60 pages • 2 hours read
Pen Pal
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Background
Literary Context: Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, sexual violence and harassment, rape, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual content.
The Divine Comedy is an epic poem written in the early 14th century by Italian poet Dante Alighieri. In the poem, Dante enters the afterlife with the help of Virgil, Beatrice, and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who guide him through the three stages of the afterlife: Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (heaven). Dante’s journey through hell shows him sin and punishment, with Virgil aiding in explaining the specific sins and their connection to punishment. Hell, in Dante’s vision, is split into circles, and his representation of the afterlife is consistent with 14th-century understandings of Christianity. After Inferno, Dante enters limbo, or purgatory, in which he learns more about the seven deadly sins and the corruption of God’s love through sin. In Paradiso, Beatrice guides Dante into heaven, revealing virtue and introducing Dante to various saints and theologians. Paradiso concludes with Dante seeing and understanding the divine trinity, which allows him to see God’s vision for humanity and the love he feels for his creation.
Pen Pal mirrors The Divine Comedy in that it is split into parts titled Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, though The Divine Comedy is split into equal parts; Pen Pal dedicates more time to Inferno. Like The Divine Comedy, Pen Pal shows Kayla’s journey through hell, into purgatory, and finally into heaven. Instead of God’s love, however, Kayla discovers Aidan and her own love, which Geissinger contrasts against Michael’s abuse. Pen Pal also does not catalog sins and virtues, instead centering on Kayla’s perception of sin and virtue, such as her guilt over sleeping with Aidan and her inability to see Michael’s crimes in her illusory “life.” Like Dante, Kayla has guides, including “Dante,” Aidan, Fiona, and Claire, who lead her from one stage of the afterlife to the next. The Divine Comedy is an allegory whereas Pen Pal is a romance, so the parallels between the two are limited to specific thematic concerns, such as life after death, sin, crime, and love.
Genre Context: Dark and Paranormal Romance
Pen Pal mixes two subgenres of romance: dark romance and paranormal romance. While dark romance usually capitalizes on mortality, portraying themes of death, violence, and sexuality, paranormal romance eschews mortality to discuss life after death, immortality, supernatural powers, or hauntings. Both genres tend to mix in elements of horror and erotic fiction, with notable dark romances like Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton or paranormal romances like Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. Paranormal romance often shows romances between humans and non-humans, such as vampires, werewolves, or ghosts, while dark romance usually addresses issues of crime and morality, such as sexual assault, murder, or human trafficking. These subgenres are not mutually exclusive, and many works contain elements of both depending on their thematic focus. For example, H. D. Carlton’s Does It Hurt? capitalizes on horror tropes of isolation, haunting, and the supernatural to emphasize the dark plot of murder, sexual assault, and kidnapping. These works generally contain explicit content, specifically regarding eroticism, but Twilight stands out as a notable example of non-erotic, dark, and paranormal romance.
Pen Pal sits firmly between these subgenres, using both supernatural and natural violence and sexuality to establish the love story between Aidan and Kayla. For most of the novel, Kayla experiences strange events that align neatly with the horror subgenre of the haunted house. However, by the end of the novel, Kayla realizes that she is dead, and her life has been an illusion. Aidan, too, is dead, making their romance a romance between two ghosts. Nonetheless, events from Kayla’s life and marriage broach the difficult topics of domestic violence, stalking, and abuse, which are common in dark romance. Additionally, Kayla and Aidan’s intense dominant/submissive role-playing is another trope of dark romances, in which the issue of dubious consent—a term often used in dark romance that refers to the gray areas between rape and consent to describe situations in which unequally distributed power dynamics limit an individual’s ability to consent—often plays a major role in the main romance.
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