The Happily Ever After by Avi Steinberg

Author:Avi Steinberg [Steinberg, Avi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

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The boom in romance lit is also a boom in critical writing about romance, not only among academics and culture critics—some of whom also write romance themselves—but also in the press. Within the span of a few months, The New York Times ran a sexist, condescending, and ragingly ignorant “roundup” of current pop romance literature, written by a male grandee of publishing, but it also finally hired a serious pop romance columnist. It was a belated hire to many romance readers, but it signaled that there is a younger generation at the Times who is starting to get it.

Many of today’s feminist critics argue that Second Wave critics got romance wrong by characterizing it as simple Reagan-era conservative propaganda. Some critics hold that their critical forbearers, especially those who were using sociological studies, survey-type research, lacked good data and that their conclusions therefore were far too reductive. I tend to think of critics from the 1970s and ’80s as mostly just dated—but largely due to their own success. They weren’t entirely wrong about what they saw, even if they overstated the case sometimes. But their ability to identify and describe the ideological problems in romance has, I believe, helped romance writers confront the industry’s problems. It is a slow process, but the feminist criticism of old is, if anything, only recently coming into its own.

If past academic work claimed that romance fixated on traditional gender norms, there is an argument to be made that today’s romance, for that same reason—its centering of gender identities—is uniquely prepared to lead the way in rewriting those norms. And as the relationship between academia and the romance industry has grown, with more and better research efforts, and also with more romance authors themselves doubling as scholars, the questions of literary politics have become much more central to the way romance publishing is practiced.

But the question of good data continues to vex. What are the facts of romance? How do we measure the influence of these books on our politics and society? It is the thing that has bothered every romance alarmist in history, but the underlying questions seem valid: If these books are so popular, how exactly are they affecting people? Is there a way to document this effect?

Everyone recognizes, for instance, the “bodice ripper” cover, an artifact from 1970s novels that became common currency. But what are the facts behind its ubiquity? Scholar Jayashree Kamblé, returning to the archives, argues that the publishing record proves that rape-hero books—the ones whose narratives, between the covers, were truly bodice rippers—fared poorly with readers in the ’70s and that these outliers disappeared quickly from the market. But the covers remained. And they transformed the romance industry, yielding a visual language that would go on to adorn millions of books, and remain the image of romance stamped on the minds of people outside of the genre. The bodice ripper became, in a sense, a design concept that suited the needs of publishers’ art

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