You can always spot a heroine who’s a spoiled darling. If it’s a regency, she stamps her foot a lot. If it’s a contemporary, she pouts. In both time periods she tosses her head quite a bit. Her family indulges the hell out of her, of course, because she’s a spoiled darling. She’s always gotten her way, which means she’s accustomed to running roughshod over everybody in her path, but her parents and siblings are convinced that she’s adorable so she gets away with murder.

Until, of course, she meets the hero, who is unaccountably intrigued by her. The two bump up against each other repeatedly, the heroine trying to bend him to her will (because everybody always bends to her will, you see) and the hero resisting. Eventually, the heroine becomes someone less bitchy under the hero’s influence and we move on to HEA.

You’ve probably gathered by now that this isn’t one of my favorite characters. I’ll put up with her as long as there’s some indication she’ll snap out of it soon. But the longer it takes her to start behaving decently, the more likely I am to move on to another book. I’m reading a historical now with a spoiled darling in the lead. She’s being beastly to the hero because he doesn’t meet her expectations for an attractive guy. He, rather than suggesting the heroine go find herself somebody who fits her exacting standards, is trying to break down her defenses. At the moment, I’m going along with it because the heroine is showing some signs of interest in the hero. But she flounces a lot, and I really wish somebody would give her a good shake.

I don’t have a problem with a heroine who defends herself against unjust social rules. Kasey Michaels’ recent The Taming Of the Rake is a great example of this type of heroine, a woman who takes charge of a situation rather than submit to unjust social mores. What I object to is a heroine who’s a bitch because she enjoys it and a hero who seems to feel that’s okay.

The spoiled darling’s origins as a character are pretty clear to me—she’s Scarlett O’Hara in modern dress. And as I’ve said before, I find Scarlett herself insufferable as a heroine. The idea that there’s something attractive about bitchiness strikes me as questionable at best. Moreover, there’s a sense in which these heroines confuse bitchiness with strength, which goes beyond questionable to dangerous. Strong women are admirable and make for enjoyable heroines. Just check out Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scandals or Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Dream a Little Dream or just about anything Jennifer Crusie has ever written. On the other hand, the idea that strength is equivalent to arrogance and insensitivity is both perverse and faintly misogynistic.

I have no real hope that the spoiled darling will disappear as a heroine. Considering how frequently she shows up, I’m guessing she must be popular with somebody somewhere After all, people still read Gone With the Wind too, so not everybody finds Scarlett as annoying as I do. I just hope that future iterations have her mending her ways sooner rather than later. After all, once that bitchiness is converted to self knowledge, she could be an interesting woman to know.