Gissing’s work sees women’s romance-reading as part of the mass commodity culture that draws women away from domesticity onto the glittering and deceptive streets of “business and pleasure” (In the Year of Jubilee 12). While the fashion and ads sections of the mass periodicals stimulate women’s desire for commodities which the glittering shops promise to satisfy, the romance-installment sections, by wallowing in sentimentality and sensuality, arouse women’s desires for sexual transgression for which, again, her new access to the public streets of commerce seems to offer a thrilling venue. Thus in The Odd Women, Miss Royston runs away with a married man because “her nature was corrupted with sentimentality”, from devoting “[a]ll her spare time” to romance reading (58). Women would be better “reform[ed]”, and saved from moral, intellectual and emotional corruption if all these romance writers are
“strangled” and “thrown into the sea”. The mass female reader, who could not understand the “vice” of romance stories, is so passively manipulated that when she commits the act of moral degradation, “ten to one she had in mind some idiot heroine of a book” (58). Monica herself gets weary of her husband and more restless of her static home-bound married life, after the perusal of many a “love-story” “embittered her lot to the last point of endurance”. Romance-reading gives her a “suggestion” of
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the ideal lover (202), which she more than finds a suggestion of later in actual life in the person of the lover that she comes to know in her many outings. A similar
cautionary tale against the morally corrupt influence of romance reading is provided in Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, where the shopgirl Mildred’s seduction by a married man is at least partly attributed to her avid reading of “penny romance novelettes”, which she thinks are so “refined” and “genteel” (425), but are really the
“same thing over and over again” with the “names” “changed” and “that’s all” (391).
That the mass female reader is especially passive and at risk from the pernicious manipulation of the romance stories is collaborated by other contemporary writings which argue for the much more dangerous effects of romance reading on the mass female reader, than of the “penny dreadfuls”-- cheap stories of murder or adventure, on their main reader, the “quarter-educated” men. Women’s reading is seen to be of more “subtle”, “invidious” and long-term effect because of its impact in the domestic sphere. Working-class girls might, by indulging in stories of a poor maid discovering her noble birth and rewarded in love and wealth, learn “high-flown conceits and pretensions”, dislike manual work, and “hand down” these ideas to their children (Salmon 523). Medical opinions of the period also see a host of female maladies and
“disturbed nerves” as arising from the “great evil of romance reading”. The romance’s focus on sentimentality and sensuality, the description of love scenes, of “thrilling, romantic episodes”, “find an echo in the girl’s physical system and tend to create an abnormal excitement of her organs of sex.” (Wood-Allen 124) Thus stimulated, it is but a matter of time before the impure thoughts translate into improper action, leading to the ruins of a Miss Royston or Mildred.
The implied charge that these views betray is that romance-reading for women risks the disruption of established moral, sexual and class order, that it offers escapist fantasies and irrational distractions, and that it grips the passive mass female reader completely in its clutches. These judgments have for years impacted heavily on the reception of the popular romance. Feminist response to the genre, which only reached its popular status with the mushrooming of mass women’s periodicals in the 1890s, has also been negative from the very start. Gissing’s denunciation in The Odd Women of the harmful effects of romance-reading on Miss Roydon, for instance, is uttered through Rhoda, the proto-feminist, who is hostile to romance’s cultivation of the irrational, sentimental and the “animal” in women (58). In real life, Helen Bosanquet, eminent feminist social-worker, disapproved in 1901 that the cheap women’s
periodicals, by allowing the “shop-girl” to “soar with a heroine (in whom she finds a glorified self) into a heaven of luxury and sentimentality” so at to “soothe away the irritation of the long day’s toil”, implanted in the female reader the wrong notion that the “whole point and interest of a woman’s life is contained in the few months
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occupied by her love story” (680). Such ideas that the escapist pleasure of romance reading blinds women to their reality and instills in them the centrality of heterosexual love, are carried on in feminist critiques in the nineteen sixties and seventies, wherein the popular romance genre, whose enormous popularity has continued unabated, was vigorously attacked for binding women to an unnatural dependency on men, and to
“cherishing the chains of their bondage” (Firestone 180). Feminists may see different things from masculinist conservatives when one disapproves of the genre’s complicity with patriarchal values while the other complains of its moral and sexual disruption, but in concurring with the latter on the female reader’s passive subjection to
manipulation, her irrationality and lack of mental judgment, these feminists have unwittingly reinforced patriarchal gender hierarchies.
Feminist critics since the 1980s have begun to adopt a different strategy. Some (Modleski) have come to emphasize the gaps and contradictions behind the textual message of the genre, pointing out the underlying frustrations female characters often nurture against men and the patriarchal system. Others, reflecting the increasing attention in cultural studies on the using/consuming process of the publications (rather than just on the meaning producing/constructing process)12, and on cases wherein the dominant values have failed to interpellate the individual (Turner 199), thus departing from previous scholarship that emphasized the passivity of manipulated readers, have stressed the discrepancy between women’s actual usage of these readings and the passive “ideal” reading position prescribed by the text’s preferred meaning. The popular romance, instead of the Adornoean culture industry unfailingly churning out sugar-coated versions of the dominant ideology, is a site both deeply saturated with the dominant values and also where negotiation and resistance are constantly acted out.
