Privilege: A Source of Internal Conflict in A Villainous Affair
Cover for Heather Massey’s steampunk romance, A Tale of Two Thieves (A Villainous Affair #1)
A person on Twitter recently expressed a wish for more romances that included scenes wherein characters confronted each other about their privilege and also incorporated privilege as part of the characters’ internal conflict. This narrative choice would be a way to challenge the fantasy that romance characters are heroic and good when in fact their privilege poses a threat to marginalized groups.
(I’m paraphrasing because I’m not seeking permission to quote the tweet here. I did, however, RT their tweet because I, too, would love more romances (especially my favorite kind, sci-fi romance) to incorporate this idea.)
This concept resonated with me because I’ve written a steampunk romance quartet that uses exactly that strategy: A Villainous Affair.
Welcome to the world of A Villainous Affair, a sensational steampunk romance saga about villains and heroes, rich and poor, science and justice, and the breathtaking power of love.
The tale begins with an unlikely pair of thieves who cross paths on one fateful day in a poverty-stricken metropolis….
Once upon a time in Victorian London, lowborn thief Ruby Darling rescues Nathan Harlow, a gentleman fugitive inventor on the run from his murderous uncle. Nathan must prevent his groundbreaking aether device from falling into the wrong hands, while Ruby craves wide-scale social reform to help the country’s destitute people. To ensure mutual success, they strike a deal—her protection in exchange for his technical wizardry to achieve her goal of conquering England.
But Ruby has one condition—their partnership will end as soon as they overthrow the Crown. With millions of lives at stake, she can’t let friendship or romance derail her mission. Nathan agrees even though he's already hopelessly in love with her. A new identity will help shield him from the authorities, so he proposes a fake marriage. Impressed by his sensible idea, she agrees.
Ruby is dirt poor, so first they need to amass a fortune and build a criminal empire. Meanwhile, the League of Vigilance—a citizen anti-crime force led by the intrepid, poleaxe-wielding Eleanor Marson—is on the hunt to capture Nathan and return him to his uncle's evil clutches.
The stage is set for a thrilling adventure as Ruby and Nathan Darling embark on a fantastical journey to gain unrivaled power in the underworld and beyond. Yet navigating their unconventional relationship proves just as challenging as their wildly ambitious mission, with many treacherous waters ahead of them.
***
As I stated in the series’ primer:
A Villainous Affair interrogates whiteness, white privilege, white supremacy, white feminism, colonialism, and imperialism. It does so primarily through the gaze of the main white protagonists, along with a few POV scenes from characters of color…
A Villainous Affair explores gendered differences regarding the use of power (e.g., the tendency of many allocishet white men to hoard power and oppress others for financial gain vs. the tendency of marginalized genders to share power and opportunities). It’s also about leveraging one’s privilege to center those who have been oppressed and empower them…
The story also subverts the idea that white women are pure/innocent/decent and that women of color are motivated by malice or should be feared.
***
Basically, A Villainous Affair takes a sledgehammer to the fantasy that a romance character’s privilege does no harm to marginalized groups.
I’m the only source of information for AVA and currently, blogging and tweeting are the main ways I can share that one of my cross-class romances accomplishes what this person expressed interest in reading about. Even if I only reach one reader who wants an examination of privilege in a steampunk romance like A Villainous Affair, it’s worth the effort for me to write this post.
It’s easy for me to assert that AVA examines privilege in the fashion stated above, but some potential readers need proof before spending their hard-earned money and that’s totally valid. Therefore, I curated examples from the series to demonstrate my efforts. I bolded the sections that make the privilege issue explicitly clear.
Example #1
The following scene from A Tale of Two Thieves details a conversation early in the story wherein Nathan learns about Ruby and how she survived as a thief in the bowels of Victorian London:
He placed down the apple core he’d been holding the entire time, transfixed as he’d been on her tale. “How in the world did you overcome such adversity?”
“You mean how did I survive the streets? Desperation. I kept dipping, but now that I was on my own, it was safer to make money in ways that wouldn’t catch the attention of Leaguers and peelers. You’ve seen the mudlarks?”
He thought for a moment and shook his head. “I’m…not familiar with them.”
“My, that is quite an ivory tower you’ve been living in.” She sighed. “Mudlarks are the children who wade in the mud at the edge of the Thames to dredge up anything of value. Copper nails, bolts, things like that. Sometimes they plunder goods from moored barges. I’ve lost count of how many hours I spent there, digging through that disgusting sludge.” She rubbed her palms together. “Sometimes there were so many pins mixed in with the mud your hands would be shredded within minutes.”
