Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (review)

138 the minnesota review remaining minutes of the play. In the final scene, when Goya has exited and Leocadia is alone on stage, Ellis was careful to focus the audience's attention on the anguished woman. As the curtain fell, the spectator was left with an unambiguous image of Leocadia as victim . The subtext thus subverts the spoken text, thereby negating the male discourse of the original script. The production in Baltimore similarly established Leocadia's role as victim through the staging. The rape scene was presented on a platform, in full view of the audience. The violence of the scene made clear Leocadia's unwilling participation. Doubtless because of these possibilities in the subtext, the actors reportedly found that Buero's tragedy conveyed a feminist, not a patriarchal view, of rape. The contemporary Spanish novel has been the subject of an increasing number of studies by feminist critics, but the theater has not yet been examined extensively from the feminist perspective. The plays considered here, however, suggest that there are at least three paths ofinvestigation that invite further study: (1) analysis of individual playwrights or plays that intentionally develop feminist ideology; (2) examination of particular themes of immediate concern to women to determine how they are treated by different playwrights; and (3) identification of staging techniques that can subvert machista discourse by actualizing feminist potentialities. PHYLLIS ZATLIN NOTE 'Angel Fernandez-Santos, "Sobre El sueño de Ia razón: Una conversacio'n con Antonio Buero Vallejo, Primer Acto 117 (1970), 23. The translation is my own. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature by Janice A. Radway. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. $7.95 (paper); $25 (cloth). For some time, many of us have vacillated between the position that gives the final word to the text and the position that defers to the reader as the source of meaning. The New Critical "authority of the text" was elitist and undemocratic in its indifference to real persons and their historical context, but the dismissal ofit has seemed a dubious project because it might actually require us to ask real persons what they make of the texts they read. The drawbacks for this project are numerous. First of all, how people speak about something is quite different from the way they comprehend, construe, or sometimes savor a text. Second , within the context of an academic study, they probably say what they think they are supposed to say. Further, they may be severely handicapped by the theoretical bankruptcy of popular terms for representing the experience of reading so that all they have at their disposal may be the most tired notions of "escape," "story," "identification," and "reality ." Finally, if unschooled readers' accounts of their experience are superficial,, critics may feel they have to supplement such accounts of their experience are superficial, critics may feel they have to supplement such accounts with critical analysis. Janice Radway's Reading the Romance is a significant attempt to balance empirical data about readers with textual interpretation. Noting the discrepancy between literary critics' treatment of fiction and ordinary readers' reports, Radway turned to forty-two women who avidly read romance novels. As much of the book is devoted to describing these women's responses to questions and situating them sociologically as it is to analyzing the texts. The women are middle class, and all have at least a high school education, while some have college training. They range from 25 to 49 years in age. Radway, approaching romance reading as an anthropologist, relies on an informant, a wonderfully frank, strong, and resourceful reviews 139 woman who works in a bookstore and publishes a newsletter for her romance novel customers. In this unusual study, Dorothy "Dot" Roberts (a pseudonym for the informant) and the fictional Smithton, Pennsylvania come alive in a nonfiction book that is about the fictional devices in the books read by women in an actual Pennsylvania town. We know Dot through her opinions about marriage and abortion (she is pro-choice) as well as through her explanation of the book reading "addiction" and her analysis of why some novels gratify and others infuriate readers. A direct challenge to the criticism which...