On page 5 of her new (1992) introduction to Reading the Romance Radway acknowledged that "even what I took to be simple descriptions of my interviewees' self-understandings were mediated if not produced by my own conceptual constructs and ways of seeing the world" (5). Furthermore, she observes thatWhereas he [another scholar] notes his excessive concentration on the single variable of class and the rather simple way in which the concept itself was constructed, so I might point in my own study to the exclusive preoccupation with gender and to the use of a fairly rigid notion of patriarchy. (9)What Radway notes here is, I think, something that it is important to remember when reading all the existing attempts to understand romance readers. Each author's interpretation is likely to be shaped by her or his "conceptual constructs." Like an invisible set of glasses, these interpretative lenses can colour the author's perception of the situations she or he sees, and may make her or him more likely to focus in on aspects of the problem which are more visible through those interpretative lenses.
Radway was looking at the small group of Smithton readers through a pair of lenses created by "the psychoanalytic theories of Nancy Chodorow" (9): "through its use of psychoanalytic theory, the book attempts to explain how and why such a structured 'story' might be experienced as pleasurable by those women as a consequence of their socialization within a particular family unit" (11). Individuals' identities are a composite of superimposed layers, and one lens alone may not suffice to understand the complexities of an individual's choices. Radway, in her new introduction, states that "I would now want to organize an ethnography of romance reading comparatively, in order to make some effort to ascertain how others social variables like age, class location, education, and race intersect with gender to produce varying, even conflicting, engagements with the romance form" (9). Having brought in those variables, she might have needed to add a few more lenses to her set of glasses: psychoanalytic theories about gender might have relatively little to say about racism or economic inequality, for example.
And, of course, not all readers are identical to the Smithton readers, nor do we all share their reading preferences. As Radway herself acknowledged,
It is clear that the Smithton group cannot be thought of as a scientifically designed random sample. The conclusions drawn from the study, therefore, should be extrapolated only with great caution to apply to other romance readers. (48)A lens, or set of lenses, which work well with one set of readers may not work so well with other readers, or may even render them invisible. The Smithton readers were all women, for example, but there are male romance readers.
Bearing all this in mind, when Radway writes that she was
struck by the urgency, indeed by the near hysteria, with which romance authors assert that the newly active, more insistent female sexuality displayed in the genre is still most adequately fulfilled in an intimate, monogamous relationship characterized by love and permanence (15)it seems legitimate to wonder which of Radway's own "conceptual constructs and ways of seeing the world" were shaping this view of romance authors' assertions. It also seems deeply ironic for a feminist scholar to employ the rather loaded term "hysteria," so often used to dismiss women's experiences, to dismiss romance authors' statements about their own work.
Her own statement seems to insist that female sexuality should not be displayed in an intimate, loving and permanent monogamous relationship. I find it difficult to understand what is so wrong about loving and permanent intimate relationships. I suppose it's possible she was objecting to monogamy and she wanted greater recognition for polyamorous relationships. Or perhaps she was not really thinking of the full range of possible "loving and permanent intimate relationships" but was only critiquing the versions of these relationships which exist in "patriarchal marriage" (14). Whatever she meant, her lenses, the romance authors' lenses, and the lenses I'm wearing myself make it rather difficult for me to untangle what Radway and the romance authors really meant when they made their statements about the genre.
Radway's a lot clearer elsewhere. For example, she concluded that there was a
deep irony hidden in the fact that women who are experiencing the consequences of patriarchal marriage's failure to address their needs turn to a story that ritually recites the history of the process by which those needs are constituted. [...] the Smithton women are repetitively asserting to be true what their still-unfulfilled desire demonstrates to be false, that is, that heterosexuality can create a fully coherent, fully satisfied, female subjectivity. (14)There's certainly a "deep irony" in the fact that, as Radway noted, the Smithton women made a "universal claim to being happily married (a claim I did not doubt)" (13) yet, while claiming not to doubt them, she remained certain that they were "experiencing the consequences of patriarchal marriage's failure to address their needs" and in particular their "desire for the nurturance represented and promised by the preoedipal mother" (14).
Interestingly, when the Smithton readers were asked "whether romance reading ever changes women" (101) they emphatically answered that it did because "their self-perception has been favorably transformed by their reading" (102) and they were "convinced [...] that romance fiction demonstrates that 'intelligence' and 'independence' in a woman make her more attractive to a man" (102). More nurturance from their husbands would not necessarily have achieved these results: it might have made the women feel more cared for, but would it have changed their self-perception and made them willing to show their intelligence and independence?