“That sounds awful.”
“The work didn’t bother me so much as the filth. Children fight something fierce over the tiniest of treasures. If you got into a wrestling match, the mud went everywhere.” She visibly shuddered at the memory. “Anyway, you can search all day long and still find nothing. Or you find useless things you can’t sell.”
“Such as?”
“I found part of a human skull once.”
He shuddered. “What did you do with it?”
“I threw it back into the river. I wasn’t about to get imprisoned for murder.”
“Understandable.”
“I also collected dog turds and sold them to the tanneries. I worked as a cross sweeper—”
“Oh, I have seen those! The cross sweepers, I mean. My father hired them when my family visited the city. Mother couldn’t bear stepping anywhere near horse dung.”
The icy look she gave him was cold enough to freeze Hell over. “How delightful for you.”
His face grew hot. “I only meant…never mind.” He wasn’t completely oblivious about London’s struggling citizens, but his remark had underscored his ignorance and widened the already gaping chasm between him and Ruby.
“Let me see, what else…I tried the slop trade on and off, but wound up losing money. They make you buy your own candles, you know.” She cocked her head. “Or maybe you don’t.”
Ouch. She did not pull any punches. “You are correct. I was unaware of that fact.”
“At least I never got stuck working in a factory or mine. The children in those places have it worse than anybody. That’s why we need more unions. I mean, I don’t think they ought to work in factories at all, but in the meantime, they need protection.” She waved her hand. “Anyway, shall I go on?”
He shook his head. “You have sufficiently enlightened me.”
Cover for Heather Massey’s steampunk romance, The Wizard of Aether (A Villainous Affair #2)
Example #2
In this scene from The Wizard of Aether, Ruby and Nathan are at the circus seeking recruits for their burgeoning criminal empire. At this point in the scene, he wants to mix business with pleasure:
“The next show begins in three minutes. Enter here!” the barker declared.
Nathan’s curiosity was thoroughly piqued, not to mention his feet sorely needed a rest. Perhaps Ruby’s did as well. He grinned down at her. “We ought to treat ourselves. It’s only sixpence.”
She arched a brow. “Only?”
He cut her a look. “Are you determined to make me feel guilty every time I forget to acknowledge my privileged upbringing?”
“It’s quite simple, Mr. Darling. I shan’t have to induce guilt if you always remember to acknowledge it.”
Example #3
The following scene details a conversation between Eleanor Marson, a butch lesbian Black woman who runs the League of Vigilance, a citizen crime-fighting force, and Ruby Darling, queen of the London underworld. Ruby has been apprehended by the police and Eleanor realizes this is her only chance to learn about Ruby’s motives for building a criminal empire.
There are huge spoilers in this scene, but it’s probably one of the best examples of how the story uses privilege as a source of interpersonal conflict as well as demonstrating how a privileged romance main character can cause harm even when they think they’re being heroic/doing good deeds. The scene deliberately subverts the fantasy we often have about privileged romance characters, i.e., that they’re good people despite the threat their privilege poses to marginalized groups.
Witness how Eleanor confronts Ruby about her privilege (white and otherwise) with surgical precision:
Had the Darlings envisioned using aether for anything other than self-enrichment? Or was Eleanor projecting her own wishes onto them? Not for the first time, she reflected on the benefits of channeling aether’s technological might to disadvantaged groups. They deserved to benefit from it above all others. She hungered for that version of the future so badly she could taste it.
Well, there was only one way to learn the answer to her question. And this moment would be her last chance.
“Tell me something, Mrs. Darling.”
Darling opened her bloodshot eye, the right one having swollen shut. Her head was the only visible part of her body. Like the rest of her, it had taken a few beatings over the past several days. Her face was a canvas of dried blood and dirt smears. Welts covered her forehead and cheeks. Her knotty, messy hair would give Medusa a run for her money. Eleanor didn’t delight in violence, but it was a necessary evil when dealing with lawbreakers like Darling.
“What do you want to know?” she asked, her voice slurred from exhaustion, pain, or both.
“What were you hoping to accomplish with the stolen aether technology?”
“We’re not the thieves you ought to be worried about. Christopher tried to steal the aether generator from Nathan and nearly killed him in the process. We were preventing it from falling into the wrong hands.”
How ironic. “Only those two know what truly happened.” Eleanor had her suspicions about the matter but refused to elaborate. “I’m more curious about what you planned to do with the aether generator. Were you only after money, or did you want something more?”
