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Okay, does anybody but me have this issue with Tori Amos's "Pretty Good Year," where the line "and Greg he writes letters and burns his CDs" means something different now than it did when she wrote it? That always jolts me right out of the song.
Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature: I reread this as part of my article revisions, and it has been so influential in my intellectual development that I thought I'd do a more extensive review than usual. Initially published in 1984 based on interviews conducted in 1979-1980, Reading the Romance is a classic audience study. Radway interviewed women who were heavy romance readers in a Midwestern city, mostly married with children above toddler age. She found that the women used romance reading as an escape – the act of reading was as important as the content, because it allowed them to assert their selfhood, their entitlement to time for themselves, against the family's demands for care. Why romances, then? Radway concluded that the women were not just seeking to step back from their caretaking roles; they were seeking nurturing, someone to take care of them, and the romance provided that in the form of the hero, who mixed male and female traits in satisfying ways.
The book begins with a history of publishing as shaped by two contending forces: the desire to gain control over audiences and predict demand versus the insistence that each book is a unique and special snowflake. Radway points out that genres are defined not just by their conventions, but by their audiences – the genre formula exists to give writers access to a group of people who like that genre. Romances attained mass commercial success when it was technically and socially possible to market them like commodities, using a brand name like Harlequin. Romances were in the vanguard of this transformation, not some other genre like Westerns, because women were the biggest audience available to publishers, and women read romances, so romance offered the biggest financial payoff.
Radway investigated what made a romance good in her subjects' eyes. Her sample would not speak about sexual arousal, and generally said they disliked explicit sex scenes. They didn't like the then-new more explicit Harlequin lines, which demonstrates the limits of her work: she has little to say about what made other types of books attractive to some female audiences, though the market success of those other types suggest that such audiences existed. Still, with that in mind, her results are fascinating. She sets out a narrative that a successful romance must follow for her sample, which involves a man and a woman who quickly recognize their own attraction to the other and must overcome emotional/interpersonal difficulties over time to understand that the other's love is true. At some point in the narrative, the man switches from antagonism/cruelty to tenderness, admits that he cannot live without the woman, and then she is able to admit her love and live happily ever after.
As with the slasher films analyzed in Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chainsaws, romances can be enjoyable because of the content that precedes the official ending of the story, even if the message of the ending conflicts with that of the setup. (This reminds me of my childhood adoration for Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman, which seemed like a celebration of female power to me but now usually makes me cringe. I paid attention to the parts I liked and ignored evidence to the contrary, writing instances of weakness or need for male assistance off as products of extenuating, external circumstances, like Radway's subjects.) In particular, Radway's readers enjoyed portrayals of female independence, even though the heroines ultimately compromised or surrendered that independence for love.
Radway's subjects felt guilty about the time, money, and even emotional energy they devoted to romance reading. They thus also developed justifications for their reading, chiefly that reading romances – historicals, generally – gave them factual information about the settings, thus transforming pure leisure into self-improvement "work." They reported that this learning justification often succeeded, at least to the extent that spousal protests dropped off, though Radway has to take their word for it. As for the emotional energy invested, Radway points out that there's a certain Catch-22 about reading traditional romances: by accepting the message that good sexuality has to be marital and monogamous, readers accept that their desire for erotic and romantic literature (pleasure not supplied by husbands) is wrong.
Radway also examines "failed" romances, ones that her informants thought were just okay or were worthy of being thrown in the trash, which further illuminates what the romances were doing for the readers. She argues that the really trash-worthy, failed romances were usually too explicit about the reality of male violence and patriarchy, so that the man's conversion from contempt and abuse to devotion and care at the end of the story was unconvincing, unable to reassure the reader after the terrible events earlier in the story. The not-great romances, by contrast, usually had weak narrative lines – two possible heroes, for example, so that it wasn't clear until late in the book which one was right for the heroine – but still produced mutual recognition of love between hero and heroine at the end.
As a side note, I've been becoming interested in our culture's increasing sexual explicitness. So I enjoyed Radway's description of one failed book as an "endless chronicle of sex act after sex act, each of which is described in too-explicit, unromantic detail," because she selects the very first paragraph as an example of the book's "obsession with the simple mechanics of the sexual act." Yet not a single sexual act is described, only a woman's "breast and belly, and passages made free to him," followed by "sudden movement, a gasping sharp intake of breath, the sound of the cloth on the dirt floor ... and then silence again." Such was graphic detail in 1979; this condemnation appears to be Radway's opinion as well as that of her informants. Admittedly, her other example of pure pornography seems a lot closer to the mark even for today, with its thrusting cocks pounding into wombs (ouch).
