Uncovering and Recovering the Popular Romance Novel A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Jayashree Kamble IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Timothy Brennan December 2008 © Jayashree Sambhaji Kamble, December 2008 Acknowledgements I thank the members of my dissertation committee, particularly my adviser, Dr. Tim Brennan. Your faith and guidance have been invaluable gifts, your work an inspiration. My thanks also go to other members of the faculty and staff in the English Department at the University of Minnesota, who have helped me negotiate the path to this moment. My graduate career has been supported by fellowships and grants from the University of Minnesota’s Graduate School, the University of Minnesota’s Department of English, the University of Minnesota’s Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, and the Romance Writers of America, and I convey my thanks to all of them. Most of all, I would like to express my gratitude to my long-suffering family and friends, who have been patient, generous, understanding, and supportive. Sunil, Teresa, Kristin, Madhurima, Kris, Katie, Kirsten, Anne, and the many others who have encouraged me— I consider myself very lucky to have your affection. Shukriya. Merci. Dhanyavad. i Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Shashikala Kamble and Sambhaji Kamble. ii Abstract Popular romance novels are a twentieth- and twenty-first century literary form defined by a material association with pulp publishing, a conceptual one with courtship narrative, and a brand association with particular author-publisher combinations. The theme of romantic love in romance novels forms the basis of a drama involving the extra-private worlds of the protagonists (financial, civic, and familial). The framework of the romantic relationship allows the genre to study the challenges these spheres face over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A comprehensive look at the genre’s history and diversity, as well as its reception in different readership communities, undergirds this analysis of three tropes involving the romance hero—capitalist, soldier, and heterosexual. The analysis proves the genre’s struggle with an economic, political, and social ideology that has gathered force over the last hundred years. Though popular as well as academic critiques of the genre disparage its formulaic sexual content or its attachment to the ideology of middle class morality, its very nature as “commodity literature” helps challenge conservative thought on capitalism, national defense strategies, and sexual orientation. The dissertation also considers the impact of the dust jackets and paperback covers of romance novels on non-romance readers. A survey of this material history suggests that it has contributed to derogatory opinions on the genre; in particular, the genre has been indicted because of the “bodice-ripper” covers that adorn many romance novels rather than the actual content. A look at reader and author discussions on the genre, alongside textual analysis of selected works, proves that romance fiction is not fixated on a clichéd plot and descriptions of sexual intercourse; it involves complex themes that are disguised as stereotypical genre elements. Readers’ online debates demonstrate how this romance “formula,” albeit a function of its commodification, engages them in addressing quandaries related to societal preoccupations. The concluding study of romance reading in India further supports the possibility of multiple, even liberating, readings that can empower romance readers. iii Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One: Capitalism……………………………………………………………..37 Chapter Two: War………………………...……………………………………….....74 Chapter Three: Sexual Orientation…………………………………………………104 Chapter Four: The Look of the Book……………...………………………………..160 Chapter Five: The Reading Public and Public Reading…………………...………..237 Chapter Six: Reading Romance in India………………………….………………...299 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..352 Appendix……………………………………………………………………………372 iv List of Figures Fig. 1. The Girl Who Saved His Honour ………………………………………………...166 Fig. 2. The Enduring Flame………………………………………………………….…....167 Fig. 3. All This for Love…………………………………………………………………….167 Fig. 4. The Pulp Romance………………………………………………………………….170 Fig. 5. The Arrogant Duke…………………………………………………………………178 Fig. 6. The Torch of Pleasure…………………………………………………………..…178 Fig. 7. A Time for Loving…………………………………….…………………………….179 Fig. 8. Dearest Demon……………………………………………………………………..179 Fig. 9. The Wolf of Heimra………………………………………….……………………..181 Fig. 10. The Wolf of Heimra……………………………………….………………………181 Fig. 11. Doctor in India…………………………………………………………………….182 Fig. 12. Witchstone……………………………………………………….