Reformed Rakes are what happens when the heroine of a romance story wants to
have her shallow little cake and
matrimonially eat it too —
because, of course, former bad boys make the best husbands. This is a common Regency Romance trope. When it applies any man who didn't sleep around as a bachelor is
supposedly going to be a boring wimp as a husband at best, if not an outright villain. Conversely men famous for cutting a swathe through the wives and mistresses of the town not only knows how to please a woman and protect her from harm, he is only waiting for that one special woman who will cause him to reform and cleave to her with unwavering fidelity as the perfect family man.
Never is it mentioned that there's a risk of disease from his antics, nor does he ever have any bastard children that he has to pay attention to, nor does anyone ever point out that real reformed rakes had a tendency to turn into gigantic prudes. He never backslides even when he is revisited years later in other books. Compare to
All Girls Want Bad Boys, but here the trope is not just that the bad boy is attractive, but that
all he needs is love to fix everything wrong with him, so you can have both that trope and
Single Woman Seeks Good Man simultaneously.
More often than not, the core of
Fan Fictions written by teenage girls, when they don't want their self-insert
Relationship Sues to become a
Love Martyr.
Compare
Ladykiller In Love, a more realistic take on this issue, and
Female Angel, Male Demon for a metaphor of this trope when the two aforementioned characters are in love.
Related to
Draco in Leather Pants.
Note this trope has nothing to do with
restoration rakes
, though they may overlap. It also has nothing to do with
The Rake making a
Heel Face Turn.
Examples:
- Ladies and gentlemen, a book list.
- Then there's Siren Publishing, an outfit that publishes "spicy" romances, including a line of novels under the imprint Reformed Rakes.
- It all started in 1740 with Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded where the eponymous character overcomes Mr. B's rakishness with her Mary Sue-like perfection of virtue. Wildly popular to the point where it alarmed the author, Samuel Richardson, producing the opening quote, and making this Older Than Radio.
- With regard to one of the conditions above, he does have an illegitimate daughter by a woman who left for another country, who he's seen taking care of near the end of the book after Pamela warms to him.
- Seth from Wicked Lovely. He has piercings, lives in a train and has a reputation for getting around....yet he truly loves Aislinn to the point of Sacrificing his mortality to be with her for eternity.
- Rod of Out There offers this. [1]
- And Wally does it...after being married a while. [2]
- Naveen from The Princess and the Frog, after he marries. Considering he says that he's dated thousands of women...
- There's a romance novel titled Stranger In My Arms that actually deconstructs this trope: The heroine's husband has been presumed dead for years, and she isn't too sad about it because he was unfaithful to her and never seemed to enjoy having sex with her. Then, out of the blue, he returns Back from the Dead, says that he's a changed man, and proceeds to be passionate and devoted to her in a way he never was before. The heroine is pleasantly surprised, but can't shake off the feeling that rakes don't reform that thoroughly, and gets uneasy when her friend uses her husband's changed behavior to justify her staying with her own physically abusive husband in the hope that he'll change eventually. It turns out that the heroine's husband did die all these years ago, and her current "husband" is actually her husband's half-brother who learned about her through diaries her husband left behind and decided to use his impersonation abilities to be the loving husband she never had.
- Deconstructed in "The Rake's Song" by The Decemberists. The Rake gets married, is apparently reformed, "no more a rake and no more a bachelor"...but then he realizes that sex leads to babies and discovers that the married life really isn't for him. Cue infanticide!
- Tramp from Lady and the Tramp. Falling in love, being adopted into a family, and becoming a father will do that to a dog.
- One episode of Castle, "Food To Die For" has a victim that was trying to become this. After he got his foster brother's girlfriend pregnant, she rejected him, telling him that she couldn't rely on a man that slept around. However, he was honestly in love with her, to the point where he planned to quit his promising career as a chef and spent two weeks going to a cafe near her job, trying to get up the nerve to propose to her. Unfortunately, the foster brother found out and killed him.
- Youth in Sexual Ecstasy arguably could be a reconstruction of this, the protagonist after being an expert womanizer, ends up settling down with a more prudish and conservative girl; it is stated that his past sexual experiences still do some harm to the sex with his wife, however, despite this with The Power of Love they are able to overcome them and become Happily Married.
- Deconstructed in A Dangerous Compromise by Shannon Donnelly, in which the heroine thoroughly believes this trope, and her (decidedly not a rake) love interest decides to pose as a reformed rake to win her over, while battling for her affections with an actual rake who has absolutely no intentions of reforming.
- According to Word Of God, Patrick Maitland from Coupling. The final episode of the series showed him awkwardly proposing to his girlfriend Sally, but the scene ended with a stunned Sally babbling an incoherent string of F-Bombs. Some time later, creator Steven Moffat was asked what happened to the characters after the end of the show on a forum. To quote him:
- "Sally said yes to Patrick, they got married and are very happy... especially as Sally beat Susan to the altar, and finally did something first. Patrick is now a completely devoted husband, who lives in total denial that he was anything other an upstanding member of the community. Or possibly he's actually forgotten. He doesn't like remembering things because it's a bit like thinking."
