The Twilight of the Gothic?: Vampire Fiction and the Rise of the Paranormal Romance, 1991–2012

By Joseph Crawford

This book explores the history of the paranormal romance genre; from its origins in the revisionist horror fiction of the 1970s, via its emergence as a minor sub-genre of romantic fiction in the early 1990s, to its contemporary expansion in recent years into an often-controversial genre of mainstream fiction. Tracing the genre from its roots in older Gothic fiction written by and for women, it explores the interconnected histories of Gothic and romantic fiction, from Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen in the eighteenth century to Buffy, Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries in the present day. In doing so, it investigates the extent to which the post-Twilight paranormal romance really does represent a break from older traditions of Gothic fiction – and just what it is about the genre that has made it so extraordinarily divisive, captivating millions of readers whilst simultaneously infuriating and repelling so many others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: May 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783161768

Joseph Crawford

Dr Joseph Crawford is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter.

Book preview

THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOTHIC?

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield, UK

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi, USA

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

The Twilight of the Gothic?

Vampire Fiction and the Rise of the Paranormal Romance

Joseph Crawford

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2014

© Joseph Crawford, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN      978-1-78316-064-8

e-ISBN   978-1-78316-176-8

The right of Joseph Crawford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Front cover: Vampire ©3QuarksMedia/Alamy

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1  The First 800 Years

2  Romancing the Paranormal

3  Sleeping with the Enemy

4  The New Millennium

5  The Twilight Controversy

6  Mutations

Epilogue Signs and Portents: Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the Huntsman and Fifty Shades of Grey

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I began this book in Cambridge; I finished it in Exeter. I wish to extend my sincere thanks to University of Cambridge for the research fellowship which allowed me to begin this book, to the University of Exeter for the lectureship which allowed me to finish it, and to my colleagues at both. I also wish to thank my wife, Filipa, who persuaded me to keep watching True Blood, and allowed me to persuade her to keep watching The Vampire Diaries in return. Virtually every idea in this book originated during our interminable conversations about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, back when we lived in London and were too short of money to go out. She should probably take credit for most of the best ones.

I wish to thank Mary Janice Davidson, Maggie Shayne and Roxanne Longstreet for their willingness to be interviewed for this project, at times when I’m sure they would all rather have been at work on their latest novels; special thanks to Roxanne for taking time out from her signing tour in order to meet with me directly. Further thanks are due to my family – Richard, Elaine, Rosa, Oliver and Sophia – for their unstinting support during the writing of this book, and for the good-humoured tolerance with which they treated me during those months when all I ever wanted to talk about was vampire sex books for teenage girls. I also wish to especially thank Sarah Lewis at the University of Wales Press for championing this project from its earliest stages: without her support, it would probably never have been written!

This book is dedicated, with great affection, to the graduate students of the King’s College London genre fiction reading group: Sarah Crofton, Maria Damkjaer, Jordan Kistler, Matt Sangster, Mary Shannon, Will Tattersdill and all the rest. You may not know it, but this is all your fault.

We are grateful for permission to reproduce the following material in this volume:

Introduction, copyright © 2009 by Annette Curtis Klause; and ‘The Silver Kiss’ from the The Silver Kiss by Annette Curtis Klause, copyright © 1990 by Annette Curtis Klause. Used by permission of Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

There are instances where we have been unable to trace or contact the copyright holder. If notified the publisher will be pleased to rectify any errors or omissions at the earliest opportunity.

Introduction

Not very many years ago, I used to attend a graduate reading group at King’s College London, devoted to the study of popular genre fiction. At each session, a different form or genre would be discussed: detective fiction, or science fiction, or online fan fiction, or comic books. The students who attended were well read, but they were also broad-minded, swift to recognize that popular fictional genres could possess cultural and historical significance quite independent of their aesthetic merits, and that even a genre in which the writing was almost universally ‘bad’ by the standards of high literature might still be able to communicate something of importance to its readers, something worthy of serious consideration and academic study. Of all the books discussed in the sessions I attended, the only one which really seemed to test the limits of their sympathy – the only one which many of them rejected out of hand, judging it to be not ‘bad but interesting’ or ‘bad but significant within its own historical context’, but simply, straightforwardly, perniciously, self-evidently bad – was Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling vampire romance novel Twilight.

