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.