2023-05-31 05:30:00
Dark love stories that deal with a “taboo” subject. It is the principle of dark romancedont Captive by Sarah Rivens is one of the avatars in bookstores. This literary genre particularly appeals to young female readers.
A love story in a sect, a mafia or a gang with kidnapping, sequestration and violence – psychological, physical or sexual. The two heroes? The victim and his executioner, or two victims, two criminals or even two members of the same family. This is – in short – the pitch of the dark romancea literary genre that is a great success with female readers.
“It works very well”, confirms Sarah Berziou, director of Black Ink Editions which publishes this type of novel in particular. “It’s a genre that is exploding, the audience is huge.”
Example with the recent success of Captive by Sarah Rivens, who recounts the “waking nightmare” of “dangerous, malignant, and deadly” young women, including the heroine, captives of criminal networks, facing their “possessors”.
The first volume was first self-published online on the Wattpad platform – the first two have accumulated 11.7 million readings there – before the entire saga was published by Hachette and became a bookstore phenomenon.
When the very first book appeared on paper, the 10,000 copies sold out in one hour. The third volume was immediately placed number one in sales when it came out, dethroning the confidences of Prince Harry. In total, the trilogy accounts for more than half a million sales in less than a year.
Novels “sometimes hard to read”
Valou, 39, co-author of a blog devoted to romance, is one of these readers. What he likes about dark romance: the psychological workings of the characters. “How, despite the desperate situations they go through, they manage to move towards something brighter thanks to a powerful feeling of love,” she explains.
The genre particularly appeals to young female readers, with the core target being 15-25 year olds. Laure, a 21-year-old student and “booktubeuse”, appreciates that these novels explore “darker” universes. “We discover subjects that are not usually discussed,” she says.
But the young woman recognizes that some books are “sometimes hard to read” and that “it can be trying”.
“I have already had the experience of reading several in a row. I realized that it was not something I had to do again.”
“We play with taboos”
Carla dark romanceit is “a forbidden or unhealthy romance with moral or legal limits which are crossed”, estimates Elodie Faiderbe, author of dark romance. In his four-volume saga Vila Emilia, the two heroes are a young woman and her guardian – a gentleman by day, a killer by night. A story of seduction, revenge and initiation to murder.
“It’s necessarily subversive and transgressive”, abounds Angel Arekin, another author.
“We play with taboos, prohibitions. But without necessarily there being physical or sexual violence”, she specifies.
In his dark romance The Missing Obsession, a woman is abducted and held prisoner by a man. “It’s a psychological duel, not the succession of difficult and gratuitous scenes”, promises Angel Arekin.
For Amélie C. Astier, author of With You – two kidnapped, abused, abused teenagers who fall in love – it’s about staging an anti-hero who “does not enter the codes of romance”.
According to its defenders, the genre would even offer more freedom. “We can tackle subjects that are uncomfortable and allow ourselves more things than in classic romance”, continues Elodie Faiderbe. “Like inventing a heroine who has deviances.” Theme of his next novel: cannibalism. But she recognizes that the trend is one-upmanship with more and more “trash” novels.
A way to “glamorize” rape?
This is one of the reproaches made to the genre: the dark romance would trivialize violence against women. What denounces Camille Emmanuelle, publisher and former author of erotic novels, who believes that the genre “glamorizes the influence and makes rape erotic” and does not push for female emancipation.
American scholars conducted a study of female readers of Fifty Shades of grey – which is not strictly speaking the dark romance but rather an erotic romance with a BDSM tendency. According to their result, the latter show more sexism than those who have never immersed themselves in the saga often presented as being at the origin of the phenomenon.
With the dark romance “Basically, it’s always the same pattern: a submissive female character who does not rebel and does not seek a collective response to male violence”, slice Camille Emmanuelle.
“At the end, the happy ending offers a form of redemption to the aggressor,” says the editor. “As if the solution was necessarily love.” Also a sex therapist, she wrote the pamphlet Letter to the one who reads my erotic romances and who should stop immediately in order to alert on the contents of these books.
“A series about a serial killer does not glamorize murder,” retorts author Amélie C. Astier. “The idea is to explore the mechanisms of manipulation. “It’s not because we read dark romance that we agree with what is happening there”, adds Sarah Berziou, of Black Ink Editions.
A very young readership – too young?
The fact remains that some booksellers are cautious. Flore Gautron, based in Fontenay-le-Comte (Vendée), does not present this kind of novels on the shelves. Because some of his clients are 12-year-old girls.
“I don’t care what adult women read and fantasize. But normalizing relationships of influence with young people aged 12-13 is a public health problem,” she worries.
If it recognizes that Harlequin type collections or the chick-lit (sentimental comedies written by women for a female audience) already conveyed stereotypes in the past, they were, according to her, “less dangerous”.
“We added to these clichés a hypersexualization and a normalization of psychological but also extremely problematic physical violence when it is addressed to young women, even young girls in sexual and sentimental construction”, she assures.
“Almost all cultural production is already crossed by sexist biases”, answers Ludi Demol, doctoral researcher at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis, specialist in pornography consumption among young people. For the academic, these criticisms would be a form of contempt for this female readership. “What girls do is never good enough,” she laments. “They don’t read enough or not enough.”
“Me, what I see is that the girls read, discuss their readings and write in turn (hundreds of dark romance are self-published on Wattpad, Ed). Which allows them a form of exploration, and that’s a good thing.”
“It’s not for minors”
Author Angel Arekin denies exposing young people to inappropriate content. “There dark romance is not intended for minors but for an informed public, like porn is not intended for children”, she defends herself. The publisher Sarah Berziou agrees: “We put warnings on the books (a warning custody or trigger warnings, keywords that warn of explicit and potentially shocking content, which are increasingly common, Ed)”
“How far should our responsibility go?” she asks. “That’s the role of the parents.”
In the case of Captive, the publisher thus specifies on his site “trigger warnings: mentions of rape, physical violence, violent language”.
As for the accusations of glorifying violence against women, it would be “reductive”, retorts Caroline Sobczak, manager of the publishing house Plumes du web. “The naive, prisoner girl who falls in love with her executioner is a sub-genre,” she says. “There dark romanceit’s much broader than that.” She also refuses to publish novels that would depict non-consensual sexual relations between the two heroes.
Only fiction?
“It’s still fiction”, relativizes Marion Libro, a 23-year-old literary blogger, for whom the dark romance would even have informative virtues.
“Faced with difficult situations, it pushes you to ask questions, to wonder if we would have made the same choices and acted like this or that character.”
This is not the point of view of Patricia Mozdzan, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst and family counselor. “The consequences are real on young people in research and construction,” she warns. For this clinical psychologist, the dark romance is part of a much broader process of trivialization of pornography.
“Children are increasingly exposed to sexually explicit content. By dint of seeing or reading it, it normalizes them.”
A “reactionary” literature, slice Camille Emmanuelle, the penitent author. “I’m not judging female readers but behind the glamorous trappings, toxic relationships are presented.” How much can a very young readership make sense of things? she wonders. For her, “making dangerous men sexy is problematic”.
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