Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 7 Gender and sexuality
reading experience in which emotional fulfilment is satisfied through the vicarious
sharing of the heroine’s journey from a crisis of identity to an identity restored in the
arms of a nurturing male. Whether a romance is good or bad is ultimately determined
by the kind of relationship the reader can establish with the heroine.
If the events of the heroine’s story provoke too intense feelings such as anger at
men, fear of rape and violence, worry about female sexuality, or worry about the
need to live with an unexciting man, that romance will be discarded as a failure or
judged to be very poor. If, on the other hand, those events call forth feelings of
excitement, satisfaction, contentment, self-confidence, pride, and power, it matters
less what events are used or how they are marshalled. In the end, what counts most
is the reader’s sense that for a short time she has become other and been elsewhere.
She must close that book reassured that men and marriage really do mean good
things for women. She must also turn back to her daily round of duties, emotionally
reconstituted and replenished, feeling confident of her worth and convinced
of her ability and power to deal with the problems she knows she must confront
(184).
In this way, the Smithton women ‘partially reclaim the patriarchal form of the
romance for their own use’ (ibid.). The principal ‘psychological benefits’ of reading
romance novels derive from ‘the ritualistic repetition of a single, immutable cultural
myth’ (198, 199). The fact that 60 per cent of the Smithton readers find it occasionally
necessary to read the ending first, to ensure that the experience of the novel will not
counteract the satisfactions of the underlying myth, suggests quite strongly that it is the
underlying myth of the nurturing male that is ultimately most important in the
Smithton women’s experience of romance reading.
Following a series of comments from the Smithton women, Radway was forced to
the conclusion that if she really wished to understand their view of romance reading
she must relinquish her preoccupation with the text, and consider also the very act of
romance reading itself. In conversations it became clear that when the women used the
term ‘escape’ to describe the pleasures of romance reading, the term was operating in a
double but related sense. As we have seen, it can be used to describe the process of
identification between the reader and the heroine/hero relationship. But it became
clear that the term was also used ‘literally to describe the act of denying the present,
which they believe they accomplish each time they begin to read a book and are drawn
into its story’ (90). Dot revealed to Radway that men often found the very act of
women reading threatening. It is seen as time reclaimed from the demands of family
and domestic duties. Many of the Smithton women describe romance reading as ‘a special
gift’ they give themselves. To explain this, Radway cites Chodorow’s view of the
patriarchal family as one in which, ‘There is a fundamental asymmetry in daily reproduction
. . . men are socially and psychologically reproduced by women, but women
are reproduced (or not) largely by themselves’ (91, 94). Romance reading is therefore
a small but not insignificant contribution to the emotional reproduction of the
Smithton women: ‘a temporary but literal denial of the demands women recognise as