This reaction intrigued me. I was carrying out some research at the time into the origins of Gothic fiction, work that ultimately led to my second book, Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism. I was reading a lot of eighteenth-century Gothic novels, and most of them, frankly, were not very good: they had no sense of pacing, their prose was clumsy and ridden with clichés, they were full of stock characters and passages of stock description, and their plots sometimes stopped making sense about halfway through. I persevered because, like other scholars of early Gothic, I believed that these novels had a cultural value that transcended their formal and stylistic limitations; that they communicated important truths about the beliefs, desires and anxieties of their readers and authors, truths that might often be obscured or invisible in the higher literature of their day. Precisely because of its lower cultural status, genre fiction is sometimes less rigorously policed than more prestigious literary forms, allowing it to directly address themes that such forms can explore only indirectly, if at all: it can thus open up a space for voices that might otherwise be excluded from literature, such as those of the eighteenth-century women who wrote many of the first Gothic novels. Most of the people at the reading group shared those beliefs, and happily applied them to other works of genre fiction. So what was special about Twilight? If a novel such as Mary Ann Radcliffe’s Manfrone, Or the One-handed Monk (1809) provided a culturally valuable articulation of the desires and anxieties of women at the start of the nineteenth century, worthy of preservation and academic consideration, then why shouldn’t Twilight (2005) be just as valuable, just as worthy of serious attention, in our own day?

As I explored the matter further, I discovered that the reaction of this reading group was by no means unique. The academic and online communities I frequented, most of which were otherwise highly tolerant of almost all forms of genre fiction, closed ranks against Twilight and its imitators; and their members often expressed not just dislike or disapproval of these novels, but extraordinary levels of hostility towards them. My familiarity with earlier pop culture phenomena – Buffy, The X-Files, Harry Potter, Stephen King – had led me to expect a wide variety of responses to Twilight, ranging from the adoration of the most committed fans, to the moderate enjoyment of more casual readers, the apathy of the uninterested, the moderate dislike of those who had found it not to their tastes and the extreme dislike of those who had found it most objectionable; but, instead, the field of response seemed utterly polarized. Fans loved the books. Everyone else seemed to hate them.

Being a cultural historian by training, I started to wonder what factors lay behind this strikingly divided response. Clearly the Twilight books had accomplished something, something that strongly appealed to an extremely wide contemporary audience: no author sells over 100 million books by accident. But why was it so divisive? The obvious point of comparison was with Harry Potter. Both Twilight and Harry Potter began as novels by previously unknown authors (both 31-year-old women, as it happens) which told the stories of young characters being introduced to magical worlds; each achieved word-of-mouth success, grew into a series, sold over 100 million volumes in less than a decade and were adapted into a successful series of films. But whereas serious objections to the Harry Potter franchise came only from an evangelical Christian fringe and certain sections of the academic and critical establishment, hostility to Twilight and the genre it popularized had been virtually omnipresent except in those circles specifically devoted to its celebration. The relatively uncontroversial success of Harry Potter, I would suggest, indicates that it is a series whose values and assumptions broadly mirror those of its historical and cultural context; but the much more heavily contested success of Twilight, which can count both its fans and its detractors by the tens of millions, points to its position astride a major fault line in contemporary culture.