Just as an experiment, I'd like to take two different sets of interpretative lenses and see how they might shape one's view of the Smithton readers' responses. What happens if one asks whether it is economics which shaped these women's reading choices? It has been argued by feminist economists that
Economics has divided life into two separate categories: the economic realm and the household realm. The economic realm focuses on the market: producers, buyers, and sellers, while the household realm includes all the range of unpaid work that is necessary for the functioning of life. Because economics only counts production that produces items that can be sold in the market, the household is seen as being outside of the economic realm and therefore 'unproductive.' In contrast, the buying and selling and trading that takes place in the economic realm, is 'productive.' This assumption that households are not sites of production has meant that within the traditional household of male breadwinner, female caregiver, and children, only the male breadwinner is seen as being 'productive.' Women's work of bearing and raising children, maintaining a home, providing food, and providing emotional support for everyone, is simply assumed despite the fact that the economy is absolutely dependent on it.Perhaps the Smithton romance readers, "women who saw themselves first as wives and mothers" (7) were taking a well-deserved break from their work in order to read books in a genre which recognised the value of that work? These were, after all, women who "referred constantly and voluntarily to the connection between their reading and their daily social situation as wives and mothers" (9), who "are angered by men who continue to make light of 'woman's work' as well as by 'women's libbers' whom they accuse of dismissing mothers and housewives as ignorant, inactive, and unimportant" (78) and, as Radway herself has written, "the romance readers of Smithton use their books to erect a barrier between themselves and their families in order to declare themselves temporarily off-limits to those who would mine them for emotional support and material care" (12). Even workers who enjoy their jobs require some leisure time, but because the work in which these women were engaged is often not considered to be "work," and because it is carried out within the home, there may be no provision made for "clocking off" at the end of a long shift. If one looks at the Smithton readers through the lenses of feminist economic theory, one might suggest that they were finding in these books both a physical means of asserting their right to leisure time, and validation that their work as wives and mothers is indeed of crucial importance. This might explain why "their self-perception has been favorably transformed by their reading" (102).
Furthermore, it could be argued that the general lack of respect for women's unpaid work is revealed in the way that the Smithton readers "are often called to task by their husbands for their repetitive consumption. [...] The women wonder [...] why they should have to adhere to standards of thrift and parsimony with respect to books when other family members do not observe the same requirements" (103). Feminist economics might answer this question by pointing out that household work is unpaid. These Smithton readers were, in a sense, attempting to take their wages in the form of books, and their spouses, in querying the expenditure, were demonstrating that women's work in the home is not seen as deserving of pay, either in cash or, indirectly, via the cost of leisure activities.
Or how about another lens, this time that of a different school of psychology, which Eric Selinger described at Romancing the Blog:
There seems to be a whole branch of psychological inquiry out there called Positive Psychology: not some fuzzy set of platitudes and bromides, but (in Seligman’s words) “a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called the ‘good life.’” My hunch, which I plan to test across the next few months, is that romance novels are often primers in positive psychology, in ways that measure up quite well against current research.After all, Radway herself "found it impossible to ignore" the Smithton readers' "fervent insistence that romance reading creates a feeling of hope, provides emotional sustenance, and produces a fully visceral sense of well-being" (12). She also relates one reader's comment:
"Optimistic! That's what I like in a book. An optimistic plot. I get sick of pessimism all the time."Perhaps, then, there is a good reason why Dot, when asked "What do romances do better than other novels today?" (87) answered: "It's an innocuous thing. If it had to be ... pills or drinks, this is harmful" (87). Perhaps these readers were treating their psychological problems with a dose of optimism, rather than resorting to more dangerous substances.
Her distinction between optimistic and pessimistic stories recurred during several of the interviews, especially during discussions of the difference between romances and other books. (99)
I'm just trying to demonstrate how a different set of interpretative lenses could lead to very different conclusions. I'm not stating here that either feminist economics or positive psychology provide the key to correctly understanding what the Smithton women told Radway. It might be that neither of those lenses are helpful or, and I think this is more likely, it might be that those lenses are helpful but individually cannot explain the Smithton readers' choices and reactions.
In fact, before undertaking a study like Radway's, I think I'd feel the need to kit myself out with a diverse set of lenses, like this-------------------------------->
I found Marysuephotoeth's self-portrait of herself wearing many different pairs of glasses at Flickr, where she had made it available for use under a Creative Commons license.
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Are the readers of any other genre - save perhaps pornography - subject to the same degree of psychoanalysis that Romance readers are? I'm getting rather frustrated by this. No one sits down and writes books about why young guys read science fiction (though you do get blogs about why women read it). No one gets all anguished about who reads detective novels or true crime or adventure books or Dan Brown's oeuvre. But women are constantly in the position of having to defend and justify what they read, and how much they spend on that hobby in a way no man ever has to.
ReplyDeleteAnd I would like it to stop, thank you. For as long as we draw a line around Romance (and related genres, including slash fanfiction) and say *these* readers are somehow odd and their reasons need to be explained, but *those* readers on the other side of the line are entitled to do as they damn well please and the really interesting discussion is to be had about the actual material they're reading, we're pathologising a perfectly normal, healthy activity in exactly the same way as we have made so many things to do with women into 'problems'. Reading Romance isn't an illness or something to be explained (and- one always senses the subtext- to be expunged). It's deeply sad that feminists, supposedly arguing on behalf of women's right to choose and to be free of male expectations, are the ones imposing boundaries and barriers and rules on their sisters which we would instantly recognise as nonsense if men did it.
