Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context - Radway

Journalists and literary scholars offer interpretations of the form's narrative development.
Critics argue these stories perpetuate patriarchal attitudes by maintaining that a woman's happiness depends on a protective man.
Ann Snitow: Romances reinforce the cultural code that pleasure for women is men.

A study of romance readers suggests interpretations are incomplete.
Critics fail to consider the context in which romance reading occurs.
Critics ignore readers' book choices and theories about why they read.
Romance reading may have positive functions and reconcile changing gender attitudes with traditional arrangements.

Weaknesses of interpretations are traced to focusing only on texts in isolation.
Literary text reification persists in practical criticism.
The text contains meanings that can be articulated by a trained critic.
Interpretive reading assumes the text has intrinsic power to coerce readers into discovering the core of meaning.

A literary work's objective reality remains unchanged despite differences among readers.
Critics assume their reading represents all adequate readings.
Their reading becomes the object of cultural analysis to explain the form's popularity and appeal.
Explanation is produced by positing a desire in the reading audience for their unearthed meaning.

New theories call for modifying the standard explanatory procedure.
Reader-theorists acknowledge the reader's responsibility for what is made of the literary text.
Literary texts exert force on the meaning produced in a reading.
Literary meaning is the result of interaction between a fixed verbal structure and a socially situated reader.

Stanley Fish: Literary meaning is the property of interpretive communities.
These communities are responsible for the shape of the reader's activities and the texts those activities produce.

Reader-theory suggests critics consider if they are in a different interpretive community than the readers.
Critics have not foregrounded their own interpretive activities.
Resulting assumption of identity between their reading and that of regular romance readers.
Critics sever the form from the women who construct its meaning, leading to an incomplete ideological account.

Cultural analysis must investigate what romance reading means to the women who buy the books.
It is necessary to know what women understand themselves to be doing when they read a romance they like.
A more complete cultural analysis might specify how readers interpret characters, narrative resolution, and how it fits in their daily lives.
We need to know how the event of reading the text is interpreted by the women who engage in it.

Interpretation developed from interviews with compulsive romance readers in a midwestern state.
Principal informant was discovered with the aid of a senior editor at Doubleday.
Sally Arteseros told of a bookstore employee with regular romance readers who relied on her advice.

Knowledge of Dot and her readers is based on sixty hours of interviews in June 1980, and February 1981.
Extensive talks with Dot about romances, reading, and her advising activities.
Observed her interactions with her customers at the bookstore.
Group and individual interviews with sixteen of her regular customers.
Administered a questionnaire to forty-two of these women.

The group appears demographically similar to a sizable segment of the romance audience.
Dorothy Evans lives and works in Smithton, a city of about 112,000 inhabitants.
Dot was forty-eight years old at the time of the survey, the wife of a journeyman plumber, and the mother of three children.
She believes women should have the opportunity to work and be paid equally with men and supports abortion rights.
She believes implicitly in the value of true romance.

Dot's customers are married, middle-class mothers with at least a high school education.
More than 60 percent of the women were between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four at the time of the study.
Exactly 50 percent of the Smithton women have high school diplomas, while 32 percent report completing at least some college work.
Forty-two percent of the Smithton women work part-time outside the home.

43 percent of the Smithton women have incomes of $15,000$ to $24,999$ , 33 percent have incomes of $25,000$ to $49,999$ .
Almost 70 percent of the women claim to read books other than romances.
37 percent report reading from five to nine romances each week.
One-half read between four and sixteen romances a month, while 40 percent read more than twenty.
Romances play a significant role in the lives of the Smithton women.

Smithton women cite escape or relaxation as their goal.
They value romances because the act of reading them draws them away from their present surroundings.
Attention is withdrawn from concerns that plague them in reality.
Reading of any kind is, by nature, educational.

Smithton readers acknowledge that romances are fantasies or fairy tales that always end happily.
Characters and events do not resemble the people and occurrences they must deal with in their daily lives.
The unreal, fantastic shape of the story makes their literal escape even more complete and gratifying.

Comments hint at a certain sadness that many of the Smithton women seem to share.
A deep-seated sense of betrayal also lurks behind their expressions of a need to believe in a fairy tale.
They feel refreshed and strengthened by their vicarious participation in a fantasy relationship.
The heroine is frequently treated as they themselves would most like to be loved.

Romance reading implies flight from a stifling or overwhelming situation, and a transfer to a more desirable universe where events are happily resolved.
Smithton women are candid about the circumstances that necessitate their desire to escape.
They mention the pressures and tensions they experience as wives and mothers.
They are eloquent about how draining and unrewarding their duties can be.

Dot explains the constant demands of motherhood and household duties without appreciation from her husband.
She declares romance reading as a temporary