Reading the Romance

Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature

Janice A. Radway

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807898857
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

One
The Institutional Matrix Publishing Romantic Fiction

Like all other commercial commodities in our industrial culture, literary texts are the result of a complicated and lengthy process of production that is itself controlled by a host of material and social factors. Indeed, the modern mass-market paperback was made possible by such technological innovations as the rotary magazine press and synthetic glue as well as by organizational changes in the publishing and bookselling industries. One of the major weaknesses of the earlier romance critique has been its failure to recognize and take account of these indisputable facts in its effort to explain the genre’s growing popularity. Because literary critics tend to move immediately from textual interpretation to sociological explanation, they conclude easily that changes in textual features or generic popularity must be the simple and direct result of ideological shifts in the surrounding culture. Thus because she detects a more overtly misogynist message at the heart of the genre, Ann Douglas can argue in her widely quoted article, “Soft-Porn Culture,” that the coincidence of the romance’s increasing popularity with the rise of the women’s movement must point to a new and developing backlash against feminism. Because that new message is there in the text, she reasons, those who repetitively buy romances must experience a more insistent need to receive it again and again.¹

Although this kind of argument sounds logical enough, it rests on a series of tenuous assumptions about the equivalence of critics and readers and ignores the basic facts about the changing nature of book production and distribution in contemporary America. Douglas’s explanatory strategy assumes that purchasing decisions are a function only of the content of a given text and of the needs of readers. In fact, they are deeply affected by a book’s appearance and availability as well as by potential readers’ awareness and expectations. Book buying, then, cannot be reduced to a simple interaction between a book and a reader. It is an event that is affected and at least partially controlled by the material nature of book publishing as a socially organized technology of production and distribution.

The apparent increase in the romance’s popularity may well be attributable to women’s changing beliefs and needs. However, it is conceivable that it is equally a function of other factors as well, precisely because the romance’s recent success also coincides with important changes in book production, distribution, advertising, and marketing techniques. In fact, it may be true that Harlequin Enterprises can sell 168 million romances not because women suddenly have a greater need for the romantic fantasy but because the corporation has learned to address and overcome certain recurring problems in the production and distribution of books for a mass audience.² If it can be shown that romance sales have been increased by particular practices newly adopted within the publishing industry, then we must entertain the alternate possibility that the apparent need of the female audience for this type of fiction may have been generated or at least augmented artificially. If so, the astonishing success of the romance may constitute evidence for the effectiveness of commodity packaging and advertising and not for actual changes in readers’ beliefs or in the surrounding culture. The decision about what the romance’s popularity constitutes evidence for cannot be made until we know something more about recent changes in paperback marketing strategies, which differ substantially from those that have been used by the industry for almost 150 years.

Standard book-marketing practices can be traced, in fact, to particular conceptions of the book and of the act of publication itself, both of which developed initially as a consequence of the early organization of the industry. The output of the first American press, established at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1639, was largely the ecclesiastical work of learned gentlemen of independent means who could afford to pay the printer to issue their books.³ Limitation of authorship to those with sufficient capital occurred generally throughout the colonies because most of the early presses were owned by combined printer-publishers who charged authors a flat fee for typesetting and distribution and a royalty for each book sold.⁴ Because it was the author who financed publication and thus shouldered the risk of unsold copies, the printer-publisher had relatively little interest in seeing that the book appealed to previously known audience taste. As a result, authors exerted almost total control over their works, which were then conceived as the unique products of their own individual intellects. Publication was concomitantly envisioned as the act of publicly issuing an author’s ideas, an act that could be accomplished by the formal presentation of even one copy of those ideas for public review. In the early years of the printing industry, therefore, the idea of publication was not tied to the issue of sales or readership. As long as the work was presented in the public domain, it was considered published, regardless of whether it was read or not.

Of course, authors did concern themselves with readers, not least because they stood to lose a good deal if their books failed to sell. However, the problem was not a major one because the literate reading community was small and because publication itself was carried out on a local scale. The author very often knew who his readers were likely to be and could tailor his offering to their interests and tastes. Indeed, it was not uncommon for an early American writer to finance publication by soliciting contributions from specific, known subscribers whom he made every effort to please.⁵ It was thus relatively easy to match individual books with the readers most likely to appreciate the sentiments expressed within them.

Thus the concept of the book as a unique configuration of ideas conceived with a unique hypothetical audience in mind developed as the governing conception of the industry. Publishers prided themselves on the diversity of their offerings and conceived the strength of an individual house to be its ability to supply the American reading public with a constant stream of unique and different books. In addition, they reasoned further that because publishing houses issued so many different kinds of works, each of which was intended for an entirely different public, it was futile to advertise the house name itself or to publicize a single book for a heterogeneous national audience. In place of national advertising, then, publishers relied on editors’ intuitive abilities to identify the theoretical audiences for which books had been conceived and on their skills at locating real readers who corresponded to those hypothetical groups. Throughout the nineteenth century and indeed well into the twentieth, authors, editors, and publishers alike continued to think of the process of publication as a personal, discrete, and limited act because they believed that the very particularity and individuality of books destined them for equally particular and individual publics.

Despite the continuing domination of this attitude, the traditional view of book publishing was challenged, even if only tentatively, in the early years of the nineteenth century by an alternate view which held that certain series of books could be sold successfully and continuously to a huge, heterogeneous, preconstituted public. Made possible by revolutionary developments in technology and distribution and by the changing character of the reading audience itself, this new idea of the book as a salable commodity gradually began to alter the organization of the editorial process and eventually the conception of publishing itself. Although this new view of the book and of the proper way to distribute it was at first associated only with a certain kind of printer-publisher, it was gradually acknowledged and later grudgingly used by more traditional houses when it became clear that readers could be induced to buy quite similar books again and again.

