In Defense of the Romance Novel PDF

## In Defense of the Romance Novel Pamela Regis, from *A Natural History of the Romance Novel* (U Penn P, 2003) **In Defense of the Romance Novel** Romance novels end happily. Readers insist on it. The happy ending is the one formal feature of the romance novel that virtually everyone can ident...

## In Defense of the Romance Novel Pamela Regis, from *A Natural History of the Romance Novel* (U Penn P, 2003) **In Defense of the Romance Novel** Romance novels end happily. Readers insist on it. The happy ending is the one formal feature of the romance novel that virtually everyone can identify. This element is not limited to a narrow range of texts: a marriage-promised or actually dramatized-ends every romance novel. Ironically, it is this universal feature of the romance novel that elicits the fiercest condemnation from its critics. The marriage, they claim, enslaves the heroine, and, by extension, the reader. In this argument the heroine's quest—which is to say her adventures, vicissitudes, or the events that she confronts in the course of the narrative-is at odds with the novel's ending, namely, the heroine's union with the hero. This view is widespread among critics, and in Part III we will see versions of it applied to texts such as *Pamela* and *Jane Eyre* from commentators as different as Terry Eagleton and Wayne Booth. Here I wish to explore the argument in principle in its most general version, which damns all romance novels because they are romance novels. Rachael Blau DuPlessis, writing about nineteenth-century novels, offers the best statement of the argument criticizing the ending in marriage. Janice Radway applies this argument to the twentieth-century popular, mass-market romance novel. DuPlessis explains the effect of the romance novel's ending in marriages "As a narrative pattern, the romance plot muffles the main female character, represses quest [and] incorporates individuals within couples as a sign of their personal and narrative success. The romance plot separates love and quest - is based on extremes of sexual difference, and evokes an aura around the couple itself" (5). ### Critics and the Romance Novel Duplessis claims that quest and love within these books are in conflict. She asserts that the marriage plot "with difficulty revokes" the quest portion of the narrative: "the female characters are human subjects at loose in the world, ready for decision, growth, self-definition, community, insight. In the novels that end in marriage - there is a contradiction between two middle-class ideas-gendered feminine, the sanctified home, and gendered human, the liberal bourgeois ideology of the self-interested choice of the individual agent" (14). To accomplish the marriage that is the goal of the marriage plot, the female protagonist chooses the "gendered feminine," the role of wife in the marriage. For her, quest is over. Radway's observations of the "social and material situation within which romance reading occurs" echo Duplessis's descriptions of the nineteenth-century romance. Like DuPlessis, Radway finds the ending of romance novels troublesome. For her the "ending of the romance undercuts the realism of its novelistic rendering of an individual woman's story" and so "reaffirms its founding culture's belief that women are valuable not for their unique personal qualities but for their biological sameness and their ability to perform that essential role of maintaining and reconstituting others" (208). Both of these critics find that what Duplessis calls "quest" and what Radway calls the heroines' "idiosyncratic histories" are destroyed by the ending (Radway 209). In this view, the ending in effect cancels out the narrative that has gone before, at least the elements of the narrative that depict a heroine as quester, as the participant in and creator of her unique history. Both the heroine and readers of such books are bound by them into marriage. These two major charges made against the romance novel are accepted by the critical community at large. Critics claim that the romance novel: - extinguishes its own heroine, confining her within a story that ignores the full range of her concerns and abilities ("muffles the main female character") and denies her independent goal-oriented action outside of love and marriage ("quest," "idiosyncratic histories") - binds readers in their marriages or encourages them to get married: it equates marriage with success and glorifies sexual difference. In this view the romance novel straightjackets the heroine by making marriage the barometer of her success. Its ending destroys the independent, questing woman depicted in the rest of the story. In depicting a heroine thus destroyed, the romance novel sends a message to readers that independent, questing women are actually better off destroyed. When the novel destroys its heroine, it urges its readers to become imprisoned - it urges them to marry-or it locks them ever more securely in the prison of the marriage they are already in. Because this charge claims that the form of the romance novel genre-its ending in marriage-extinguishes the heroine and binds the reader, every romance novel by virtue of its being a romance novel has these powers to extinguish and