Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance

Jonathan A. Allan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351240000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études relatives au genre

Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance seeks to open a lively and accessible discussion between critical studies of men and masculinities and popular romance studies, especially its continued interest in what Janice Radway has called "the purity of his maleness."

Popular romance novels, perhaps more than any other genre, explore sexuality and gender, creating an ideal space in which to consider and explore theoretical models that think seriously about gender. The romance novel has long been criticized and celebrated by feminist critics. How can these novels maintain, according to some, feminist ideals, while also upholding what Raewyn Connell has long theorized as "hegemonic masculinity"?

This volume is an original and important contribution examining the previously underexamined nexus of masculinity and popular romance studies. It will be of key interest to undergraduates and postgraduates in Masculinities, Gender and Women's Studies, and Literary Studies, and highly relevant to courses in Masculinity Studies, Pop Culture Studies, Queer Studies and Sexuality Studies.

1

STUDYING THE POPULAR ROMANCE NOVEL

One of the most impressive and ongoing challenges in the study of popular romance is the question of method. In this chapter, I set out to think about method because undoubtedly the questions that will appear amongst readers and reviewers alike will engage with just this. When I survey critiques of earlier works on popular romance, for instance, I note how often reviewers comment on the method of the book. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Pamela Regis’ lecture ‘What do Critics Owe the Romance?’ (2011b), which she delivered at the second meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. This organisation is ‘dedicated to fostering and promoting the scholarly exploration of all popular representations of romantic love’ (IASPR, 2019). While the mission is undoubtedly about romantic love in all popular forms, it does, it would seem, privilege the romance novel. In her lecture, Regis analyses influential works of criticism of the popular romance novel. In accounting for early works of literary and cultural criticism, Regis explains the following:

Snitow, in her article-length study, cites five Harlequin romances published between 1977 and 1978 – that is, just five novels published during just two years – and then goes on to describe the ‘underlying structure of the sexual story’ that she identifies as the point of Harlequins (319). Modleski cites just nine Harlequins, all from one year, 1976, in her chapter on Harlequins, and then conjures Roland Barthes, Wolfgang Iser, Karl Marx, Jonathan Culler, and others in her pursuit of a psychoanalytic explanation for the ‘increase’ in ‘the reader’s … psychic conflicts’ and ‘dependency’ on these novels, which she likens to a ‘narcotic’ (57). Although Mussell has a wider reading list – more than 80 romances including such ‘originals’ as Pamela, most of her study texts were published from 1955 through 1982. She pursues the insights that these ‘escape fantasies’ provide into women’s lives (4). Radway’s ethnographic study of the ‘Smithton’ readers – 40 or so Midwestern U.S. fans of long, sensual historicals – concludes with her now-world famous claims about patriarchy’s power as revealed in these novels.

(2011b: pp. 3–4)

I cite this passage at length because these works will find their way into Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance, particularly those of Snitow and Radway, as well as – though to a lesser degree – Mussell and Modleski. Curiously, one thing that is never quite articulated is why Regis chose these four; after all, Thurston’s The Romance Revolution, for instance, has been cited 277 times, while Mussell’s Fantasy and Reconciliation has been quoted 125 times, according to Google Scholar. If we think in terms of citation and impact, then surely, at least superficially, Thurston’s work was more influential. Regardless of Regis’ choices, in her critique of those works, what ‘counts’ (as it were) is the number of novels that each scholar uses to make their arguments about the romance. We can fault Snitow, for instance, for citing only five Harlequin romances, and the same holds true for Modleski, though she now cites nine Harlequins. Even Mussell, who cites more than 80, is faulted because of the time period of her romances. Radway seems to escape the count of novels but is faulty for only speaking to 40 readers of romance. All of this leads Regis to provide suggestions for how critics might improve their study of the romance; she writes a series of recommendations including the following:

We owe it to the romance novel to recognize that our study texts are probably not representative of ‘the romance’ and to stop committing the logical fallacy known as hasty generalization. This is not to say that all claims of representativeness are wrong – but they must be proven, they must be substantiated and argued for. It is a failure of critical imagination to assume we have seen it all. A corollary: We owe it to the romance to stay within our evidence when we state conclusions. So, if we have not demonstrated that our study texts are representative, we must qualify our conclusions, and avoid talk about what ‘the romance novel’ writ large is or does.

