Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Reading romance 141
critic but as someone examining myself, examining my own life under a microscope’
(ibid.). Her position is in marked contrast to that, say, of the ‘culture and civilization’
tradition or the perspective of the Frankfurt School. Popular culture is not looked
down on from an Olympian height as the disappointing, but rather predictable, culture
of other people. This is a discourse about ‘our’ culture. Furthermore, she refuses to
see the practices and representations of popular culture (the discourse of ‘female
desire’) ‘as the forcible imposition of false and limiting stereotypes’ (16).
Instead I explore the desire presumed by these representations, the desire which
touches feminist and non-feminist women alike. But nor do I treat female desire
as something unchangeable, arising from the female condition. I see the representations
of female pleasure and desire as producing and sustaining feminine positions.
These positions are neither distant roles imposed on us from outside which
it would be easy to kick off, nor are they the essential attributes of femininity. Feminine
positions are produced as responses to the pleasures offered to us; our subjectivity
and identity are formed in the definitions of desire which encircle us. These
are the experiences which make change such a difficult and daunting task, for
female desire is constantly lured by discourses which sustain male privilege (ibid.).
Coward’s interest in romantic fiction is in part inspired by the intriguing fact that
‘over the past decade [the 1970s], the rise of feminism has been paralleled almost
exactly by a mushroom growth in the popularity of romantic fiction’. 29 She believes
two things about romantic novels. First, that ‘they must still satisfy some very definite
needs’; and second, that they offer evidence of, and contribute to, ‘a very powerful and
common fantasy’ (190). She claims that the fantasies played out in romantic fiction are
‘pre-adolescent, very nearly pre-conscious’ (191–2). She believes them to be ‘regressive’
in two key respects. On the one hand, they adore the power of the male in ways reminiscent
of the very early child–father relationship, whilst on the other, they are regressive
because of the attitude taken to female sexual desire – passive and without guilt,
as the responsibility for sexual desire is projected on to the male. In other words, sexual
desire is something men have and to which women merely respond. In short,
romantic fiction replays the girl’s experience of the Oedipal drama; only this time without
its conclusion in female powerlessness; this time she does marry the father and
replace the mother. Therefore there is a trajectory from subordination to a position of
power (in the symbolic position of the mother). But, as Coward points out,
Romantic fiction is surely popular because it . . . restores the childhood world of
sexual relations and suppresses criticisms of the inadequacy of men, the suffocation
of the family, or the damage inflicted by patriarchal power. Yet it simultaneously
manages to avoid the guilt and fear which might come from that childhood
world. Sexuality is defined firmly as the father’s responsibility, and fear of suffocation
is overcome because women achieve a sort of power in romantic fiction.
Romantic fiction promises a secure world, promises that there will be safety with
dependence, that there will be power with subordination (196).