Inside those stories is everything you need to have a happy, loving relationship. [...] And what better way to learn about relationships and how they start, fracture, and become stronger once repaired, than to read about those relationships in many, many permutations and variations? (4-5)
In her review of EIKALILFRN Jessica Miller, a romance reader and a philosopher who teaches at the University of Maine, suggests that there's something rather problematic about Wendell's line of argument: Though Wendell is writing a “gift book,” not a work of theory or literary criticism, her specific claims deserve some scrutiny, particularly around the issue of reader engagement, which is central to her arguments on the genre’s behalf. How, for instance, do romance readers manage to glean the good stuff but not the bad? [...] Wendell relies on reader testimonials for her claim that romance readers learn the real lessons, but merely enjoy the fantasy, but then what do we do about readers who testify that romance has harmed them [...]? To her credit, Wendell includes a few comments from readers who claim they learned what not to expect by reading romance [...]Miller argues that
But if savvy readers come to the genre ready and able to suss out what’s just fantasy, what’s worth emulating, and what not to do, then romance novels aren’t actually teaching these readers anything new. Wendell herself admits that the lessons romance teaches are “things you likely learned as a child when you were taught how to treat other people.” In that case, it would be more accurate to say that romance novels reflect or deepen moral beliefs readers already hold. This makes sense—but then it follows that if a reader holds pernicious or delusional moral beliefs (however we define those), given the sheer size of the genre, she can probably find some reinforcing of those bad moral beliefs in romance novels, too.
It’s time to stop evaluating romance novels in terms of their putative effects on (women) readers, and to pay more attention to their literary merit and ability to provide pure pleasure.
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- Miller, Jessica. "A Fine Romance." Open Letters Monthly. 1 Feb. 2012.
- Wendell, Sarah. Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2011.
"It’s time to stop evaluating romance novels in terms of their putative effects on (women) readers, and to pay more attention to their literary merit and ability to provide pure pleasure."
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking about Jessica Miller's piece since reading it and I am still mulling over thoughts, but I am struck by this argument. Is pleasure intrinsic to literary merit, or are they separate notions that should be treated in isolation? That is, does pleasure function in the same way as the didactic value of the novel, or the affect and effect of romance?
I have found the review to be exceptionally rich and very rewarding. In my McDaniel paper, I argued alongside Wendell (who was in the audience, a genuine thrill to speak about the book with the author present) that romance does affect readers and we need to consider the affective value of romance. Much of my current work continues to explore questions of affect, therapy/therapeutic, and fiction, especially romance. So, while on the one hand I am happy that some are interested in speaking to "literary merit" (a term that always seems problematic to me, how far is "value judgment" away from "literary merit", do we measure the "literary merit" of a romance novel the same was as "literary fiction" or other "genre fictions"?), I am reluctant to move away from theoretical questions already contained within the romance novel, both as a "general" category and as an individual text to be studied (romance scholarship, of course, runs the risk of seeming to be either "too general" or "too specific" -- balance is the ideal).
It’s time to stop evaluating romance novels in terms of their putative effects on (women) readers [...]. We should not ask more—or less—of romance than we ask of any other fiction.
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, I have the impression that arguments somewhat similar to Sarah Wendell's have been made about other types of fiction. Those arguments aren't (as far as I know) gendered in the same way as the discussions about the benefits/dangers of reading romance, and they're much more about agape than eros, but they do exist. On the other hand, some people may well feel it is time to stop making those arguments too. Here's part of what Suzanne Keen has to say about the issue in her Empathy and the Novel:
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Empathy and the Novel presents a comprehensive account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism, exploring the implications for literary studies of the widely promulgated "empathy-altruism" hypothesis. Social and developmental psychologists, philosophers of virtue ethics, feminist advocates of an ethic of caring, and many defenders of the humanities believe that empathic emotion motivates altruistic action, resulting in less aggression, less fickle helping, less blaming of victims for their misfortunes, increased cooperation in conflict situations, and improved actions on behalf of needy individuals and members of stigmatized groups. The celebration of novel reading as a stimulus to the role-taking imagination and emotional responsiveness of readers - in countless reading group guides and books on the virtues of reading, in character education curricula, and in public defenses of humanities funding - augments the empathy-altruism hypothesis, substituting experiences of narrative empathy for shared feelings with real others. Read Henry James and live well [...]; become a better world citizen through canonical novels, philosopher Martha Nussbaum advocates [...]. Discover compassion through "The Lion and the Mouse" or "The Legend of the Dipper" writes William J. Bennett [...]. Shed your prejudices through novel reading, suggests novelist Sue Monk Kidd [...]. Azar Nafisi affirms, "empathy is at the heart of the novel," and warns, if you don't read, you won't be able to empathize. Is the attractive and consoling case for fiction implied by these representative views defensible? Surveying the existing research on the consequences of reading, I find the case for altruism stemming from novel reading inconclusive at best and nearly always exaggerated in favor of the beneficial effects of novel reading.(vii)
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Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
Viewing this from an entirely personal point of view (i.e. in terms of how it might affect my work as a romance scholar), I can only conclude that the debate about the effects of fiction seems to be a complex one to which I don't have the knowledge or training to contribute.
