Romantic Fiction

An important book that I dipped into years ago, but have only now read completely, is Janice Radway's Reading the romance. It's brilliant in its thoughtfulness about a subject—women's reading of romance novels—that is usually dismissed without much thought.

Radway studied a selection of women's romance novels and, more importantly, had a series of conversations with an informant, Dorothy Evans, who worked at a Mid-Western branch of an American chain bookstore and published a monthly newsletter in which she reviewed newly published romances. Dorothy believed that "a good romance focuses on an intelligent and able heroine who finds a man who recognizes her special qualities and is capable of loving and caring for her as she wants to be loved" (p. 54). Radway also had  informative conversations with 16 of Dorothy's customers, and analyzed 42 responses to 50 questionnaires she sent out. It seemed to be a surprise to Radway to find herself performing a psychological study of readers' experiences, and to come to respect readers' opinions.

Part of the brilliance of this book is that, in it, Radway leaves telling trails of footprints along paths she traced and retraced in her approaches to her material. One of Radway's paths was that, as a literature professor influenced by the New Critics, she was supposed to study the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text. So she took a rather sniffy attitude to the romance texts, which she describes as "dominated by cliché, simple vocabulary, standard syntax, and the most common techniques associated with the nineteenth-century realist novel" (p. 189). A second path was from her feminist perspective. She says: "it is tempting to suggest that romantic fiction must be an active agent in the maintenance of the ideological status quo because it ultimately reconciles women to patriarchal society and reintegrates them with its institutions" (p. 217). A third path was her interest in psychoanalysis, especially in Nancy Chodorow's work, The reproduction of mothering (1978). She wonders whether the romance's underlying appeal is based on regressive fantasies in which women "feel particularly happy, [as] they escape figuratively into a fairy tale where a heroine's needs are adequately met"  (p. 93).

Here are two readers' descriptions of romances, which Radway says were echoed again and again by Dorothy's customers:

Generally there are two people who come together for one reason of another, grow to love each other, and work together solving problems along the way—united for a purpose. They are light easy reading and always have a happy ending which makes one feel more light hearted.

I think [a romance] is a man and a woman meeting, the growing awareness, the culmination of the love—whether it's going to jell or if it's going to fall apart—but they [the heroine and the hero] have recognized that they have fallen in love [emphasis added]. (p. 65).

Radway says most of her respondents were middle-class women with children, who saw reading as making time for themselves apart from the insistent demands of their families. Here's what she writes:

Romance reading … is a strategy with a double purpose. As an activity, it so engages their attention that it enables them to deny their physical presence in an environment associated with responsibilities that are acutely felt and occasionally experienced as too onerous to bear. Reading, in this sense, connotes a free space where they feel liberated from the need to perform duties that they otherwise willingly accept as their own. At the same time, by carefully choosing stories that make them feel particularly happy, they escape figuratively into a fairy tale where a heroine's needs are adequately met. As a result they vicariously attend to their own requirements as independent individuals who require emotional sustenance and solicitude. (p. 93).

In the end, it's the path taken by the readers that Radway herself comes to tread with most confidence. She explains how, in identifying with the heroine in romance fantasies, a typical reader first explores how the man in the story is aggressive and insensitive (as men often are!) but of then being loved by him with the kind of care and tenderness that she herself gives to her family, but which the family by no means always gives to her. Perhaps, Radway suggests, romances have the effect of helping women to maintain and develop this kind of love in themselves and to develop it, too, in their marriages and among their children, female and male.

Nancy Chodorow (1978). The reproduction of mothering: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Janice Radway (1984). Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.