Page 267 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

256 ENGLISH STUDIES

larger unity (the family, the British people, ‘we’re all human beings’). All these
and many other forms of naturalization are at work in developed social
formations, not only in those institutions of the superstructure (school, church,
family) that directly ‘manufacture’ ideology, but also in the most intimate
interstices and very atmospheres of public and private life.
If we identify certain basic structural features of popular female romance, we
can begin to see how these features closely tie in with the texts’ predominant
concern, reproduction through the heterosexual family. They compose a cluster
of assumptions concerning the natural inevitability of love and marriage. In fact,
a conflation of the two takes place, with an ideology of ‘romantic love’, infused
with religiosity, becoming the guarantor and site of reproduction. Romantic love
leads to the family and children. Romance and reproduction are harnessed
together. Popular female romance enacts a closure as the knot is tied by the
collapsing of emotional commitment into marital inevitability.
In this passage from unreproductive femininity to potential familial
reproduction an attenuation of the woman’s public identity takes place, leaving
her to explore the ‘external values’ of love and emotion only within the
privatized and servicing cage of the family. The needs of the male (often
represented as a displaced or exiled aristocrat) to continue his family’s line and
to assume symbolic manhood by settling down in his ancestral home are the
centre of the text. It is this cluster of traditional assumptions concerning
heterosexual relations and romantic love as the guarantor of secure reproduction
that demarcates the span of the connection between popular female romances and
‘common-sense’ popular culture, but it also pinpoints the particular terrain on
which such romances work. There are alternatives offered, but only on this
terrain. For example, the alternative of marrying for money is roundly defeated
by the dominant form of marrying for love.
But these texts are not to be read simply as ideological (in that, by various
magical ways, a happy ending is achieved and is equated with marriage and
abnegation before the husband). For in the course of these novels the various
contradictions between love and money, independence and marriage are staged,
and disruptive and forbidden elements (for example, sexuality) make their
absences known (as in, for example, the Gothic novel). So too the ‘confinement’
of the romance to the realm of personal experience and emotional relationships
has been seen as the suppression of ‘real relations’, as outside history or as a
‘feminine’ (that is, trivial) concern. This is due to the invisibility, both to the Left
and to the Right, of the domestic sphere and the unacknowledged domestic labour
involved in day-to-day and generational reproduction.
Nevertheless, in their overriding attention to marriage as a natural and inevitable
form for sexual relations and reproduction, to domesticity as the only and proper
space for women, to the social, emotional and sexual servicing of the woman
to the man, popular romances are located within the structures and relations of
capitalist and patriarchal hegemony. A process of naturalization recruits and
secures the consent of the dominated classes and groups to the conditions of their