What Twilight’s detractors seem to have found most objectionable about it is its romantic content. Those elements which it has in common with Harry Potter – the story of a teenager exploring a magical, hidden world, and the often violent and dangerous adventures they have there – have seldom been the focus of the criticisms levelled against it; instead, its critics have objected to its romance plot, and its depictions of gender roles, sex and sexuality, especially female sexuality. Some have scorned it simply for being ‘a romance’, as though it was self-evident that no romance novel could ever be worth reading or worthy of serious consideration; others complained about its assimilation of Gothic horror material to the tropes of romance fiction, insisting that vampires and werewolves should be monsters, not romantic lovers, and that any novel that failed to respect this convention must, necessarily, be a bad one. Still others, whilst accepting that romance plots might not be inherently bad, bemoaned the specific form of romance presented in Twilight, variously accusing it of being unhealthy, stereotypical, misogynistic, old-fashioned, unrealistic, improbably de-sexualized or just plain unromantic.¹ Had Meyer written Twilight as an adventure story rather than a romance, focusing on the exploits of her teenage heroine amongst the vampires and werewolves of the Pacific Northwest and keeping the romance plot strictly secondary to the main action, it is hard to imagine her novels attracting even a fraction of the hostility they have actually drawn. But it is just these much-criticized romance elements that most of Meyer’s fans have clearly found most attractive about the novels; and the same material which her critics found most unpleasant, unappealing and anti-feminist was evidently experienced by many other readers as romantic, moving, empowering and erotic. Clearly something strange was happening here: different groups of readers were seeing the same signs, but interpreting them in entirely different ways. It was this oddity that first prompted me to research this topic, in order to explore what might lie behind this somewhat surprising state of affairs.

In this, however, I was rapidly overtaken by events, as the Twilight controversy proved to be only the first stage in a larger cultural event: the rise of the paranormal romance. First there were the books: after the success of Twilight, paranormal romances came to be written in such volume that they rapidly established themselves as a new bookstore category, with a new section – sometimes labelled ‘paranormal romance’ and sometimes ‘dark fantasy’, but always awash with novels featuring red, white and black covers – appearing in bookshops across the English-speaking world, swiftly dwarfing its notional parent genre of horror fiction. Then the films and TV shows: Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Red Riding Hood, Dark Shadows, Snow White and the Huntsman. By the time second-order works such as Fifty Shades of Grey – a series of erotic novels, originally written as online Twilight fan fiction, which became major international best-sellers in 2012 – began to rise to prominence, it was clear that something much larger than a disagreement over the meanings of a single novel was taking place. I had studied the history of Gothic fiction, from its eighteenth-century origins down to the present day; but now I could see it evolving into a new form before my eyes, despite the efforts of many of the genre’s existing fans to fight its transformation every step of the way.

My aim, in this book, has been to address these facts historically, which has meant placing them within a broader historical context. This, then, is a book about Twilight; but it is also a book about that longer history of which Twilight is a part. There were paranormal romances long before Twilight, and the histories of those genres which we now call ‘Gothic’ and ‘romantic’ fiction have always been heavily interlinked; indeed, for most of their history, the single word ‘romance’ has served to denote them both. I believe that it is only within this larger history that the Twilight controversy, and the paranormal romance phenomenon which has followed it, can be truly understood; but, in studying it, I have also come to believe that it is a history of some significance in its own right. Ever since the academic study of Gothic fiction took off thirty years ago, the genre has overwhelmingly been interpreted as, to use Punter’s influential formulation, a ‘literature of terror’, and Gothic criticism has, accordingly, tended to focus on themes of horror, violence and fear: a focus which made intuitive sense in the 1980s and 1990s, when the horror film and the horror novel seemed to be the natural successors of the Gothic romances of previous centuries. But with the eclipse of horror and the rise of the paranormal romance, it has become possible to see the outlines of a different sort of history of Gothic fiction, one in which romance has always played a central role; and within this history the paranormal romance, Twilight included, may be less an aberration than a return to form.

