In this article the author focuses on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca which is the late 1930s story of an orphan girl who marries an aristocratic widower and has got everthing a romance needs and more. First, Light presents the Left political view that romance novels reinforce the role of the submissive woman only to criticise it by arguing that women aren’t so easily manipulated and that readers are more complex than that. She argues that we should not be afraid of pleasure that comes from reading such literatures and she sees fictions as « restatements of realities. » I too, once thought that romance readers were desperate housewives who were trying to fill a void in their lives. I thought of romance novels as cheesy and simply degrading women by promoting the idea of an eroticized woman being swept off her feet or even "rescued" by a strong, tall, dark and handsome man. Although I do not want to generalize, we have to be honest with ourselves by saying that at some point we have imagined such a fantasy, searching for that self that could possibly experience this "romance". Here is the problem though: romance novels (that I know of) are usually aimed at heterosexual women. However, Light does specify that the « self » that comes of reading romance equals the norms of female heterosexuality. So in a subtle way, she acknowledges that these texts are not representative of homosexual experience. In her conclusion, Light makes the point that women who read romance fictions are, « as much a measure of their deep dissatisfaction with heterosexual options as of any desire to be fully identified with the submissive versions of femininity the texts endorse » and urges feminists to analyse romance and its reception as symptomatic instead of reflective.
Romance and the Work of Fantasy – Struggles over Feminine Sexuality and Subjectivity at Century’s End (Janice Radway)
I liked the fact that she was critical of her own work right at the beginning of the article. She criticised because it reinforced sexist assumptions about romance novels and its readers. while she wanted to claim romance for feminism instead and takeromances and its readers seriously. To be completely honest, I have probably never read a romance novel. My first thought was always that they are cheesy and irrealistic. I was never one for fantasy in that kind of sense.
Janice Radway seeks to « review the nature of the struggles that have been conducted at this site (that of the struggle for feminine subjectivity and sexuality) and to show that just as feminist discourse about the romance has changed dramatically in a short time, so too has the romance changed as writers have resisted the efforts of the publishing industry to fix the form in the hope of generating predictable profits. » (396) She praises the accomplishments of romance writers by stating that they have showed an increased confidence in claiming female sexuality and have imagined a female subjectivity to support it.
Radway offers an overview of romance of the early 1960s and presents two critical views of them: 1) romances as a threat to patriarchal culture due to the sexual revolution and, 2)romance seen as a backlash against the women’s movement. Her response to this is that « policing was the real work enacted by leftists and early feminists critiques of romances and their readers. »(397) She thinks that by criticizing women they were reinforcing their authority on them and dictating what they « ought » to be doing instead of reading romance novels. I completely agree with this. It seems as though, still today, men or women who are still embedded within the patriarchal views of « woman » are often threatened by women stepping out of normative female identities. God forbid, a woman should think about sexual pleasure or go off in a world of fantasy. It seems that men are the only ones allowed to do this with pornography. For men to do this is often seen an natural, like an innate behaviour or desire. In fact, one could think that a man who does not engage in such activities or dreams does not fall into the heterosexual male norm.
Radway reinforces the idea that the fantasy of the romance is closely connected with the social and material conditions of women’s lives in a patriarchal culture. Later in the piece she offers a brief history of the evolution of romance novels and publishing companies while arguing that feminism made its way into romances through the career aspirations of the middle-class writers of the genre. What we are left to consider is that fantasies are offerings of different versions of female sexuality and different subject positions for readers to experience and try. I now see it as perhaps a safe place for women to experience their sexuality before thinking or actually engaging in certain situations in their reality. Some of them may or may not or probably never experience these outside of the romance novel but can certainly take full advantage of this place to explore their inner self.
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