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introduction Women and the Story of Romantic Love “I believe my Prince Charming is out there somewhere.” These words were tearfully spoken by rejected “Bachelorettes” in the ninth season of the popular reality TV show The Bachelor, in which dozens of beautiful women compete for “the heart” of a coveted male. This time around, The Bachelor: Rome (2006), whose overwhelmingly female audience numbered over eight million viewers a week, featured an actual prince from Europe, thereby invoking many breathless references to fairy tales. The tale of Cinderella, with its beautiful but undervalued woman and the instant recognition she garners from the prince, is of course the quintessential romantic story. As even a six-year-old can tell you, its climactic moment centers on the perfect fit between the mistreated Cinderella’s dainty foot and the highly improbable shoes that she wore to the ball. And as a feminist literary critic will tell you, the Glass Slipper is a trope for the “perfect fit” of the romantic couple and particularly women’s wish to be chosen as the One, whose value is at last recognized and rewarded at the moment she is discovered as perfect for him. It’s well known that the Bachelor series rarely works as a route to romantic happiness for its participants, though this lack of success apparently doesn’t prevent the audience from enjoying the fantasy. We may take this odd fact as a metaphor for the cultural view of marriage as a safety net for the domestic happiness of young women. In 2005 newspapers trumpeted a new trend in American society: for the first time, married women were in the minority of all U.S. women. Marriage has been decreasing in the United States, slowly catching up to a trend that has been prevalent in Europe for quite a while. Even as gay activists campaign for marriage rights in America, all couples are marrying later, divorce is common and increasingly acceptable, and more women remain single after being widowed or divorced. 1 2 the glass slipper But the story of “finding” or being chosen by the “right guy” still has enormous power over many women’s lives. Feminism or no feminism, romantic “chick lit” is mushrooming, date movies still dictate the ideal lifestyle for women, and Valentine’s Day is like a national holiday requiring levels of spending surpassed only by Christmas. It’s a fascinating irony that Harlequin novels began publication at the same time that feminists were engaged in a forceful critique of romance and marriage as oppressive and weakening to women.1 A quarter of a century later, the popular romance industry has gone on to become phenomenally successful, while my college students are irritated by Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 pronouncement that “men can’t love” and laugh at Germaine Greer’s formulation that romance is “dupe for dopes.” At the same time that there is widespread anxiety and cynicism about marriage today, there is also more and more hope, envy, and desire among young and old for the kind of romance that will make a woman feel . . . well, womanly. Though it’s no longer true, thanks to the postwar explosion of women’s participation in the workforce, that getting the right man to marry you is the only golden ticket to the good life, as it was for my mother and earlier generations, it still seems widely and unquestioningly accepted that romance is essential to personal identity, and that women in particular can’t get enough of it. We might say that, in a way, romance is the new marriage. The irony is that romance is most often defined by the kind of love that leads to marriage—whether or not the marriage “works” in reality. One way that romance triumphed is in seeming to take seriously feminism’s advocacy of equal gender roles, leading to an egalitarian partnership or marriage.2 I will argue, however, that a strong wave of nostalgia for traditional ideas of gender informs what might be called the master narrative of current romantic literature, as a hidden agenda masked by the modern ideology of love’s democratizing power. At the height of the feminist movement in the 1970s, Colette Dowling’s analysis of the Cinderella myth, The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence, was a best seller because it spoke to women’s new expectations for their lives, including the exciting possibility of breaking through the Glass Ceiling. But the Cinderella story is only...

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