Page 163 - Decoding Culture

156 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

about the pleasures that it provides. Hence her resort to Williams'
expression 'structures of feeling' in an attempt to catch those
elements of Coronation Street that are pleasurable to women while
standing in an ambiguous, even contradictory, relation to patriar­
chal ideology.
This tension between the demands of an approach focused upon
ideology and those grounded in the recognition that women make
active use of 'their own' cultural artefacts increasingly pervades
1980s work. On romantic fiction, for example, while conceding that
such material may be ideological in as much as it 'inoculates' its
readers against some of the 'evils of sexist society', Modleski (1982:
43) makes much the same point as Lovell. 'Instead of exploring the
possibility that romances, while serving to keep women in their
place, may at the same time be concerned with real female prob­
lems, analysts of women's romances have generally seen the
fantasy embodied in romantic fiction as evidence of female
"masochism" or as a simple reflection of the dominant masculine
ideology' (ibid: 37-38). Similarly, Radway (1987: 14-15) suggests
that, even after extensive research, she is still not able to untangle
the answers to a crucial pair of questions: 'Does the romance's
endless rediscovery of the virtues of a passive female sexuality
merely stitch the reader ever more resolutely into the fabric of
patriarchal culture? Or, alternatively, does the satisfaction a reader
derives from the act of reading itself, an act she chooses, often in
explicit defiance of others' opposition, lead to a new sense of
strength and independence?' So, while there does remain wide
recognition that women's popular culture may indeed help to rec­
oncile women to patriarchal social forms - though Radway's (1987:
217) point is well made, that direct evidence is lacking to support
this claim - there is also a clear and growing desire to engage
more positively with the ways in which these cultural forms are
pleasurable to their female audience.

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