ReplyDeleteI also feel unequal to the task of assessing reading pleasure with the requisite academic rigour.
So that leaves me with this bit of Jessica's sentence:
It’s time to [...] pay more attention to their literary merit.
It seems to me that this is a call which is not dissimilar to the one Pamela Regis made in her keynote speech to the second IASPR conference: "We owe the romance novel a good-faith effort to uncover the complexity that our discipline values so highly. A skilled literary critic can see the complexity in any apparently simple text."
I know I haven't really answered your questions, Jonathan, but that's because I don't feel qualified to give a firm opinion on questions such as
ReplyDeleteIs pleasure intrinsic to literary merit, or are they separate notions that should be treated in isolation? That is, does pleasure function in the same way as the didactic value of the novel, or the affect and effect of romance?
My hunch would be that pleasure need not be at all related to literary merit. Lots of people have "guilty pleasures" which they openly state are badly written but which they nevertheless enjoy reading.
However, given that romance as a genre has often been considered a "guilty pleasure" and given that in my work I've been arguing that romances can be rather more complex/ have more literary merit than has generally been acknowledged, I have to concede the possibility that some of those "guilty pleasures" may in fact be complex too.
Thanks for these comments. I think my concerns were very much in relation to my own work. I have shared the review with many people because I think it is so well done. It raises many important questions of romance and for romance scholars. I think Regis is right when she writes: "We owe the romance novel a good-faith effort to uncover the complexity that our discipline values so highly. A skilled literary critic can see the complexity in any apparently simple text." And, I think, that is what Miller is asking us to do as well. I guess for me, the question of complexity also includes the affective question as well, something that is far more complex than the standard "romance novels are dangerous" argument.
ReplyDeleteI guess for me, the question of complexity also includes the affective question as well
ReplyDeleteSo instead of generalising about whether "romance" is good or bad, you'd try to identify a range of positive and negative effects?
Or would you look at whether particular combinations of romances might have particular cumulative effects on certain readers? Miller, for example, writes that
it would have been interesting to hear explicitly from non-white readers about how they negotiate these texts. In “We Know Good Sex,” Wendell insists that romances are liberating for women because they celebrate female desire, and she’s right, but this reader is sorry that the strict parameters of feminine desire as constructed in the romance genre (namely, that the best sex is committed, monogamous, heterosexual sex, between two white people in love) go unacknowledged.
Or would acknowledging complexity mean you'd get down to the level of individual romances and the potential effects that a particular romance could have on particular readers?
I think there are many ways to approach the affective question in reading romance, and this is what Wendell's book does so well. Wendell provides us with many, many anecdotes from readers, how they responded to texts, etc. These instances are, to my mind, very important because they allow us -- as literary critics -- to engage with readers responding to texts and how those texts affected them. (As a side note, as much as I agree with Northrop Frye, I wonder about the place of reader response in Frye's work -- and this is something I should look at in further detail.)
ReplyDeleteI am not interested in saying this is "good" or this is "bad" or that a text is "good" or "bad." My reasoning is that what is good for one may not be good for the other. I don't think that is the goal, but I would be interested in the way that romances novels have helped the broken hearted, or the lonely, or the widowed. What is remarkable, I think, about romance is the range of experiences that can be found in romance. I agree that romances may treat these issues superficially and that these experiences may not speak to every reader (after all most "first times" are never all that amazing!), but another interesting aspect of romance, for me, is the readers to whom these texts do speak (or even its affective possibility). Imagining love after tremendous heartbreak is no easy task, and if romance can do this, I think we are talking about a powerful medium.
Wendell provides us with many, many anecdotes from readers, how they responded to texts, etc. These instances are, to my mind, very important
ReplyDeleteIf EIKAL had just been a collection of anecdotes, though, it would have been a very different book. Quite a lot of them can be found on the original thread in which readers supplied Wendell with their answers to the question "Have romance novels helped you with real life relationships?"