bind. If this argument is right, *Pride and Prejudice*, for instance, an acknowledged work of genius, must, because it is a romance novel, extinguish Elizabeth Bennet and bind its readers. I intend the whole of the present work to stand as a refutation of this claim. Here I would like to outline the general shape of that refutation. My response to critics is, in part, that this complaint about the ending of the romance novel is more nearly a complaint about ending itself than a complaint about a given kind of ending. Narratives end. *Ulysses* returns to Ithaca. Tennyson finds the pathos in that return: "How dull it is to pause, to make an end" *"Ulysses"* (line 22). The *Odyssey's* reader is nonetheless glad to see the hero return home to Penelope. Homer's reader rejoices that clever Ulysses has evaded and outsmarted the various creatures, gods, and natural disasters that for ten years have impeded his return from Troy. So, too, do readers of romance novels rejoice when the heroine evades and out-smarts the people and events in the novel that are in the way of marriage. And when, like Ulysses, she cheats fate and is free to choose the hero. At the end of the *Odyssey* we hear no more of Ulysses. His quest is over. So, too, is a romance heroine's quest at the end of a romance novel. But just as *Ulysses* is not "extinguished," neither is the romance heroine. Her narrative, like that of *Ulysses*, has simply ended. Romance writers look at the conclusion of the heroine's quest and see victory, Linda Barlow and Jayne Ann Krentz assert " [A]s the romance novel ends [t]he heroine's quest is won" (20). In the last chapter of *Pride and Prejudice*, Darcy's sister notes with some alarm Elizabeth's "lively, sportive manner of talking to her brother" (345). Elizabeth Bennet has not been extinguished, despite her becoming Mrs. Darcy. In *Pamela* the eponymous heroine must confront the members of her husband's community, which has become Pamela's community as well, who disapprove of her marriage. This she does with energy and audacity to the applause of her new husband and the horror of the old society that her marriage rousts from its staid assumptions about who should marry whom. Far from being extinguished, Pamela becomes more powerful and active after her marriage. Novels end, including romance novels. We imagine that heroines go on, even if we do not see them do so. Part of the claim about the extinguished heroine is that, whatever the nature of the ending-defeat or victory for the heroine-the romance novel ignores the full range of the heroine's concerns and abilities. Yet this claim, like the complaint about the "extinguished" heroine, might be made about almost any protagonist of almost any genre. If *Pride and Prejudice* alludes to, but does not explore in detail, Elizabeth's intellectual development through her reading and study of music, then *Moby-Dick* alludes to, but does not explore in detail, Ahab's life on shore, where his sea-going skills, much in evidence in the novel, would be eclipsed by whatever landsman's abilities he may or may not have possessed. Art is selective. No protagonist is presented as fully as she or he might be. True, some romance novels once depicted women who did little except wait to be married. This has never been the usual sort of romance heroine, and by the early 1980s, almost all romance novels, no matter how modest, depicted women who had active careers, and who kept them after they married. Heroines in even the most modest popular romance novels are social workers, linguists, journalists, caterers, entrepreneurs, public relations people, horse trainers, ranchers, screenwriters, veterinarians, teachers, detectives, and so on. Critics claim that in equating marriage with success for the heroine, the romance novel reconciles readers, who are overwhelmingly women, to marriage which keeps women subservient. And it is not just the plot of the romance novel, but its form that reconciles women to marriage. This is a very strong statement of this genre's power to compel its readers. This claim has two versions-one quite sweeping, the other more circumspect, but ultimately more damaging. First, the sweeping claim. In her conclusions, Radway spells out what the romance novel ought to be doing instead of "reaffirm[ing] its founding culture's belief that women are valuable for their biological sameness and their ability to perform that essential role of maintaining and reconstituting others" (208). Romance reading, Radway opines, "gives the reader a strategy for making her present situation more comfortable without substantive reordering of its structure rather than a comprehensive program for reorganizing her life in such a way that all needs might be met" (215, emphasis added). This statement rests on the assumption that literature can provide a "comprehensive program for reorganizing" the life of the reader. To take this assumption literally, we must imagine a novel providing, through its form or through its content, a "program" for reorganizing readers' lives. Has any book ever done this? Certain novels of ideas come to mind as possible candidates. *Uncle Tom's Cabin* contributed mightily to the abolition of slavery. *1984* remains a strong argument against