Becoming a Woman Through Romance

Linda K. Christian-Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000639124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für weibliche Autoren

A woman is incomplete without a man, motherhood is a woman's destiny, and a woman's place is in the home. These conservative political themes are woven throughout teen romance fiction's sagas of hearts and flowers.

Using the theory and interpretive methods of feminism and cultural studies, Christian-Smith explores the contradictory role that popular culture plays in constructing gender, class, race, age and sexual meanings. Originally published in 1990, Becoming a Woman through Romance combines close textual analyses of thirty-four teen romance novels (written in the United States from 1942-1982) with a school study in three midwestern American schools.

Christian-Smith situates teen romance fiction within the rapidly changing publishing industry and the important political and economic changes in the United States surrounding the rise of the New Right. By analysing the structure of the novels in terms of the themes of romance, sexuality and beautification, and the Good/Bad and Strong/Weak dichotomies, she demonstrates how each has shaped the novels' versions of femininity over forty years. She also shows that although romance fiction is presented as a universal model, it is actually an expression of white middle class gender ideology and tension within this class.

This high readable, comprehensive and coherent work was the first to combine in one volume three vital areas of cultural studies research: the political economy of publishing, textual analysis, and a study of readers. The first full-scale study of teen romance fiction, Becoming a Woman through Romance establishes the importance of the study of popular culture forms found in school for understanding the process of school materials in identity formation.

1

Overview

It’s funny what a boy can do. One day you’re nobody and the next day you’re the girl some fellow goes with and the other fellows look at you harder and wonder what you’ve got and wish that they’d been the one to take you out first. And the girls say hello and want to walk down to the drugstore to have cokes with them because the boy who likes you might come along and he might have other boys with him. Going with a boy gives you a new identity—especially going with a fellow like Jack Duluth. (Seventeenth Summer, 1942, p. 60)

In a few years you’ll love someone, Julia, and it will make a great difference in you. You’ll see. A woman is never completely developed until she has loved a man; when that happens in the right way she is happy in other people’s love as well as her own; she is more generous and understanding about the feelings of others. You might say that she knows completeness. (Up a Road Slowly, 1966, p. 103)

In one short day, I had turned pretty … Just the night before I’d been practicing my smile, and it had been just as rigid as it had always been. But Paul had said my smile was beautiful— sure enough, now it was. (P.S. I Love You, 1981, p. 60)

It’s just when you’re reading you’re in some other world, well, not really, physically, I mean but you imagine you are. Sometimes I feel like I am the person going on dates, having loads of fun (Annie, a twelve-year-old romance reader).

We’re selling jeans on the outside and happy family stories on the inside; but you have to sell the books the way the jeans are sold (Ron Buehl, editor of “Sweet Dreams” teen romance series as quoted in Pollack, 1981, p. 28).

When young women read teen romance novels similar to these above, they enter the world of a half-billion-dollar-a-year industry (Market Facts, 1984) whose stock in trade is not only fantasies of love and specialness, but also politics. Teen romance fiction articulates the longstanding fears and resentments of segments of society regarding feminism and women’s growing independence. The rapid rise to prominence of teen romance novels in only ten years parallels the shift in the political climate in the United States to the right-wing positions of Reaganism characterized by traditional perspectives on gender relations (Hunter, 1984). For woven throughout teen romance fiction’s saga of hearts and flowers is an accompanying discourse that a woman is incomplete without a man, that motherhood is women’s destiny, and that a woman’s rightful place is at home. These themes are part and parcel of the New Right’s political and cultural agenda regarding women, representing the conservative restoration of women to their “proper” place in society. Although I do not believe that there is an outright conspiracy between teen romance publishers and the New Right, one worked out over champagne and caviar, it is the case that more and more segments of the culture industry, particularly publishing, are owned by large corporations whose interests are politically conservative (Coser, Kadus-hin & Powell, 1982). These interests make their way into books like teen romances, which then become the site of ideological struggles for young women’s hearts and minds.

In early 1980 the first new teen romance series “Wildfire,” published by Scholastic Books, appeared in the bookstores. In the same year, Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency of the United States during the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Reagan entered office with an agenda supporting business and the restoration of traditional gender and family sentiments as a response to the economic crisis and pressure from conservative interest groups (Gordon & Hunter, 1977/78; Plotke, 1986). Reagan must be seen as one element in the New Right’s long-term attempts to restructure the American economy and construct a conservative cultural accord (Hunter, 1985). According to Hall (1985), a key element in restructuring economic relations is winning the consent of the public by tapping into its fears, needs, and dreams, and then using them to shape a new consensus. Apple (1989) contends that the New Right has been very successful in both articulating the themes of loss of control that many groups feel regarding family, security, and authority, and in building coalitions based on these concerns.