I haven't compared the two, but just quickly looking at the original thread, I came across comments like this one: "Romance novels RUINED my love life. Ok, I’m being dramatic. But they certainly gave me unrealistic expectations." I don't know what proportion of comments like that made it into EIKAL. That said, EIKAL wasn't intended to be a scientific study, so Wendell wasn't obliged to ensure that the anecdotes included in EIKAL accurately reflected the range of anecdotes supplied to her.
I also think it has to be remembered that the anecdotes in EIKAL are mostly provided by readers of Wendell's site, so one probably has to be careful not to assume that they're representative of the anecdotes that one might get if one asked a wider range of romance readers about their experiences of reading romances. For example, I imagine the romance readers interviewed by Lynn S. Neal for her Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction would probably have given significantly different answers.
I would be interested in the way that romances novels have helped the broken hearted, or the lonely, or the widowed
Eric wrote a post at the now-defunct Romancing the Blog in which he suggested "that romance novels are often primers in positive psychology, in ways that measure up quite well against current research." I wrote a short post inspired by that.
Re Jessica and where she's coming from, I think that if you haven't already read her posts about ethical criticism you'd find them really interesting: Part 1 and Part 2.
“I also think that it has to be remembered that the anecdotes in EIKAL are mostly provided by readers of Wendell’s site, so one probably has to be careful not to assume that they’re representative of the anecdotes that one might get if one asked a wider range of romance readers about their experiences of reading romances.”
ReplyDeleteA few early thoughts...
I find myself recoiling at the concern about anecdotes, and I think this might be a question of theoretical approach. But, immediately I find myself thinking about feminist pedagogies coming out of the second wave and continuing through to the present. The personal is political. The mantra is now commonplace and yet here it seems that there is a questioning of these anecdotes, these personal narratives about romance, which are also intensely political. I think one of the strongest aspects of Wendell’s book is the personal narratives that are found throughout. I am less turned off by these instances than others.
I know that this perspective puts me into another “camp” of literary criticism, and I am content with that, but I worry about a critique of Wendell’s book based on anecdotes. The anecdote is a rich site for inquiry, particularly with the scholarly work of someone like Jane Gallop. In her book Anecdotal Theory, she provides numerous examples of how we might explore the “anecdote” in academic contexts, how we might theorize these instances, and how these instances might help us better understand theory. But, even without a book like Anecdotal Theory, feminist theory and queer theory have been insistent upon the recognition of the personal. I am not suggesting that we all just wax poetic about our relation to romance novels, but I am asking that we seriously consider our relation as readers and as scholars to the romances we read.
I don’t think that we can take these “anecdotes” as representative of all romance readers anymore than a Harlequin represents all of romance. But, just as we ask for studies of romance that are less general and more individual (for instance, close readings of a given text), I think we should consider that same rule in relation to the question of readers of romance.
What is at stake in treating cautiously – or perhaps even denying – the anecdotal claims of readers at the Smart Bitches website, in EIKAL, or even in Neal’s Romancing God or Radway’s Reading the Romance?
I find myself recoiling at the concern about anecdotes [...] What is at stake in treating cautiously – or perhaps even denying – the anecdotal claims of readers at the Smart Bitches website, in EIKAL, or even in Neal’s Romancing God or Radway’s Reading the Romance?
ReplyDeleteI'm not denying the anecdotal claims that readers make about the effect of romance-reading on their own lives. Nor am I concerned about the academic use of anecdotes per se. My concern here is about the ways in which a particular set of anecdotes might be obtained and interpreted. I felt Neal used anecdotes very well but (and I've not got the text to hand right at the moment, so I'm drawing on my memory for this) it felt to me as though Radway was drawing conclusions about all romance readers, on the basis of what she was told by about 40 romance readers. I have concerns about that. If someone's going to make big claims about a genre and its readers, then I think they need to make sure they have enough evidence to back up those claims. However I'm not a sociologist, anthropologist or statistician so I wouldn't try (a) doing this kind of work or (b) setting firm guidelines for how to do it.
Speaking entirely personally and anecdotally, as a romance reader and a reader of SBTB, when I read Wendell's call for answers to the question "Have romance novels helped you with real life relationships?" I chose not to respond. That's one of the things which makes me wonder if other readers perhaps also held back, for reasons similar to mine.