She sighed. “I suppose I haven’t got anything to lose by telling you. This is the truth, I swear.”
“Go on.”
“We wanted to use aether to fix things. Help the poor. Clean up the streets.”
She frowned. “Clean them up of what? Crime?”
“No, the shit. The literal shit from horses. The nasty rubbish people dump everywhere.” Darling’s non-injured eye slid shut, but she forced it back open.
A fantastical, yet appealing idea. “So…a sanitation device?”
“Mmhm. Nathan was also going to make an aether-powered filter system so everyone in the city could have clean water.”
“Is such a machine even possible?”
Eleanor had never heard wind of anything like it from the Council. Access to clean water would help London’s citizens in countless ways. Had the Council ever considered using its inventions to improve infrastructure? Or had such a venture been too cost-prohibitive until aether came along?
“Nathan can build anything with aether. He’s brilliant beyond your imagination. We were going to help improve the cities. Make them a nice place to live for everyone, not just the rich.”
Darling’s proposal beggared belief. What criminal would ever have that kind of authority? Yet now Eleanor understood why Christopher had pulled political favors to keep his nephew at the Hall of Science. If Nathan Darling could build aether weapons, he could make inventions geared toward the common good.
“I suppose he still may.”
“Not now, he won’t.”
Eleanor tsked. “Why so petty?”
Darling scowled. “His uncle…and Vic…Queen Victoria…they’ll use aether as a weapon of control. They’re evil.”
“Hardly. They weren’t the ones committing crimes right and left.”
She visibly struggled to speak around the reddish drool leaking from her mouth. “I beg to differ. Christopher tried to murder Nathan, remember? And the queen does nothing to stop poverty and other social ills. Neither does Parliament—or the Council. For those crimes alone, none of them have a right to the technology.”
Spoken like a true white person battling other white people for world supremacy. “What makes you so entitled to it?”
“It’s not a matter of entitlement but having compassion and the proper intent.” She noisily cleared her throat, though it did nothing to alleviate her slurred speech. “We were going to use aether to improve everyone’s quality of life.”
Framing her privilege, crimes, and sheer luck as a charitable contribution to society was downright devious. Such twisted arguments were simply old aggressions leveraged against marginalized groups in a new form—a cycle that never ended. “Many people help the poor and improve the city without resorting to crime.”
“Good for them. But there’s much more work to be done and aether technology is key. Our reforms were going to happen on a grander scale, like redesigning the city streets to make them accessible for the disabled. We were going to regulate the factories to make them safer. Build proper houses and heat them with aether. Things like that.”
Did her wild ambition know no limits? Only a government had that kind of reach, assuming it was a government that cared. Or did Darling not understand how systemic oppression worked to keep marginalized people in chains? It wasn’t a ship that would easily change course. “How on earth would you have done all that from your underworld lair?”
“I…well, think of the harm to England if I hadn’t found a way.”
When it came to criminals and their lies, Eleanor had heard them all—or thought she had. Darling’s had an unusual flavor. Grandiose, yes, but something more. Something unsaid. “Those are worthy goals. Unrealistic, but worthy. But why did you believe a crime spree was the best way to achieve them?”
“I prefer to describe my methods as unconventional.”
Eleanor snorted. “‘Course you do.”
“I don’t deny my unlawful acts. But I wouldn’t have had to resort to any of them if society hadn’t stacked the odds against me from the start.” She sighed. “As a woman, I was going to be framed as villainous no matter how I tried to change things for the better.”
“Why fight the inevitable.”
“Exactly.”
Eleanor tightened her grip on the dart pistols, wary of bonding in any way with the criminal before her. Ruby Darling was her nemesis, so solidarity could only go so far. “Not only am I familiar with that experience, I have the extra bonus of being judged by my skin color.”
“Meaning?”
“Frankly, I’m suspicious of your charitable intentions.”
“Why?” she snapped, and then coughed up some blood. “Because I’m a criminal?”
Eleanor narrowed her eyes. “No, because few people of color in this country are deemed worthy of the position and power you held, even if it was ill-gained. In fact, white people of all kinds have gone to great trouble to deny folks like me the opportunity in the first place.”
She appeared taken aback. “Didn’t you hear a word I said? Nathan and I were going to help everyone. We’re nothing like those fucking blue blood race haters.”
“Is that so? You didn’t give the aether generator to anyone of color after it fell into your lap. That proves you were only interested in consolidating power for yourself.”
“You’re upset that we hoarded the aether.”