totalitarianism. Certain books with charismatic protagonists inspire readers to pursue certain professions. Harper Lee's *To Kill a Mockingbird* has sent some of its readers to law school. James Herriot's *All Creatures Great and Small* has undoubtedly inspired some of its readers to become veterinarians. Any number of books motivate readers to become teachers. But none of these books can be said to lay out a comprehensive program. Radway's criticism of the romance novel is a criticism of its form: the ending is the culprit. Can the form of a novel accomplish, or, as Radway claims, thwart, a "comprehensive program for reorganizing" the reader's life? Of course not. Literary forms do not have this power. Readers are free to ignore, skip, stop, disbelieve, dislike, reject, and otherwise read quite independently of the form. Readers of a given genre often read with another genre in mind. Female readers have done this for generations. For example, many have read science fiction with romance novel conventions in mind, attending hard to the romantic subplot and skimming the adventure or journey that provides the primary structure of the book. Some men begin to read romance novels and abandon them, claiming that "nothing is happening." They have a different set of generic expectations in mind. True, form shapes reading. It creates a certain set of expectations in a reader who is in tune with the form. But because readers are free, form cannot compel the aesthetic, intellectual, or psychological belief in those expectations. Thus, the strongest version of the claim that these books are powerful enough to relegate women to patriarchy and marriage is simply not true. This leaves the second, more circumspect claim about the romance novel binding its readers. To restate this claim: Even if the form itself cannot compel readers, even if literature, including the romance novel, cannot provide a comprehensive plan for life itself, books do influence their readers. Reading about a heroine getting married in book after book must surely reinforce patriarchy and strengthen an institution-marriage-that damages many women trapped in it. This claim rests on the assumption that because marriage is the ending these romance novels, it is its governing element. It is not. Romance novelist Suzanne Simmons Guntrum asks, "[W]hy read a novel when we already know how it is going to end?" and answers, "because it is the process, not the conclusion, that we are reading for" (153). What Guntrum calls the "process" is contained in one of the eight essential elements of the romance novel, the barrier. This element, along with a second narrative element called "the point of ritual death," provides the best defense against the claim that the marriage is the most important element of the book, the element that fixes the book's meaning on a reader. Here I must anticipate my argument in Part II of this study to present, in brief, my definition and analysis of the romance novel's form. First, the definition: The romance novel is a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines. All romance novels contain eight narrative elements: a definition of society, always corrupt, that the romance novel will reform; the meeting between the heroine and hero; an account of their attraction for each other; the barrier between them; the point of ritual death; the recognition that fells the barrier; the declaration of heroine and hero that they love each other; and their betrothal. I will consider each of these narrative elements separately in Part II and offer examples to illustrate them. My argument here will focus on the barrier and point of ritual death, two narrative elements that are far more important than the ending in determining a romance novel's meaning. The "barrier" is the conflict in a romance novel; it is anything that keeps the union of heroine and hero from taking place. The "point of ritual death" is that moment in a romance novel when the union of heroine and hero seems completely impossible. It is marked by death or its simulacrum (for example fainting or illness); by the risk of death; or by any number of images or events that suggest death, however metaphorically (for example, darkness, sadness, despair, or winter). The ending in marriage so objectionable to critics is more accurately a betrothal (an actual marriage is an option in the romance novel). It results from the surmounting of a barrier. Seeing the barrier overcome is for many readers and writers the focus of the book. A blinkered look at the form's ending might suggest a single issue for the romance novel, but the barrier's flexibility and ubiquity force a wider view. The barrier can raise virtually any issue the writer chooses. A writer might create a series of funny miscommunications as a barrier between heroine and hero and the result is a "screwball" relationship between a woman and a man who would declare their love for each other if only each could understand what the other was saying. At issue is the difficulty and importance of communication. Another writer might create a heroine who is the daughter of alcoholic parents for whom the barrier is her belief that the hero's courtship will return her to a family in which the adults do not fulfill their obligations. The