Date of Award
Spring 5-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Justine Van Meter, Ph.D.
Second Advisor
Lynda Hall, Ph.D.
Third Advisor
Richard Ruppel, Ph.D.
Abstract
This thesis argues that the contemporary rise of Romantasy is not merely a publishing trend but a significant literary and cultural development through which female desire, agency, and subjectivity are being renegotiated. Tracing a historical continuum across Gothic horror, fairy tale discourse, and contemporary fantasy romance, I contend that patriarchal ideology has long constructed women according to a restrictive binary: either silent and compliant, or monstrous and punishable. Drawing on theorists including Jack Zipes, Barbara Creed, Cristina Santos, Maria Tatar, Louis Althusser, and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, this project examines how literary forms have both reflected and reinforced cultural anxieties surrounding female sexuality, autonomy, and self-definition.
Through readings of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, canonical fairy tale traditions such as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Beauty and the Beast”, and Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses, I demonstrate how narratives centered on women's maturation and desire have historically served as ideological training grounds. In many horror traditions, women who transgress prescribed gender roles are rendered dangerous, deviant, or doomed. In many fairytale traditions, women who remain pure and submit to prescribed gender roles are rewarded. However, in Romantasy, the very traits once coded as monstrous are increasingly reframed as sources of power and are free to safely fantasize different choices they can make. I argue that Maas's novel reworks the cautionary structures of horror and fairy tale into a form that privileges female erotic agency, consent, self-possession, and narrative authority.
Ultimately, this thesis positions Romantasy as a modern fairy tale apparatus through which women writers and readers contest inherited scripts of passivity, marriage, purity, and submission. Its extraordinary popularity signals more than commercial success, it reflects a broader sociopolitical shift in which women increasingly reject patriarchal definitions of fulfillment and embrace stories that authorized desire, autonomy, and transformation. In this context, the rise of Romantasy reveals not only the persistence of cultural panic around liberated womanhood, but also the growing power of women to rewrite the terms of their own representation.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Stucki, Rachel. The Rise of Romantasy: Female Desire, Monstrous Feminists, Fairy Tale Ideology, and Societal Panic. 2026. Chapman University, MA Thesis. Chapman University Digital Commons,https://doi.org/10.36837/chapman.000739