Page 99 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 90
fantasies, and thus, in the words of Allison Light, ‘as the explorations and productions of
desires which may be in excess of the socially possible or acceptable’ (1984:7).
This insight may lead to another interpretation of the repetitiveness of romance
reading as an activity among women (some critics would speak of ‘addiction’), which
does not accentuate their ultimate psychic subordination to patriarchal relations, but
rather emphasizes the rewarding quality of the fantasizing activity itself. As Radway
would have it, romance fans pick up a book again and again because romantic fiction
does not satisfy them enough, as it is only a poor, illusory and transitory satisfaction of
needs unmet in ‘real life’. But couldn’t the repeated readings be caused by the fact that
the romance novel satisfies them too much, because it constitutes a secure space in which
an imaginary perpetuation of an emphatically Utopian state of affairs (something that is
an improbability in ‘real life’ in the first place) is possible?
After all, it is more than striking that romance novels always abruptly end at the
moment that the two lovers have finally found each other, and thus never go beyond the
point of no return: romantic fiction generally is exclusively about the titillating period
before the wedding! This could well indicate that what repetitious reading of romantic
fiction offers is the opportunity to continue to enjoy the excitement of romance and
romantic scenes without being interrupted by the dark side of sexual relationships. In the
symbolic world of the romance novel, the struggle between the sexes (while being one of
the ongoing central themes of melodramatic soap operas; see Ang 1985: esp. chapter 4),
will always be overcome in the end, precisely because that is what the romantic
imagination self-consciously tries to make representable. Seen this way, the politics of
romance reading is a politics of fantasy in which women engage precisely because it does
not have ‘reality value’. Thus, the romance reader can luxuriate in never having to enter
the conflictual world that comes after the ‘happy ending’. Instead, she leaves the newly
formed happy couple behind and joins another heroine, another hero, who are to meet
each other in a new book, in a new romantic setting.
What is achieved by this deliberate fictional bracketing of life after the wedding, it
seems to me, is the phantasmatic perpetuation of the romantic state of affairs. Whatever
the concrete reasons for women taking pleasure in this—here some further ethnographic
inquiry could provide us with new answers—it seems clear to me that what is
fundamentally involved is a certain determination to maintain the feeling of romance, or a
refusal to give it up, even though it may be temporarily or permanently absent in ‘real
life,’ against all odds. And it is this enduring emotional quest that, I would suggest,
should be taken seriously as a psychical strategy by which women empower themselves
in everyday life, leaving apart what its ideological consequences in social reality are.
If this interpretation is at all valid, then I am not sure how feminism should respond to
it. Radway’s rationalist proposal—that romance readers should be convinced to see that
their reading habits are ultimately working against their own ‘real’ interests—will not do,
for it slights the fact that what is above all at stake in the energy invested in romance
reading is the actualization of romantic feelings, which are by definition ‘unrealistic’,
excessive, Utopian, inclined towards the sensational and the adventurous. That the daring
quality of romanticism tends to be tamed by the security of the happy ending in the
standard romance novel is not so important in this respect. What is important is the
tenacity of the desire to feel romantically.