janice radway 2

Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature by Janice RadwayReview by: Lauren BerlantModern Philology, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Feb., 1987), pp. 346-350Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/437220 .Accessed: 08/11/2011 03:23

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346 Modern Philology (February 1987)

need, biographically speaking, to recognize the loss that a division of lives inevitably incurs and to explore some of the psychological mechanisms that allowed the coexistence in Stevens of these dual and disparate roles.

Despite these criticisms, it should be stated as a closing note that what Bates does, he does very well. He has a mind for discriminations, and he can present difficult ideas and subtle variations on those ideas with a crafted turn of phrase. He is clear and analytically probing as a writer, and the book does, in fact, fulfill the promise stated in its preface of serving both the novice and the more seasoned reader of Stevens. As a biographer, Bates may not answer all our expectations of that art, but biography itself in this poststructuralist era has begun to rethink its mode and methodology, and Bates's book offers a worthy practical example to others of various kinds of questions a biographer can try to answer.

Most important, however, Bates has reopened our perspective on Stevens. This abstract and intellectual poet, so courted and commented upon by the academy, has been at risk of himself being obscured beneath the layers of criticism's supreme fictions. We can be grateful to Bates for reaching beneath those layers and showing us the words of Stevens in the glint of a more personal sunlight.

Louise M. Kawada/ Harvard University

Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature

Janice Radway/Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Pp. x+274.

Janice Radway's Reading the Romance enters the critical debate about women's relation to mass culture by challenging the dominant cultural image of the female readers of popular romance novels. Radway asserts that these kinds of texts-the Harlequin Romance, the Silhouette Book-are not merely frivolous or porno- graphic objects of consumption but instead play important and complex roles in the self-empowerment of their mostly female readership. In making this argument Radway situates her text at one extreme of the current academic feminist debate over the effects of romances on the women who read them; like a knight-errant, she wants to be "doing justice to" (p. 221) the romance reader who has been heretofore patronized and condescended to by "academic" readers of mass cultural texts. In particular, Radway wants to repudiate arguments made by Ann Douglas and Tania Modleski' in their own ground-breaking critical analyses of the effects of popular romance--critiques of the way these texts deform female desire and diminish women's power further by making women the passive recipients of self-negating messages that they quite happily, unreflectively, and unresistingly incorporate as they read. As a result, they argue, popular romances both reveal and reproduce the emotional and political disenfranchisement of women, through the manipulative strategies of capital, as well as through oppressive (because valorized) representa- tions of dominated women. Repudiating this notion of consumption as passivity, Radway uses semiotic and reader-response theory (finding inspiration in Stanley

1/ Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1978), and "Soft-Porn Culture," New Republic (August 30, 1980), pp. 25-29; Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance (New York, 1982).

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Fish's theory of the function of interpretive communities in the production of meaning) to argue that reading is a kind of praxis, "a human act of signification ... a process of making meaning" (p. 7). From this she concludes that by reading romances women enter a discursive realm in which reading becomes not only the source of pleasure and knowledge but also the real and potential catalyst for personal and political change.

It is, therefore, on the "reader" that Radway's study focuses; more specifically, she assumes the stability of a "real [female] reader" who has "real needs" that are fulfilled in some way by the text she "needs" to read. To do this Radway establishes clear distinctions between "academic" readers, who presumably read from a position of cultural alienation (and who therefore have no "need" and derive no pleasure from these texts), and "real readers" who read in "actual social settings" and who purchase romances for pleasure and not out of a desire to use them. The unconsciousness of her reading subjects as to their motivations for reading romances is a vital ingredient in Radway's sense of what a "real" reader is; unselfconscious- ness here seems to imply a more immediate relation with one's needs and desires.

Clearly this is an inadequate construction of reader psychology. While Radway makes some effort to situate her reader historically and idealogically, her emphasis on the "realness" of the subject and the "real" problems she faces produces mainly conventional descriptions of female behavior and desires. The "real" that Radway sees represented in her conversation with these women and in their responses to her questionnaires takes place within a generic nuclear household and in the female reader's "typical" psychology. She takes into account no other potentially mediating discourses whose interests might very well collaborate with gender and the family to construct the reader's reception of the text: education, profession, class, and reli- gion, for example. Since a strong cultural tradition aligns women with middle-class affiliations to popular culture and especially to the novel, these less intimate social factors must have enormous influence in preparing the woman to become the kind of reader she "typically" is. Moreover, since genre is a contract between the text and the reader to fulfill certain reading conventions, and since, as Radway herself argues, much of the narrative tension in these novels derives from the way they threaten not to fulfill their generic contracts, Radway's insistence that the Oedipal drama of the nuclear family constructs the female romance reader seems very incomplete indeed.

