This morning’s Halloween edition of the Wall Street Journal looks at the trend of “paranormal romance novels,” books in which the heroine falls in love with a vampire, a werewolf, or a shape-shifting warlock.
Journalist Laura Miller thinks there’s some cultural importance to the fact that this genre is selling so well among American women. She writes:
“Here lies one of the unique pleasures that the vampire romance can provide for its female readers: the opportunity to enjoy an 18th- or 19th-century courtship while remaining a 21st-century woman.
“The problem with historical romances is that if you want a man who behaves like Mr. Darcy, you have to live within the constraints imposed upon a woman like Elizabeth Bennet; in addition to the lack of voting rights, credit cards and any chance of pursuing a profession, there is the fun-squashing little matter of virginity taboos. In order to bask in the chivalry of a Regency-era gentleman, a modern woman can be magically transported back to his time (another popular romance device), but she’ll still be stuck in a society where she hasn’t mastered the rules and her freedoms are severely curtailed.
“Make the gentleman immortal and he brings with him into her modern world not only his ancestral estate and fortune, but an anachronistic understanding of how to treat a lady. Replete with old money, the vampire hero has plenty of leisure time to embroil himself in politics (fictional vampire societies tend to be complex and conspiracy-ridden hierarchies) and to woo the heroine.”
I find all this a little creepy, and very sad. What does it tell us about the American sexual-industrial complex that women feel a need to fantasize about undead blood-feeders in order to imagine a courtship in which men are less, well, predatory than they seem right now?
It’s probably the same reason that so much “historical fiction” in the “Christian” market is about the same thing, minus the blood-sucking and the sex, plus some dialogue about getting saved and discipled. The protagonist finds a man who is faithful, respectful, protective, self-sacrificial, and who will lead. But she has to imagine herself in the 17th-, 18th-, or 19th-century if it is to appear at all realistic.
Vampire romance is twisted, for sure, but it’s just one more signal that there are some hurting men and women ought there, some of them browsing the racks of your local bookstore.
Let’s pray for churches that signal a Christ/church union in which Jesus honors, respects, and cares for his bride. This Alpha and Omega male isn’t a predator and he isn’t a manipulator. He doesn’t seek his bride’s blood, and he doesn’t use her body. He offers up his body and blood for her.
In our culture, sadly, that seems even more incredible than werewolves, witches, and vampires.