Genres of popular fiction tend to be named after the fact, and the paranormal romance is no exception. The process of generic evolution may be compared to that of evolution by natural selection; at any given moment, hundreds of minor variations exist from each established generic norm, and only time can tell which will subsequently give rise to new genres of fiction. However, once a new genre, like a new species, is well established, it becomes possible to trace the process through which it arose from its parent stock; and, in doing so, three phases of development can usually be discerned. First comes a pre-history, in which works are written that, while not belonging to the genre itself, nonetheless lay the cultural and aesthetic groundwork necessary for it to come into being: for the classic Gothic novel this period would be the antiquarian revival of the mid-eighteenth century, which first made a genre of fiction dealing with the ‘Gothic’ past commercially and culturally viable, while for the paranormal romance it would be the revisionist horror fiction and erotic romance fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, which prepared the way for fictions in which classic horror-monsters could be presented as credible romantic leads. Second comes a period of consolidation, during which the genre starts to be recognized as a distinct category of fiction by readers and publishers, but in which the works that comprise it are so few in number that no strong consensus regarding its generic norms has yet emerged: for the classic Gothic novel this would be the period from 1765 to about 1792, while for the paranormal romance it would be from about 1989 to 2001. Finally comes the period of generic maturity, in which the norms of the genre are well established, often ushered in or cemented by the publication of a work so successful that it immediately becomes the standard by which other works in the genre are judged. For classic Gothic, this happened in about 1792–4, with the success of The Mysteries of Udolpho firmly setting the mould for subsequent works of Gothic fiction; while for the paranormal romance, it occurred in 2002–5, in the years leading up to the publication of Twilight. Read forwards, this schema can easily seem teleological, as though the rise of a given genre was somehow foreordained; but, in practice, it is only ever a backward-looking reconstruction of what actually happened to take place. In generic evolution, as in evolution by natural selection, contingency plays a powerful role: the chance preferences of a J. K. Rowling or a Stephen King can set an entire genre on a different course to what may otherwise have ‘naturally’ emerged. Nonetheless, when dealing with very popular genres, I believe it may be safely said that mere contingency cannot account for the full scale of their success. To put the matter crudely: one might just be able to sell a million books by being clever and lucky and original, but one can only sell 100 million books by being, on some level, in tune with the times. Evolution favours those who are best adapted to the environments into which they happen to be born.

What, then, were the social and cultural factors which allowed the paranormal romance to develop and flourish as it did, and why, if the circumstances of the genre’s birth were so propitious, did the success of Twilight generate such enormous controversy and hostility? Such questions never have a single, straightforward answer: many different people may like (or hate) a book or a genre for many different reasons, some commonplace, some utterly idiosyncratic. But in writing and researching this book, I have come to believe that at least one important answer is to be found in the changing cultural status of that most basic Gothic figure: the outsider. The outsider is the one who is not like us, who does not look like us, does not live like us, does not share our laws and our limitations, and is thus, in consequence, partially or totally excluded from the social order. Such outsiders can be at once attractive and fearsome: attractive to the extent that we long to share their freedom or to alleviate their loneliness, and fearsome to the extent that we dread that freedom being used against us. The period in which the paranormal romance developed has been marked by major social changes, which have repositioned a variety of former outsider groups as being, in fact, ‘just like us’ (where ‘we’ are assumed to be white, Western, heterosexual, Christian or agnostic, and middle class), and stigmatized their persecution; and the transformation of the horror-monsters of classic Gothic fiction from fearsome destroyers to loveable, misunderstood romantic leads surely reflects this. But this process of assimilating the fears of the past to the desires of the present has not been an untroubled one, generating incoherencies and contradictions that mirror the fragile and imperfect social toleration such outsider groups have found in real life. The triumph of Twilight has been to express these contradictions in their purest form, in a kind of dream-work within which all manner of impossibilities are staged and celebrated. For the unsympathetic reader, the result is moral and artistic nonsense, self-evidently absurd; but for the reader who shares the combination of fears and longings that the Twilight novels express they perform a rare and valuable service, articulating a range of desires and anxieties that mainstream media generally strives to keep decently out of sight. It is the strangeness of Twilight, its oddness and incoherencies, which set it apart from the very many, much more polished, paranormal romances which preceded and followed it; and I strongly suspect that it is these very characteristics, for which it has been so widely mocked, which have permitted its extraordinary success.