(2011b: p. 9, Regis’ emphasis)

Within these recommendations, which for Regis are really ethical obligations, is a comment, once more, on the size of the data sample, whether it be Snitow’s five novels or Mussell’s eighty, the assumption is that what is being argued can only be argued about that textual corpus. A curious side note here might be the exclusion of Carol Thurston’s The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity from Regis’ analysis of the major works of popular romance criticism; Thurston’s bibliography includes over 180 romance texts.¹

Regis is not alone in highlighting the problem of corpus selection. An Goris, in her response to Regis’ lecture, writes that

1 Thurston’s study has one of the largest sample sizes of scholarly studies of popular romance novels. Jayashree Kamblé’s Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology (2014) includes 94 novels in the bibliography. Laura Vivanco’s For Love and Money: The Literary Art of Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance (2011) includes 147 novels in the bibliography, and her book Pursuing Happiness: Reading American Romance as Political Fiction (2016) includes 46 novels in the bibliography. All of these books are speaking about and reading the genre, and while close analysis of texts may occur, the goal is more encompassing than studies of singular novels.

one of the most important elements of Regis’ discussion is her eloquent articulation and clarification of one of the basic methodological issues that has haunted the critical community of romance scholars since its inception: the methodologically sound selection of study texts.

Goris clarifies this point by noting that

popular romance criticism has a somewhat problematic reputation in this regard: many older studies – like the ones by Ann Snitow, Tania Modleski, and Janice Radway – make quite general claims about the entire genre of ‘the’ popular romance novel despite being based on rather small and/or undiversified corpi.

In essence then, one of the most ‘important’ critiques of earlier popular romance criticism is at the level of its methods, more than its findings (although the findings, we are told, are also problematic). But the suggestion is that had the methods been different, so too would the findings have been different. Time and again, scholars are critiqued for the methods that underpin their study.

I am perhaps sensitive to this argument because I have also been a recipient of this criticism. On her blog, Romance Novels for Feminists, Jackie Horne critiques my article ‘Theorising Male Virginity in Popular Romance Novels’ (2011). She writes:

In the course of his article, Allan uses only a handful of books to map out the entire territory of virgin male romance hero-land. Allan thus seems to repeat a move that many of the earliest students of popular romance have been rightly criticized for: creating a topographical map without accurately surveying the wider genre.

When I published that article, I have to admit I thought I had done a good job and distinguished myself from my precursors. Evidently, Horne found my article to be like those of Modleski, Snitow, Radway, and others – today, I might take that as a compliment. Admittedly, I did only quote a ‘handful of books’; the bibliography shows well over a dozen titles, but most of those were merely named. Analysis of these novels consisted of a sample size of half a dozen; a small sample size, to be certain. But, at the time, nothing had been written on male virginity in popular romance fiction (and, as far as I know, nothing has been written on the topic since).

Since being ‘called out’ for ‘repeat[ing] a move that many of the earliest students have been rightly criticized for,’ I have thought about the methodological questions that haunt the study of popular romance. A part of me wished at the time that someone would just tell me exactly how many novels to study; clearly Snitow’s six novels were not enough but neither were Mussell’s eighty. So what is enough? And when is enough enough? For instance, as far as I can tell, very few have called into question Regis’ corpus size, which consists of 37 novels written between 1692 and 1999, representing a total of 15 authors, and yet she is able to define the entire genre from that sample size – a definition which has been accepted by many scholars, including myself. Accordingly, this chapter sets out to offer some thoughts on how to study the popular romance novel. This chapter should not be read as definitive but rather as exploratory and as a critique of the now common critique that one has not read enough, not read widely enough, or, for instance, that one only studies ‘contemporary’ romances (as Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance does). Indeed, I am arguing against the idea that ‘size matters,’ wherein the critic wields the size of their corpus like a phallic object.

Given how often method is called upon in critiquing popular romance studies, I must admit that I am surprised to realise how little the ‘field’ has to say about method. In New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays (2012), the word ‘method’ or ‘methodology’ does not appear in the index. Indeed, each use of the word ‘method’ in the book refers not to the methods deployed by the author but to either a quotation (pp. 34, 35, 43) or an engagement with someone else’s method (p. 207) – in this case, that of Janice Radway. Likewise, in Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom (2016), the word ‘method’ again does not appear in the index, nor does it seemingly appear in the text at all. So how important, then, is method to popular romance scholars if two of the most recent anthologies of scholarly essays fail to account for method? In some ways, then, this chapter is an answer to this question insofar as I set out to describe some of the methodological challenges of a book like Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance.

The study of the popular romance is the study of genre, one that is highly productive. Regis notes that ‘in 1999, for example, more than 2,500 romances were published in North America, accounting for 55.9 percent of mass market and trade paperbacks sold,’ and that

in the twentieth century alone, thousands of American authors wrote and published in the tens of thousands of romance novels. In 2007, the latest year for which there are data, the number of romance titles published in North America had risen to 8,090.

