Romance Fiction and American Culture

Love as the Practice of Freedom?

William A. Gleason, Eric Murphy Selinger, William A. Gleason, Eric Murphy Selinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134806287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Since the 1970s, romance novels have surpassed all other genres in terms of popularity in the United States, accounting for half of all mass market paperbacks sold and driving the digital publishing revolution. Romance Fiction and American Culture brings together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and publishing to explore American romance fiction from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. Essays on interracial, inspirational, and LGBTQ romance attend to the diversity of the genre, while new areas of inquiry are suggested in contextual and interdisciplinary examinations of romance authorship, readership, and publishing history, of pleasure and respectability in African American romance fiction, and of the dynamic tension between the genre and second wave feminism. As it situates romance fiction among other instances of American love culture, from Civil War diaries to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Romance Fiction and American Culture confirms the complexity and enduring importance of this most contested of genres.

PART I
POPULAR ROMANCE AND AMERICAN HISTORY

Chapter 1
Pamela Crosses the Atlantic; or, Pamela Andrews’s Story Inaugurates the American Romance Novel

Pamela Regis

The popular courtship novel in English, the form that becomes known as the “romance novel” by the mid-twentieth century, has a widely recognized “first” title: Samuel Richardson’s best seller Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded.¹ First published in London in 1740, exported immediately to the colonies, Pamela was printed by Benjamin Franklin in 1742–1744, thus becoming the first novel published in America.² It was also the first romance novel printed in America, marking the beginning of a history of American romance publication unbroken to this day. Franklin’s choice of Pamela reflected the popularity of the novel on both sides of the Atlantic.³ Although I have briefly traced the broad outlines of the history of the American romance novel from colonial times to the present, placing Pamela at the beginning of the mostly unwritten history of the American romance novel,⁴ and although I have explored Pamela’s significance for the history of the romance form,⁵ a fuller exploration of Pamela in America is in order. In part because historians of the American novel have evinced an almost allergic reaction to the romance form—which ends happily—the significance of Pamela’s story for the early American novel has been obscured. Instead of viewing Pamela as a shorter, lesser warm-up for Clarissa, whose tragic plot was read as a dire warning for democracy’s dangers, the story of Pamela’s courtship and its ending in a successful marriage in fact illustrates the new ideas of companionate union in the early Republic. In its widely available abridged form, her story anticipates by almost two centuries the short contemporary romance novel of the Harlequin and Silhouette type. Pamela’s story, like Clarissa’s, has immediate successors in the early American novel, and they in turn engender a continuous line of daughter narratives, the most recent of which are on the shelves and the e-reader screens of romance readers across the world. With Pamela’s place in American literary history more fully understood, we can identify her American heiresses and begin to write the history of the American branch of this popular genre, the romance novel.

In classifying Pamela as a “seduction novel,” literary historians have obscured part of Pamela Andrews’s significance to the early American novel. Building on John Adams’s claim that “democracy is Lovelace, and the people Clarissa” these historians have constructed a compelling case for the importance of the seduction plot in early American literature.⁶ They have found Clarissa Harlowe’s story, the plot of a heroine cruelly seduced and left to die, in a number of early American novels such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794) and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1794).⁷ Indeed, Clarissa ends tragically. Adams’s famous analogy between on the one hand the novel’s protagonists and on the other hand the action of democracy on a vulnerable populace furnishes a grim view of the dangers Adams saw as inherent in the political foundation of government in the new nation. However, literary historians have mistakenly swept Pamela up in Clarissa’s wake, where she remains. In a recent account of Richardson’s novels in this American literary tradition, Anna Mae Duane cites not only “Clarissa’s sentiment-laden decline and death” as a model for early American seduction fiction, but also “Pamela’s meek virtue [which] wins her a husband.”⁸ However, Pamela differs from Clarissa. Consider this rewrite of Adams’s claim, substituting for the triumphant rake and the seduced, doomed virgin, the reformed rake and triumphant wife: “Democracy is B—, and the people Pamela.” In contrast to the dark nightmare of Adams’s claim about Clarissa Harlowe, a comparison using Pamela offers a vision of democracy domesticated by the people.⁹ B—, the rake-in-need-of-reformation instantly recognizable to a reader of twentieth-first-century romances, begins the novel with a series of scenes in which he attempts seduction, but by the middle of the novel, this effort to compromise Pamela has become a courtship, and the novel ends with a betrothal and marriage. The union of the protagonists, the happily-ever-after, or “HEA,” is a distinguishing feature of what would come to be called the “romance novel.” Indeed, the two best-known definitions of that form insist upon it. In my own definition of the term, “betrothal” indicates this HEA: “A romance novel is a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines,”¹⁰ or more generally, one or more “protagonists.”¹¹ A more thematic, open-ended definition is offered by The Romance Writers of America, the professional association for romance authors, yet it still insists on the HEA: “Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.”¹² To put it bluntly, unlike Clarissa Harlowe, Pamela Andrews wins. She does not die, she is not seduced or raped, she retains her virtue, and she triumphs, ending the novel with an independent income, with a secure portion for her once destitute parents, with social standing as the lady of the manor, and with a husband whom she, by her example, has reformed. Richardson tells us that after B—’s marriage to Pamela, he became “remarkable for Piety, Virtue, and all the Social Duties of a Man and a Christian.”¹³ This is not the description of a seducer, nor a metaphor for a menace to the citizens of a democracy.

