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Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy and popular literature
Book Reviews
accorded the respect of a social, economic, and sexual equal. When DeSalvo stays within Woolf’s articulation of her own problems-problems she sees as common to all women-she underscores patriarchal power as the source of women’s imposed inferiority. She meticulously examines her subject’s fiction, nonfiction, essays, articles, and diaries to illuminate this thesis. In the novel Flush, for example, Woolf voices the experiences of Elizabeth Browning’s male dog to illustrate that “If you treat a boy the way you treat a girl then men too would be fearful, timid, prone to illness and anxiety and unable to make their way in the world without protection.” In The journal of Mistress Joan Martin, she explores the relationship between the treatment of women and historical forces, which locates the reason for women’s oppression in the social structure. In Orlando, Three guineas, and The years, she develops a mastery of the historical process to understand the way societal and historical facts impinge on people’s lives. A great portion of her writing is a denouncement of women’s oppression. Woolf saw that female powerlessness was based on gender. She discerned that women are subjected to the most brutal as well as subtle coercion in order to create what is acceptable behavior; most women are trained into submissive behavior so as to fit them for a life of domestic unpaid labor and education and opportunity has been denied to women to subvert control and make them dependent on men and privilege. DeSalvo is far more credible when she focuses on Woolf’s broad political views but, like so many of us, even the staunchest, she borrows from spurious psychological ideology when the current institutions which govern our lives and can institute constructive change are frozen within a rigid patrist social system. Nevertheless, she has produced animpressive work; a scrupulous examination of the life and work of Virginia Woolf which weighs heavily in favor of feminist sexual politics. This is a book which will be greatly appreciated and welcomed by Virginia Woolf’s long list of followers, admirers, and scholars. FLOF.ENCE RUSH NEW YORK, NY, U.S.A.
THE ROMANCE: WOMEN,PATRIARCHY AND POPULARLITERATURE, by Janice A. Radway, 214 pages. Verso, London, 1987. f9.95 net. READING
In the autumn of 1980, Janice Radway circulated a questionnaire among a number of women who were regular customers at a suburban bookstore in a midwestern American city. All the women were known afficionadoes of romantic fiction, experts in the ways and by-ways of the genre, although before Radway’s probings they had neither articulated nor realised their expertise. Forty-two completed questionnaires were returned, and from the information these contained and from tape-recorded discussions, Janice Radway formed her conclusions about the popularity of the romantic form with women and about the value of the act of reading itself for the suburban housewife. Her book falls between two allied disciplines. In part it belongs to the field of cultural studies, interpreting
277
audience responses through the analysis of statistical data and bringing a distinct sociological methodology to bear on her material. It also owes much to literary critical approaches in its analysis of narrative structures and its utilisation of both structuralist and feminist critical practice to this end. Radway’s questions are thoughtful and her study as a whole stimulating. Starting with a survey of the production of popular romances in America in the 1970s and 1980s. she moves on to examine the social conditions of the particular group of readers questioned and the nature of the appeal the genre holds for them. In asking first why do women read, and second why do they read romance, Radway develops her thesis to show how the romance satisfies sociologically produced needs. Her sample of readers were mostly insistent that recourse to books-a couple of hours on the sofa immersed in The Flame and The Flower in an afternoon, for examplewas one way of creating a private space for themselves, a resistance, Radway suggests, to the burdens of domestic responsibility that otherwise oppressed them. Romance reading in particular, she argues, provides a degree of emotional replenishment for women, and her analysis of the narrative features that constitute the ideal romance is one of the most rewarding sections of her book. She demonstrates that the fantasy world women enter in the love stories they experience is not ultimately one of erotic or even romantic fulfilment, but rather one of tenderness and being cared for, as they return, with their fictional counterparts to the childlike state of helpless innocence, enfolded protectively in the lover’s arms. Finding similarities between Nancy Chodorow’s theories of female personality development and the history of the ideal romantic heroine, Radway comes to rely on this psychoanalytic reading too intensively, and the final sections of her book reveal a tendency to impose and to generalise from this base. Similarly, despite the impressive array of theoretical material, the assumption at the heart of her study is never fully examined- that the act of reading can be treated as a science and is thus available to scientific models of investigation. It is here that the sociologist and the literary critic must part company, for the attempts of the first to categorise resist the insistence of the second on openness and multiplicity, features which Radway’s all too able analysis of romance emphasises rather than reduces. JUDY SIMONS SHEFFIELD Cm- POLYTECHNIC,U.K.