The specific technological developments that prepared the way for the early rationalization of the book industry included the improvement of machine-made paper, the introduction of mechanical typesetting and more sophisticated flatbed presses, and the invention of the Napier and Hoe cylinder press. The inventions of the steamboat and the railroad and the extension of literacy—especially to women—combined to establish publishing as a commercial industry with the technical capacity to produce for a mass audience by 1830.⁶ What this meant was that commercially minded individuals began to enter the business with the sole purpose of turning a profit.

Lacking the interest of their literary confreres in the quality of the material they produced, men like the Beadle brothers, Theophilus B. Peterson, and later Street and Smith determined to publish what the general American public wanted in the way of diversionary reading material. Their concern with profit further prompted the first literary entrepreneurs to search for ways to sell their books not merely effectively but predictably as well. These men reasoned that if they could take the traditional risk out of book publication by identifying their potential audiences more successfully, they might avoid the common losses that came with overproduction and poorly directed distribution. As a consequence, they experimented with many varied schemes, all of which were designed to establish a permanent channel of communication between the publishing house and an already identified, constantly available audience of readers. This view of the relationship between a publisher and a book-buying public was vastly different from the more traditional view held by men like Mathew Carey of Philadelphia and the Harper Brothers of New York.

The extent of the gap between these two views of the publishing process can be illustrated easily by considering the two most commonly employed schemes used by literary entrepreneurs of the mid-nineteenth century to rationalize their production. In commodity exchange, which is exactly what these men were proposing, the producer attempts to convince the largest number of individuals to part with relatively small amounts of capital in return for some specially designed thing. Unless that producer wishes to go out of business rather quickly after having initially supplied the available audience, it becomes necessary to extend demand for the commodity either by enlarging the purchasing public or by convincing it to consume that commodity repetitively. Although the early commercial publishers attempted to do both, they tended to concentrate their efforts on the task of inducing repetitive consumption, either by closely duplicating earlier literary successes or by establishing newspaperlike subscription operations.

The first technique—the imitation of an earlier bestseller—led to the practice of publishing particular types or categories of books such as the domestic novels associated with Peterson or the dime-novel Westerns created by the Beadle brothers after the initial success of Ann Stephens’s Maleska.⁷ Peterson and the Beadles reasoned that once they had loosely identified an actual audience by inducing it to buy a specific kind of book, it would not be difficult to keep that audience permanently constituted and available for further sales by supplying it with endless imitations of the first success. Although a good idea, the technique failed as often as it worked. Because they lacked a formal way of maintaining contact with the audience they created, these publishers simply had to trust that continuous feeding would mean continuous buying. Furthermore, Peterson and the Beadles could determine audience preference only experimentally by issuing new material in the hope that some of it would ferret out new readers and thereby enlarge the market as needed. Nevertheless, in relying on repetitive formulas as a result of their primary interest in profit, they managed to create America’s first mass-produced fiction in book form. We will see that the contemporary romance is nothing more than a highly sophisticated version of this prototypical category literature and that its publishers are, if anything, even more interested in profit than were their nineteenth-century counterparts.

Just as contemporary romance publishing is guided by this entrepreneurial vision of the book as an endlessly replicable commodity, so also does it rely on another distribution practice engineered in nineteenth-century America specifically to rationalize the sale of books. In depending heavily on highly predictable subscription sales to distribute their romances, Harlequin Enterprises and Silhouette Books, in fact, have merely realized the potential of a scheme adopted first in American book publishing in 1839 by New York journalists, Park Benjamin and Rufus Wilmot Griswold.⁸ At first looking only for a way to enlarge newspaper sales, these two journalists created a “story” newspaper called Brother Jonathan whose pirated British serials, they hoped, would appeal to a larger audience than did the usual daily fare of political and criminal news. Although Brother Jonathan was essentially a magazine, it qualified for free distribution through the United States mail as a newspaper because Benjamin and Griswold deliberately combined their serials with a minimum of “news.” As a consequence, they managed to keep their prices well below those of the competing magazines that were the traditional channels for story and novel distribution.

The venture prospered so well that the newly enlarged serial audience often refused to wait for the concluding installments in Brother Jonathan. Many readers chose instead to purchase the complete novel in book form issued, of course, by a traditional printer-publisher. To combat their own self-subversion, Benjamin and Griswold then created the “supplement,” a complete novel printed on cheap paper, priced at fifty cents, and disguised, still, as a newspaper. This all-important disguise permitted the inexpensive circulation of the Brother Jonathan supplements through the mail to an audience of permanent subscribers. Despite the disguise, however, these supplements were really the first mass-marketed paperbound books to be distributed in the United States.

Unfortunately for Benjamin and Griswold, other newspaper publishers caught on quickly and soon began to issue their own paperbound extras. The ensuing competition lowered prices even further, placing books well within the financial reach of a significant portion of the American population for the first time. Traditional book publishers, to be sure, were dismayed by this challenge to their control of book distribution. In retaliation, they, too, began issuing cheap reprints at twenty-five cents and then, later, at twelve and a half cents. By 1842, book charges had dropped so low that Bulwer’s newly published Zanoni could be purchased from one of three sources for as little as six cents.

The situation did not improve for trade publishers until 1843 when, with the book market apparently saturated, the postal service ruled that the supplements could no longer be carried at newspaper rates. This decision effectively closed off the first real channel for mass distribution of books ever used in America. Deprived of its way to reach its thousands of readers regularly but cheaply, Brother Jonathan collapsed almost immediately; its many imitators disappeared soon thereafter. During their short lives, however, they had performed the important function of proving that a large and diverse audience, sometimes the size of thirty t...