Ahem. Right. I don't think I have anything useful to add :)
"Are the readers of any other genre - save perhaps pornography - subject to the same degree of psychoanalysis that Romance readers are?"
ReplyDeleteSince I've not researched other genres, I don't know, but I suspect readers of other genres have been psychoanalysed too. John G. Cawelti certainly seemed to think they had been:
Older children and adults continue to find a special delight in familiar stories, though in place of the child's pleasure in the identical tale, they substitute an interest in certain types of stories which have highly predictable structures that guarantee the fulfillment of conventional expectations: the detective story, the western, the romance, the spy story, and many other such types. For many persons such formulaic types make up by far the greater portion of the experience of literature. [...]
Because of their association with the times of relaxation, entertainment, and escape, this type of story has been largely ignored by literary scholars and historians or left to the mercy of sociologists, psychologists, and analysts of mass culture. These disciplines have produced many interesting analyses of various literary formulas, but have largely treated them as ideological rationalization, psychological strategems, or opiates for the masses. (1)
Here's something from a recent article on vampires in fiction:
vampires have been used again and again as a way to speak of our fears and concerns.
"It's almost this perfect vessel," says Eric Nuzum, an NPR colleague and the author of The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula. "If you want to understand any moment in time, or any cultural moment, just look at their vampires."
Take Bram Stoker's Dracula.
"It was written at the end of the 19th century, at a time when England had some of the largest ports in the world," says Benita Blessing, who teaches modern European history at Ohio University. "Here you have a ship arriving from Eastern Europe, bearing soil from another country, and a plague-like person who is going to bring death and destruction. The concerns at that time were foreign illnesses, unwanted immigrants. What Dracula is about is the fear of what we might today call globalization." [...]
Today's fear is not the Cold War or AIDS, it's the fate of the Earth: "We sense that there is something wrong with the environment, that the planet itself may not be able to sustain us very long, and so we are beginning to romance death once again."
Maybe it gets back to that very American notion that we have laws and constitutions to keep our baser instincts in check. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote recently: "We are beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality."
Exactly. Maybe that's why vampires aren't really a fad. Because — except for that all-but-immortal thing — they really are us. (Adler)
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Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.
I don't think anyone should have to "justify" reading romance anymore than he/she should have to "justify" reading pornography or philosophy, but perhaps the reason people ask them to do so is that possible reasons are easier than study of the genre as a genre is. That lady who said she read romance because of the optimisim in it probably expressed the reason most readers would give.
ReplyDeleteMany authors have expressed the same reason for writing it, as well. I wonder what answers would be forthcoming if authors--setting aside economics--were asked why they choose to write romance rather than say lit fic or westerns or mysteries, what they derive from it, if they've learned more than the craft from it. I think it was P.D. James who said, in an interview, that she had discovered from writing mysteries that justice is far more complex than it appears to be.
dick
Laura's post about Radway and her Smithton readers calls my name. My focus in a (still unfinished) piece on Crusie was the way in which one of her books takes on Radway's conception of Romance Readers. Laura's post suggests that Radway's analysis may depend on limited or even flawed lenses through which to examine her subject. I would agree and suggest as well that simple academic snobbery plays a part in her misreading of her subjects. Radway strikes me as an Emma looking down on a host of Harriet Smiths for their reading taste. Her notion that they are experiencing "patriarchal marriage's failure to address their needs" might be corrected by an examination of Stephanie Coontz's work on the state of marriage at the time. Her psychoanalytic approach might be refined not only by considering Seligman's work, but considering other work on "emotional intelligence" and how it develops and finds expression. Maybe Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis" has something to offer in general about the reading of popular fiction, which may feed our "elephant" instead of our "rider." As for considering an economic lens, it may be worth considering how oddly advertising is constructed to suggest that women now are the primary, savvy consumers in any household. Consider Sarah Haskins' comic deconstructions of the presentation of men in advertising. One absolutely critical lens, it seems to me, that Radway never considers is the lens of reading acts themselves. Robert Scholes or Benjamin DeMott define these acts in works like "Textual Power" and "Close Imagining." Which reading acts are romance readers particularly adept at? One that is fundamental to reading poetry or reading Shakespeare is the act of reading for the counter-coding of a character. I wonder at the reading experiences of the Smithton readers during their own formal education. ERIC identifies the persistence of the same ten works taught in American high schools over decades: Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, The Scarlet Letter, The Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Huckleberry Finn. While these are great works of the imagination, by implication they suggest that the world can't be known or understood by a female consciousness, and that women have little to do in the world but err and cause suffering. A woman educated in this tradition might need a container ship full of Harlequins just to recover.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this, Laura.
