Page 98 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Feminist desire and female pleasure: on Janice Radway's 89
different’, Radway is drawn to conclude that ‘they refuse to admit that the books they
read have a standard plot’ (ibid.: 199). In imposing such a hasty interpretation, however,
she forgets to take the statement seriously, as if it were only the result of the women’s
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being lured by the realistic illusion of the narrative text. But perhaps the statement that
all heroines are different says more about the reading experience than Radway assumes.
Perhaps it could be seen as an index of the pleasure that is solicited by what may be
termed ‘the grain of the story’: the subtle, differentiated texture of each book’s staging of
the romantic tale that makes its reading a ‘new’ experience even though the plot is
standard. In fact, Radway’s own findings seem to testify to this when she reports that
‘although the women almost never remembered the names of the principal characters,
they could recite in surprising detail not only what had happened to them but also how
they managed to cope with particularly troublesome situations’ (ibid.: 201).
Attention to this pleasure of detail could also give us a fresh perspective on another
thing often asserted by many of the Smithton women that puzzled Radway, namely that
they always want to ascertain in advance that a book finishes with a happy ending.
Radway sees this peculiar behaviour as an indication that these women cannot bear ‘the
threat of the unknown as it opens out before them and demand continual reassurance that
the events they suspect will happen [i.e. the happy ending], in fact, will finally happen’
(1984:205). But isn’t it possible to develop a more positive interpretation here? When the
reader is sure that the heroine and the hero will finally get each other, she can concentrate
all the more on how they will get each other. Finding out about the happy ending in
advance could then be seen as a clever reading strategy aimed at obtaining maximum
pleasure: a pleasure that is oriented towards the scenario of romance, rather than its
outcome. If the outcome is predictable in the romance genre, the variety of the ways in
which two lovers can find one another is endless. Cora Kaplan’s succinct specification of
what in her view is central to the pleasure of romance reading for women is particularly
illuminating here, suggesting ‘that the reader identifies with both terms in the seduction
scenario, but most of all with the process of seduction’ (1986:162, emphasis added).
This emphasis on the staging of the romantic encounter, on the details of the moments
of seducing and being seduced as the characteristic elements of pleasure in romance
reading, suggests another absence in the interpretive framework of Reading the Romance:
the meaning of fantasy, or, for that matter, of romantic fantasy. In Radway’s account,
fantasy is too easily equated with the unreal, with the world of illusions, that is, false
ideas about how life ‘really’ is. It is this pitting of reality against fantasy that brings her to
the sad conclusion that repetitive romance reading ‘would enable a reader to tell herself
again and again that a love like the heroine’s might indeed occur in a world such as hers.
She thus teaches herself to believe that men are able to satisfy women’s needs fully’
(1984:201). In other words, it is Radway’s reductionist conception of phantasmatic
scenarios as incorrect models of reality—in Radway’s feminist conception of social
reality, there is not much room for men’s potential capacity to satisfy women—that
drives her to a more or less straightforward ‘harmful effects’ theory.
If, however, as I have already suggested in chapter 5, we were to take fantasy
seriously as a reality in itself, as a necessary dimension of our psychical reality, we could
conceptualize the world of fantasy as the place of excess, where the unimaginable can be
imagined. Fiction could then be seen as the social materialization and elaboration of