A Court of Thorns, Roses, Starlight, etc
Some thoughts on Sarah J. Maas’ extremely bestselling, apparently controversial fairy romance series
In a way, Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses trilogy was exactly the pandemic read I was looking for, its plot loosely-limbed and golden, conscious of its grace and unaware of its faults. Much like the male romantic hero, an immortal faerie prince, who, for all of book one, occupies the female protagonist’s attention. And how could he not, with descriptors like these:
[Tamlin] was shirtless, with only the baldric across his muscled chest. The pommel of his sword glinted golden in the dying sunlight, and the feathered tops of arrows were stained red as they poked above his broad shoulder. I stared at him, and he watched me back. The warrior incarnate.
To call this series a romance undersells just how deeply these books commit to the genre. Indeed, throughout the book, Maas tries to sell us on a romance as strained as it is improbable, based on the much-told and frankly preposterous Beauty and the Beast.
Leaving aside the question of whether these books are really just faerie erotica, Beauty and the Beast makes for troubling source material even in the hands of self-aware writers. It’s hard to spin a modern love story about a wealthy powerful man holding a poor village girl captive in his house. Maybe the problem is captivity. Maybe it’s the house.
But what is a love story without a good house? In book one, Feyre, the tasteless mortal female at the heart of this complex web of desires, falls for a fairy lord who owns a beautiful estate. It’s crammed with rose gardens and full of jewel-bright rooms that unfold endlessly, like the patterns at the end of a kaleidoscope. Unfortunately, the guy turns out to be a controlling jerk, which fans of foreshadowing will note is an upset that’s been many centuries in the making. So Maas does something entirely unexpected — she has her heroine decamp, dumping Tamlin (henceforth, Bae 1) for a seemingly villainous alternative, Lord of the Night Court, Rhys. Bae 2. A breakup! In a romance novel! Great stuff!
Bae 2, unlike his predecessor, is occasionally woke. When it comes to getting married, taking on dangerous missions, or having children, he reassures Feyre that everything is her “choice.” “It’s always my choice with him,” Feyre says at one point, starry-eyed, perhaps unaware that Jane Eyre left Mr. Rochester for far less, back in 1847.
The story goes to great lengths to reassure us that despite Feyre’s departure from Tamlin’s untender affections, she’s not — God forbid — just some promiscuous and changeable mortal, intent on getting with as many hot faerie dudes as she can before she’s forcibly returned to the human realm, where men are generally unattractive, die of old age, and go maskless to marches. (It’s no wonder, perhaps, that her standards are low.) No, no, no, Rhys is Feyre’s mate, a bond that runs straight through the soul, supersedes institutions like marriage, and also — in Rhys and Feyre’s case — allows them to communicate telepathically across great distances. Obviously, they use this mental link for sexting. Maas uses it, meanwhile, to subtly justify Feyre’s decision to abandon one lover for another, which made me sad, because really, who’s here for an explanation?
There are moments — for example, when Feyre leaves Tamlin, or when he alludes to bonds greater than marriage — when I felt great hope for this story, for the possibility that maybe it’d grow beyond the moral strictures of the typical het romance. There was even a point, when Rhys confronted Tamlin and Feyre about their relationship, when I wondered if they might resolve their triangle with an old-fashioned threesome. Alas, no dice.
You might be thinking, wow, she was really looking for something different, and this is true. I liked these books. I liked them because they were romance, not in spite of it (after all, there’s not much left in spite of the romance). My cavils come down to two: the love stories are utterly banal; and Feyre is about as interesting as yesterday’s toast.
It’s not Feyre’s fault. Maas is constantly trying an impossible balancing act, in which she’s trying to center some feudal notion of heterosexual love while also asserting that Feyre is her own independent person. These two ideas can’t really co-exist.
Consider, for example, the idea of power. This book talks a lot about power, both implicitly and explicitly. In book two, Feyre refers to Rhys, breathlessly, as “the most powerful male in Prythian”. One of his courtiers teases him about “being such a powerful High Lord.” When introducing Rhys to her sisters, Feyre notes again his “otherworldly grace and thrum of power,” and when he nears, she has to prepare herself for “his scent, his warmth, the impact of his power.” These references to Rhys’ power frequently appear in the story’s most sexually charged moments, gilding descriptions of him that veer into the animalistic: he purrs, he stalks. It’s like watching a Nature documentary about humans. Feyre isn’t just a partner, she’s prey.
For a less powerful person to be attracted to someone for their power is not attraction at all, but a fetishization of inequality. There’s fear at the heart of it: fear of being powerless; which is why it’s so significant to Feyre (and perhaps to Maas) that Rhys constantly gives power back to her. At one point, upon discovering that Rhys is her mate, Feyre herself doesn’t quite believe it: “Mates were equals — matched, at least in some ways.” Someone else reassures her: “You are made of all Seven High Lords.” Even to me, in the moment, this felt like a stretch. Made? We were all born; it’s what we do afterwards that counts. Beside 500-year-old ruler Rhys, the teenage Feyre feels like a guttering candle.