In this book, my aim has been to map out the generic history of the paranormal romance; to tell the story of its development and rise to popularity, and to explore just what it is that has made the genre so very divisive, even by the standards of contemporary popular culture. My first chapter deals, briefly, with the genre’s pre-history: the long, interwoven histories of Gothic and romantic fiction, from their medieval origins down to the 1970s and 1980s. In my second chapter, I explore the emergence of the ‘paranormal romance’ proper in the early 1990s, and the ways in which this subgenre developed out of existing trends in the Gothic and romantic fiction of the previous two decades, while my third chapter is devoted to case studies of two crucial transitional franchises, Hamilton’s Anita Blake and Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which jointly did much to lay the foundations for the subsequent development of the paranormal romance. My fourth chapter focuses on the crucial years 2000–8, in which the paranormal romance moved from being an obscure subgenre to an enormously popular (and extremely controversial) form of mainstream fiction, and my fifth chapter is devoted to a detailed exploration of the Twilight controversy, which did so much to bring the genre to public attention. My sixth chapter explores the transition of the paranormal romance to TV and film, in such media franchises as the Twilight films and the True Blood and Vampire Diaries TV shows; and lastly, in a brief conclusion, I consider what the rise of the paranormal romance may imply for the broader development of Gothic fiction in the twenty-first century.

Before I proceed: a word on definitions. By ‘paranormal romance’ I refer to romantic fictions which feature overtly supernatural elements: ghosts, vampires, angels, werewolves, fairies, wizards, and so on. For obvious reasons, I am particularly concerned with the subgenre of ‘vampire romance’, by which I mean those paranormal romance fictions, such as Twilight, in which the hero and/or the heroine are vampires. I have no strict set of rules for determining which works count as paranormal romances, like those which Pamela Regis proposes for the romance as a whole in her Natural History of the Romance Novel, for the simple reason that I do not believe that such rules reflect the way in which genres actually function.² A genre, in the sense that the word is used by readers, booksellers and publishers, is not composed of a checklist of generic requirements, against which any given work of fiction can be compared in order to discover whether it belongs to that genre or not; instead, it is defined by a constellation of associated tropes, and works of fiction participate in those genres to the extent that they partake of those tropes which define it. Nor is this constellation fixed: it can shift and change as the genre develops, and almost always does so. When I call a work a ‘paranormal romance’, all that I mean is that it partakes heavily of that set of associated tropes which have come to characterize and define the body of fiction to which readers and publishers have assigned this generic designation over the last twenty years. A work that tells the story of the development and consummation of a positive, loving romantic relationship between a human and a vampire, adhering to all the standard romance-novel tropes apart from the convention that the hero and heroine should be live human beings, is clearly a paranormal romance: Lori Herter’s De Morrissey series (1991–3) would be a good, early example of this sort. A work that devotes a substantial portion of its plot (and page count) to the development of such a relationship, while also including mystery and action adventure storylines, would be a work that contained paranormal romance elements: Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series (1993–present) was a foundational work of this kind, and now has so many imitators that they form something of a subgenre of their own. An accurate generic history must, by necessity, include such hybrid works, for the simple reason that authors, readers and publishers almost never restrict themselves to ‘pure’ works of a given type, and thus lines of influence often run through other channels. Many of the works that I shall explore in this book – Buffy, Anita Blake, The Southern Vampire Mysteries, True Blood – are not paranormal romances in the same straightforward way as Herter’s vampire novels; but they all include paranormal romance elements, and they form important parts of the ongoing history of the genre as a whole. Neither Buffy nor Anita Blake could be described as being simply ‘a paranormal romance’, but both have exercised so much influence over subsequent paranormal romances, hybrid and otherwise, that a history of the genre which excluded them would simply be inaccurate and false. I have thus tried to map out, to the best of my ability, that line of literary and cultural descent which ultimately led to the modern genre of paranormal romance, rather than limiting myself to those works which fit some Platonic definition of generic form.