Using data gleaned from her small and fairly loosely constituted sample, Radway argues that women read romances because they are unfulfilled in their daily lives. Because they are "emotionally needy," they need to escape: bills, husbands, children, and the generic "pressures" of daily life (p. 95). For these women, reading provides two kinds of escape from the familial realm: the act of reading itself establishes a place for the reader on which no one can intrude (and thus becomes a site of potential resistance to familial claims for caretaking). Along with this performative function of romance reading, the plot of the romance text (Radway determines this using Proppian structural analysis) provides a complex set of reflections of the real and fantasied lives of the female reader. This plot, which operates according to an inevitable erotic and financial poetic justice for a hero and heroine, while foregrounding possible resistances to that justice, repeats romanti- cally the woman's sense that the world resists her desire both personally and struc- turally, while providing an ultimate narrative transcendence of these difficulties. The implications of this double function in Radway's analysis reveal the ambivalent


tendencies of the popular romance. From one perspective, romance reading is a compensatory response to an inadequte familial dynamic (her analysis of this dynamic derives from an oversimple appropriation of Nancy Chodorow's work on the ideology of the contemporary family and its effect on female psychology in The Reproduction of Mothering), one riddled with a fear of sexual violence and with unhappiness about her family's emotional demands: in this scenario, the woman is debilitated not by reading romances but by life in the nuclear family, the tensions of which are resisted by the woman's insistence on reading the romance. But the romance plot itself, with its dynamic of exposing a heroine to danger (the danger of not getting what she wants and needs) and then resolving this in a bliss of heterosexual and economic fortune, tends toward not resistance or transformation of the nuclear scene but rather a fantasy of its metamorphosis into the strongest and most powerful version of itself. Thus Radway argues convincingly that popular romance has neither intrinsically conservative nor radical implications but always imma- nently contains both sites of resistance and of valorization of the structures of female disempowerment.

Radway derives her evidence for the complex social and psychological construction of the "typical" female romance reader both through reader-response theory and through an ethnographic analysis of a community of romance readers from Smithton (a fictional name for a real town), who congregate around Dot, an employee at a chain bookstore that features these romances. Dot has romance authority in a number of contexts: first, she is an expert in her audience's taste for romances and is active in selecting texts for her store's patrons; second, she has turned her knowledge about these texts into a lucrative business for herself, publishing a monthly romance fiction newsletter; third, even major publishing houses have identified her refraction of audience values as authoritative; and, finally, Radway constitutes the women who frequent Dot's bookstore as the community of readers whose typicalities become the index of analysis for Reading the Romance. Thus Dot's role as a site of intersection for different interests-her readership, the romance publishing industry, and Radway herself-gives a certain tautological ring to the text: she represents and advocates a kind of institutionalized "typicality," and Reading the Romance honors the authority of her position by situating its analysis of the romance phenomenon squarely in terms of the concerns, values, and practices of the community as she constructs it. Radway acknowledges the limitations of her methodology but nonetheless generalizes about both the genre of the romance and the psychology of the romance reader largely from reading the selections and analyzing the expressions of Dot's self-styled "community" of consumers.

Radway's argument about the psychology of reading dominates the text-she wants to give these women a voice-but her analysis also describes the way the industry understands and creates its market, a market that seeks to convince its readers to associate consumption of the romance with the fulfillment of desire, the production of pleasure, and the gathering of knowledge. Here the text is at its most useful. Chapter 2, "'The Institutional Matrix': Publishing Romance Fiction," and chapter 3, "Romances and Their Readers," describe a complex collaboration between national corporations, chain bookstores, and local bookstores, all of whose purpose is to channel the already established romance reading practices of the middle-class American woman toward their products. While inadequately taking into account

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the strong historical association between popular romantic genres and a female reading audience, Radway provides a fascinating history of the popular paperback, culminating in a description of how the big boom in romance consumption in the mid-1970s can be attributed to a change in strategy by publishing houses away from marketing their product according to its intrinsic qualities and toward marketing according to audience taste instead. The increased focus on the audience leads both to great advancement in audience polling techniques and a constant reduplication of texts that contain what the audience says it wants: repetition becomes the aim of both publishing houses and readers, all mutually returning to an endless salad bar of romance. Major publishing houses collaborate with mall bookstore chains like B. Dalton; locally, people like Dot become clearinghouses to select even more specifically for the audience, whose main desire seems to be to avoid surprise at all costs, while still indulging in the titillating possibility that something unexpected might occur, after all, in the text, or in life.