Through New Right rhetoric, worries over family and authority have become translated into the defense of the family, promotion of traditional gender interactions and a general antifeminist stance. Concerned Women of America, Life Amendment PAC, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, the Conservative Caucus, and Right to Life movement are among the prominent right-wing organizations that mobilize popular fears over the growing independence and political power of women. These fears are also seen in the “return to romance” themes in fashion, dating, and music (Schneider, 1983) as well as in popular slogans such as “A Homemaker and Damn Proud of It” and “ERA, NO.” The burgeoning home-party system for selling Tupperware, lingerie, and cosmetics promote the modern-day version of “true womanhood” by idealizing women as wife/ mother/sex object. The resurgence in importance of the home as women’s privileged space is seen in the popularity of community college courses in creative child-rearing and interior decoration. “Cocooning” or spending time at home is touted as the new form of leisure. A home made comfortable and beautiful by a woman’s hand is the unstated requirement here.

Yet there are tensions within this ideology of femininity ones that surface within popular romance fiction. For as Radway (1984) notes, the act of reading romance novels becomes a form of mild protest against patriarchy: in romance novels women triumph and their sense of competence is validated. Above and beyond this, the adult “erotic romance,” as developed over the past ten years (Thurston, 1987) offers readers heroines who seek career satisfaction, economic independence, and more equitable relationships with men. Teen romance fiction reading involves the shaping of consciousness and provides the occasion for young women to reflect on their fears, hopes, and dreams.

While many films, soap operas, and popular songs explore the relationships between women and men, literature has a particularly long history of being concerned with the romantic and sexual aspects of these relationships (Robinson, 1978). The experiences of women in romance and marriage, and the power relations between the sexes, are abundantly described in the novels of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontës. This strong interest in romantic motifs has found expression in today’s adult romance novels from Harlequin and Silhouette. Lately, teen romance novels in serial form have appeared in bookstores and school bookclubs. This fiction has astounded the publishing world by its popularity and actual sales. Although there have been several critical studies of adult romance novels and their readers,¹ it is only recently that teen romance novels been critically analyzed despite their popularity (Christian-Smith, 1986, 1987).

Becoming a Woman Through Romance is about femininity, about how thirty-four adolescent romance novels (see Appendix B) written in the United States from 1942 to 1982 define feminine identity for young women readers. I explore this topic through a close textual analysis of the fiction and by reference to a study of young women readers of the romance. Gender is only one aspect of women’s identity. Social class membership, sexual orientation, and racial/ethnic background also contribute to one’s social identity. 1 will explore how each of these shape the version of femininity in teen romance fiction.

When I analyzed each of the thirty-four novels, certain themes or codes recurred throughout all the novels: the codes of romance, sexuality, and beautification. Romance not only refers to the emotional and caring aspects of a special human relationship, but also involves patterns of power between women and men. Sexuality concerns various expressions of intimacy such as kissing, cuddling, and intercourse, expressions that like romance, include power relations between the sexes. On one level, beautification has to do with ways of getting and maintaining male attention. On another level, every stroke of the hairbrush and twist of the mascara-wand centers feminine consciousness in the body and converts women into consumers. There are two sets of oppositions, Good/Bad and Strong/Weak, that form the characters in the novels. Good/Bad and Strong/Weak have to do with the dominant characteristics of the heroine and her counterpart, the “other girl.” The “good” heroine is dutiful, weak, shy, and naive about boys, whereas the other girl is assertive, self-confident, and very experienced with boys. Moreover, these codes represent how other people view female characters once they are no longer either totally good or bad. Together, these codes structure form and content, as well as the novels’ version of femininity. These novels contained certain changes in the codes that fall into a chronological pattern. The novels can then be grouped into three periods: Period 1, 1942–59; Period 2, 1963–79; and Period 3, 1980–82. This periodization permits the detection of any changes that occur in the ways in which novels depict femininity over forty years.

Textual analysis alone cannot account for how individuals read romances or the range of responses to this fiction (Moi, 1985). I have therefore incorporated ethnographic data collected during the 1985–86 school year in three schools in Lakeview, a large midwestern city.² Through surveying, interviewing, and observing, I was able both to account for the complex meanings young women readers made during romance-fiction reading and to speculate on the implications of this reading for their developing social identities.

Themes and issues

Becoming a Woman Through Romance explores seven central questions that involve the representation of femininity in popular fiction: What views of femininity do the books present to readers? What patterns of power and control are implicit in textual definitions of femininity? What are the connections between gender identity and one’s class and racial membership? How do adolescent girls interpret romance novels? What are the social, economic, and political implications of this fiction? How can teachers and parents help readers to read these books critically? How can a political practice be developed around popular culture? This book is divided into nine chapters that analyze the ways in which symbolic forms such as popular romance fiction both shape and regulate definitions of femininity, class, race, sexuality, and age.

