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7 Feminism and Harlequin Romance The Problem of the Love Story He’d give her some romance that would knock her out of her glass slippers. —Nora Roberts, Cordina’s Crown Jewel, 2002 What is the problem with romance? Is it even a problem, besides to those whose hearts get broken? Actually, yes. Romantic fiction is irresistibly delicious to many women. And many academic feminists have not been happy about that, or at best have had a vexed and ambivalent view of the pleasure women have derived from this genre. There is a whole body of scholarship out there that analyzes the heterosexual narrative of romantic love as a popular form, and at least in the past, it was seldom admiring.1 I’ve (modestly) contributed to it myself. In fact, much to my surprise, I recently came across a couple of references to this modest contribution in Pamela Regis’s defense of the genre, A Natural History of the Romance Novel.2 Regis infers that my own view aligns me with other critics who are “against” romance, while she seems vehemently “for” it. Analyzing romance seems to encourage choosing up sides, rooting for your own team while booing the opposition. This chapter represents my own attempt to describe how a feminist like me, who enjoys romance low and high and every which way, thinks about the feminism-and-fictional-romance kerfuffle. But, you might reasonably inquire, why are feminists reading these books in the first place, and why should they care that others do? In fact, feminist scholars not only care but are quite passionate about it all, pun intended. What makes this odd is that in their long tug-of-war with faithful readers who mostly don’t appear to care if feminists approve of them or not, only one side has been holding 130 Feminism and Harlequin Romance 131 the rope. I wonder how many buyers of romantic fiction have given a passing thought to the feminist scholarship written about it (and I don’t mean the tiny percentage of romance readers who are scholars themselves). After all, as the critic Wendy Langford has said, as a concept, love remains “illdefined , assumed rather than explained, seeming to reflect rather than elucidate a livedexperienceofsomethingmysteriousandimpenetrable.”3 Themysteryofwhat love is serves as both part of its glamour and a rationalization for not analyzing it. Why do fans of the romance want to see or read this genre? Not to understand it but to maintain the mystification. Mystification apparently sells well: a billiondollar -plus industry, romance fiction dominates the U.S. consumer book market and accounts for as much as half of all paperback book sales.4 When an industry hasbeenassuccessfulastheromance-publishingbusiness,thebusinessofpleasure is to make us consume the spectacle of that pleasure, not ponder it. It’s perfectly understandable that many feminist critics in the past have been critical of mass-market romances. Feminist criticism both analyzes and advocates at the sametime,afterall,forafairerworldwherewomencanlivebetterlives.Romanticfiction comes in for scrutiny because, for all its exaggerations and idealizations, it both reflects women’s lived choices and practices and possibly—though no one knows exactly how or to what extent—influences them as well. The very fact that it is a widespreadpleasure,writtenalmostentirelybyandforwomen,andoverwhelmingly focused on men as objects of desire (or on men focusing on women as objects of desire ) brings the whole genre under suspicion.5 What are its values, in the literal sense ofwhatshouldbevaluedattheexpenseofotherpossibilities?Itseemsfair,important infact,forfeministstoaskwhatitisaccomplishingforus,exactly. But are feminism and romance inherently opposed? In a way, sorting out their supposedly dueling interests is like trying to do counseling with mismatched lovers. As is so often the case with quarreling couples, the conflicts and issues that emerge turn out not to be the ones they at first seemed to be arguing about. I would say there are mutual attractions as well as antagonisms arising from the feminist and romantic perspectives and agendas. A Troubled Romance In order to uncover these buried issues, let’s first take a quick potted and admittedly incomplete look at a few important points in what might be called the lovehate relation between feminist criticism and popular romance. The association of women with what the eminent Victorian novelist George Eliot called “silly” novels (as opposed to serious, morally and aesthetically) is an old one, not only predating mass-market romance but perhaps as old as the genre of the novel itself. Certainly there was a tradition of highly fanciful “amatory” adventures written by and...

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