Radway suggests that the "good" romances worked because they allowed women to interpret male behavior in a reassuring way. Although the hero was cold and harsh, he was secretly vulnerable, and only behaved coldly because he misunderstood the heroine's initial behavior, while she misunderstood his. When the truth came out, the hero would admit his terrible need for the heroine, his uncontrollable passion and tender care, and all would be well. At the same time, Radway felt that the hero's shift from mean to tender was usually not well-motivated by something the heroine did, instead seeming to come out of the blue, which she thought suggested that women could not really change men but had to hope for one who was secretly good all along. Still, the narrative allowed the readers to interpret male and female behavior as naturally sex-segregated, and discount male (husbandly) failures as not really showing lack of care. I wasn't completely convinced, in part because her informants never said that they thought of their own husbands as romantic heroes who just hadn't gotten around to the part where they confessed total dependence, but certainly I understand the narrative appeal of gentling a man through love – the meaner he starts out, the greater the triumph is. Her interpretation also has echoes in what![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
melymbrosia has said about the idea of a romance as a first encounter story. Radway suggests that in the romances she reviewed, the heroine "discovers" that masculinity need not be contradictory to female fulfillment, but "when properly interpreted," "implies only good things for women" – to wit, sexual difference and thus love, marriage and attention. Because Radway's readers wanted to read about couples overcoming difficulties that were emotional rather than external (such as physical separation or other barriers that kept the couple apart even though they both knew they loved each other), they wanted a story that was fundamentally about interpretation of the unknown and its eventual domestication, in all the senses of the word.
The book retains its force for me on rereading. Radway's attention to reading as a practice, rather than just analyzing the texts, remains helpful to me in thinking about what texts mean in the world, as opposed to what I think of them. She has interesting insights into the appeal of a narrative that is both known (it's part of a genre; it has conventions that will produce a happy ending) and unknown (the reader can't tell what in particular will happen this time; tension remains). Especially in the introduction to the revised edition, she's also careful to state what she's found out and what she hasn't, such as the reading practices of other female audiences. I would be interested to see another, similar study of a different, more current set of romance readers – somehow, I don't think Radway's readers would like Jennifer Crusie and some of the other names that I see in other journalers' reviews.
Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature: I reread this as part of my article revisions, and it has been so influential in my intellectual development that I thought I'd do a more extensive review than usual. Initially published in 1984 based on interviews conducted in 1979-1980, Reading the Romance is a classic audience study. Radway interviewed women who were heavy romance readers in a Midwestern city, mostly married with children above toddler age. She found that the women used romance reading as an escape – the act of reading was as important as the content, because it allowed them to assert their selfhood, their entitlement to time for themselves, against the family's demands for care. Why romances, then? Radway concluded that the women were not just seeking to step back from their caretaking roles; they were seeking nurturing, someone to take care of them, and the romance provided that in the form of the hero, who mixed male and female traits in satisfying ways.
The book begins with a history of publishing as shaped by two contending forces: the desire to gain control over audiences and predict demand versus the insistence that each book is a unique and special snowflake. Radway points out that genres are defined not just by their conventions, but by their audiences – the genre formula exists to give writers access to a group of people who like that genre. Romances attained mass commercial success when it was technically and socially possible to market them like commodities, using a brand name like Harlequin. Romances were in the vanguard of this transformation, not some other genre like Westerns, because women were the biggest audience available to publishers, and women read romances, so romance offered the biggest financial payoff.
Radway investigated what made a romance good in her subjects' eyes. Her sample would not speak about sexual arousal, and generally said they disliked explicit sex scenes. They didn't like the then-new more explicit Harlequin lines, which demonstrates the limits of her work: she has little to say about what made other types of books attractive to some female audiences, though the market success of those other types suggest that such audiences existed. Still, with that in mind, her results are fascinating. She sets out a narrative that a successful romance must follow for her sample, which involves a man and a woman who quickly recognize their own attraction to the other and must overcome emotional/interpersonal difficulties over time to understand that the other's love is true. At some point in the narrative, the man switches from antagonism/cruelty to tenderness, admits that he cannot live without the woman, and then she is able to admit her love and live happily ever after.
As with the slasher films analyzed in Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chainsaws, romances can be enjoyable because of the content that precedes the official ending of the story, even if the message of the ending conflicts with that of the setup. (This reminds me of my childhood adoration for Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman, which seemed like a celebration of female power to me but now usually makes me cringe. I paid attention to the parts I liked and ignored evidence to the contrary, writing instances of weakness or need for male assistance off as products of extenuating, external circumstances, like Radway's subjects.) In particular, Radway's readers enjoyed portrayals of female independence, even though the heroines ultimately compromised or surrendered that independence for love.
