For as long as my heart has beaten, I’ve been in constant fascination with the ambiguity of amorous unions. Within my enthusiasm grew a fervent pursuit of the simultaneously impalpable yet corporeal emotional bond between the souls of two individuals. To call into question if a man was my destiny is a dream of mine. To be confident that the active state of the intangible from a particular individual was destined for me was a belief that I held strong in my heart, refusing to let the wind of unlucky romance blow out the candle of my romantic convictions. No matter how many dates ended in unanswered texts, or emotionally one-sided kisses I engaged in, I still harbored a penchant for the romantic, a love, nay— an obsession for seeking the power that was sure to be provided and embodied in my other half. Yet, I frequently consider how I’ve arrived here with convictions as fanciful as the daydreams of a lovelorn schoolgirl. However, my values are still paramount to how I navigate through the treacherous landscapes of personal existence, often more dependent on the secret raw intimacies of my heart rather than the distant impersonal logic of my head. The intensity of my inclination to search for the romantic started the only way appropriate for the gravitas I bestowed upon romance- -within the weight contained in pages.
I was initially drawn to the gravity of the romantic through my fascination with 80’s bodice-ripper romance novels. It was a shameful compulsion whose roots began during the pandemic when my aunt gifted me a book. It was an attempt to bond during a period in which bodily connection and social connection were temporarily annihilated. Although incapable of replacing the quirky warmth of my clamoring musical theater aunt, a book was an acceptable substitute for personal connection. With familial friendship in mind, she gifted me a copy of a 1980s classic, Jude Devereux’s A Knight in Shining Armor. I was immediately drawn in by how the cover embraced the aesthetic of ethereal tackiness; the dramatic multidirectional billowing of the female character’s dress emphasizing the provocatively gauzy garment, her hair lavish, simultaneously virginal and sinful as a gust in the implicit breeze, and a golden glowing yet antique castle in the background hinting at adventures to come. In merely viewing the cover, I felt drawn to the dramatic and fulfilling anticipation of what was to come, especially once I turned the page on the gusty vixen and her coquettish communications.
As soon as I began to read, the substance of the novel itself whisked me away, the anxiety of reality dissipating with great relief. Instead of a world with Clorox-wiped groceries and social distancing, I was propelled into a universe of women whose passion lay dormant until discovered and unleashed by the love-making of a treacherously imposing but arousing fifteenth-century knight, and a multiplicity of euphemisms meant to be mysterious enough to not be bluntly anatomical yet obvious enough to evoke a slight blush, a secretive giggle, and induce a sweaty hand. It was here that I awoke in a world that was, more than anything, an inventive literary reflection of our desire to indulge in clandestine fantasies. Within the evocation of sword, piercing, and stabbing euphemisms, lay a world in which we could implicitly revel in the illicit. What shouldn’t be was. What was taboo, pranced through my head, images of torn corsets and rough riders, all symbols of overindulgence into bodily pleasure. There it was, the greatest gift of lusty literature; an immersion into the taboo, teasing out cheekiness, letting it float to the surface of one’s secretiveness. Yet, I only wanted to tear through more pages, quite like the knight tore through the young woman’s corset— fervently and with a burning curiosity turned desire.
As I continued on my journey of bodice rippers, I became further intertwined in worlds of erotic escapades, lost in visions of intentionally and suggestively torn clothing, and a pulsating carnality evident in the caricaturish prowess of many an archetype alpha. The text, dynamic with its many unorthodox and inventive vocabularic choices for genitalia and active physical experiences of desire, made me giggle and turn pages so fast, it was as if the book was air and I was miming the act of reading. Beyond the cover, there lies palpably a proliferation in ostentatious innocence, for an evocation of the promiscuous. It was a tension so coiled in its pre- and post-promiscuity states, that it often made me giggle like one of the fair lasses in their alluring restrictive corsets, pondering the debauched innocence; an untainted state that was somehow described to be just as sensual, and percolating in the erotic, as its more obviously carnal counterpart. I felt a bit cheeky, as I turned the pages, all weathered and worn from the fervent grips of the desperate suburban housewives that had come before me, dissolving my physical reality into a universe whose romantic climaxes gripped me as hard as the main female protagonists’ corsets. As two books turned into three, slowly, heroine by heroine, euphemism by euphemism, I lost track of the amount I read, and lost myself in the plot, fixating on delving into substance as a way of replacing the starkness in which I was forced to confront my reality, with the rose-colored glasses of sensual castle encounters, horseback riding in the rain, and physical ailments that managed to seem like lubricious suffering.
