Emotion and morality in times of rupture

marital rape in sentimental novels and their reading communities

Abstract

The reading of sentimental novels is a cultural practice that, based on a deep emotional experience, generates, in the sites specialized in the genre, a series of discussions on the aesthetic quality of these works. However, the troubled ratings of the fans of this literature inevitably fall upon moral judgments about the characters’ character and actions. However, the moral system that readers use to think about love, marriage and sex, central themes in this literature, shows ample evidence of ruptures, the most diverse. These ruptures can be clearly expressed in regard to conjugal rape, a recurring theme in the most popular love books sold in magazine banks, published in Brazil in the 1980s. These have gone through time, being eagerly consumed by generations of women distinct from their original audience. In this context we ask ourselves: how do perceptions of love romance readers about conjugal rape reflect important changes in the moral codes that guide heterofeminine sexuality? How do such moral codes align themselves in a community in which emotional extravagance is their raison d’être? How are the moral parameters governing marital rape being negotiated, contested, and reformulated across different times and social spaces? In this sense, this work aims to understand how moral codes about marital rape, in the clear process of destabilization, circulate in the public space in a particular emotional community - that of love story readers. To accomplish this purpose, we chose as a search scenario the site Adoro Romances. The analysis was carried out from the selection of posts related to five works of popularity in the site, whose plot ends in the conjugal rape.