Page 92 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Feminist desire and female pleasure: on Janice
Radway’s Reading the Romance

Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984), one of the most influential studies within
the so-called ‘new audience research’, does not exactly read like a romance. In contrast to
the typically engrossing reading experience of the romance novel, it is difficult to go
through Reading the Romance at one stretch. The text contains too many fragments
which compel its reader to stop, to reread, to put the book aside in order to gauge and
digest the assertions made—in short, to adopt an analytical position vis-à-vis the text.
Contrary to what happens, as Radway sees it, in the case of romance novels, the value
and pleasure of this reading experience does not primarily lie in its creation of a general
sense of emotional well-being and visceral contentment (ibid.: 70). Rather, Reading the
Romance has left me, as one of its enthusiastic readers, with a feeling of tension that
forces me to problematize its project, to ask questions about the kind of intervention
Radway has tried to make in writing the book. Such questions generally do not present
themselves to romance readers when they have just finished a particularly satisfying
version of the romance genre. Radway has argued convincingly that it is precisely a
release of tension that makes romance reading a particularly pleasurable activity for
female readers. This release of tension is accomplished, on the one hand, by a temporary,
literal escape from the demands of the social role of housewife and mother which is
assured by the private act of picking up a book and reading a romance, and, on the other
hand, by a symbolic gratification of the psychological need for nurturance and care that
the romance genre offers these women—needs that, given their entrapment in the
arrangements of ‘patriarchal marriage’, cannot be satisfied in ‘real life’. This is
elaborated by Radway in her characterization of romantic fiction as compensatory
literature (ibid.: 89–95). In other words, the value of romance reading for women is, in
Radway’s analysis, primarily of a therapeutic nature.
But this opposition—between the analytical and the therapeutic—invites a somewhat
oversimplified view of the relationship between Reading the Romance and women
reading romances. To be sure, in Radway’s book, we can distinguish an overtly
therapeutic thrust. For what is at stake for Radway is not just the academic will to offer a
neat and sophisticated explanation of the whys and hows of romance reading, but also a
feminist desire to come to terms, politically speaking, with this popular type of female
pleasure.
The enormous popularity of romantic fiction with women has always presented a
problem for feminism. It is an empirical given that pre-eminently signifies some of the
limits of feminist understanding and effectivity. One of the essential aims of Reading the
Romance, then, is to find a new feminist way to ‘cope’ with this ‘problem’. And I would
suggest that it is precisely this therapeutic momentum of Reading the Romance that,
paradoxically enough, produces the deep sense of tension I felt after having read the
book. At stake in the therapy, as I will try to show, is the restoration of feminist authority.
The result, however, is not an altogether happy ending in the romance tradition. This is
not to say that the book should have a happy ending, for Reading the Romance belongs to