LWAV was published originally in 1982. I purchased the newest edition, which contains a new preface but is otherwise unchanged. This is a very slight book, both in page numbers (107) and in argument. All of the Harlequins Modleski quoted were published in 1976. A few examples:
I find it remarkable that the new preface spends so much time responding to the evolution of feminist cultural critique and almost none to changes in the romance genre. Anyway, here are the quotes:
1. A television commercial for Harlequin Romances shows a middle-aged woman lying on her bed holding a Harlequin novel and preparing to begin what she calls her “disappearing act.” I can’t think of a better phrase to describe at once both what is laudable and what is deplorable in the appeal of such fiction. … Indeed, as we shall see, the heroine of the novels can achieve happiness only by undergoing a complex process of self-subversion, during which she sacrifices her aggressive instincts, her “pride”, and – nearly – her life. And a close analysis of the dynamics of the reading process will show that the reader is encouraged to participate in and actively desire feminine self-betrayal. (p. 29)
2. The element of fantasy in romance lies less in the character traits of the hero than in the interpretation readers are led to make of his behavior. … Male brutality comes to be seen as a manifestation not of contempt but of love.
This is an important function of the formula. It is easy to assume, and most popular culture critics have assumed, a large degree of identification between reader and protagonist, but the matter is not so simple. Since the reader knows the formula, she is superior in wisdom to the heroine and thus detached from her. The reader, then, achieves a very close emotional identification with the heroine partly because she is intellectually distanced from her and does not have to suffer the heroine’s confusion. (pp. 32-33)
3. A different view of “the grovel”:
A great deal of our satisfaction in reading these novels comes, I am convinced, from the elements of a revenge fantasy, form our conviction that the woman is bringing the man to his knees and that all the while he is being so hateful, he is internally grovelling, grovelling, grovelling) … (p. 37).
4. An explanation for romance readers’ “addiction”:
In both texts, the transformation of brutal (or, indeed, murderous) men into tender lovers, the insistent denial of the reality of male hostility toward women, point to ideological conflicts so profound that readers must constantly return to the same text (to texts which are virtually the same) in order to be reconvinced. (p. 104)
I find Modleski’s use of the term “our” in this chapter suspect and therefore extremely troubling in its implications for her analysis.
5. From the new preface, which defends her psychoanalytic approach against the new ethnography in pop cultural studies, this response to Janice Radway’s claim that she never contradicted her subjects’ interpretations in Reading the Romance:
One cannot quarrel with the notion that feminist critics ought not to engage in attacking or presuming to direct other women. But are there no limits to the actual support a feminist critic ought to extend to their struggles and their terms? to take an example, if romance writers and readers were to defend their genre … on the grounds of man’s natural superiority to women, should feminist critics simply go along with these “terms?” Do we not have an obligation as feminist critics to contest such notions? How can criticism call itself feminist if it is not first and foremost an engaged criticism?
Finally, something on which we agree. This is an important issue.
Related posts:
Glad to see you working your way through this one, Jessica. Your work with Thomas Roberts’ book on “junk fiction” really jumpstarted my teaching of the genre this past year.
Modleski’s psychoanalytic explanation of the “addiction” to romance strikes me as overcomplicated and, frankly, a little bit smug. It’s the equivalent of the village atheist observing that regular religious-service goers are obviously the ones whose faith is most shaky, since they clearly need to keep going back to be re-convinced.
There’s plenty of clinical evidence that random reinforcement leads to addictive behavior, or something that resembles it. Since it’s essentially impossible to know which romance novel will give the powerful pleasure that the best in the genre can provide–or where in a novel of mixed success that kick or payoff will come–these novels are wonderfully designed to cause this effect, perhaps especially in the category format. (More so than, say, post-New Wave SF novels, which tend to be–and to be packaged as–more different, one from another.)
Eric, your last paragraph has confused me. Are you saying that you think category romances are more addictive because they look similar but aren’t, whereas single-title romances and books in other genres are less addictive because they look dissimilar and are dissimilar? Are you arguing that the expectation of similarity makes the effect of random reinforcement stronger?
