Happiness and Culture

By Ryanne Kap

Abstract

It’s a trope as old as time: a career-driven woman finds happiness and self-actualization by choosing her love life over her work life. Romantic comedies such as The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and The Proposal (2009) depict women at the height of their careers as cold and joyless; their success in the workplace is mutually exclusive with romantic love, and thus with a happy ending. Yet films such as Set It Up (2018) and Always Be My Maybe (2019) subvert this trope by allowing their workaholic leading women to achieve romantic love in tandem with their career goals. This paper traces the evolution of the lovelorn careerist trope within the aforementioned films, drawing on feminist theory and gender studies to analyze how the genre’s equation of romantic love with happiness intersects with the neoliberal feminism of the “girlboss” to contain the protagonists within a regressive model of socially acceptable womanhood.