Radway's subjects felt guilty about the time, money, and even emotional energy they devoted to romance reading. They thus also developed justifications for their reading, chiefly that reading romances – historicals, generally – gave them factual information about the settings, thus transforming pure leisure into self-improvement "work." They reported that this learning justification often succeeded, at least to the extent that spousal protests dropped off, though Radway has to take their word for it. As for the emotional energy invested, Radway points out that there's a certain Catch-22 about reading traditional romances: by accepting the message that good sexuality has to be marital and monogamous, readers accept that their desire for erotic and romantic literature (pleasure not supplied by husbands) is wrong.
Radway also examines "failed" romances, ones that her informants thought were just okay or were worthy of being thrown in the trash, which further illuminates what the romances were doing for the readers. She argues that the really trash-worthy, failed romances were usually too explicit about the reality of male violence and patriarchy, so that the man's conversion from contempt and abuse to devotion and care at the end of the story was unconvincing, unable to reassure the reader after the terrible events earlier in the story. The not-great romances, by contrast, usually had weak narrative lines – two possible heroes, for example, so that it wasn't clear until late in the book which one was right for the heroine – but still produced mutual recognition of love between hero and heroine at the end.
As a side note, I've been becoming interested in our culture's increasing sexual explicitness. So I enjoyed Radway's description of one failed book as an "endless chronicle of sex act after sex act, each of which is described in too-explicit, unromantic detail," because she selects the very first paragraph as an example of the book's "obsession with the simple mechanics of the sexual act." Yet not a single sexual act is described, only a woman's "breast and belly, and passages made free to him," followed by "sudden movement, a gasping sharp intake of breath, the sound of the cloth on the dirt floor ... and then silence again." Such was graphic detail in 1979; this condemnation appears to be Radway's opinion as well as that of her informants. Admittedly, her other example of pure pornography seems a lot closer to the mark even for today, with its thrusting cocks pounding into wombs (ouch).
Radway suggests that the "good" romances worked because they allowed women to interpret male behavior in a reassuring way. Although the hero was cold and harsh, he was secretly vulnerable, and only behaved coldly because he misunderstood the heroine's initial behavior, while she misunderstood his. When the truth came out, the hero would admit his terrible need for the heroine, his uncontrollable passion and tender care, and all would be well. At the same time, Radway felt that the hero's shift from mean to tender was usually not well-motivated by something the heroine did, instead seeming to come out of the blue, which she thought suggested that women could not really change men but had to hope for one who was secretly good all along. Still, the narrative allowed the readers to interpret male and female behavior as naturally sex-segregated, and discount male (husbandly) failures as not really showing lack of care. I wasn't completely convinced, in part because her informants never said that they thought of their own husbands as romantic heroes who just hadn't gotten around to the part where they confessed total dependence, but certainly I understand the narrative appeal of gentling a man through love – the meaner he starts out, the greater the triumph is. Her interpretation also has echoes in what
melymbrosia has said about the idea of a romance as a first encounter story. Radway suggests that in the romances she reviewed, the heroine "discovers" that masculinity need not be contradictory to female fulfillment, but "when properly interpreted," "implies only good things for women" – to wit, sexual difference and thus love, marriage and attention. Because Radway's readers wanted to read about couples overcoming difficulties that were emotional rather than external (such as physical separation or other barriers that kept the couple apart even though they both knew they loved each other), they wanted a story that was fundamentally about interpretation of the unknown and its eventual domestication, in all the senses of the word.The book retains its force for me on rereading. Radway's attention to reading as a practice, rather than just analyzing the texts, remains helpful to me in thinking about what texts mean in the world, as opposed to what I think of them. She has interesting insights into the appeal of a narrative that is both known (it's part of a genre; it has conventions that will produce a happy ending) and unknown (the reader can't tell what in particular will happen this time; tension remains). Especially in the introduction to the revised edition, she's also careful to state what she's found out and what she hasn't, such as the reading practices of other female audiences. I would be interested to see another, similar study of a different, more current set of romance readers – somehow, I don't think Radway's readers would like Jennifer Crusie and some of the other names that I see in other journalers' reviews.
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Romance is Dead
Chica, send me your VA phone #, I wanna talk to you!
Sally
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no subject
Rivka's review is compelling!
"Sam whatshername" is Sam Jones in Lauren Henderson's mysteries, and none of those seven books are at all explicit, in spite of Sam's multiple partners and the gritty urban scene. Ter added, since these are evidence of Mixed Genre, which gives me hope that some Mix will match my interests.
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