In 1972, Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower started a new trend in romance literature. Thurston writes that:
The results was that what began as a small bushfire in 1972 with the publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower quickly raged into a conflagration of pas-sion, possespas-sion, piracy and rape, portraying high-spirited women who ultimately won not only love but more re-spect and independence than the times in which they lived commonly would have allowed their sex. (1987, p. 19)
Woodiwiss’s novel became a model for the so-called pers.” The label is, of course, a disparaging one. The “bodice-rip-pers” were generally placed in a historical setting, often the Regency era, and they were more sexually explicit than other romance nov-els. They sometimes included the “raping hero.” A recurring theme
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is that the hero in the beginning of the novel rapes the heroine, usu-ally mistaking her for a prostitute. He is a dominant and often brooding Byronic hero, who fails to understand the word “no.” In The Flame and the Flower, the heroine Heather, who has just managed to avoid being raped by a distant relative, a repulsive older man, falls into the hero Brandon’s clutches. He thinks she is a prostitute, and she is too shocked after her earlier ordeal, in which she acci-dently kills her uncle, to say anything. The rape itself is described as a painful and shameful experience for Heather:
A half gasp, half shriek escaped her and a burning pain seemed to spread through her loins [...] When he finally withdrew, she turned to the wall and lay softly sobbing with the corner of the blanket pulled over her head and her now used body left bare to his gaze. (Woodiwiss, 2003, p. 29f)
When Brandon realizes she is a virgin, he is gentle with her, but it is not until she is pregnant with his child and he is forced to marry her that he understands that she is an honorable woman. It then takes more than a year and a few hundred pages before the couple can overcome the start of their relationship and end up in bed again.
This time, Heather enjoys herself fully, thus signaling the happy end of the book. One of the most important traits of modern ro-mance is that the heroine must have at least one orgasm before the happy ending. Wendell and Tan write in Beyond Heaving Bosoms:
The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels (2009):
No other genre is as obsessed with the heroine (a) having excellent sex, and (b) not having sex at all unless it’s with the One True Love, who’s also usually the sole person who can make her come. Got orgasm? Got true love. (p. 37)
In these books, sex is important and quite often connected to vio-lence. But even if the hero is “allowed” to abuse the heroine during the course of the novel, he must repent and make amends. Not be-fore they have arrived at a point where they have mutually enjoy-able sex is the story over.
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Not all “bodice-rippers” included a “raping hero,” but a lot of them did, and while they became quite popular in the 1970s, they also met a lot of critique. Thurston shows in her study that as early as 1981 when RWA (Romance Writers of America) was founded, the general consensus was that the romance novel needed to change.
The readers wanted older and more mature heroines and a hero that
“no longer gets his ultimate thrill from being first, and no more rape” (Thurston, 1987, p. 22). Gradually the “bodice-rippers” disap-peared. The heroine of the romance novel became more sexually ex-perienced and the power balance between the hero and the heroine became more equal. For a while, the domineering hero who does not understand the word “no” disappeared.
It is all too easy to fall into the trap of reading “bodice-rippers”
as one-dimensional texts. On one hand, the “bodice-rippers” por-trayed men as sexual predators and women as passive victims, but on the other hand, these novels also gave detailed descriptions of female desire and showed women both initiating and enjoying sex.
The “bodice-ripper” novels are not just about rape and sex, they are also about obedience. The hero is described as a strong-willed man who is used to getting his own way and who needs to be in control. A very typical trait is that the hero is damaged in some way.
In The Flame and the Flower, Brandon distrusts all women, engaged as he is to the unfaithful and manipulating Louisa. He is used to being obeyed: “You are mine now Heather. No one will have you but me. Only I shall taste your body’s joys. And when I snap my fingers, you will come” (Woodiwiss, 2003, p. 385). In James’s trilogy, Christian is badly damaged by his birthmother and her client, and has never really been able to trust anyone completely: “‘I’m used to getting my own way, Anastasia,’ he murmured. ‘In all things’”
(James, Fifty Shades of Grey, 2012, p. 44).
The heroine is often defiant. She refuses to obey in the beginning and thus earns the hero’s respect. He is angered by her, but unlike other women who obey him without question, the heroine does not bore him. Usually there is a scene in the novel when the heroine
“takes charge” and confronts the controlling hero. In The Flame and the Flower, Heather’s brave speech is a bit one-sided as Brandon is passed out drunk at the time: “You blithering ninny, I am a woman.
What I had, I was holding for the man I’d have chosen and you stripped me of even that. I’m a living, breathing human being, and
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I do have some pride” (Woodiwiss, 2003, p. 191). In Fifty Shades Free, Ana, being pregnant, finally tells Christian to stop being a tyrant:
“But you’re an adult now - you need to grow up and smell the fucking coffee and stop behaving like a petulant adolescent” (James, Fifty Shades Free, 2012, p. 434). Ana is in a way empowered by her pregnancy that gives her a new kind of authority. She speaks not only for herself, but also for her unborn child. This does not mean that the hero stops being controlling, but these scenes are important in the novels. When the hero acknowledges that the heroine will not be a compliant slave, and that he has to change in order to keep her, this generally means that the happy ending is near.
Even if the “bodice-ripper” romance is born in the 1970s, there is, of course, a long tradition of these novels in popular literature, in which E.M. Hull’s famous novel, The Sheik, published in 1919 is an obvious example. James borrows heavily from this tradition in her trilogy. She reintroduces an old-fashioned version of the alpha male. Does this mean that we should interpret Fifty Shades of Grey as backlash? Is James’s recipe for success to go back to a formula that used to be popular and reinvent it? No, I would argue that she also uses current popular genres to make her own unique blend.