Paperback Romances Seen as a Threat

I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.

--Thomas Macaulay, 1841

Great is the poverty of their (novelists’) inventions. She was beautiful and he fell in love.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Society and Solitude,” 1870

Paperback romances pose a serious threat . . . .

--Gayle Greene, 1985

Like most professors of literature, Gayle Greene is concerned about the impact of television on the reading backgrounds of the young women she teaches at Scripps College, Claremont. However, Greene is more alarmed about the fashionable novels on their tables. Paperback romances--which sell in the millions with “addicts” reading them by the dozens--are not mere escape entertainment. They represent a serious threat to women’s intellectual growth and emotional health, she said.

Greene, who has a Ph.D. in literature from Columbia University and has taught literature for 18 years, is so concerned that she is writing a book about quality novelists who write for women--Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Laurence, Marge Piercy, Erica Jong and others. She is concerned that many women (and men) simply do not know about some of these writers. Some of their books are out of print, and in any case, unlike romance novels, they are not displayed in “the average supermarket next to the frozen broccoli.”

Fiction, while the feigner of it knows that he is feigning, partakes more than we suspect of the nature of lying.

--Thomas Carlyle, “Essays”

Greene says she does not oppose fantasy as an occasional escape from reality, “but these (romance novels) are not Disney cartoons, Bob Hope comedies or Broadway musicals,” she said. “Paperback romances focus intensely on love and work, the core of life for most people. These stories purport to show life as it really is. By creating false expectations they can cause great harm.

“In book after book the reader is shown that the solution to a woman’s problems is to attach herself to a dominant male. No matter what the story is, the solution is always the same.”

In a nod to the women’s movement, these books cast heroines as assertive women with exciting jobs, but the seeming liberation of these heroines is a thin veneer in stories of women with the same old goal: “snaring a powerful male,” Greene said. “In none of these stories do women face up to their problems themselves. You don’t see the heroine manipulating the environment like the heroes who traditionally serve as role models for men. Instead of manipulating her environment, the heroine of the paperback romance achieves happiness by manipulating or surrendering to a man.”

. . . the phantasmagorical world of novels and of opium. . . .

--Matthew Arnold

“And the myth--the myth of the omnipotent male as the redeemer of the woman--has worked against fulfillment for women down through the centuries,” she said. Greene doesn’t believe that indulging in this myth is harmless. “Paperback romances pose a serious threat to the many women who use them as a form of quack medicine--as a bromide that temporarily relieves the pain of unfulfillment and thus delays attempts to seek a cure.”

Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them--almost all women; a vast number of clever, hard-headed men.

--William Thackeray, “Roundabout Papers”

Greene has a theory about why women are buying paperback romances in the millions. “I think that’s the danger of them (romances). Whenever there’s pain, you’ve got to attend to it.” She attributes the trend to women’s continuing feeling that they do not have real equality. Most women are still stuck in low-level jobs and suffer powerlessness and alienation. “Their lives are grindingly dull. So you can’t blame them for trying to find vicarious excitement by devouring paperback romances.”

Greene believes the same excitement can be found in good literature by and about women, and that the works of the novelists she is writing about are vehicles for raising women’s consciousness. “Their novels are not the traditional love stories. Love may be part of the story, but it’s not presented as the whole of a woman’s reason for existence. Women in these novels have as many interests as men. These women protagonists don’t just sit around waiting for men to slay dragons or discover continents. Some of these women even establish utopias. And some do something that was unthinkable in previous literature: Go off on a quest.

“I guess you could argue that any fiction is divisionary,” Greene said, but novels by writers including Beryl Bainbridge, Barbara Pym, Fay Weldon, Alice Walker, Tillie Olson, Carolyn See, Anne Tyler, Joyce Carol Oates and a host of others are “a good read that extends awareness of issues rather than dulling awareness.” A good novel for women deals with “women’s day-to-day lives, raising children, dealing with men realistically, friendship with other women.” Many of the best women novelists would not call themselves feminists, Greene said, and many are not political, “but that may make them more effective.”

Along with the women novelists Greene likes, a few male novelists deal well with women characters, she said. Among those whose books she says, “I could wish were written by women” are Brian Moore and Larry McMurtry. Greene could not cover all the novelists she regards as fine writers about women in her book, “Contemporary Women Writers and Tradition.” Still in the writing stage, it will not be published for more than a year; another book she wrote, “Making a Difference,” an anthology of feminist literary criticism, will be published by Methuen Press in the fall.

Novels, remarkable only for their exaggerated pictures, impossible ideals and specimens of depravity, fill our young readers with wrong tastes and sentiments.

--Mary Baker Eddy

Greene has taught courses in classic and contemporary literature at Scripps for 11 years. Do her students read paperback romances? They are sufficiently discreet, she said, “to hide them from me. But I’ve heard there’s quite a traffic in them in the dorms.”