(2011a: p. 847)

One can only assume that these numbers have increased even more, especially with the rise of the e-book, e-publishing, and self-publishing. To study the popular romance, then, is to study a field that produces far more than any single reader could ever read; indeed, even reading one percent of the books published in 2007 would require one to read 81 novels, more than Mussell’s sample size; to read ten percent of those novels would be to read over 800 novels.

Instead of arguing about the quantitative, perhaps critics of the romance might instead think in terms of saturation of data, which has long been ‘the key to excellent qualitative work’ (Morse, 1995: p. 147). The question, of course, is how does one know when the data has become saturated? ‘Margaret Mead is purported to note that one index of saturation was the boredom that occurred when investigators had “heard it all,”’ writes Janice M. Morse (1995: p. 147). Data saturation for Morse should not be understood as ‘frequency’ (1995: p. 148); instead, ‘researchers cease data collection when they have enough data to build a comprehensive and convincing theory. That is, saturation occurs’ (Morse, 1995: p. 148). The point here is not to number crunch either the number of times a given thing is repeated or the number of samples studied but rather to produce a ‘comprehensive and convincing theory’ based on the data collected. It is important here to recall that theory, almost by definition, is falsifiable. The critic may do better to critique not the method but the theory itself. A critic, thus, would be better to prove that the theory proposed by the data is problematic, or demonstrate how the theory is wrong, rather than suggest that not enough data was collected (unless, of course, a rule is written on when enough data is enough).

In my own understanding of genre, then, I would largely agree with Northrop Frye’s approach in Anatomy of Criticism (1996–2012: vol. 22), which sought to provide a scientific study of literature, and with his more particular approach to romance in his The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1996–2012: vol. 18). Before reading Anatomy of Criticism, which has, in the words of Brian G. Caraher, been ‘relegated to the archives of modern literary criticism’ (2006: p. 30), I do wish to pause to realise just how influential Frye’s work was before it was ‘relegated to the archives’ and how influential it continues to be. Which is to say, though Anatomy of Criticism may be archival, it is not covered in dust waiting to be rediscovered. Scholars continue to read Frye, and this is especially true of scholars of romance. In his book, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson writes that ‘Frye’s theory of romance […] is the fullest account of the genre’ (1981: p. 110). Corinne Saunders in her introduction to A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary writes that the ‘most influential in developing a grammar of romance has been Northrop Frye’ (2007: p. 2). David Fuller, echoing Saunders, refers to Frye as ‘one of the most influential critics of the mode’ (2007: p. 166), and Raymond H. Thompson writes that Frye is ‘the most influential among theoreticians’ (2007: p. 456). Even in disagreement, critics like Doris Sommer have to admit that ‘Frye’s observations about masculine and feminine ideals are to the point; they point backward to medieval quest-romance where victory meant fertility, the union of male and female heroes’ (1991: p. 49). It would seem Frye’s definition of romance is the one from which studies of romance should depart. Accordingly, this study continues in that tradition, but this should not be read as blind loyalty and fidelity to Northrop Frye’s theories of romance.

In Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, what connects one text to another is the part(s) of the text that are repeated, or what he calls ‘archetypes.’ For Frye, an archetype is a ‘typical or recurring image,’ which is ‘a symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience’ (1996–2012: vol. 22, p. 99). Frye explains,

And as the archetype is the communicable symbol, archetypal criticism is primarily concerned with literature as a social fact and as a mode of communication. By the study of conventions and genres, it attempts to fit poems into the body of poetry as a whole.

(1996–2012: vol. 22, p. 99)

The keyword here for scholars of popular romance in Frye’s method is ‘attempts.’ The scholar who pays attention to archetypes attempts to fit a given text into the whole of that body. To do this, he or she focuses on the parts of the text that are repeated and repeating. This does not negate the new and innovative ways an archetype might be used, but it does insist upon the repetition of those archetypes, which are, then, essential to the genre. If we pay attention to Regis’ work, she identifies many ‘essential elements’ of the genre and argues that these ‘essential elements’ will appear in all popular romance novels: ‘whether the romance takes place in America or Great Britain, and whether an American or British cultural sensibility informs the plot, it is the courtship that makes a romance,’ writes Regis (2003: p. 159).

Perhaps an even clearer example of this phenomenon is that in A Natural History of the Romance Novel, where Regis imagined the popular romance novel as uniquely heterosexual. In recent work, however, Regis has expanded her definition to account for the vastness of human sexuality and desire: ‘[S]ome of the more recent romances feature a courtship between two heroines, between two heroes, or among two heroes and a heroine’ (2011a: p. 849). Of course, even this definition still relies on a certain heteronormativity in its insistence upon hero and he...