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may also point to the Utopian elements in popular fiction, in so far as it
promises, in the end, a world without contradictions.
We are not saying that popular fiction is the same as common sense. But
whereas previously we defined popular fiction solely by its relation to the
institutions which structure the field of literary production and consumption, ‘the
literary field’, we would now see popular fiction as also placed between highly
developed ideologies/philosophies, the language of common sense and the
experience of subordinate groups and classes. When a fiction addresses each of
these we call it popular.
Popular fiction’s relation to the literary field, and particularly to education, is
one of exclusion. Girls’ magazines, ‘confessions’ books, romantic novelettes or
Superman comics are not normally legitimated by schools, let alone by the
cultural gatekeepers of universities. They are part of the ‘mass civilization’ against
which the ‘minority culture’ defines itself and ‘exist within social and cultural
relations which are different from and antagonistic to those represented in the
school curriculum’. 97
Yet, however antagonistic the literary establishment appears to be to popular
fiction, the case of romance makes it clear that popular fiction is not oppositional
in any simple way. ‘Romance’ as a category in literary criticism connects novels
as dissimilar as Richardson’s Pamela, Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Cartland’s Blue
Heather. Also, the themes of love and of the true nature of womanhood which
permeate Cartland’s fiction can be seen as the popularization of an elaborate
ideology/philosophy of womanhood, developed in response to the nineteenth-
century women’s movement and crystallized by John Ruskin in the doctrine of
separate spheres. 98
If romance is placed in this way in relation to ‘high’ literature and philosophy,
it also addresses the linguistic practice of common sense (the simple sentence?)
and is read within popular culture. The words ‘I love you’, which are the
culmination of romantic fiction, are spoken daily as part of the lived experience
of women and men within different class cultures, different age groups and
different familial positions, and they have a range of connotations depending in
part on when and by whom the magic words are uttered. It is because popular
female romances occupy this contested space between highly developed
ideologies, common sense and women’s lived experiences that we have turned
our attention to them.
To paraphrase Gramsci once more, a socialist feminist analysis of popular
fiction initially aims to demonstrate that everyone is a reader and a writer. ‘It is
not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought’; it is a
question of renovating and making critical an already existing activity, drawing
out the historical forms and contradictory status of already existing practices of
reading and writing. It is not altogether easy to draw a distinction between the two
practices involved: the rereading of old stories quickly becomes a rewriting (from
current feminist rereadings of fairy stories to Brecht’s rereading of Coriolanus).
Feminist analysis or reinterpretation of popular female romance would bear the