At the time of writing, the Twilight phenomenon and its attendant controversies appear to have passed their peak.³ The last of the Twilight books was published five years ago, and the last of the film adaptations came out while I was writing this study; the girls who read Twilight when it first came out at the age of thirteen or fourteen are now young women of twenty-one or twenty-two, and are likely to have moved on to very different forms of fiction. But its legacies seem very much alive, dramatically reshaping the face of Gothic fiction; and the paranormal romance, which it did so much to popularize, is still in a moderately flourishing condition. It is thus, I feel, an appropriate moment at which to take stock of the events of the last several years; to attempt to make sense of the rise of the paranormal romance genre, and to consider whether, as many of its critics fear, its ascendancy truly marks the twilight of the traditional Gothic. Almost two decades ago, the well-known scholar of Gothic literature Fred Botting declared that Coppola’s lushly romantic 1992 adaptation of Dracula marked the end of Gothic, the point of its collapse into romance.⁴ But, as his subsequent work has demonstrated, Gothic fiction, like Gothic villains, never really seems to die: it just mutates into new and unfamiliar forms.⁵ This is the story of one of its latest mutations.

1

The First 800 Years

Origins: the genesis of romance

We should begin at the beginning.

We should start with the very word ‘romance’: it derives from the Old French roman or romans, which was the name given by the educated inhabitants of early medieval France to the vernacular language they spoke every day, the dialect of provincial Latin which would one day become modern French.¹ A ‘romance’ was a literary work which was written in the romans language, rather than in Latin, the language of scholarship and the Church. Serious works of theology were written in Latin: but romans was good enough for the songs and stories of Roland, Charlemagne and the other warrior-heroes of old France, and it was these works that became the first romances.

The rise of the heroic romance as a literary genre in twelfth-century France coincided with the appearance of the aristocratic cultural ideal of fin’amor, ‘fine’ or ‘courtly’ love, which postulated the then almost unheard-of idea that, under the right conditions, love between men and women could potentially be a morally or spiritually ennobling force.² The development of both the romance as a literary genre, and of fin’amor as a cultural practice, were encouraged by Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of England and France: she and her eldest daughter Marie acted as patrons to important early romance authors such as Chrétien de Troyes and (probably) Marie de France, while simultaneously helping to spread the ideals of fin’amor across the royal courts of Western Europe.³ The same ideals of love were reflected in the works of the romance-writers whom they patronized, and so thorough did the identification of this new code of courtship with this new form of writing eventually become that, when we wish to refer to intense and ennobling love-relationships today, we no longer speak of fin’amor: we refer, instead, to ‘romantic love’.

The literary romances which flourished at the courts of Eleanor and Marie, and later elsewhere in Europe, were not only love stories – they were also stories of war, magic and adventure – but the importance that they attributed to their love-plots set them apart from the older heroic epics and chansons de geste upon which they drew.⁴ The Song of Roland, for example, which dates from about 1100, is a story about aristocratic chivalric warriors similar to the heroes of later romances, but they are definitely fighters, not lovers: the relationships that matter most to them are the bonds of loyalty which tie them to their comrades and their king, there are no significant female characters, and women seldom even merit a mention amidst all the heroic bloodshed. A century later, however, the focus had shifted: in the romances of Chrétien, Marie and their successors, personal relationships could be as important as battlefields, and knights are as much concerned to win the favour of their ladies as the approval of their feudal overlords. This combination of courtly love stories with magical high adventure proved so enduringly popular that, for the next 500 years, a single genre – ‘romance’ – served simultaneously as Western Europe’s preferred form of both. Pure and perfect love was ‘romantic’; but so were supernatural events, or incredible feats of arms. ‘Romantic love’ went alongside ‘romantic heroism’ and ‘romantic enchantment’, linked so inseparably that, when Don Quixote decides to become a knight errant like the heroes of his favourite romances, he concludes that not only must he be an invincible warrior who inhabits a world of magic and monsters, he must also have a beautiful and virtuous maiden with whom he is perfectly in love, on the assumption that the former must naturally imply the latter. Thus, when we consider the modern literature of supernatural-themed romance fiction, our first question should not be how stories of love and the supernatural came to coexist within the same genre; rather, we should investigate how it came to pass that, after five centuries of unity, they ever came to be separated.

