless men and good girls around her (87).

In the post-feminist world of twenty-first century romance, a genre which purportedly celebrates female desire rather than feminine self-sacrifice, is there a need any longer for the figure of the villainess? Though she served as a standard trope in the Harlequin and Silhouette books of my early teen years, the  greedy, heartless, self-absorbed woman who cares far more about her own needs than those of her swain has proven far less common in the romances I've found myself reading of late (though the lack of category romance in my daily reading fare may throw doubt upon this claim--any category readers out there have thoughts?)

Perhaps that was why I found myself surprised to read not one, but two romances this past week that featured bad old-fashioned villainesses. Laura Moore's contemporary, Once Tempted, features a throw-back villainess, one who attempts to use her sexual wiles to win back the fiance she dumped in the hopes of bagging richer game. This type of villainess worked in those 70s and 80s category romances in part because their point of view was typically restricted to that of the heroine; neither she, nor we as readers, were privy to thoughts of the hero, and thus the heroine's worry that the villainess would work her sexy mojo on the hero did not come off as entirely unmotivated. In Moore's book, however, readers know that the hero thinks as little of the scheming siren as does the heroine (in fact, everyone in the entire book thinks poorly of her, although her stepsister and future brother-in-law are just too polite to openly acknowledge it). The villainess, then, has absolutely no chance of winning over our hero. Her inclusion, then, adds little to no tension to the romance arc, making this reader wonder what purpose she was supposed to serve. As a decidedly unfeminist reminder of the guilt women are still so often encouraged to feel for pursuing a man, rather than waiting for a man to pursue them? (Not surprisingly, the climax of the novel occurs after the hero follows the fleeing heroine cross country to declare his love...)

Grace Burrowes' historical Darius features not one, not two, but three villainnesses, one of the old-fashioned greedy variety, and the other two embodying a trope more commonly associated with villains: the perverted sexuality = evil variety. The main story—an aged aristocrat in need of an heir arranges for his new young wife to sleep with a virile young man—is a pleasure to read. But the three villainesses who threaten, but do little to really endanger, the young couple's baby or growing love, do nothing but leave a bad taste in this reader's mouth. One, a shrew married to the natural son of the aristocrat, is so stupid that her actions would have led to the illegitimatizing of her own husband, rather than to his inheriting a title. The other two, female dominants whom Darius submits to sexually for pay in order to support a cast-off sister, are just as easily thwarted when our hero throws aside his false role and takes up his true identity as threatening alpha male. It's almost as if we needed a reminder, during this age of celebrating Shades of Gray, that while BDSM can be OK, even sexy, if the male is the one who dominates, women who get off on subduing a man are still too appalling to countenance. Or is it perhaps the fear of a submissive man that we find too gender-role-destabilizing to imagine?

What do you think—can there be any such thing as a villainess in a feminist romance?



Photo credits:
Joan Collins as Alexis Carrington: The Telegraph

Next time on RNFF

The first openly gay pro athlete in m/m romance