ReplyDelete"Her own statement seems to insist that female sexuality should not be displayed in an intimate, loving and permanent monogamous relationship."
I personally don't think her statement implies that, but then I've not read the bit from which you have quoted. To my mind, it means "aren't there other ways of constructing feminine sexuality in addition to heterosexual monogamy? And can't we tell interesting readable stories about those, too?"
I just read Laid Bare by Lauren Dane in which the heroine ends up settling down with two men, and of course we have the explosive growth in m/m so my bigger problem with her statement is that it implies something factually imcorrect.
I am glad you called Radway on her use of "hysteria", especially bad since her main source is a feminist psychoanalyist (Chodorow).
Ann -- I agree that romance readers have been studied more than romance as literature, and I also think they have borne the brunt of the questioning compared to other genre readers (and still do). And there are mainly pernicious reasons for this. In the genre fiction book I've been working through on my blog, every time the author wants to say something about readers, he quotes Radway, which I think means that, at least in the early 1990s there wasn't much else for him to turn to.
"perhaps the reason people ask them to do so is that possible reasons are easier than study of the genre as a genre is"
ReplyDeleteIf that's the case (and I'm not sure that it is) I'd suggest that they'd need to be very careful when they set about trying to interpret the responses they get from readers. As I've said in this post, interpretative lenses can be very powerful. But there are other sources of misunderstandings and miscommunication too. Just recently there's been a long thread over at AAR about "placeholder heroines" and as usual different people responded to, and interpreted the term differently. And when I tried asking a few questions at TMT about how people read and responded to romances I found that there were huge differences, and there were plenty of times when I wasn't sure I'd fully understood what other readers meant, because their ways of reading and relating to what they read were so different from mine.
I also think that anyone who wants to understand "romance readers" as a group needs to understand the huge variety that exists among readers. Radway apparently chose a very homogeneous group made up of white women living in the same town, mostly married with children and most of whom worked as housewives. There were so many other groups of romance readers she didn't interview at all: homosexual readers, older readers, women who work outside the home, male readers, African-American readers, academic readers, all of us who are non-American readers ....
Kate, I'm glad my post called to you, and thanks for listing all those other angles/approaches which could complement Radway's.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how many of them existed at the time Radway first wrote her study. I got the impression from her new Introduction that she felt she was doing something quite innovative, and that she was working out her methodology as she went along. I'm not sure how wide a range of interpretative lenses she had available to her, or how much training she'd actually had in the ones she did put on. Again, based on the impression I got from reading the Introduction, it seemed as though she hadn't been trained as an anthropologist/ethnographer, but she was trying to carry out something which combined literary studies with anthropology/ethnography, and then she used some of Nancy Chodorow's psycholanalytic theories.
I'm away from my books at the moment, so I can't double-check those impressions, unfortunately.
I personally don't think her statement implies that, but then I've not read the bit from which you have quoted. To my mind, it means "aren't there other ways of constructing feminine sexuality in addition to heterosexual monogamy? And can't we tell interesting readable stories about those, too?"
ReplyDeleteAs I said in that paragraph, it's "rather difficult for me to untangle what Radway [...] really meant."
I certainly think she thought it would be nice if the genre included more of (or possibly moved towards being wholly comprised of) stories like 2 she analysed in some detail, one of which focuses on a daughter's relationship with her mother (and in which the women's relationships with their suitors take second place to the mother-daughter relationship, at least as far as Radway retells the story) and the other of which ends with the heroine focused on her career, and accepting that her relationship with her lover may or may not be a lasting one.
It seems to me that if she wanted those kinds of story, nowadays the first might be shelved in Women's Fiction and the second might be in Chick Lit. And as for women's sexual relationships outside marriage, there's plenty of female-authored erotica nowadays which deals with that. I can't remember if Radway mentions lesbian romances and readers, but again, they exist in significant numbers and present an alternative to heterosexual marriage. Although Betz, whom I'll discuss in my next post, seems to think that they don't present a sufficiently alternative model (although, as with Radway, I'm not sure I've fully understood her position, and I wouldn't want to assume I've interpreted her position correctly).
So, I'm not sure what Radway meant, or what she'd have preferred the genre to be. My general impression, though, is that critiques of the romance genre which are based on the fact that it prioritises long-term sexual/romantic relationships should probably place romance in the wider context of all the other related genres of women's fiction, romantic fiction and erotic fiction. Stories which aren't being told in one of those genres may well be abundant in another of the genres.
@Laura Vivanco:
ReplyDeletePossibly though, romance readers are themselves responsible for the misunderstanding of their reasons for reading romance. I find it difficult to explain--other than as the Smithton woman who responded that she preferred optimism--why I enjoy reading romance. At times, in fact, I'll be reading along and think to myself, "hey, you've read this before" even though the book I'm reading is hot off the presses. I'll nonetheless continue reading if the story is good enough.
