Reading the Romance

From MarxWiki

Janice Radway's Reading the Romance explores the particular significance of the practice of `reading` popular cultural texts, in this case women's literal act of reading romance novels. While she does analyze the content of the texts, she emphasizes the importance of the readers' interpretations and the significance of those texts to the practices of their everyday lives. This is a major contribution to cultural studies. By considering both the act of reading the texts and an analysis of the texts themselves, Radway leaves room for resistance within the dominant ideology. For example, the romance novel is often blatantly and aggressively unsubversive yet the way it is consumed may be subversive.

Radway grounds her study of romance reading in its means of production. The first chapter, "The Institutional Matrix," is a survey of the history of the production of popular fiction in America. We don't really think about it, since we're used to buying books online, in supermarkets, in airports, and sometimes even bookstores. (Or maybe not--we do watch a lot of TV.) But way back in the day, it was hard for people to have access to contemporary fiction. Due to a series of technological innovations, it became easier (and cheaper!) for book publishers to both manufacture and distribute books to a mass market. Then came the next problem for publishers: what were they going to publish and who were they going to sell it to? Publishing is an expensive business; they needed to know that their product was going to sell, and they needed to ensure repeat buyers. Thus comes the birth of category or formulaic fiction, which were books that followed a certain scripted plot, and had "consistent appeal to a regular audience." Therefore, "contemporary romance publishing is guided by this entrepreneurial vision of the book as an endlessly replicable commodity."

Janice Radway, in her infinite wisdom, decided to study women's reading of romance novels after she became interested by the mass consumption of texts that seemed to reinforce patriarchy. She found a community of female romance readers in a Midwestern community, and interviewed them in order to study their reading. Before she started her project, she thought of reading, whether for pleasure or other ends, in terms of literary interpretation. So at first, her study was about how women interpreted their romance novels. Soon though, that all began to change.

When Radway asked the Smithton women what romance novels did differently than other novels, she expected them to talk about the content of the books. However, what she got back were entirely different answers. Instead, the women talked about their reading as a form of escapism. Radway then began to see her work in terms of social activity and ethnography, and started looking at the practice of reading:

"Romance reading is a strategy with a double purpose. As an activity, it so engages their attention that it enables them to deny their physical presence in an environment associated with responsibilities that are acutely felt and occasionally experienced as too onerous to bear. Reading, in this sense, connotes a free space where they feel liberated from the need to perform duties that they otherwise willingly accept as their own" (93).

For the Smithton readers, romance reading is important because it is a temporary escape from the pressures of being a caretaker 24/7. But the term escape is loaded with guilt for these women (now why would that be?) Therefore, they often need to justify their reading to themselves and to their husbands.

Radway uses the work of feminist psychologist Nancy Chodorow to explain that female readers get vicariously the romantic fulfillment they don't receive in everyday life since they are the providers of care. Oh, and happiness becomes a commodity-form (117).

In short, reading romances is a way for these women to negotiate their own positions within a patriarchal system by identifying with a heroine as she confronts challenges and threats imposed by patriarchy throughout the course of the book.