On the topic of the process of reading, have any of you read Michael Burke’s Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind? I haven’t read it myself but it’s described over at OnFiction:
The Harlequin advert which “shows a middle-aged woman lying on her bed holding a Harlequin novel and preparing to begin what she calls her ‘disappearing act.’” would seem to show a reader who also feels a need to “prepare to read.”
-sighs dramatically- Ohhhh, Modeleski.
So slightly off-topic but ultimately related . . . we were reading “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” in the class that I’m TA-ing for. A male student came up to me before class, chit-chatting and was all, “Well, I don’t think any of this is what women want.” To which I replied, no because the question at the heart of TWBT, “what do women want?” is stupid because it assumes that women, like the Borg, are a collective entity who want the same things, who act the same way and are generally categorized as a giant single brain, rather than as individual persons with individual responses and desires. A critique that TWBT kind of makes.
Which brings me back to Modeleski, who I think even more than Radway, generalizes women in this Borg like-way to such an extent that her argument cannot hold up. I mean, look at the way she’s chosen her texts–such a small number of books from a single year 35 years in the past. My god, I’m younger than those books by three years! And like you said, Jessica, I think it is interesting that the new preface doesn’t address any changes in the romance genre over that last 35 years, but instead adheres to those texts as if they really could be representational of all romance.
Moreover, her characterization of addiction is so summary–”Romance readers do this. Romance readers are like this. This is what this indicates about romance readers.” Yet, it seems to me that she does not take into account–and I wonder if she does not take this into account on purpose–the variety of responses readers have to romance plots. Certainly, one can read a book and not like the plot and yet still want to read the genre again.
At this point in my academic career, I’m not even sure what engaging as a feminist critic means . . . especially since what this particular book seems to be doing is consciously not engaging with romance or romance readers based upon the sparsity of the texts chosen and the amalgamation of all romance readers into one giant ideologically conflicted creature–like Frankenstein’s Monster, stomping towards their own self-immolation in a quest for love.
To be fair to Modleski, I feel it should be noted that of the nine novels “directly referred to in the text” (118), one was first published in 1964 (and reprinted in 1976), and one was first published in 1974. She doesn’t give the full publication details of two novels mentioned only by title: “The very titles often indicate the basic conflict: [...] Beloved Tyrant, Fond Deceiver, etc.” (40). I think she may be referring to Beloved Tyrant by Violet Winspear, which was apparently first published in 1964 and Fond Deceiver by Pauline Garnar, which was apparently first published in 1970.
She may well have read others which she does not mention, or quote from, in Loving With a Vengeance.
There’s lots of very interesting points here. One, however, that is common both to Modleski’s analysis and other very divergent analyses of romance novels, is the insistence on relating to them in a literal way; the assumptions made regarding where the reader stands in the reading experience and how she relates to the action. This:
This betrays so many assumptions. The reader MUST be placing herself in the heroine’s shoes; the hero MUST be ‘other’ to the reader; the satisfaction MUST relate to this actual grovel and how it resolves the conflict.
No! No, that is not it at all for me. It totally misses both what in fact is happening inside my head and the nature of the ‘satisfaction’ I am deriving which is all about the skill of the conflict resolution, the breaching of power differentials, the emotional arc of the story. Much of it is about pace and size and proportionality. It is not me, a woman, enjoying watching a man grovelling for god’s sake. It’s beyond patronising and frankly, lacking in imagination.
@Eric Selinger: I am glad you found something of value in the Roberts!
Re: Modelski — I am skeptical of psychoanalytic explanations of this sort to begin with, and as a feminist frankly astounded at the way she used, without critique, the concept of hysteria to characterize romance readers. As a scholar who has read a lot of both French and US based psychoanalytic feminism, I cannot comprehend why she did not rely on cutting edge feminist psychoanalysis, which would have at least been an improvement.