Some analyst, I can't remember who, stated that one of the appeals of genre fiction is that recognition of sameness which I experienced, the repetitive kind of thing that appeals to children. Reading romance fiction holds the same appeal as a well-known ritual, such as the Anglican service of Morning Prayer. Every participant knows the outline; the only surprises come from the celebrant who places the stresses in a different way or chooses an alternate Psalm. The rite itself remains essentially unaltered.
dick
@Kate:
ReplyDeleteAssuming the same levels of ability, aren't all "reading acts" ultimately alike? That is, if we are all academics reading the same passage from the same poem in the same language, the essential meaning of that passage should be the same for everyone. The impact of the passage might differ from reader to reader--that is, one might accept and another might be sceptical--but the basic meaning remains the same for all...or should. Or did I misunderstand what you wrote?
dick
Dick, I'm interested in your comparison of reading and ritual. My father (who is an Episcopal priest) once said to me that you repeat these rituals--go to morning prayer or whatever--regularly not because EVERY experience of them is transforming (often it will be dull, familiar, you won't really pay attention, you'll just find it comforting) but because without the discipline of participating regularly in worship, you won't have the OPPORTUNITY for a transformative experience. Whether that's true or not, it does suggest that there's something to people's reading of what are sometimes fairly similar works, or variations on a theme, beyond comfort (which for me, as a reader, is certainly part of it). Are we looking for the one that will stand out, really speak to us? I think, too, that the more we read in a genre, the more we get out of it, because we have a more sophisticated understanding of how it is working within and playing off a tradition. So "I've read this before" can also be "look what interesting thing this writer is doing with a familiar theme or plot structure" or "why do I like one writer's use of this trope more than another's? what's the difference?"
ReplyDeleteI'd see this as related to your question about "reading acts" too. I'm not sure exactly what Kate meant by that, but I know that I can read the same thing in very different ways at different times, see different things; different readers, too, respond to the same texts in very different ways.
It's been a long time since I read Chodorow, and I don't even seem to own Reproduction of Mothering any more. But doesn't she argue, essentially, that it is harder for women to grow up than for men, or at least that women grow up differently? Men are able to separate from the pre-oedipal mother by identifying with the father: the mother becomes an object of love and the man is an independent subject. Women, though, remain enmeshed with the mother, who is both a love object and the subject with whom they must identify in order to develop their own sense of subjectivity. For Chodorow, the idea that women don't develop a fully autonomous sense of self explains their secondary status in patriarchal culture.
ReplyDeleteSo, women are kind of like children. And I've been thinking for a while about connections between Romance and Children's Literature. There's a lot of debate about whether children's lit consitutes a genre, but the defining generic feature most widely claimed for it is a hopeful or happy ending. I can't help but wonder, then, if the denigration of romance partly has to do with this "childish" feature of the genre. This connection might also have something to do with the interest in studying romance readers and reading, as much as the texts. "We" worry about what kids read and how they might be influenced by what they read, just as "we" worry about how women might be influenced by reading romance (we don't trust either group to separate themselves enough from the text not to just internalize its messages, to read in a sophisticated way). Have there ever been hand-wringing articles about men who read Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum, why they are drawn to violent thrillers, and how such reading might influence them for ill? I'm over-simplifiying a LOT, I know, but the parallels between romance and children's lit are interesting.
There are others:
- struggle to be accepted as worthy of academic study (Children's Lit is further down the road than romance, but I think the experience has been similar)--study of these texts is "easy," "fun," and not "real work"
- assumption that writing this kind of thing is easy; maybe Madonna can try her hand at romance next
More positively:
- a vibrant on-line community where bloggers, authors, editors, fans, teachers, librarians, academics interact, and that enriches the study of the genre
Also: the romance hero as pre-oedipal mother? Ick.
"Possibly though, romance readers are themselves responsible for the misunderstanding of their reasons for reading romance."
ReplyDeleteI think that anyone carrying out an ethnographic study has to take the ultimate responsibility for trying to understand what the people being studied said. In this particular case, Radway was the one responsible for asking particular questions, and she then interpreted the answers to those questions, asked follow-up questions, and prioritised the responses she received. All those things put her in a position of power relative to the romance readers she studied.
"I find it difficult to explain--other than as the Smithton woman who responded that she preferred optimism--why I enjoy reading romance."
Explaining things often is difficult, and that's why I think someone investigating a topic like this needs to be so very careful before reaching conclusions about readers. Even when the researcher identifies themselves as a member of the group being studied, as appears to be the case in Thomas J. Roberts's An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction which Jessica is summarising at Read, React, Review (part 1 and part 2), gaps in comprehension may well still arise, because not all readers of a genre will read in the same ways and for the same reasons.
Because I believe that to be the case, I'd have to answer your question, "aren't all 'reading acts' ultimately alike?" in the negative.
Even if you're just looking at the physical aspects of reading, there are audiobooks, books in braile, and ebooks as well as paper copies of books, and those differing methods of reading mean that the physical processes of reading vary.
