Juliet, Romance, and the Award-Winning Genocidal Hero

Romeo and Juliet by Ford Madox Brown (1870)
 Is it just me, or is Juliet gritting her teeth?
And Romeo's pose is kinda awkward.

    Is Romeo and Juliet a romance?  

    No, it's not.

    Many people consider R&J the epitome of romantic stories, and ... well, I think they are wrong.  If someone wants to try to convince me that R&J is a romance, I promise I'll listen and hear them out (but I'm unlikely to change my mind).  It is certainly a poignant story, but it is a heart-breaking tragedy and not a romance.  Hell, its full title is The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. 

    Seriously, on date night, do you think accidentally killing your partner's kinsman is romantic? Might you consider going no-contact with both families?  No? How about getting stranded because of a plague epidemic or committing suicide?   Do those sound like a fun and oh-so-romantic followup to a dinner by candlelight? 

    The death of children has never struck me as especially romantic, perhaps because I've seen the emotional wreckage it leaves behind.  Even in the 17th century, Shakespeare's audiences would have been horrified as soon as Juliet's age was revealed and that her mother had been had only been 14 when Juliet was born.  The groundlings at the Globe would have been considered Juliet much too young for marriage because a thirteen-year-old was still a pre-pubescent child (in 1600, the average age at menarche was 16). 

    Pregnancy in young girls was also dangerous as hell because they frequently died in childbirth (perhaps because their pelvises hadn't yet broadened), and infants born to very young mothers were nearly always underweight. In a time when the child mortality rate approached 50%, risking an underweight newborn was asking for trouble, and the Elizabethans knew it.  While it's true that on rare occasions, dynastic marriages occurred when the girl was only thirteen, the young couple was typically kept apart until the bride could safely bear a child, usually around the age of 18.  

    Romeo and Juliet may not be a romance, but it is about love ... and hate.   It's a conflict between the individual and the group; two individual kids fall in love, yet their families' hate tragically keeps them apart.  

    I'm comfortable with calling R&J a love story, though, because there is an important distinction between that and romance, but the terms are not interchangeable.  There is dissent, of course, on what counts, but the most commonly agreed-upon modern definition of romance is that it's a story that focuses on the romantic love between the main characters, has at least hope for a happy ending, and the main characters must be in a relationship at the end of the book (you can see how this definition excludes R&J).

    A love story is a much broader category, requiring only that love be at least a subplot. It is far more defined by what it doesn't require than what it does; no happy ending is necessary, the main characters don't have to end up together (they might even marry other people), and romantic elements don't have to be the primary focus.

    In other words, all romances are love stories, but not all love stories are romances. 

    The disagreement as to what counts as a romance even extends to the Romance Writers of America (RWA), and whoo-boy, do they have an oddball history, particularly with regard to changing social norms, and their inability to respond to the wishes and needs of their diverse readership. For the last decade or so, they've had egg (or entire omelets) on their face more often than not.  I'm not going to address most of the organization's problems here - that's the subject for a term paper or even an MA thesis, but I included a few links at the end if you are interested.

    But the RWA, with a stunning lack of awareness, confused love story with romance twice in a six-year period, honoring books featuring genuinely genocidal heroes. Because committing genocide is so, so romantic?

    The hell? 

    In one case, RWA gave one of its prestigious awards to a book that features a hero with a "tortured soul" (it's a common romance trope). He's an American soldier who took part in more than one massacre of Native Americans, including at Wounded Knee. I get that sometimes soldiers get caught up in horrific situations after the shooting starts, but those are tragedies.  And no matter how remorseful he is, how can one enjoy his romance and happily ever after against a backdrop of the innocent victims he murdered and the author's condescension toward the victims' religious beliefs? 

    In the hands of a skilled author, a genocidal soldier might make an interesting protagonist or anti-hero (Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy, I'm looking at you), but a hero of a romantic story? Yeah, no. 

    In another case, the RWA advanced a book to finalist (in two different categories!) that features an SS officer at a WW2 concentration camp as a hero. The heroine is a Jewish prisoner, and they fall in love; he saves her, she rejects her Judaism, and converts to Christianity. While I don't think the hero needs to be a good man, it's pretty hard to accept one who is committing actual war crimes. The SS officers who ran the camps were evil shits, monstrous in ways the Beast never was in Beauty and the Beast.  

    There could also never be genuine consent by the heroine, and it's hard to imagine finding the love story between a Stockholm syndrome-suffering victim and an evil genocidal monster in the least bit romantic. And what happy ending is even possible when she knows her lover holds her ethnicity in so much contempt that he is willing to torture and murder people because of it? 

    It's reasonable to call the novels described above love stories, and I don't doubt they are well-written -- they wouldn't have been finalists or won awards if so -- nor do they lack realism; they strike me as possible, perhaps even probable in real life. I suspect the WW2 love story was inspired by the real-life relationship between Franz Wunsch, an SS guard at Auschwitz, and the Jewish prisoner Helena Citrónová. While she did have feelings for him, they had no happy ending (she married someone else, and he stalked her for years before finally giving up), and at his trial in 1972, she testified that, yes, he had indeed saved her, but that she had also witnessed him committing atrocities.

    So, I know I'm gatekeeping a bit, but I'd really prefer that genocidal main characters stay off the romance shelves and stay in the historical fiction lane where they belong. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this. 

    Oh, and did I mention that the RWA regularly passed over highly acclaimed entries by black authors in order to recognize books that featured the deeds of the aforementioned genocidal heroes?  Unsurprisingly, the RWA entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May of 2024.

Selected Links:

• RITA Controversies
• RWA Wiki page - Diversity Controversies
• Inside the Spectacular Implosion at the Romance Writers of America
• Fifty shades of white: the long fight against racism in romance novels
• White romance novelist in racism row says she was used
• A romance novelist spoke out about racism. An uproar ensued