The unravelling of the medieval romance tradition took place over several generations. The first element to disappear was its reliance upon the supernatural, which Cervantes mocked in Don Quixote (1605), reflecting the increasing scepticism regarding the reality of supernatural forces which was then taking root amongst the educated elites who read and wrote romances: and the influential mid-seventeenth-century romances of Madeleine de Scudéry, such as Artamène and Clélie, made no use of magical or supernatural incidents.⁵ Seventeenth-century romance-writers still preferred their heroes and heroines to be larger-than-life figures living in far-off times and places, perfect in love, and superhuman in war; but, by the eighteenth century, tolerance for even this level of ‘romantic’ heroism had started to wane.⁶ Early novels such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Richardson’s Pamela (1740) achieved lasting popularity and fame throughout Europe by recounting the loves and adventures, not of morally perfect aristocratic heroes and heroines living in a fantastical version of the past, but of flawed, ordinary people living in a recognizable, realistic present; and, in their wake, the genre of romance came increasingly to be dismissed as suitable only for the ignorant poor, who were thought too credulous to understand the difference between the pointless fantasies favoured by earlier, more superstitious centuries and the realistic, educational novels by which they had now come to be displaced.⁷ It was in this context that the love story, the adventure story and the supernatural ‘wonder tale’ first started to come adrift from one another, after centuries of being united within the capacious boundaries of the old romance form; for the novel defined itself against the romance, establishing its cultural credibility by eschewing the less naturalistic elements of the tradition which it aspired to replace. Widely criticized for its lack of realism, the romance passed into cultural eclipse, from which it has never fully emerged.

Despite the decline of the old romance form, however, the love story flourished during the eighteenth century, to the extent that ‘novel’ and ‘love story’ became almost synonymous terms. The success of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), and Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), established a template that would be followed by many other English novelists over the following decades: that a novel told the story of one or more young people, and the various difficulties that they had to navigate on their way to (hopefully) securing a suitable marriage with the partner of their choice. These difficulties might be as minor as family disapproval, or as extreme as abduction by rival suitors, but they generally remained personal and domestic in scale; unlike their literary predecessors in earlier centuries, the protagonists of such novels generally did not have to contend with wars, shipwrecks, disasters or mysterious acts of God.

Both the pre-modern romance and the early English novel were thus important way-points in the development of modern romance fiction. The romance first established love as a worthy theme for literature, but postulated it as very much an all-or-nothing affair: characters tended to fall in love instantly and totally, and if their love was reciprocated then only physical barriers could suffice to keep them apart and thus prolong the narrative. The early novel developed the possibility of telling a love story without such plot devices, in which the obstacles that would-be lovers needed to overcome were social, emotional and psychological rather than physical: Richardson’s Pamela, in particular, has been singled out by Modleski as an important prototype of the modern romance, a judgement in which she has been followed by Engler and Regis.⁸ Despite their emphasis on love and marriage, however, few eighteenth-century courtship novels are particularly ‘romantic’ in the modern sense of the word, and there are good reasons why, today, we refer to highly emotionally charged love relationships as ‘romances’ rather than ‘novels’. The eighteenth-century novel tradition inaugurated by the works of Fielding, Richardson and their contemporaries generally prioritized good sense and social responsibility over grand passion, and often went to some lengths to demonstrate that an overly ‘romantic’ view of the world, and of love, could lead young people – especially young women – very dangerously astray.⁹

As I have discussed, the romance form fell out of fashion in the early years of the eighteenth century, displaced by the rising popularity of the novel. Its re-emergence began towards the century’s end, as part of that resurgence of interest in all things medieval which is known today as the Gothic revival; and it was during the heyday of the Gothic revival in art and literature, when works referring to themselves as ‘romances’ began once more to be published and read in English, that the entanglement of what we now call ‘the Gothic’ and ‘the romantic’ first began in earnest.

Gothic/romance 1: Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen

When we go looking for the origins of genres such as ‘Gothic fiction’ or ‘romance fiction’, we must be wary of anachronism. If we take the hallmark of ‘Gothic fiction’ to be a preoccupation with fearsome events and/or supernatural phenomena, and the hallmark of ‘romance fiction’ to be a story that revolves around the development of a love relationship between two characters, then both must be thousands of years old: many examples of each could be found, for example, in the mythology of ancient Greece. But the fact that the conceptual categories of ‘Gothic fiction’ and ‘romance fiction’ are very much newer than this, and only started to be used by