"the basic meaning remains the same for all...or should"
Again, I don't think it does remain the same. If it did, there wouldn't be so many flame wars online because someone wrote something and other people didn't realise it was sarcastic/humorous/parodic. Or, to give another example, if the basic meaning remained the same for every reader, everyone would draw the same conclusions from their readings of the Bible, and it's rather obvious that they don't.
It may depend on what you mean by "basic reading" but people's differing moods, knowledge, cultural backgrounds etc can all affect their interpretations of, and responses to, a text. This is the kind of thing that ensures that translation is an art, not a science, and keeps literary critics and theologians busily writing about the same texts for decades and even centuries.
@Elizabeth:
ReplyDeleteYou stated it better than I, I think. But, you know, I don't think I would like it if Morning Prayer, for example, were transformative. That would, in some troublesome way, break the ritualistic nature of it, making it something other. The small shift of the celebrant's altering the syntax slightly by stressing a different word than is usually stressed is fine, refreshing the ordinary a bit; it wouldn't be transformative though. So also with reading romance fiction, If the author's shifts away are such that the reading becomes more than what is expected.
dick
It's been a long time since I read Chodorow, and I don't even seem to own Reproduction of Mothering any more. But doesn't she argue, essentially, that it is harder for women to grow up than for men, or at least that women grow up differently?
ReplyDeleteI haven't read it at all, but that was the general impression I got of it, via Radway's description of it. It seemed to be based around the assumption that women are the ones who provide all the childcare, so it's easy for a male child to differentiate himself from the female caregiver, but it's not so easy for a female child to mark her difference from the female carer. I have no idea (a) how this theory's supposed to work if the main caregiver is the male parent, or (b) if Chodorow (and Freud) even considered that as a possibility.
"This connection might also have something to do with the interest in studying romance readers and reading, as much as the texts. "We" worry about what kids read and how they might be influenced by what they read, just as "we" worry about how women might be influenced by reading romance (we don't trust either group to separate themselves enough from the text not to just internalize its messages, to read in a sophisticated way)."
I wouldn't discount the possibility of a connection, but as I discussed in a previous post, women's reading in general has been seen as problematic for centuries, even before women were reading a genre which shared certain characteristics with children's literature. For example, at one point chivalric romances came to be (a) denigrated and (b) identified as texts likely to be read by women. I don't know which came first, though, the denigration of the genre, or the perception that it was mostly read by women.
@Laura Vivanco:
ReplyDeleteI'm not that conversant with Radway's process. Did she, for example, give the Smithton women a list of questions prior to interviewing them? Or were they asked during the interview only?
Re the "reading acts:"
But, if the basic meaning differs that much from reader to reader, communication becomes chaos, doesn't it? If a romance author were to write, "To marry or not to marry him. That was the question she pondered" wouldn't all readers derive the same basic meaning? Agreed that one person may bring experiences to the reading that change the impact of what the author wrote for that person. But if that same person doesn't get the basic meaning the words impart, there would be no impact at all.
At the same time, I agree that recognition of the "tone" of what is written is more difficult for some readers than for others, thus leading to the flaming on internet sites. That's why I cadged with assuming the save levels of ability.
A clarification on "reading acts." As one who teaches reading daily, the issue is not so much the meaning of words on the page, though of course, young readers can miss meanings and even words altogether, the issue is the reading acts by which readers construct the characters. Basic reading acts include imagining feeling, imagining characters' personalities, observing change, and importantly for romance (or for reading Shakespeare) imagining counter-intentions in the text. Almost any Shakespeare play includes a character who is coded in opposing ways.
ReplyDelete@Kate:
ReplyDeleteSorry. I did misunderstand what you meant by "reading acts." I've never taught reading, but I've taught many classes which required that I train college students how to go about getting the most they possibly could out of a particular work. Often those students simply didn't pay attention to words; i.e. they almost refused to give any weight to literal meaning first, wanting rather to seek out some underlying meaning without ever considering that the author meant the words to be first taken as literal. It was from those experiences that I drew the conclusion that reading anything has to begin with meaning--words and syntax; that unless all readers do that first, misreading results. Thus my questions.
dick
"I'm not that conversant with Radway's process. Did she, for example, give the Smithton women a list of questions prior to interviewing them? Or were they asked during the interview only?"
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately I haven't got access to the book at the moment so I can't double check this, but I remember there were various stages to the process and I had a look at the Appendixes, which are visible via the Amazon preview. Radway had a "pilot questionnaire," she posed questions during more free-flowing discussions among groups of readers, and she drew up a "final questionnaire" to ask additional questions.
"If a romance author were to write, "To marry or not to marry him. That was the question she pondered" wouldn't all readers derive the same basic meaning?"
I'm not sure they would. For example, some readers would recognise this as a paraphrase of something Hamlet says, and that would affect their interpretation because it might make them think about whether the situation under consideration is as serious as Hamlet's life and death ponderings. Depending on the context, the reference to Hamlet might undercut the seriousness of the character's ponderings, or they might enhance them.