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework from cultural studies and reviews the development of teen romance fiction in the context of massive changes in the publishing industry. Chapter 2 describes how the code of romance structures teen romance fiction and helps construct the version of femininity that the novels contain. This code gives to emotions and romance key roles in heroines’ lives and has boys granting meaning to girls’ lives. Although romance and the emotions give heroines a sense of belonging, they also contribute to their social subordination. In Chapter 3 I explore the code of sexuality and its role in rendering sexuality as synonymous with heterosexuality. I then connect sexuality to romance and power, describing how the code of sexuality defines pleasure and regulates sexual practices. The practices involved in becoming beautiful are analyzed in Chapter 4: I discuss how beautification centers feminine consciousness in the body and lays the groundwork for heroines’ sexual objectification. Beautification also makes heroines into consumers and establishes consumption as a distinctively feminine activity. On the surface, femininity seems to be of one piece in romance fiction. However, in Chapter 5 I demonstrate that social class and race contribute significantly to the heroine’s gender identity. I argue that romance fiction’s version of femininity is actually rooted in a particular class and race, although it masquerades as a universal identity. From this perspective, being a “proper” woman means putting home and family first and all other interests last.

Each of these chapters exemplifies a very consistent representation of femininity despite the fact that the novels span a forty-year period and contain two plot variations that have their heroines unsure of the virtues of romance. This consistency is due in part to the central qualities of the heroine and her counterpart, the “other girl” and to a central motif of “becoming a woman through romance.” Chapter 6 explores the aspects of romance fiction that constitute its narrative form and analyzes the kind of feminine personality the novels extol. In Chapter 7, I move beyond the world of the romance text to twenty-nine actual teenage female readers of romances. I discuss school as a setting for this reading and the impact romance-reading has on how school officials view these girls. I then account for the reasons for romance-reading and the role of romance-reading in constructing these girls’ femininity as well as their plans for the future. I argue that their romance-reading provides not only a way of fulfilling romantic fantasies, but also an occasion for self-examination. Chapter 8 places romance fiction within its historical context, focusing on the domestic, work-related, and political aspects of women’s lives in the United States from 1942 to 1982. I draw parallels between key historical events and the content of romance fiction, arguing that the novels re-code larger social tensions, especially those represented by the New Right regarding women’s place. I further argue that romance fiction is contradictory: it reconciles women to their social subordination while providing an escape from it. The final chapter places many of the issues from previous chapters in relation to one another, and considers the important practical concerns of teachers and parents. I argue here that in view of the pervasiveness of popular culture in the lives of young people and its importance in shaping modern consciousness, political struggles must be conducted around it. A methodological appendix contains pertinent theoretical and methodological background to both studies.

Cultural studies, femininism and popular fiction

The theories and methodologies of cultural studies yield much of use for the analysis of popular teen romance fiction and its readers.³ Developed in the mid-1960s at the University of Birmingham, England, cultural studies provide an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing theory and interpretive methods from literary studies, anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy, and feminist studies. The culturalist perspective drew heavily on the writings of Antonio Gramsci (1980), particularly those relating to hegemony and popular culture. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony becomes the framework for analyzing the role of cultural processes in securing people’s consent to existing social arrangements and as a source of opposition. For Gramsci, hegemony refers to the variety of ways in which dominant social groups (the ruling class) achieve and maintain power and control within a society. While maintaining power by force has always been historically important, for power to be truly consolidated the hearts and minds of people must be won. Gramsci singles out culture, especially the popular cultures of the working class, as a key element in this struggle for rule by consent. In Gramsci’s view, these cultures are not only aspects of class-affirmation and “good sense,” but also the site where the ruling class seeks to win favor. Cultural studies’ research and its political agenda emanates from this problematic, as is evident in Johnson’s important essay, “What is Cultural Studies Anyway?”:

The first [premise] is that cultural processes are intimately connected with social relations, especially with class relations and … formations, with sexual divisions, with the racial structuring of social relations and with age oppressions as a form of dependency. The second is that culture involves power and helps to produce asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define and realise their needs. And the third, which follows the other two, is that culture is neither an autonomous nor an externally determined field, but a site of social differences and struggles (Johnson, 1983, p. 3).

For me cultural studies is about the historical forms of consciousness or subjectivity, or the subjective forms we live by (Johnson, 1983, p. 11).

Studies by Hall and Jefferson (1976), Hebdige (1976), and Willis (1977) focus on the identity formation of youth through work and social class membership.⁴ However, much of this research relegates questions of gender, race, age, sexual orientation, family, and personal life to secondary status. That cultural studies came to include these topics is largely due to the influence of feminist criticism and the reaction against racism.

The essays in Women Take Issue (Women’s Studies Group, 1978) were among the first to examine how gender differentiation is linked to class, race, and age. Important for the analysis of romance fiction is McRobbie’s study of girls at a Birmingham youth club (1978b), which situates them within a “culture of femininity” organized around domestic duties, consumption, personal life, and above all, romance. The girls’ immersion in romance and beauty routines were responsible for the prominent positions these girls occupied within the home and family and their marginal status in the work-force. Although many of the girls questioned aspects of this mode of femininity, they ultimately endorsed a conventional femininity because they saw housework and children as “unavoidable, unalterable aspects of life” (McRobbie, 1978b, p. 98). The girls equally wel...