Review by Choice Review
``No one touches the heart of a woman quite like Harlequin.'' This flyleaf teaser cannot be dismissed as empty puffery: Harlequin sold 180 million books in 1980; it commands the loyalty of 14 million consumers, virtually all of them women. Reader-response criticism coupled with the interest in recuperating women's experience, perspective, and values has set the stage for careful feminist studies of an activity that has engaged a sizable segment of women-the reading of romance fiction. Rabine's Reading the Romantic Heroine joins a growing number of excellent works on popular fiction that appeals to women, among them: Reading the Romance by Janice A. Radway (CH, May '85), Loving with a Vengeance by Tania Modleski (1982), Insatiable Appetites by Madonne M. Miner (CH, Jun '84). Rabine studies exemplary love narratives from Tristan and Isolde to contemporary Harlequin Romances, and pulls together Marxist theory, poststructuralism, and feminist theory to disclose the inherent contradictions that account for a significant portion of the seductiveness of romantic love stories: these stories provide one of the few accepted outlets for expressions of women's anger and revolt against patriarchial repression, and at the same time, they idealize and eroticize women's powerlessness and lack of freedom. Romantic love narratives join together two powerful myths-the sexual myth of romantic love, and the historic myth of the quest for identity. However, the hero and heroine of love stories represent different kinds of historicity. Through the analysis of exemplary texts, Rabine pieces together the autonomous feminine other as well as exposes the ideological and textual processes that mask its differing historicity.-P. Schweickart, University of New Hampshire
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review