Eljie Mae Omandam English 198 SP1

Wildest Dreams: Reading the Narrative Elements of

Romance in Judith McNaught’s Perfect

First published in 1993, Perfect1 is a single-title contemporary romance novel written by Judith
McNaught as part of her “Second Opportunities” series. It follows – to keep true to the language of
romance – the gripping love story of Julie Mathison and Zachary Benedict whose societies are
sketched, at first, as disparate and distant. The hero belongs to notorious Hollywood, our heroine to
an uneventful small town called Keaton. Ostracized from the high society of Ridgemont, Zachary
moves to Los Angeles and succeeds as a critically acclaimed actor/director. He has it all: money,
fame, women, and the rugged good looks. All these (except the latter, of course) he loses after his
conviction for his wife’s murder. Incidentally, Julie revels in her family’s affections. She is
nonetheless familiar with the ordeal of social banishment: Julie is formerly an outcast, a delinquent
foster child, before becoming a beloved teacher and the perfect, decorous daughter and sister to her
new family.

Zachary’s experience (sexual and otherwise) highly contrasts that of Julie’s ‘innocence’. He is
a ‘man’s man’. She is an angel. The distinction is further delineated in their meeting wherein our
hero – after escaping prison – abducts Julie. How he came to abduct her is so unrealistic, but it
effectively establishes the dramatic tension and the amorous chemistry of the two. It is the kind of
“highly charged emotional situation” (Barlow and Krentz 17) for which we can attribute the
intensity of the reading experience. We already expect they will end up together, but it matters how
the writer takes us from this fantastical meeting to the satisfying betrothal scene.

In the first few chapters, the author gives the hero something almost all our favorite
brooding male characters share: a mysterious, oppressive past. Zachary’s family disavows him after
he purportedly caused the death of his brother. Moving to California, he lands a role as an extra in a
movie, which catapulted his career in the show business. What this personal history achieves is not a
justification for exaggerated machismo. Instead, it highlights the ‘transformative power’ of our
heroine after she unpacks the hero’s complexity as Zachary’s past underpins his capacity to love. We
realize that the hero, while hypersexual and aloof, is actually extremely loyal and sensitive. These
redemptive qualities often delineate the elusive distinction between bad boys and toxic men. It can
also very well be a projection of women’s desire for a more active role in the dynamics of courtship:
the idea that only one woman can invoke feelings of love from a Heathcliff or a Hades2.

In the end, nothing remarkable has changed with their society except it saw, through the
hero and the heroine’s union, healing and redemption. Linda Barlow and Jayne Krentz3 pointed out
that this kind of narrative alludes to a long tradition of narrating tales about a naïve girl falling for
the ‘devil’ or the contemporary ‘bad boy’. We all know how it ends. The climactic barrier, i.e., the
death of a character that implicates Zachary in the murder of his wife only augments the reader’s
satisfaction when the couple finally surmounts them. It is, precisely, this familiarity and level of
predictability – “the promise of integration and reconciliation” (Barlow and Krentz 18) – that
ensures a satisfying ending and why they continue to hit the Bestseller shelves.

1
McNaught, Judith. Perfect. Pocket Books, 1993.
2
Reading the heroine this way might present a problem, i.e., women expecting to change a potential partner’s
behavior. I, however, think that this is where we draw the line between the “wild dream” and real-life expectations lest
we make a facile interpretation, ignoring what the fantasy actually reveals apropos of the desires expressed through
it.
3
Barlow, Linda, and Jayne Ann Krentz. "Beneath the surface: The hidden codes of romance." Dangerous Men and
Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance (1992): 15-29.