“Damn right I am. White people hoard enough things in this world without adding a powerful new energy source to the mix. By keeping the aether to yourself, you were actively causing harm to people of color. Hardly what I’d call dismantling systemic barriers.”
Eleanor sighed in exasperation. Why was she wasting so much emotional labor on a person destined for the gallows?
“There’s no denying we acted in our own self-interest. And not only because we’re criminals,” Darling added wryly.
“No argument there. But if given a second chance, you wouldn’t have done anything differently.”
She looked askance. “If I’m to be honest, no. I didn’t relinquish my power because….” Then she seemed to think better of continuing. “Well, I have my reasons.”
“Right. I’m sure they’re as pure as the driven snow.”
“Pure or not, it doesn’t matter anymore.”
That much was true. “Listen, you can’t escape your whiteness any more than I can escape my blackness. But whereas the color of your skin makes you invisible, mine makes me a target for hate and violence every single day. So when technology like aether comes along and people like you get first crack at it every damn time, it’s infuriating.”
Darling’s gaze searched hers. “You’re right. I know an apology wouldn’t be worth shit, but perhaps it’s some consolation that in my case, society has finally gotten around to holding a white woman accountable for hoarding her privilege.”
“Seems we agree on one thing, at least.”
Cover for Heather Massey’s steampunk romance, Dark Queen Rising (A Villainous Affair #3)
Example #4
Here are a few scenes where Ruby’s newfound wealth privilege is a source of internal conflict:
Close to midnight on November fifth, Ruby rode with Nathan in the aethercoach cab as it rumbled down Nankin Street in Limehouse.
Several hundred Chinese seafolks and immigrants lived here at any given time. They prospered despite numerous obstacles, but the newspapers dwelled on the area’s reputation for crime, poverty, and poor living conditions because publishers would rather profit from people’s misery than their joy.
The disparity between Limehouse’s poverty-stricken residents and her privileged life induced a pang of guilt. Not only was she traveling to Limehouse dripping with wealth, she was doing so with one of her two full-time drivers. With so much work to do, driving the aethercoach herself was no longer practical.
***
Then she sighed. Why was her mind wandering down that road at a time like this? Her recent conversation with Eleanor Marson must have prompted it.
Marson had been right to doubt her intentions and accuse her of selfishly hoarding aether. As far as the Hammer of Justice was concerned, the Mudlark Queen was nothing more than a ruthless mob boss. Since when did criminals give a rat’s arse about social reform?
Ruby’s plans to help dismantle race hatred at an institutional level would have been an effective use of her privilege, but wouldn’t change the fact that she and Nathan had continued the pattern of keeping innovative, profitable technology in the control of white people. Though life had dealt her a rotten hand, her suffering paled compared to those of color. Until she proved her good intentions with meaningful results, marginalized folks would be right to question her qualifications to be a leader for all.
Cover for Heather Massey’s steampunk romance, Battle Royale (A Villainous Affair #4)
Example #5
In the following two scenes from A Tale of Two Thieves, Nathan struggles with the negative impact of his privileged life:
How unsettling that he was thoroughly dependent upon Ruby for his every need. Yet it wasn’t a new experience. Since he’d been born, someone else had always provided for him. While living with his parents, he had never wanted for anything. Before Christopher turned murderous, he had given Nathan a generous stipend in addition to housing and meals. Not once had he ever had to worry about having a roof over his head. Now he would have to claw his way back from nothing. The prospect of fending for himself terrified him. When it came to survival, his skill sets were plentiful in all the wrong areas.
Even worse, his dire situation had piled yet another burden onto Ruby’s underprivileged life. He wasn’t her problem. Neither was the fate of his aether generator. It was time to take the reins of his life into his own hands for once. Best to take his chances alone than place her life in danger by being in his company. Mrs. Harding had already exploited her once. No matter the consequences, Nathan would not perpetuate the cycle. He would leave as soon as circumstances allowed and hope for the best.
***
Truth be told, though he had always been sympathetic to the plight of the poor, the issue had never been foremost in his mind. Even his mother’s charity work had operated on the fringes of his life. He’d listened to her tales about the downtrodden women she served but had rarely seen any of them. The sad truth was he had learned more about underprivileged people during his short time with Ruby than the rest of his life combined.
***
These scenes as well as many others make the case that A Villainous Affair examines the harm posed by different kinds of privileges and makes this issue a source of internal conflict. If you find this approach intriguing and want to give AVA a try, A Tale of Two Thieves is permanently priced at $0.99.
