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114 the minnesota review Reading the Romantic Heroine: Text, History, Ideology by LesUe W. Rabine. Women and Culture Series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985. viii + 224 pp. $24 (cloth). Narratives of romantic love bother us for a number ofreasons: they seem to deny historical context; they foreclose the importance of differences other than gender; they psychologize social relationships. They seem to create a feminine domain at the same time that they repress women. But the love story has seduced women as an audience, Leslie Rabine argues, because it produces a contradiction. From Tristan and Isolde to Harlequins, the love story has provided not only a model for oppression but also a way of expressing desire. Subversive desire. Rabine argues that the romantic love story works under what Julia Kristeva has called the ideologeme of the sigh. That is, romantic narrative admits and defines otherness only to make difference finally subject to identity. The romance moves toward transcendence, rehearsing a story of meaning according to an idea of the sign which would deny the difference between signifier and signified, as it unites male subject and female object. To enable readers to decenter such seemingly unified narratives, Rabine practices a way of reading that reveals the heterogeneity that the iUusion of coherence masks. She shows how feminine discourse has been silenced, and how it may be recovered by replacing the paradigm of historical logic (based on the romantic quest model) with the paradigm of dialogism (based on recognizing conflict and contradiction between male and female voices). In Rabine's reading practice, the reader sees the romantic hero and heroine as the product of coded historical sets of social as well as literary agreements between writer and reader. These codes serve in contradictory ways to express and to repress the passion that threatens order—to write what Nancy Miller has called "the heroine's text," but in a way that reinserts her into a masculine discourse, centered on the definition of the hero's identity. Rabine shows the reader how to refuse the coded agreements. Rabine's readings uncover stories of heroines fragmented and disjointed by their situations . The readings demonstrate the danger of interpreting texts as if the author could enforce a seamless unity—simply and innocuously aesthdic, or simply and malignantly repressive. Unlike Denis de Rougemont, whom she criticizes, Rabine does not reproduce the ideology of the romance in her narrative. She may, however, be prey to the ideology of the postmodern—may on occasion seem to elevate the principle of contradiction to espistemological privilege. Rabine is not proposing a history of romantic literature, but rather showing how history participates in a number of readings. Nevertheless, the examples she chooses have less historical relationship to each other than we would like—we skip from Tristan to the eighteenth century , from French novels (Manon, The Red & the Black) to Bronte's Shirley. She argues in her conclusion that romantic love narratives appear at times when direct personal relations are breaking down and being replaced by an impersonal and rationalized governing oT social order: "romantic love is a response to this disappearance of community." But she does not support this assertion at any length. The strength of her work really lies in her suggestive readings of individual works and of the corporate Harlequins. She teaches us to look at familiar materials in new and subversive ways. We may, for example, be used to the de Rougemont reading of romantic love as it appears in the Tristan stories, a reading which emphasizes love's destrudive power. But Rabine argues de Rougemont writes romantic love narrative because he ignores the role of Isolde—his "dualism" is really a monism, because spirit becomes primary over matter and the difference of feminine subjectivity is suppressed. Rabine reads the stories as a turning point in the history of male/female relations, a turn from a multilogic to a monologic, not about the loss of love but about women's great loss of power and the birth of the modern subject in Tristan as he internalizes social codes to combat passion, producing guilt and a divided self. The heroine is caught in a double bind, so that she...

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