This blind spot in the history of the American novel is a testament to the extent to which our courtship novels, which is to say our romance novels, have been unacknowledged as critics simply read in spite of or around the elements of their form, including the HEA. This critical lacuna began with the influential early critics who established the canon and pioneered the exploration of the American novel, it persists through the most influential critical consideration of the post 1972-boom of popular romance fiction, and the gap is still evident in the statements of recent critics who are part of the ongoing project of recovering eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women’s fiction, especially the sentimental novel.

F. O. Matthiessen, whose American Renaissance (1941) established the canon of nineteenth-century American letters, makes the following claim when he turns from consideration of the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to explain the literary scene that Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) encountered: “Fiction in New England had hardly advanced since Royall Tyler had sensed the stirring of a new audience for novels, at the end of the eighteenth century.”¹⁴ For Matthiessen, the works of Susan Warner, Maria Cummins and “Mrs.” E. D. E. N. Southworth fell far short of literary art. He quotes Hawthorne: “[W]orse they could not be, and better they need not be,” a damning, whining lament.¹⁵ Yet Matthiessen also quotes a passage from Hawthorne’s sketch “The Hall of Fantasy,” in which the narrator places Richardson, along with Henry Fielding and Sir Walter Scott, among the “rulers and demigods in the realms of imagination.”¹⁶ Despite this endorsement, Matthiessen quotes Hawthorne’s now-infamous description of Richardson’s American heirs, calling the best-selling writers of his day that “damned mob of scribbling women,” whose books “sell by the hundred thousand.”¹⁷ Any “advance” that Matthiessen was willing to recognize did not include these sentimental writers of courtship tales.

Leslie A. Fiedler, in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), characterizes his project in that now-iconic work as an exploration of “the failure of the American fictionist to deal with adult heterosexual love and his consequent obsession with death, incest and innocent homosexuality.”¹⁸ “Adult heterosexual love” is overwhelmingly the subject of the romance novel, albeit not often, in America, written by any “him.” Fiedler considers the place of Richardson in American literary history, but focuses on Clarissa, defining the ground of inquiry away from marriage, away from the HEA of the courtship tale: “[T]he struggle over the virtue of Clarissa has been moved from the arena of marriage to that of maidenhood.”¹⁹ Thus Fielder ignores—and condemns—what he calls the “sentimental love religion” of nineteenth-century American popular fiction.”²⁰

Critics of the post-boom twentieth-century romance novel are similarly dismissive. Janice A. Radway, in her early and influential ethnographic exploration of a romance reading community, claims that the romance novel “reaffirms its founding culture’s belief that women are valuable … for their biological sameness and their ability to perform the essential role of maintaining and reconstituting others.”²¹ Patriarchy is at the root of this stifling reaffirmation of what she calls the “present situation” of the romance readers she studies—that is, of their married state.²² Radway, as well as a number of other critics, condemns the romance on different grounds from those cited by Matthiessen and Fiedler, but the rejection is no less absolute.²³

Making a cautious departure from this critical dismissal, more recent historians of nineteenth-century American women’s writing, most notably Cathy N. Davidson, describe America’s “first novels” with their focus on courtship and the attendant “good or bad decisions in sexual and marital matters” that confront the heroines of these works, as presenting themes of “informed choice,” even going so far as to assert that these works “are not the frothy fictions that we commonly take them to be.”²⁴ Yet this apologetic, “not the frothy fictions” view of courtship tales still undervalues the HEA. Cindy Weinstein, like Davidson, working to expand our understanding of American novels neglected by scholars, analyzes a series of texts that end in marriage, the most famous of which is Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World, offering this defensive account of the HEA of that novel: “[T]he conventional nature of this conclusion [the marriage of the heroine] is not necessarily a basis fo...