Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature

• A Natural History of the Romance Novel
• A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire
• Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media
• Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream (Cultural Studies Series)
• Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Harvard Paperback, Hp 21)

First, I will second the claims by previous reviewer M. Dargan who found that Radway shows little evidence that her pseudonymous town of Smithton really exists, under any name. She maintains that the town is a suburb of 112 thousand people, next to a city of 800 thousand (the last two figures are supposedly from the 1970 census), is in the Midwest, is about 2000 miles from New York City, and is in a state with 115 counties. Do a little research, as M. Dargan did, and you'll find that no location satisfying all five of these descriptions exists. I'm willing to concede that Radway may have made some minor mistakes in description, but should this happen in a book that is so extensively researched otherwise? Meanwhile, except for "Dot" the women profiled in the book appear very homogenous and undifferentiated. Radway's general lack of definition for these women is at least a problem of research methodology, if not outright misrepresentation.

In any case, such questions of method would be of little concern if Radway had stuck to her planned thesis, which is to find out why women read romance novels. However, this book descends into a swamp of rusty Hite-style feminist theories on gender roles and sexuality (especially in the interminable Chapter 4), of the type that are just as unyielding and condescending as the male-oriented conceptions they are rebelling against. Radway even concedes that the women in the study rarely had conceptions of such supposedly deep thoughts. On the other hand, they regularly make the standard claims that men are only thinking of one thing, that husbands are threatened by their wives' reading material, et cetera. They can think these things if they wish, but Radway fails to notice that these are stereotypical categorizations of the type that feminist theory is supposed to counter against. Once again, I have no problem with romance novels or the goals of feminism. However, one must wonder about the true agenda of a researcher who turns a thin cultural study of 42 homogenous women who read romance novels, in a town that may not really exist, into 200+ pages of pretentious theorizing and pontification. (...)


11 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

Where is Smithton?, 2003-12-06
Janice Radway goes to great lengths to describe the town, Smithton, where she claims to have assessed the reading habits of romance novel maven Dorothy "Dot" Evans and her disciples. She then chooses to protect the identities of the group by describing the town as "nearly 2000 miles from New York City, "Midwestern" and "surrounded by corn and hayfields." Furthermore, she places Smithton as a suburb of a town with about 850,000 residents according to the 1970 Census.

I've looked at the 1970 Census and the only town that comes close to 850,000 is Dallas, TX at 844,000. However, while Dallas has many suburbs that could have been Smithton, none of them were surrounded with corn and hayfields and any characterization of the Dallas area as Midwestern would no doubt raise the ire of Texans who consider themselves (even the snowbirds) either Southerners or Westerners.

Furthermore, if you look at a map of the USA and draw a radius 2000 miles from New York City, you're going to be in central Montana, Wyoming, western Colorado, and parts of New Mexico. None of that is Midwestern and there aren't any towns that fit the population estimate.

Has anyone ever identified the "Dot" character and has anyone ever seen proof that Radway's book is based on actual research? Surely, if Dot actually existed she would have exploited the notoriety from the book to promote her newsletter. The whole book is fishy: Her methods, findings, and conclusions are not convincing and her description of Smithton is implausible.

Cheers


11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

Conflict of Interest Makes it Interesting, 2002-07-18
An interesting book and a pretty good read. With the exception of the first chapter, which is an enlightening but pretty dry history of book publishing, the author writes with an enganging and personable style that's highly unusual for an "academic" book. I picked it up thinking that I'd browse through it and found myself reading it cover to cover. There's a bit of the usual feminist/critical studies rhetoric but it's neither bombastic enough nor pervasive enough to dampen the book's accessibility nor its credibility.

What keeps the book interesting is the author's ongoing engagement with a smallish group of midwestern romance readers. The group makes up the core of her study and she cites interviews with these readers as well as statistical results from a questionnaire. An undercurrent which runs through this book but which Radway doesn't directly address is her conflicted relationship with this group. On the one hand, she is seems to respect them a great deal and doesn't want to dismiss them the way many romance readers have been dismissed as mindless and passive women. Indeed, part of her analysis is that the romance novel is a complex response to power relations between men and women and that it does not simply reinforce the status quo. On the other hand, she seems to suggest that the readers she's interviewed aren't entirely aware of this agenda--that they simply read to escape.

Radway refers over and over again to the idea that the women she's interviewed read romances in order to experience vicariously what they are missing in their lives. She makes a pretty interesting case, but it's significant, I think, that she never asks the women about whether or not they think they are missing anything in their lives. Thus, though interesting, the book takes a sort of, "I know what you really need and why you really read these books even if you don't" mentality. She cares about and respects these women and she listens closely to their experiences and opinions. But she still thinks she knows their motivations better than the readers themselves. I'm not sure it's really so much condescending as conflicted.

It would have been interesting to have Radway actually address this issue with the readers she interviewed or at least in an afterword to the book. I wonder if the women she interviewed read the book and what they thought about it if they did.


7 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

Enlightening, 2002-04-02
Despite the growing popularity of cultural studies, it's still surprising to find a literary academic who embraces popular culture. More surprising still is that Janice Radway managed to head down this path almost twenty years ago. Recognizing that a theorist who refuses to engage with popular fiction is ignoring perhaps 90% of what people actually read, Radway does not dismiss romantic fiction as beneath her attention. Rather, she sets out to conduct an empirical study into the genre. In doing so, she addresses some important questions: Why do women read romance? What social and psychological needs does it meet? If there is an "ideal" romance, what are its components and why? How does the unique language of romance do its work? In answering these, Radway not only manages to define an entire genre. She also draws out some rather chilling and not so obvious conclusions about the role of romantic fiction in preventing the feminist agenda from taking hold. And unlike many criticisms of romance, Radway's is based on observation, experience and facts. Her preference for foregrounding the evidence rather than her own views is mightily refreshing. My only reservation is the ease with which she extrapolates the reading experiences of a small group of women into conclusions about American culture in general. However, her excellent introduction to the second edition recognizes this, positions her study in relation to the emerging discipline of cultural studies, and suggests ways in which her study's insights might be further explored and tested. I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in the romance genre, or in academic approaches to popular fiction in general. Readers, writers, students and critics will all find something to learn here.