WORLDSWITHINWOMEN:MYTH AND MYTHMAKING IN FANTASTIC LITERATURE BYWOMEN,by Thelma J. Shinn, 214 pages. Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1986. US$29.95 cloth. ALIEN TO FEMININITY: SPECULATIVE FKXON ANDFEMINISTTHEORY,by Marleen S. Barr, 189 pages. Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1987. US$32.85 cloth. Shinn and Barr share a number of philosophical assumptions characterizing the feminist analysis of culture. Shinn focuses on the influence of myth on womenauthored science fiction (SF) and fantasy. “I hope to show in this study,” she states, “that both the truths
accorded the respect of a social, economic, and sexual equal. When DeSalvo stays within Woolf’s articulation of her own problems-problems she sees as common to all women-she underscores patriarchal power as the source of women’s imposed inferiority. She meticulously examines her subject’s fiction, nonfiction, essays, articles, and diaries to illuminate this thesis. In the novel Flush, for example, Woolf voices the experiences of Elizabeth Browning’s male dog to illustrate that “If you treat a boy the way you treat a girl then men too would be fearful, timid, prone to illness and anxiety and unable to make their way in the world without protection.” In The journal of Mistress Joan Martin, she explores the relationship between the treatment of women and historical forces, which locates the reason for women’s oppression in the social structure. In Orlando, Three guineas, and The years, she develops a mastery of the historical process to understand the way societal and historical facts impinge on people’s lives. A great portion of her writing is a denouncement of women’s oppression. Woolf saw that female powerlessness was based on gender. She discerned that women are subjected to the most brutal as well as subtle coercion in order to create what is acceptable behavior; most women are trained into submissive behavior so as to fit them for a life of domestic unpaid labor and education and opportunity has been denied to women to subvert control and make them dependent on men and privilege. DeSalvo is far more credible when she focuses on Woolf’s broad political views but, like so many of us, even the staunchest, she borrows from spurious psychological ideology when the current institutions which govern our lives and can institute constructive change are frozen within a rigid patrist social system. Nevertheless, she has produced animpressive work; a scrupulous examination of the life and work of Virginia Woolf which weighs heavily in favor of feminist sexual politics. This is a book which will be greatly appreciated and welcomed by Virginia Woolf’s long list of followers, admirers, and scholars. FLOF.ENCE RUSH NEW YORK, NY, U.S.A.
THE ROMANCE: WOMEN,PATRIARCHY AND POPULARLITERATURE, by Janice A. Radway, 214 pages. Verso, London, 1987. f9.95 net. READING
In the autumn of 1980, Janice Radway circulated a questionnaire among a number of women who were regular customers at a suburban bookstore in a midwestern American city. All the women were known afficionadoes of romantic fiction, experts in the ways and by-ways of the genre, although before Radway’s probings they had neither articulated nor realised their expertise. Forty-two completed questionnaires were returned, and from the information these contained and from tape-recorded discussions, Janice Radway formed her conclusions about the popularity of the romantic form with women and about the value of the act of reading itself for the suburban housewife. Her book falls between two allied disciplines. In part it belongs to the field of cultural studies, interpreting
277
audience responses through the analysis of statistical data and bringing a distinct sociological methodology to bear on her material. It also owes much to literary critical approaches in its analysis of narrative structures and its utilisation of both structuralist and feminist critical practice to this end. Radway’s questions are thoughtful and her study as a whole stimulating. Starting with a survey of the production of popular romances in America in the 1970s and 1980s. she moves on to examine the social conditions of the particular group of readers questioned and the nature of the appeal the genre holds for them. In asking first why do women read, and second why do they read romance, Radway develops her thesis to show how the romance satisfies sociologically produced needs. Her sample of readers were mostly insistent that recourse to books-a couple of hours on the sofa immersed in The Flame and The Flower in an afternoon, for examplewas one way of creating a private space for themselves, a resistance, Radway suggests, to the burdens of domestic responsibility that otherwise oppressed them. Romance reading in particular, she argues, provides a degree of emotional replenishment for women, and her analysis of the narrative features that constitute the ideal romance is one of the most rewarding sections of her book. She demonstrates that the fantasy world women enter in the love stories they experience is not ultimately one of erotic or even romantic fulfilment, but rather one of tenderness and being cared for, as they return, with their fictional counterparts to the childlike state of helpless innocence, enfolded protectively in the lover’s arms. Finding similarities between Nancy Chodorow’s theories of female personality development and the history of the ideal romantic heroine, Radway comes to rely on this psychoanalytic reading too intensively, and the final sections of her book reveal a tendency to impose and to generalise from this base. Similarly, despite the impressive array of theoretical material, the assumption at the heart of her study is never fully examined- that the act of reading can be treated as a science and is thus available to scientific models of investigation. It is here that the sociologist and the literary critic must part company, for the attempts of the first to categorise resist the insistence of the second on openness and multiplicity, features which Radway’s all too able analysis of romance emphasises rather than reduces. JUDY SIMONS SHEFFIELD Cm- POLYTECHNIC,U.K.
WORLDSWITHINWOMEN:MYTH AND MYTHMAKING IN FANTASTIC LITERATURE BYWOMEN,by Thelma J. Shinn, 214 pages. Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1986. US$29.95 cloth. ALIEN TO FEMININITY: SPECULATIVE FKXON ANDFEMINISTTHEORY,by Marleen S. Barr, 189 pages. Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1987. US$32.85 cloth. Shinn and Barr share a number of philosophical assumptions characterizing the feminist analysis of culture. Shinn focuses on the influence of myth on womenauthored science fiction (SF) and fantasy. “I hope to show in this study,” she states, “that both the truths