Passion on the Pages

What, Freud famously wondered, does a woman want? Well, one answer crops up in a survey commissioned by the Romance Writers of America and released last June: during the preceding year, 37.9 million females age 10 and over in the U.S. had read at least one romance novel. One what? The R.W.A. helpfully provides a definition: "A romance novel is a love story with an optimistic and emotionally satisfying ending."

Never mind, for the moment, that this definition could, with a little tweaking of emphases, apply equally well to Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The R.W.A. is not indulging in literary criticism here but rather offering its 8,200 members a blueprint for success in the contemporary marketplace. Because the people who find the keenest emotional satisfaction in romance novels tend to be their authors and publishers. More than half the mass-market paperback fiction titles sold annually in the U.S. are romance novels. Factor in hardback sales, and romances account for about 40% of the fiction total. Almost 1 of every 5 adult books sold is a romance novel. Those 37.9 million women readers could devour three romances every day of the year and still not exhaust the annual output of some 2,000 new titles.

Why are these things so popular with so many women and so scorned by book critics and reviewers, who are often, but by no means always, males? (Some of the sharpest attacks on romances have come from academic feminists, who find the "love conquers all" plots distressingly retro.) Romances may account for a sizable share of U.S. publishing profits, but they don't get discussed much in polite print or society. Even dedicated fans report feeling embarrassed buying them.

Other genres--mystery, thriller, horror, sci-fi--attract no cultural stigma, but those categories also appeal heavily to male readers. Romances do not, and therein, some of the genre's champions argue, lies the problem. "I cannot help but suspect," writes romance author Penelope Williamson, "that romance is so often ridiculed and denigrated because it is a literature written almost exclusively by women for women."

There is more than sour grapes in this charge, but less, perhaps, than the whole story. For romance writers labor under, and romance readers demand, a formula of childlike restrictions and simplicity. Here is how two romance authors, Linda Barlow and Jayne Ann Krentz, jointly define it: "The reader trusts the writer to create and re-create for her a vision of a fictional world that is free of moral ambiguity, a larger-than-life domain in which such ideals as courage, justice, honor, loyalty and love are challenged and upheld." Free of moral ambiguity? So much, then, for Homer, Shakespeare and Austen.

And so much for the other popular genres, in which good and evil are allowed to mingle. Think of all the seedy detectives and flawed spies. Romances must end happily; the spirited heroine must bring the male of her choice to heel--"civilize" or "tame" him, as romance authors like to put it--before the final clinch and fade-out. Defenders often point out that mysteries must also conclude in a predetermined manner: the crime is solved, the suspect unmasked. But that analogy won't wash, since the identity of the guilty party in mysteries is withheld until the end. Romance heroines and readers rarely doubt which man is in her sights or whether he will succumb.

It is impossible for contemporary romance writers to subvert or extend their genre in the way that, say, John le Carre upended conventional spy fiction when he killed off the sympathetic hero of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Fiddle with the romance formula--make the heroine a passive office temp with an eating disorder and the man of her dreams a philandering salesman with a wife and three kids in Cleveland--and the story suddenly resembles ordinary life.

Which is apparently the last thing romance readers want to confront in their spare time. The rift between those who dote on and those who disdain romance novels really centers on the question of fantasy and its proper place in adult imagination. Here again sexism may play a part. Patriarchs have traditionally fretted about their womenfolk's being ruined by a book. Flaubert's Madame Bovary graphically portrayed the ruin that ensues when a young female's head is filled with romantic fancies. Can it really be good, modern critics wonder, for women to be whiling away so many hours reading impossibly glamorized love stories? Which begs a question: What about all the time male readers spend on page-turning fantasies of casual sex or violence?

The romance genre will never have its Le Carre, but spy novels have never had a Nora Roberts--an author who has made the transition from paperbacks beloved by the romance cognoscenti to hard-covers marketed successfully for mainstream readers. "Nora is the standard that nobody's going to eclipse," says Kate Duffy, an editorial director at Kensington Books, America's largest publisher of romance novels--but not, to Duffy's regret, of those by Nora Roberts. "Authors don't know how Nora does it. She is unique. She is a phenomenon. She has a gift, an extraordinary talent. It just doesn't get any better than Nora Roberts."