…………………183 Fig. 13. The Arrogant Duke……………………………………………..…………………185 Fig. 14. The Flame and the Flower………………………………….……………………191 Fig. 15. Captive Bride………………………………………………………………………196 Fig. 16. A Pirate’s Love…………………………………………………………………….196 Fig. 17. Fires of Winter…………………………………………………………………….197 Fig. 18. Hearts Aflame……………………………………………………………………..197 Fig. 19. Gentle Rogue………………………………………………………………………197 Fig. 20. Destiny in Rome………………………………………………………….………..200 Fig. 21. Irish Thoroughbred……………………………………………………………….200 Fig. 22. No Red Roses………………………………………………………………………200 Fig. 23. Savage Pagan…………………………………………………………….………..200 Fig. 24. The Sicilian’s Christmas Bride………………………………………………….206 Fig. 25. The One-Night Wife………………………………………………….……………206 Fig. 26. By the Book…………………………………………………………….…………..208 Fig. 27. Dreaming of You…………………………………………………….…………….209 Fig. 28. The Pirate Prince……………………………………………………….…………209 Fig. 29. An Offer from a Gentleman…………………………………………….………..209 Fig. 30. Dark Challenge………………………………………………………….………..217 Fig. 31. To Die For…………………………………………………………………………229 Fig. 32. The Devil to Pay…………………………………………………………………..229 Fig. 33. Rejar………………………………………………………………………………..231 Fig. 34. Dark Legend…………………………………………………………….…………231 Fig. 35. The Dark Highlander…………………………………………………………….231 Fig. 36. Mr. Impossible…………………………………………………………………….231 Fig. 37. Two Little Lies………………………………………………………………….….234 Fig. 38. The Barefoot Princess………………………………………………….…………234 Fig. 39. Journey to Romance………………………………………………………………345 Fig. 40. This Much to Give…………………………………………………………………345 Fig. 41. King of the Castle…………………………………………………………………346 Fig. 42. Bitter Enchantment……………………………………………………….……….346 Fig. 43. Silken Thunder…………………………………………………………………….346 Fig. 44. Her Scandalous Affair……………………………………………………………348 v Introduction [I]n order to be consequent, the will to read literary or cultural texts as symbolic acts must necessarily grasp them as resolutions of determinate contradictions […] The type of interpretation here proposed is more satisfactorily grasped as the rewriting of the literary text in such a way that the latter may itself be seen as the rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext , it being always understood that that "subtext" is not immediately present as such, not some common-sense external reality, nor even the conventional narratives of history manuals, but rather must itself always be reconstructed after the fact. (Jameson 80) Romance fiction has become an increasingly visible object of academic analysis in the last three decades, from Tania Modleski’s The Disappearing Act: A Study of Harlequin Romances (1980) to Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) and the recently published A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003) by Pamela Regis. While Modleski understands the term to mean short novels published by the firm Harlequin, Radway does not actually define the genre, except to say that the “ideal romance” focuses “on a single, developing relationship between heroine and hero”; in practice, her analysis discusses one subset of romance fiction called the historical romance (Modleski 435, Radway 122). Regis conceptualizes a romance novel more broadly as “a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines” (14). My dissertation understands popular romance novels to be a 1 form that originated in the twentieth-century and is defined by a material association with pulp publishing, a conceptual one with courtship narrative, and a brand association with particular author-publisher combinations. 1 Romance novels make up a genre in which the familiar narrative impulse of relating a courtship and marriage completely permeates the form it has assumed and becomes the source for regaining the lost Lukàcsian “immanence” or “totality of being” in a bourgeois universe (17). 2 In other words, the genre comprises prose narratives in which the move from the fragmented self to a unified one is achieved primarily through the establishment of a relationship between a man and a woman. In both its hardcover and mass market paperback format, genre romance incorporates and develops the myth of romantic attachment—as sexual and emotional fulfillment—to address the destabilizing influences of modernity and post-modernity. This is a rare genre, however, in that it is known more for what it allegedly is, rather than for itself; in this sense, it actually exists as a kind of metafiction in the public imagination. In academic critiques, for better or worse, romance novels are formulaic love stories; in popular critiques (television, movies, newspapers) they are silly tales of sexual misbehavior. While the latter has little in common with the