The very covers themselves, in their tattered, used and worn, loose spine-shifting state, communicated how many others before me had found enjoyment in a silent rebellion, an act of page-turning and diving into the secrets of the salacious. The bent pages and worn spine only indicated to me more that it was more than just me who enjoyed taking a bite of the seemingly forbidden fruit for daily leisure. These novels felt like a secret world, a world that rejected or played with common decency, trading it in for pleasurable indulgence. In indulging in the almost unspeakable, powerfully self-championing the illicit, these worlds were subterranean and operated in sensual sub rosa rules. The very weathered appearance of these novels proved there was a broader population who partook in abandoning implicit guidelines of acceptable politeness and literary morality, and that overall, indulgence was a universal desire, despite how we might stand in opposition to one another in a multiplicity of social arenas. Escaping to these stories, we revel in dalliance and erotica, all enjoyed in a very parodical manner. Soon, we’re festering in and thriving off of guilt, of the pleasurable kind, as if what we are doing is something we shouldn’t be, but in the most positive way possible. The illicit is embodied and communicated to be caricaturish, allowing obscenity, the sensual, and the provocative to pass, an acceptable escape, and to engage in comprehension of.
Furthermore, amidst this universe of heaving bosoms, desire that shines like scintillating moonlight, throbbing need, and temptatious trysts, sex no longer is enjoyed for being sexual, and romance no longer simply proves to be enjoyable because of being romantic. Instead, it is what the romance and sex within these novels elicit within us, rather than the substance of obvious acts. We are pushed to move past the act, the fickleness of fornication, and instead focus on the emotional elicitations. I feel, when I read bodice rippers, a sense of excitement, bubbliness, and humor that feels secretive, a sense of self-indulgence and enjoyment that I revel in concealing. Perhaps by reading novels such as bodice rippers, perhaps why we continue to read such novels is that indulgence is an activity that is selfish in a purely constructive way. We owe it to ourselves to live in a world that only we can call our own. We deserve to draw lines between what is ours and others, theirs and ours, yours and mine, curating a location in which co-opting or borrowing is against the rule of law— it is solely ours. Tacky romance novels present us each with a universe in which we can keep our fantasies, daydreams, and hearts to ourselves. The nuances and obscurity of our secretiveness, starkly shroud what is our own from what is others’. It is in this literary kingdom of oiled-up bodies and torn shirts, ab-exposed warriors, hearts that hang as heavy as the moon with lustful conflict, virginal awakenings, conspiratorial harlots and families, and chiseled jawlines and fiery eyes that kindle the most unexpected of inner stirrings, that one is provoked to simmer in all that they love and are curious of, simmer in what they feel, and savor in the elicited, whose property is strictly yours. The found fondness, and emotional secrecy, within the elicited denies others above one’s self. It is a realm in which keeping secrets isn’t deceitful, not trading in lies for lust. Although their covers may be worn, faded images of sartorially constrained bosoms and six-pack pirates, and a laughable libidinousness, the escape and the power they provide are not. Whenever the novel I am holding is criticized— “Oh heavens, it’s not real literature,”— speaketh the naysayer, I always remember how desire captured in tacky descriptors has helped me to realize that the truest conviction that is always alive in my heart is to love and be loved, both by and with myself, as well as to be open to the infinite affections of others around. To laugh and to love transforms and keeps my idea of romance at bay from being finite. Instead, I revel in, all that is ridiculous as all that is immensely perfect, sustaining romance as the possibility of anything and everything, as wild, fun, and appreciatively unpredictable as the very covers of these books themselves.