Unfortunately, the claim outlined in these two chapters-that one must account for the massive production and consumption of romances in part by looking at technological advances in book production and advertising and increasingly complex corporate collaboration-is for the most part lost in Reading the Romance; instead, Radway produces a reading of the way the romance responds to women's "real" needs. Yet what does this text mean when it talks about real needs and real readers who live actual lives? The text focuses on the way the romances play out the marital dramas of "real" life in displaced and more glamorous ways; Radway's notion that the "stories are experienced as a reversal of the oppression and abandon- ment suffered by women in real life" (p. 55) is at best only a partial reading of the situation that produces these women's attachment to the genre.

In a perverse way, Reading the Romance argues that mass culture does not commodify women's needs and desires at all; in fact, the argument implies that "Harlequin" and "Coventry," to name a few, are really the proper names of desire for middle-class, middle-American women. Even the notion articulately and force- fully expressed at the end that feminists might harness the dissatisfaction encoded in these texts for the transformation of women's "real" lives denies the obvious point that these texts are not direct expressions of women's dissatisfaction with their lot but rather are mediated responses to a particular corporate reading of the desire of a certain gender of a certain class whose consumption of these novels produces the need to reproduce the scene of consumption, which includes both buying and reading the romance text. To the extent that the reproduction of consumption is dependent on both economic privilege and a particular consciousness of how to dispose of one's disposable income, the romance phenomenon must be seen as a part of a complex class fantasy as well as a symptom of the manifest and latent heterosexual and maternal needs of the woman reader as such. Even in their own terms, the Smithton women do not merely say that "escape" means "escape" just from husbands and children but also from "meeting your bills" (p. 95); the ideology of success that characterizes the paradigm romance plot is also clearly related to the women's own desires for "upward mobility" (p. 82). Moreover, a significant percentage of these women work: even given her own limited evidence, Radway's exclusive focus on problems of emotional alienation in the contemporary white middle-class couple is archaic with respect to the contemporary woman's


"real" situation, her perception of her condition, and the complex and difficult relations between her material condition and her feelings about it that produces a set of incoherent, contradictory, and not at all fully articulated discourses we call "needs." Of course the ideology of domesticity that still pervades contemporary culture's representation of women's ideals is at once powerful and increasingly at odds with the practices and possibilities of contemporary life: all the more reason not to shut out these contradictions but instead to push the dissonance between the various "reals" within which these women live.

Radway claims she wants to produce an analysis of these texts from the point of view of reading and writing conventions in order to provide a Geertzian "thick description"2 of a community which can then be read symptomatically with respect to women's position in the culture at large. The potential strengths of such a project lie in its contribution to the study of such questions as: How does mass culture constitute a terrain both of oppression and expression for consumers? How can we talk about the relationship between aesthetic production and daily life? How is cultural information transmitted, and what does this tell us about the potential role of cultural production in political transformation? Finally, does the persistent association of women with culturally devalued forms of popular and mass culture like the romantic novel reproduce female social alienation and male hegemony, or provide for women a discourse of their own in which-across class and racial lines-they can articulate women's concerns and imagine solutions to them? Read- ing the Romance is a smart, careful, and valuable contribution to the study of gender and romance, but its failure to see the genre's female readers outside of their sexual and maternal relations and desires finally reproduces the kind of sexism rampant in much feminist and mainstream academic discourse about popular genres associated with women. This makes Reading the Romance a significant entry in the debate over what it means that so many women read so many romances, but it does not advance the dialogue beyond the conditions of condescension to which it was an original response.

Lauren Berlant/ University of Chicago

2/Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), pp. 3-30.

Article Contentsp. 346p. 347p. 348p. 349p. 350

Issue Table of ContentsThe British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Jun., 1982), pp. 113-234Front MatterThree Old English Implement Riddles: Reconsiderations of Numbers 4, 49, and 73 [pp. 243-257]The Semantic Value of "Ingegno" and Dante's "Ulysses" in the Light of the "Metalogicon" [pp. 258-266]"Irreference": The Poetic Diction of John Ashbery, Part I: Styles of Avoidance [pp. 267-281]Character, Progression, and the Mimetic-Didactic Distinction [pp. 282-299]Notes and DocumentsSir Landevale 25 ff.: A Possible Reconstruction [pp. 300-302]William Blake's Reputation in the 1830s: Some Unrecorded Documents [pp. 302-307]

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Back Matter