Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context

TLDR

Romance novels, exemplified by Harlequin's 168 million sales in 1979 and the ongoing output of dozens of publishers, dominate the paperback market but lack precise audience data, prompting scholars to speculate on their cultural significance. Critics concur that romance narratives reinforce patriarchal norms by depicting a woman's path to fulfillment as dependent on a protective male companion.

Abstract

By now, the statistics are well known and the argument familiar. The Canadian publisher, Harlequin Enterprises, alone claims to have sold 168 million romances throughout the world in the single year of 1979.1 In addition, at least twelve other paperback publishing houses currently issue from two to six romantic novels every month, nearly all of which are scooped up voraciously by an audience whose composition and size has yet to be accurately determined.2 The absence of such data, however, has prevented neither journalists nor literary scholars from offering complex, often subtle interpretations of the meaning of the form's characteristic narrative development. Although these interpreters of the romance do not always concur about the particular ways in which the tale reinforces traditional expectations about femalemale relationships, all agree that the stories perpetuate patriarchal attitudes and structures. They do so, these critics tell us, by continuing to maintain that a woman's journey to happiness and fulfillment must always be undertaken in the company of a protective man. In the words of Ann Snitow, romances reinforce the prevailing cultural code proclaiming that pleasure for women is men.3