Disney vs. Dark Romances

What is a romance novel? Does it regard a man falling in love with a woman, do they live happily ever after, is it always this simple. Not necessarily, one of the greatest books I ever read was Wuthering Heights which is considered to be in the romantic genre but it does not abide by many standards that the original romantic genre is composed of.  The traditional romantic genre mainly involves a man and a woman who are separated by some sort of force before they are to be married. This has some correlation to the Disney movie princesses as they are sometimes obstructed by a witch to get to their prince. After the prince defeats the witch the two live as a happy couple. What does not make sense is that the prince and princess have a few actions of being together before they get married? This is best exemplified in movies such as Cinderella, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, and Sleeping Beauty. Contrary to that, the genre that evolves from novels like Wuthering Heights are dark romances. Dark romances are conceptualized with death and can have happy endings except they are not the basic happily ever after as in most romance novels. Rather dark romances can have ties to Shakespeare such as in Romeo and Juliet, though they were both in love they both did end up dying in the end. This helps explain the fact that living happily ever after in a castle is not always the case in many lives. In many lives death will occur, but the way you remember your lover is what matters. This can be seen in Wuthering Heights when Elizabeth dies and Heathcliff is torn to pieces as he cannot be with his beloved. According to this book the conventions of a dark romance would consists a strong female character who has to make a decision between wealth or a man that she loves. In the book Catherine’s decision was between Edgar Linton who was a rich neighbor that she had or Heathcliff, her adopted brother who was rescued by her dad. Furthermore, as this romance is dark a person dies has to die and I mentioned before this is Catherine. Also the love that developed between Heathcliff and Catherine can be seen as dark since they are step siblings. The overbearing protagonist in the book was Heathcliff who was not a kind person, but rather a mean person who would hurt anyone in this way to get closer to Catherine. This evokes another convention in this genre as the main character is not necessarily a prince but rather a person taken over by love for another. Another convention would be that the love between the two people is unorthodox such as a possible connection between a vampire and a human. The endings of dark romances can be happy or a saddening one. For one the novel  Wuthering Heights ending was a little bit of both since it involved a depressed Heathcliff who acquired a bunch of land by negative means. However, the ending also involved positivity as his lover’s daughter and his adopted son were eventually going to get married because their love was growing. The romance genre is complex as it involves conventions from Disney animated love stories, while also containing darker elements such as in Wuthering Heights.