Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature

An interesting book and a pretty good read. With the exception of the first chapter, which is an enlightening but pretty dry history of book publishing, the author writes with an enganging and personable style that's highly unusual for an "academic" book. I picked it up thinking that I'd browse through it and found myself reading it cover to cover. There's a bit of the usual feminist/critical studies rhetoric but it's neither bombastic enough nor pervasive enough to dampen the book's accessibility nor its credibility.What keeps the book interesting is the author's ongoing engagement with a smallish group of midwestern romance readers. The group makes up the core of her study and she cites interviews with these readers as well as statistical results from a questionnaire. An undercurrent which runs through this book but which Radway doesn't directly address is her conflicted relationship with this group. On the one hand, she is seems to respect them a great deal and doesn't want to dismiss them the way many romance readers have been dismissed as mindless and passive women. Indeed, part of her analysis is that the romance novel is a complex response to power relations between men and women and that it does not simply reinforce the status quo. On the other hand, she seems to suggest that the readers she's interviewed aren't entirely aware of this agenda--that they simply read to escape. Radway refers over and over again to the idea that the women she's interviewed read romances in order to experience vicariously what they are missing in their lives. She makes a pretty interesting case, but it's significant, I think, that she never asks the women about whether or not they think they are missing anything in their lives. Thus, though interesting, the book takes a sort of, "I know what you really need and why you really read these books even if you don't" mentality. She cares about and respects these women and she listens closely to their experiences and opinions. But she still thinks she knows their motivations better than the readers themselves. I'm not sure it's really so much condescending as conflicted. It would have been interesting to have Radway actually address this issue with the readers she interviewed or at least in an afterword to the book. I wonder if the women she interviewed read the book and what they thought about it if they did.

Despite the growing popularity of cultural studies, it's still surprising to find a literary academic who embraces popular culture. More surprising still is that Janice Radway managed to head down this path almost twenty years ago. Recognizing that a theorist who refuses to engage with popular fiction is ignoring perhaps 90% of what people actually read, Radway does not dismiss romantic fiction as beneath her attention. Rather, she sets out to conduct an empirical study into the genre. In doing so, she addresses some important questions: Why do women read romance? What social and psychological needs does it meet? If there is an "ideal" romance, what are its components and why? How does the unique language of romance do its work? In answering these, Radway not only manages to define an entire genre. She also draws out some rather chilling and not so obvious conclusions about the role of romantic fiction in preventing the feminist agenda from taking hold. And unlike many criticisms of romance, Radway's is based on observation, experience and facts. Her preference for foregrounding the evidence rather than her own views is mightily refreshing. My only reservation is the ease with which she extrapolates the reading experiences of a small group of women into conclusions about American culture in general. However, her excellent introduction to the second edition recognizes this, positions her study in relation to the emerging discipline of cultural studies, and suggests ways in which her study's insights might be further explored and tested. I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in the romance genre, or in academic approaches to popular fiction in general. Readers, writers, students and critics will all find something to learn here.

I was disappointed to see that an earlier reviewer found the book condescending. I think it is true that when the book was written, for a largely academic audience, back in 1984, she probably felt she had to bend over backwards to have her work taken seriously by academics, so she couldn't have written "as a fan." But condescending? I really didn't think so. This book was inspirational to me when I was trying to find a way to approach the material I study (and personally enjoy), Japanese girls' and women's comics. I don't know if Janice (whom I know and admire) is a fan of romance novels, but I know she has always enjoyed popular literature, and that she really tried, in this book, to see romances as their readers see them, and to convey that point of view to academics and feminists who have always looked on romance with contempt. But think about it: if she had written the book from a "fannish," "gee-aren't-romance-novels-great" point of view, it would have ended up as a book by and for romance readers, and wouldn't have contributed to helping non romance-readers understand the genre. I would recommend this book to A) anyone who has always considered "genre fiction" to be pap, B) feminists who want to break out of the "feminists vs. non-feminist women" paradigm, and C) romance readers who would like some ammunition in defending the genre to others.

It's easy to look at the title and expect an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel. There's been more than enough written about the romance as rape fantasy or patriarchal imagining without trying to understand the appeal behind the books themselves. Radway is much more fair than earlier writers and I was impressed, particularly considering that the book was written in 1984 (this was a reprint edition). She begins the book by tracing the history of the popular novel in America and then narrowing that down to the history of the romance. This is an informative and effective way of setting the context. She then spends time interviewing women in the town of Smithton who center around a bookstore that caters to romance readers. Radway seems to genuinely like the women she's interviewing and there's a real sense that she makes an effort to understand the whys even though she clearly doesn't share the taste.

Janice Radway does a terrific job of crossing and blurrign the lines of academic critical writing. Never before have I read a book that looks critically at a literary reality but manages to do it in a personable, friendly way. By the end of the novel, I felt as if Janice, Dot, and the other ladies of the reading group were my personal friends. As a graduate student in literature whose focus is feminist literary studies, I have often found my choice in studies at odds with my passion for reading romance novels. What a pleasure (and relief) to see someone who has taken the desire and need to read popular literature seriously. Often, studies on popular lit, particularly romance novels, are often critical of the preferences of non-academic individuals. What they tend to forget is that the purpose of reading is most frequently for the purpose of pleasure. I recommend this book to both "academics," potential writers of romance novels (a great way to learn what your audience is really thinking) and to those of us who just need a little ammunition against those who critique our choice in reading!