In addition, different people have different experiences of, and ideas about, marriage. Some people might think that marriage is much more restrictive/damaging to women than others do. So that might affect how they interpret and respond to the character's ponderings.
This study is still considered a ground breaking study in romance reading. Radway learned that women read romance as a means to escape from the every day doldrums of their married lives. The term "escape" is used by most of the women as a means to describe their reading experience. Radway suggested that the “escape” these women experienced was a means to escape their marriages and everyday responsibilities while yearning for the nurturing they wished for and yet did not receive at home. Unless you read only nonfiction, the purpose of which is to learn facts, strategies, and opinions, reading fiction is a means to escape into a world created by the author for pleasure based on the reading experience. This correlates to the reader response theory in literary methodology. It's a "Calgon, take me away "moment.
ReplyDeleteRadway's study is hindered by the fact that she is not only a feminist (bringing preconceived ideas about romance to the study), but she does not understand the genre nor read it and admits to that fact on pg 6 of the Introduction to the new 1991 edition. How can you legitimately approach a study without having ever experienced the topic before! However, Radway sees fit to do just that. She agrees that romances are “valuable…because they enable the reader to accumulate information, to add to her worth, and thus better herself,” but she continues to say that if the Smithton women adhere “to traditional values” the reading of romance is in “itself subversive of those values” (118). In her concluding remarks, Radway states that the romance genre is more a detriment to the Women's movement than a help. In her way of thinking, women who read romance are imprisoned by the escapist view of perfect love. They should be encouraged to “join hands with women who are, after all, our sisters [active feminists] and together imagine a world whose subsequent creation would lead to the need for a new fantasy altogether” (220). By refusing to read romance, the romance reader can join forces with active feminists and consciously verbalize their dissatisfaction in a public arena thus joining the protest line for Women's rights. In John Storey’s text, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: a Reader, an article by Radway is included which reflects on her 1984 study. In “Reading Reading the Romance,” Radway writes that “in the end, Reading the Romance argues that romance reading is a profoundly conflicted activity centered upon a profoundly conflicted form (297). She continues to say that romance readers and feminists need to
“talk to each other from within our culture’s ‘pink ghetto’” where “we might indeed learn how to make talk walk. We might learn how to activate the critical power that even now lies buried in the romance as one of the few widely shared womanly commentaries on the contradictions and costs of patriarchy” (298).
Radway recognized but failed to understand that not all romance genre of the 80’s was a form of literature that severed the feminist from the romance reader, nor was it comprised solely of what publishers termed “bodice rippers” where the female hero was enslaved, raped, or abused. Most readers of romance refused these characteristics as being an acceptable element of the romance genre as proven by Radway’s statistics (73-4).
"It seems to me that if she wanted those kinds of story, nowadays the first might be shelved in Women's Fiction and the second might be in Chick Lit. And as for women's sexual relationships outside marriage, there's plenty of female-authored erotica nowadays which deals with that."
ReplyDeleteI agree, and this raises a really interesting question for me, personally, about whether it is enough for critics that related genres "think outside of the box", and whether thinking outside the box defines something as not-romance.
Why is Radway considered important if her methodology and results are so flawed?
ReplyDeletedick
this raises a really interesting question for me, personally, about whether it is enough for critics that related genres "think outside of the box", and whether thinking outside the box defines something as not-romance.
ReplyDeleteIn theory, it seems to me that it ought to be less of a problem in the UK and other countries where "romance" doesn't exist so strongly as a genre in the US sense (i.e. as defined by the RWA with "a central love story" and "an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending"). What we have in the UK is "romantic fiction" (often shelved as "romance") which includes but isn't limited to romance in the US sense. However, this sometimes means that scorn for the limitations of "romance" in the US sense is directed at Harlequin Mills & Boons. That was possibly what was happening in the article you and I looked at which seemed to elevate chick lit above M&Bs. Bridget Fowler does a similar thing when she elevates romantic fiction of the Catherine Cookson sort by contrasting it with M&Bs.
Since I've not researched other genres, I don't know, but I suspect readers of other genres have been psychoanalysed too.
ReplyDeleteThey certainly haven't been psychoanalysed to such an extent as romance readers. I've done quite a lot of research on fantasy fiction but I can't remember ever having come across a study focused on the readers.
Laura's post suggests that Radway's analysis may depend on limited or even flawed lenses through which to examine her subject. I would agree and suggest as well that simple academic snobbery plays a part in her misreading of her subjects.
Absolutely. At one point she even expresses surprise at the eloquence of some of the people she interviewed. The way Radway talks about them reminded me very much of early ethnographic studies - 19th-century and early-20th-century anthropologists were about as prejudiced about the people and cultures they were studying as Radway.