This has been a fascinating discussion to read Laura and Jonathon. Thanks for having it where I can watch over your shoulders.Reader here - not an academic; but I was thinking about the commentary to Jessica's 50 Shades of Grey review http://www.readreactreview.com/2012/01/30/50-things-about-50-shades-of-grey/
ReplyDeleteand Lizmc2's recent blog post on 'reading with a passionate eye' http://myextensivereading.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/reading-with-a-passionate-eye/#comments
Because in both cases the commenters are discussing books that matter to them on a feeling level and trying to distill how this occurs and why it does which for me fits with Jonathon's comment "...
that romance does affect readers and we need to consider the affective value of romance". The ways in which readers try to draw this out are based on anecdote and example. Are these the 'language' of readers? I am somebody who would not say that I have learned from reading romance but I would say that I have been affected by it and it reading is an affective experience for me.
Just thought of an anecdote re affective reading.... I have a book that is a collection of first person narratives of British soldiers and sailors who fought in the Falklands War. It is a mass market paperback. I keep it for one story in particular - a young sailor who won the George Medal for bravery after his ship was bombed. He was pinned down below decks and when he regained consciousness he was injured and dazed. As he lay there he thought to himself "what would the Silver Surfer do?" (the Silver Surfer is a comic book superhero). The Silver Surfer what get up and get going he thought. The sailor freed himself and then others who were trapped, helped them into life jackets and into the ocean where they were picked up. He didn't have a life jacket and helped keep afloat an unconscious man who was picked up first. He was drowning and sinking under the waves when a surgeon climbed down the helicopter rope (which they are not supposed to do) and dragged him up.
ReplyDeleteMerrian, following up on part of what Lizmc2 writes about "Reading with a Passionate Eye":
ReplyDeleteI don’t think I’ve been uncritically lost in a book since childhood. I had my readerly Romantic fall from Innocence to Experience long ago. Unlike Wordsworth, I don’t mourn “the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.” I’m content to give up intense immersion in exchange for the pleasures of critical thinking.
I'm pretty much the opposite: the first time I read a novel it will usually have quite a strong emotional effect on me. However, because that makes the reading experience feel very personal, I generally try to avoid discussing books from that perspective.
If I want to analyse them from a literary-critical perspective, I usually have to re-read them, or at least re-think them. I'm happy to write/discuss my literary-critical thoughts about books because they're much less based on my emotions, so feel less personal.
My emotional response to EIKAL, by the way, was that my feelings had been erased from an account which was overwhelmingly positive in its assessment of the effects of romance reading.
Here's one of the least personal examples of the kind of negative effects I personally encounter as a result of romance reading. Sometimes I come across passages in romances in which a heroine bewails the fact that her hair goes fuzzy in humid weather. Or someone else, when giving her a makeover, will straighten her hair. In both cases it's either stated explicitly, or strongly implied, that her fuzzy hair looks ugly and messy. I have fuzzy hair all the time - and it hurts me when I read passages like that because they make me feel as though I've just been told that my hair is ugly and messy.
Thanks for the comments, and here are a few more thoughts-in-progress (I am still trying to work through all of these ideas).
ReplyDelete"If I want to analyse them from a literary-critical perspective, I usually have to re-read them, or at least re-think them. I'm happy to write/discuss my literary-critical thoughts about books because they're much less based on my emotions, so feel less personal."
I'm not sure that I understand this because I'm not certain how one is able to remove or displace (even momentarily) the self from the "literary-critical perspective." Also, I am not certain I fully understand the advantage that "less personal" offers than say "more personal." I admit that I am coming at this from a very different perspective, one that it is intimately connected with a query into the reader -- myself as reader -- and how to relate to a text. But what is lost, for instance, when we don't consider "the first time" that we read a novel? Peter Pan was a remarkably haunting novel for me "the first time," that I read it (which was quite recently), and this is precisely where I started when I started writing about Peter Pan. Is my reading "right" or "wrong," I'm not certain, but that haunting quality of my first reading affected my second and third readings.
It is not that I need to "relate" to a text or to somehow see myself within a text, but rather my reactions to a text, which seem to me a source of concern. Why, for instance, has Proust managed to capture my attention even though we are miles apart in identity? I'm not French, I'm not Jewish, I'm not gay, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, and yet, I return, over and over again, to In Search of Lost Time. My questions here are likely motivated, in part, because I was trained in Hispanic Studies and thus none of the texts that I read could ever relate to my own experience because I was always already removed from the context of the text. So with this difference between a reader and a text, when there is some sort of pull that brings them together, I think this is an interesting site of concern. It is, of course, remarkably personal, and it may very well have something to do with "literary merit," but I'm not certain. (This is not to discount negative affective experiences either.)
