A Court of Thorns and Roses and Twilight: The Female Gaze in Contemporary Women's Literature

When we consider modern American Women's literature that actually gets attention from the media, many minds immediately think of Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses and Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. Unfortunately, this attention usually isn't for the right reasons. More than any other contemporary fantasy series, the emphasis on the writing quality is pointed at to devalue the success they've achieved through their mostly female audiences. Jade Glenningdale comments on this idea in her contemplations on why Twilight and ACOTAR are over-scrutinized: 

   "No part is...aimed at a male audience, and it was never tweaked for the male gaze. Even its male love interests are entirely creations of a woman’s imagination, based on what she thought would be universally appealing to her female readers."

The attempts to diminish their respective achievements then stem from patriarchal backlash and a need to control women's narratives. In the beginning, the main audiences of women's literature were still largely men. Now, women are finding out they don't need to cater to male audiences to have success; and men are finding out what it is like to consume media that doesn't directly relate to them. They don't want to be Edward, Jacob, or Rhysand because, "it’s a fantasy world where women’s desires are at the centre of the action and the romance," and because they can't discredit the popularity of the narrative itself, they dissect the technical elements as if they are being objective (Glenningdale). Do they do the same for George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones? Does the technical merit of a piece of writing determine its popularity, its longevity? Of course not, but nonetheless, they use "bad writing" to brush aside the significance these narratives have among women audiences. In that way, the fans of these books are designated as less intellectual or basic, and their opinions and discourse about the books inconsequential. Furthermore, remembering that the fans are mostly women, this is an easy "drift" to make by the patriarchy, which already assumes women's intelligence and interests are below men's.

I think what also bothers men is the way women gather in communities around these books and bond over them. Because of these books, we can have the conversations about what women want in a relationship and find attractive, and not just what men think women find attractive (muscles, masculinity, career success, etc). This idea, in recent years, has been termed the "female gaze," which is essentially just viewing the world through the eyes of what a woman desires. Through these books, women have windows into a world that is "a kind of eternal girlhood, a medium of escaping real life into a fantasy which is just as much about a women-centric world as it is about magical fae, vampires and immortality" (Glenningdale). The fantasy aspects are the avenue through which women are resisting against the constraints of patriarchy; because to imagine a human man who has grown up under our societal conditions able to meet a woman's emotional and physical needs -- to see her as her own person -- among so much violence and hatred against women and feminist movements is even more of a fantasy. 

Works Cited

Glenningdale, Jade. “So Bad, It’s Good: Twilight, ACOTAR and the Eternal Girlhood of Romantasy.” The Oxford Blue, 2 June 2025, 

      https://theoxfordblue.co.uk/so-bad-its-good-twilight-acotar-and-the-eternal-girlhood-of. romantasy/.