@Laura Vivanco: Thanks for that recommendation, Laura. I tried to find the ad on You Tube, but no luck. I wonder why Harlequin doesn’t use TV ads anymore.
@Angela/Lazaraspaste: I was not impressed with this book. However, the things she does which were useful for the time — 1984 – are (1) try (not always successfully) to move beyond the “open their brains and put in” view of consumers’ engagement with popular narratives, (2) deal with the texts in the manner of a real literary critic, and (3) recognize forms of resistance in reader response to romance.
But — despite Laura’s correction (thank you) as to the dates of her sources — the fact remains that Modelski thinks of romance as one book being written over and over, and also that she equates the Harlequin romance line with the entire genre.
@Tumperkin: I agree with you but then … how is it done? How to theorize romance? Can we only ever say something about one book and one reader at a time?
And yet, jay Dixon, who is a reader of M&Bs, as well as having edited many of them, has written that during her marriage:
Susan Elizabeth Phillips writes something similar, I think, in the Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women volume of essays:
In the same volume Daphne Clair writes that
So it would seem that for some readers it is indeed the case that “A great deal of [...] satisfaction in reading these novels comes [...] from the elements of a revenge fantasy” and from the “conviction that the woman is bringing the man to his knees.”
–
Dixon, jay. The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1990s. London: UCL, 1999.
I was thinking about this quote and on one hand I agree nothing is above critique because thinking about our ways of being in and with the world is important if things that should be changed are to be opened up to the possibility of change…. but I have a however.
I wonder if I as the romance reader/person/group being studied get to ask the same thing back? The example Modelski gives is a no brainer; of course we would all be on the side of opening up to examination and critique something such as romance writing that reinforces inequality should be (I don’t actually believe that romance writing does this). To me her example is a hammer for squashing opposition to her project. Her approach leaves me questioning her theorising because it doesn’t leave anywhere for the subjects of the research to go, if they defend themselves then they are part of the patriarchy. The quote is a neatly back hand way of presenting romance readers as unreflective and in need of a light being shone upon them/for them because they can’t or won’t themselves.
If that middle-aged lady says she disappears then that is a description of her relationship with the text, not necessarily a reflection on her life and its possible problems and lacks as imputed by the researcher. For example, it might also be a description of focussed attention – shouldn’t we celebrate that the lady found a way to carve out some time for herself with the tools (books) available to her?
I think Modelski reduces her subjects into less complex beings because that suits her purpose not because they are and that is very colonial of her.
For me romance writing is a dialogue of male and female and of self and other in which (whatever sub-genre from UF to historical to m/m to contemporary, etc.) we are engaged in working through what relationships are and mean and having some fun along the way. Given that relationships are the core of our everyday life and well-being this is a worthy project. I think romance novels reflect our times. I also think they are an ongoing conversation not the static objects that Modelski presents as her straw figures.
@Merrian:
Her orientation is psychoanalytic. By definition, it means she has privileged access, as analyst, to the reader’s unconscious motivations and desires.
@Merrian:
Well, it is actually more complex than prior studies, as she claims in the book. She sees readers getting revenge on patriarchy by reading these books, not just getting duped. BUT … you are very right that there is a colonizing vibe here.
For me, this is text suffers so clearly from many of the faults of second wave feminist theory: universalizing, ahistorical, essentializing, and, as you say colonizing.
I am also intrigued by the new edition of a book published in 1984, even with the new preface. It is a book of its time. My question is as I think you have drawn out – what does it mean over twenty years later and what insight does it offer the genre and its critical readers in 2011? It might have been interesting if she had taken her analysis from 1984 and applied it to five books published over the ensuing 20 years or even five books published in one year in this century which .
So, exactly as you say, Jessica….
Modelski’s book is a now historical analysis of how historical books and the women who read them … and I have a feeling the re-publication is jumping on the train of the emerging academic respectability of romance and the growing recognition of the size of the romance novel genre and reading population.