result is a dark romance novel in which the heroine perceives the hero's declaration of love as a threat. At issue is the difficulty in breaking old family patterns and of distinguishing love from unhealthy demands. If the novel is a romance novel, however, these barriers will fall. The screwball heroine and hero will finally understand each other; the daughter of alcoholics will finally realize that the family the hero promises is different from the family her parents made. Any issue (from incest and spouse abuse to not putting the top back on the toothpaste) and everything in between (from interpersonal issues to world politics) can be depicted in the barrier. In overcoming the barrier, the heroine moves from a state of bondage or constraint to a state of freedom. The heroine is not extinguished and the reader is not bound. Quite the contrary. The heroine is freed and the reader rejoices. The point of ritual death provides a similar set of possibilities for meaning in the romance novel form. This element marks the moment when no happy resolution of the narrative seems possible. The heroine herself is threatened, either directly or indirectly, actually or symbolically. Her escape from ritual death involves an overthrow of the most fundamental sort. It is death itself that is being vanquished, and life itself that the heroine will win. Ritual death in the screwball romance novel could take any number of forms. In keeping with the light tone of the work, the heroine could be laid up with a cold after being drenched in an unexpected downpour, her illness a simulacrum of death. All of the resources of slapstick are available to suggest death at that moment when the betrothal of the heroine and hero seems least likely. Ritual death in the darker romance novel, in which the heroine is the child of alcoholics, might take the form of a friend becoming destructively drunk. To darken the mood more, the friend might be a recovering alcoholic. To further darken the mood, the friend might die. Again, this marks the point at which the union of heroine and hero seems impossible. In both cases, the heroine symbolically overcomes death. The heroine of the romance novel, then, undergoes two great liberations. She overcomes the barrier and is freed from all encumbrances to her union with the hero. She cheats ritual death, symbolically or actually, and is freed to live. Her freedom is a large part of what readers celebrate at the end of the romance. Her choice to marry the hero is just one manifestation of her freedom. This state of freedom is the opposite of the bondage that feminist claim is the result of reading romance novels-both for heroine and reader. Here is the reason that readers react to the happy ending with enthusiasm with joy. Each of the other elements of the romance novel offers other delights to the reader, but the barrier and point of ritual death answer the critics' chief complaint most directly: heroines are not extinguished, they are freed. Readers are not bound by the form; they rejoice because they are in love with freedom. Romance novels are a subgenre of comedy. The freedom of the comic heroine, which is to say the heroine of the romance novel, differs from that of the comic hero. For comic heroes, freedom seems nearly absolute. Often they are princes or nobles. The new society that is inaugurated by their union with the heroine will perpetuate the state as well as humanity. If the traditional blocking character in comedy, an opposing father (or senex) is also the king, the marriage of the hero, his son, heralds the ascension of the next generation to rule. The ending of a comedy that focuses on the hero promises not only a marriage and children, but the hero's coronation and heirs. The freedom won for the comic hero is total. For comic heroines, including the heroine of the romance novel, the freedom at the end of the book is often provisional. Like the comic hero, the heroine is freed from ritual death: her life is restored to her, symbolically or actually. Like the hero, the heroine is freed from the barriers to her union with the hero. Unlike the hero, the heroine's relationship to society and, in many cases, to the state, is not that of a prince or ruler who will lead that state, but that of a woman whose freedom is constrained by that state. The heroine's freedom in the form of her life, her liberty, or her property may be in doubt not only in the original society that promotes the barrier, but also in the new society at the end of the work. Nonetheless, the heroine's freedom, however provisional, is a victory. She is freed from the immediate encumbrances that prevent her union with the hero. When the heroine achieves freedom, she chooses the hero. The happy ending celebrates this. In the remainder of this study I explore in detail issues dealt with briefly in this defense-the form of the romance novel, including its definition and an analysis of that definition. I also present a history of the romance novel written in English from the eighteenth century, when the form was all but synonymous with the English novel, up to the year 2000, when the genre constituted a large percentage of the fiction sold and read in the English-speaking world. ## Part II: The Romance Novel Defined