YMMV / The Flame and the Flower

• Character Perception Evolution: Back in the early 1970s, Brandon Birmingham was regarded as a complex and swoonworthy love interest, going from an arrogant (though attractive) rogue to a devoted husband willing to protect and be vulnerable around Heather. Their love story was popular enough to make The Flame and the Flower a bestseller and revolutionized the romance genre. However, by the 21st Century most readers find Brandon to be representative of almost everything wrong with romance novels of yesteryear, due to him being a possessive, controlling rapist who treats Heather extremely poorly; abusive behavior being presented as romantic and/or downplayed is now far more heavily criticized than it was in the 70s. The fact Brandon is a sympathetically-portrayed slave owner in the American South (which the book itself glosses over) also makes him come off unfavorably to modern readers.
• Designated Hero: Brandon. He rapes an already-traumatized Heather twice and only regrets it later when he realizes she wasn't a prostitute (as opposed to rape generally being awful). When she rejects his offer to become his mistress (which he makes to prevent her from reporting him), his earlier remorse goes out the window and he rapes her again. He's only prevented from raping her a fourth time because he's interrupted. He then resents being forced to take responsibility for Heather and their unborn child, when it's entirely his fault she's in this predicament. He also already has a fiancee while he's out picking up prostitutes and trying to coerce Heather into being his side chick. The reader is expected to root for him and Heather to overcome their differences and end up in a happy marriage. Brandon does eventually start to become a better person and a loving husband towards Heather, but considering how abhorrent his initial behavior was and the circumstances of their marriage, a lot of modern readers find him difficult to tolerate as a romantic hero.
• Genre Turning Point: A massively pivotal work in the history of the romance genre. The most significant innovations were being the first full-length romance novel to be published as a paperback original, and the first romance novel to include graphic sex scenes, but there were a number of others.
• Once Original, Now Common: A romance novel with explicit sex and a Reformed Rake falling for The Ingenue? Isn't that basically all of them? Well...for those not in the know, The Flame and the Flower all but invented the modern bodice ripper. Prior to this book's publication romance novels tended to be very chaste, while this one was significantly Hotter and Sexier. Its popularity led to it having a huge influence on the genre, with many subsequent romance novels taking inspiration from this one.
• Values Dissonance: The plot of the book is essentially about a teenage girl who is repeatedly sexually assaulted by a man who had mistaken her for a prostitute, they're forced to marry after she gets pregnant, he's a complete jerk to her because he resents marrying her, then they fall in love eventually and he's subsequently redeemed via The Power of Love. To say the plot hasn't aged too well is a major understatement. Admittedly, it makes more sense if you consider the historical context; the sexual revolution was still ongoing when the book was published in the early 1970s, pre-marital sex was just barely acceptable and the idea that women actively wanted sex at all (and that this didn't make them immoral) was still making it into the mainstream. Having the hero of the romance novel be forceful with the heroine got around the issue of 'good women didn't actively seek out sex' while still giving readers sexy stuff; it was treated more like an erotic fantasy than rape. Nowadays of course, few romance novels would take this approach as it very much comes across as Romanticized Abuse and those that do often get harshly criticized.

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