Introduction: The Romance Genre and an Overcoming of the Sadistic Gaze

Chan-wook Park's 2016 film The Handmaiden is exemplary of the (lesbian) romance genre, and while its narrative content and structure elicit a strong pleasurable emotional charge, its stylistic treatment (mise-en-scene, cinematography, and sound design) appeals to the viewing body—to the affective experience. Taken altogether—that is, the emotional and affective charge—this makes for a deeply pleasurable experience. With the romance genre obstacles are invariably thrown in the path of the protagonists impeding the way to their objective. And obstacles can come in many forms—often something that impedes the satisfactory coupling of the primary characters. More often than not, in mainstream cinematic narratives, a satisfactory conclusion ends with the characters’ union, or its potential—marriage being the most obvious example of character unions.

“Whatever the barrier to the romantic union,” Jackie Stacey observes, “the question which must sustain the narrative tension is: will they (and importantly, how will they) or won't they overcome it?” And in most cases the degree of the obstacle proportionally corresponds to the intensity of the emotional charge for the spectator. Similar to the melodramatic genre, as a narrative culminates “it is typically, although not exclusively, the heroine who suffers pain, loss, denial, self-sacrifice and punishment,” Stacey notes. A satisfactory resolution to a romance narrative is predicated upon whether “the couple stay together in either literal or symbolic heterosexual marriage,” if the obstacles cannot be overcome, or the price exacted for overcoming those obstacles is just too great, this will likely lead to a less than satisfactory denouement (within the narrative diegesis, and for the audience as well). “The function of these barriers is to produce narrative tension and to encourage audience involvement in a particular set of intense emotions. The pleasures of romances, then, involve audience participation in the desire for love to win out over these obstacles.”