The relationship between Rhys and Feyre is characterized by an awkward push and pull that never quite resolves. Two of the most disturbing sequences in the books involve Rhys parading Feyre around like actual property; scenes that get swept under the rug of memory when the two confess their love.
The rest of the plot is similarly divided against itself: it alternates between long chapters in which Feyre moons after powerful men; and frenetic sections when she must claim and display an agency she is otherwise unable to locate with both hands and a map.
At the end of book one, Feyre succeeds in solving a difficult riddle and besting a villain’s insane challenges, only to meekly return to withering in her partner’s shadow. And despite an apparent talent for math, she amasses wealth by that most ancient of mechanisms: via marriage to Rhys. Her power comes from him, so does her money, so does her authority.
In book four of the series, which is really a Solstice-themed novella that has a bit of a “Doctor Who Christmas Special” flavor — a queer female character — full of wanderlust — contemplates the sprawling secret estate she’s bought as a refuge for herself. She feels ownership, pride and agency. A desire to move, to be learn, to grow.
Contrast this with where Feyre has landed: at the end of book four, she goes moony-eyed when Rhys gifts her an enormous estate and notes that it’s big enough for a nursery. In this final move, the heterosexual romantic plot comes full and vicious circle: Feyre becomes the mistress of the big house, not through independent work or inherent worthiness, but rather through her partner’s love and generosity. The apogee of the straight romantic story is not just a transactional gesture but a feudal one: this will be, Feyre notes with barely concealed glee, the largest house in town. A perfect match to the jewels that Rhys has already given her, and the “salary” he pays her for services that seem to amount to being his partner. Why not just call it an allowance? Early on in book two, while Feyre is still struggling to make things work with Tamlin, another faerie taunts her: “Isn’t that what all human women wish for? A handsome faerie lord to wed and shower them with riches for the rest of their lives?” Feyre flees this domestic bliss, but by the end of the series, is her outcome really that different? And how much of that difference is something she’s effected herself?
The worst part, perhaps, is that Maas has a lot of talent when she’s not shoring up the edifices of medieval heteronormativity. Some critics revile her writing style for being flowery and slow-moving, I love it entirely. For all his philosophical flaws, Rhys, lord of the starry Night Court, is described repeatedly as having “star-flecked” eyes. This descriptor is both cheesy and epic; it offers a lot of flavor.
A Court of Thorns and Roses is one of the most successful but by no means the only YA fantasy romance to profit from this formula, in which a stubborn young woman falls for a wealthy and powerful man. In Maria Snyder’s “Poison Study” series, Yelena is drawn to Valek, who is notably overprotective and successful. He happens to be an assassin for a fascist regime, but she ignores this seemingly minor problem. Here, too, Yelena struggles to become Valek’s equal, although perhaps with slightly greater success. Meanwhile, in the “Graceling” series — which I adore — Kristin Cashore has the passionate Katsa fall for Po, a Prince in exile, who happens to be wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. I understand that these stories are fantasies, but why do they all look so much the same? These were not the fantasy novels I read as a teenager, which makes me wonder if this crossover has become more successful in recent years, perhaps in the wake of phenomena like “Twilight” or “50 Shades.”
For me, personally, there’s poison at the heart of this feudal love story, and not only for the obvious reasons. The history of this type of attraction is also a history of financial and social exclusion. To wear a marginalized history on your skin, regardless of the margin you inhabit, is to know that for a long time you were (often legally) barred from personhood, including from a starring role in so-called love stories. To question what makes people attractive and where our love stories lead, then, is inextricable from the exercise of untangling racism and patriarchy.
I love when fantasy romances live up to the genre’s premise: to re-envision the world, to re-examine and re-assign power. My favorite fantasy romance of all time appears in Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart trilogy. While it features two straight people, it does so in a world inherently pansexual, kinky and non-monogamous; where sex work is respected; and where the seam between love and society can be a site of exploration, growth, and acceptance. Phedre, another teenage heroine with a hard-to-pronounce name and a tragic backstory — is a prostitute, a linguist and a diplomat. Her lover doesn’t appear in tough moments to solve conflicts with his all-consuming powers, because he has no such powers. She ascends no thrones herself, and when she does earn a title, her partner’s best hope is to occasionally share it. (It’s perhaps no surprise that another of Carey’s works is Miranda and Caliban, a fantasy romance retelling that critiques The Tempest for its colonialism, and questions who benefits when one person is deemed a “suitable partner” and another isn’t.) On the other end of the spectrum, in the Court of Thorns and Roses trilogy, even Feyre’s enemies note that she “married quite well.” No friction.
I think, on some level, this better, newer story is one that Maas wanted to tell. My complaint isn’t that she didn’t try, it’s that I wanted her to try harder. In fantasy worlds, love looks different, and so does its history. Storytelling expands the boundary of the possible. There are writers doing this work in queer spec romance (Gideon the Ninth is my next read) and in science fiction (Left Hand of Darkness, Lilith’s Brood, many others), but that’s partly what makes these formulaic fantasy romances even more depressing, especially since I look to these stories for escape, inspiration and creativity.