Janice Radway is a key representative of this new trend to perceive women’s reading of popular romance as a historicized act located at the level of her everyday life and activities. Radway points out that the escapist fantasy the female reader experiences in her romance-reading, attacked by earlier feminists as the sugar-coated narcotic doled out by patriarchal hierarchy, functions indeed to offer temporary comfort and as a means of venting frustrations, so as to facilitate the reader’s eventual return to and acceptance of the reality of patriarchal domination. Yet Radway also argues for a completely different socio-cultural value for such a reading experience,
12 Two main influences are usually ascribed to for this important shift in the critical focus in studies of popular culture. Barthes’ ideas on the death of the author and on readerly pleasure valorize the importance of reader’s response regardless of textual intentions, while Gramsci’s idea of hegemony as a permanent process of negotiation facilitates the realization that popular culture, hitherto seen as a venue for the seamless top-down imposition of dominant values, is also a site where constant negotiation and even bottom-up resistance is possible. The position of the popular reader, instead of one of complete passivity, may also harbor potentials of active judgment and even resistance. See Turner 193-207.
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when the female reader could treat it as their “own” time, “a gift to themselves”, with entirely their own pleasure in mind and without the need to play, if only temporarily, the nurturing and caring role imposed on them by the patriarchal system (91). This may not be a conscious rebellion by itself, but in insisting on enjoying “my own time”, their reading act, located in the everyday context of her normal daily duties, does in some sense deviate from the endless daily requirements that women are subject to (92). Thus the romance text may attempt to achieve an unproblematic return, after due relief, to patriarchal reality, but the female reader’s actual use of this escapist reading contains possibilities of disruption that depart from the prescribed position.
Such an opinion obviously treats the mass female reader as a subject with the ability to understand and even partially control their own behavior, even though such behavior and self-comprehension are limited and are themselves subject to the control of social structures that the subject finds herself in. In Gissing’s The Odd Women, Monica exchanges the exhaustion and tedium of her shopgirl life for the security of marriage life, only to find that she has merely moved from the slavery of shop labor to another form of bondage. The Victorian ideal of the wife’s role in marriage,
prescribed for in nineteenth century manuals on women’s domestic duties (Sanders 208) and obsessively insisted on by Monica’s husband Widdowson, is that the wife treat domesticity as her work and duty, and that she defers to her husband’s opinions on her movements, friendships, and the choice of her reading matters. Such demands of work and duty stultify Monica, and she insists on the need for leisure and for free time, which she fills with reading “yellow-backed” (The Odd Women 164) romances that “amuse” her and bring her “pleasure” (163). It is in her resistance to her
prescribed role to do her work and duty, her protests that a woman should not be
“overburdened” or should not “make work”, that she should have leisure and
“enjoyment” of life “as full as possible” (163), that Monica’s romance reading becomes a gesture of resistance. It is true that the romance stories she reads may present marriage as the ultimate destiny for women and prescribe for the same feminine virtues of domesticity and submissiveness. It is also true that Monica’s romance reading may just be a repetitive act of addiction cultivated intentionally by the culture industry and profit-oriented publishers, through the use of clever ploys like the never-ending installment system which hooks on the reader and induces more desires. Yet at the same her reading is never an isolated activity, nor is her actual use of the text an entire replication of the prescribed position. Located in the specific everyday context of her married life, when she is always pressed upon to do her duty and work, Monica’s use of her reading does indeed take on the “combative” color that Radway claims in her landmark research (7), and does indeed embody the positive potential of being transformed into a means of constructing a more independent,
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self-oriented feminine identity. The linear power of gender politics which permeate both the romance texts as well as the social context that Monica finds herself in is indeed powerfully objectifying, but one should not entirely ignore the horizontal dimension of Monica’s actual use of the reading, or the interweaving of her reading into her everyday activity which is really where the meaning of her reading is to be located.
A further aspect of the female reader’s use of romance reading is that the
“trivial”, gossipy and seemingly never-ending nature of the serialized romance installments in turn-of-the-century mass women’s periodicals, though another
effective ploy to flatter and hook on the female reader as has been pointed out above, may also still allow the reader to use romance reading as a means of establishing a shared subject of gossip and conversation, and thus a shared sense of community and of mutual support. The many letters published in the correspondence columns of the 1890s mass journals, a number of which are responses to and discussions of the journals’ serialized romance stories, still provide a venue of mutual listening and support and networking for the female reader, a collective forum of encouragement for the female voice which might not have dared to speak alone.