There is something remarkably affective about romance reading, and it is this side of the coin that seems interesting to me as a "scholar" (I'm not sure if I am a literary critic). Romance reading affects both negatively and positively and that is what is, to my mind, fascinating. It is certainly true that most of the readers in Wendell's book offered "positive" experiences of romance reading, but perhaps that is because we have already read more than enough "negative" experiences, after all, romance readers, we are told, don't use condoms. Wendell's book is not a "cure" to the bad press romance novels receive, instead, it is perhaps an antidote -- it allows us to say, yes, romance novels may affect readers negatively, but at the same time, it affects readers positively.
I'm not certain how one is able to remove or displace (even momentarily) the self from the "literary-critical perspective."
ReplyDeleteObviously my reading history and personal preferences will affect the way I select and respond to texts. Some of those preferences are academic ones. So, for example, what happened when Eric, Sarah and I all set out to write posts about Louise Allen's Virgin Slave, Barbarian King was that Sarah chose to focus on masculinity (which is an area of particular academic interest to her), I related the text to Roman mythology and Eric looked at the novel in the context of the history of the popular romance novel.
Or, to give a more recent example, if I've read a romance and found its use of horse imagery interesting, I don't feel it's particularly necessary to write anything about my own feelings about horses, horse-riding or horse-riders as I write about the romance. Instead I related the horse imagery in the romance to horse imagery in other texts, and then tried to analyse whether the romance did something innovative within that tradition of horse imagery and what that might imply given the connotations of horses in other texts.
Also, I am not certain I fully understand the advantage that "less personal" offers than say "more personal."
Privacy, for one thing. And also I think that my writing is more likely to interest readers if it's "less personal": they're interested in the book, not in me.
My questions here are likely motivated, in part, because I was trained in Hispanic Studies and thus none of the texts that I read could ever relate to my own experience because I was always already removed from the context of the text.
Jonathan, I was trained as a Hispano-medievalist, so I could also say that "none of the texts that I read could ever relate to my own experience because I was always already removed from the context of the text." It hasn't motivated me to write about my own feelings, though.
Thank you for your comments. I genuinely appreciate them. More thoughts to come as I think them through. Initially and cautiously, I don't think that I am asking that we write about "our own feelings," so much as we recognize that "feelings" often motivate our readings.
ReplyDeleteJonathan, I've just seen a post by Keith Oatley at OnFiction which might be of interest to you. It's a mini-review, really, of two books by Patrick Colm Hogan:
ReplyDeleteThe first of these is What literature teaches us about emotion. Hogan has an especial knowledge of Shakespeare as well as an extraordinary familiarity with world literature, and this expertise enables him to bridge between psychology and literary theory, by offering examples in which people interested in the emotions can discover important understandings of specific emotions such as romantic love, grief, and guilt. [...] The book is also a study of particular works, but with a perspective that is different from that of the usual kinds of literary analysis; it's a study of how these works function specifically to explore and throw light on emotion.
The second book is Affective narratology, the emotional structure of stories, in which Hogan shows that the structure of stories is a product of human emotion systems.
I haven't read Wendell's book yet, so I cannot weigh in on the critiques. However, I do think that we need to acknowledge and consider the fact that women have long been reading fiction in ways that are both communal and affective.
ReplyDeleteAs numerous scholars of late 18th and 19th C sentimental fiction have pointed out, women often shared their reading experiences in what we would today likely identify as a book club type environment. As Cathy Davidson argues in Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, an "unstated premise of sentimental fiction is that a woman must take greater control of her life and must make shrewd judgments of the men who come into her life (113), because choosing a good marriage was one of the most important (if not the most important) choice a woman would make. While the choices women now face are more diverse, romantic partnership is still central for us, and romantic fiction allows us to explore and discuss many issues relevant to, well, taking greater control of our lives and making shrewd judgments, not only about our romantic partners but also about many other life choices. Why is it we can talk respectably about how the fiction of Camus can make us contemplate the nature of the individual and the limits of ontological reasoning, but we can't talk about how romantic fiction makes us think about the nature of love and marriage without being accused of being anti-feminist, simple-minded, or in denial?
I don't ascribe to a purely affective theory of reading (although I do think we might need to consider reader response theories here), nor am I fond of simplistic assertions of how fiction "affects" us, but I'm also very reluctant to dismiss affective aspects of reading, especially when they are paired with intellectual discussion (e.g. "shrewd judgments"). I think we do a disservice to women and to the genres that comprise women's fiction to dismiss or diminish any aspect of the reading experience, especially when those dismissive of these genres are so eager to do this very thing.