Radway's study is really good of how to not conduct a questionnaire study. For even though she mentions at the beginning that she interviewed only a small group of people and that the results thus don't allow for any generalisations (Laura quotes this bit in her post), generalising is exactly what she does. The title of her book already makes this obvious: after all, she has not written a study about reading romance fiction, but a study about reading romance fiction in Smithton.
In addition, a lot of passages reveal her utter cluelessness about simple mechanics of writing and about the publishing business. Take this bit from the introduction: "That the problem might even be more complicated than we think is suggested by Krikland's discovery that most of the women in the group of romance writers she studied had been avid readers before they tried their hand at romance writing." Goodness. What a discovery! Writers are readers before they become writers! Totally unheard of!
At one point she also talks about amateur writers (if I remember correctly, her example is Janet Dailey), namely writers who've got a day job.
Why is Radway considered important if her methodology and results are so flawed?
Because "Reading the Romance" was one of the first studies of romance fiction. Furthermore, it is a relatively well-known work even among mainstream scholars. So we all feel the need to mention Radway when writing a longer study on romance fiction. At the very least, you have to mention her in your overview of relevant secondary literature.
They certainly haven't been psychoanalysed to such an extent as romance readers
ReplyDeleteThanks for the additional information, Sandra.
Why is Radway considered important if her methodology and results are so flawed?
As Veronique said, "This study is still considered a ground breaking study in romance reading." It may not be highly regarded by many of those of us who're in the current wave of romance scholarship, and who view ourselves as romance readers, but as Sandra and Veronique have suggested, it's probably the study of romance and romance readers which is best known to those in other areas of academia. To give an example, the book by Roberts on "Junk Fiction" which Jessica at RRR has been reviewing, and which I linked to above, repeatedly quotes from Radway.
If we want to challenge stereotypes about romance and romance readers, we have to address Radway, because down the years her study has provided academic support for many of them.
What a discovery! Writers are readers before they become writers! Totally unheard of!
Snort! Very good point.
If we want to challenge stereotypes about romance and romance readers, we have to address Radway
ReplyDeleteAnd then we immediately pull out Regis and yell "Ha!"
To be serious, I've just realised how well suited "A Natural History of the Romance Novel" would be for teaching a historical overview of the genre as she discusses the works of so many classic authors (Heyer! Stewart! Not Holt though.) I might just put it to the test soon. Very soon, in fact.
There's a kind of topsy-turvy element in the study of romance fiction, I think. Much of the criticism in other genres focuses on authors rather than readers. Great attention, for example, is given to what led them to produce what they produced, what influenced them to give attention to what they wrote about. Why is that?
ReplyDelete"Much of the criticism in other genres focuses on authors rather than readers. [...] Why is that?"
ReplyDeleteI suspect that if researchers are convinced that a particular text is a work of genius, they may be interested in writing about the genius who created it.
On the other hand, if the perception is that romance novels are mass-produced items, churned out according to a strict formula, then there will be no incentive to study an individual author's body of work, because it will be assumed to be pretty similar to any other romance author's body of work. It seems probable to me that researchers with that perception of the genre turned to the readers to try to understand their seemingly inexplicable devotion to a worthless, trashy genre.
I think things are changing in romance. Nowadays more romance scholars see themselves as romance readers. I think that affects how we go about studying the genre. As far as authors are concerned, we've had a conference about Georgette Heyer, there will be a panel at the PCA/ACA conference on Nora Roberts, and Eric and I are editing a volume of essays about Jennifer Crusie's novels.
I am studying Radway's work for the dissertation towards my Media degree. I have encountered a number of problems with her interpretation of her results.
ReplyDeleteI am using her questionnaires to carry out a smaller although more diverse investigation. I hope my results will be less biased as the lenses i wear are those of a romance reader
Hollie
Thanks for commenting, Hollie. That sounds very interesting. Will you be reporting back about your research somewhere? What were the problems you noticed about Radway's interpretation of her results?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about reporting back, i think that depends on how well I do over all.
ReplyDeleteMy biggest problems with Radway was her disregard of some of the things the women said. Like the belief that the stories are on some level real. Which they are can not put a man in a pair of jeans in 1800's London, it wouldn't be real.
Also she didn't read any of the books to read them, for enjoyment in the way the women did. She analysed them in an academic way, its the difference between coaching a team to win at sport and playing with friends just for fun.
The first set of questionnaires are in, the oral interviews are set up for next week and the last set of questionnaires, will go out at the same time.
Hollie
"I'm not sure about reporting back, i think that depends on how well I do over all."
ReplyDeleteI hope you do really well!
"My biggest problems with Radway was her disregard of some of the things the women said. Like the belief that the stories are on some level real."
I definitely got the impression that there was a communication/interpretation gap between Radway and her interviewees and that Radway sometimes interpreted their words in ways which seemed to assume that the women were naive/stupid.
Thank you, and yes I agree, I did wonder for a while if she had even read any romances and often got the impression that she humored the women and their belief and understanding of the books.
ReplyDelete