REVIEW ESSAY

Novels as Popular Culture

Ella Taylor
University of Washington
The American Dream and the Popular Novel. Elizabeth Long, Boston:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.
Reading the Romance: Woman, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature.
J a n i c e A. R a d w a y . Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
In an age when popular culture is increasingly defined by visual rather than
verbal language, it is not surprising that the changing character of mass-market
fiction has been relatively neglected by scholars interested in cultural change.
Two new studies redress that imbalanceand, better still, offer us the conceptual and empirical fruits of the healthy cross-fertilization of disciplines that has
characterized cultttral studies during the last decade. The best work in this tradition shares a common intellectual project, the attempt to provide a dynamic
account of popular culture as social practice; shaped, that is, by the routine conditions under which it is made and received. In these two studies (one by a sociologist, the other by a specialist in literary analysis and American studies)
the empirical work simultaneously illuminates its subject matter, extending
the knowledge available in the field, and carries on a spirited dialogue with
the theoretical and methodological foundations on which it rests.
Long and Radway share the view that popular culture, by the breadth of its
audience appeal, serves as a barometer of key changes in public consciousness.
Each author has her own thematic concerns, and each focuses on different "moments" in the process of cultural production. In her textual reading of post-World
War Two best-selling novels, Elizabeth Long explores the changing ideology
of the American Dream, as expressed in shifting definitions of success. Janice
Radway, addressing the specifically woman-oriented genre, romance fiction, be-

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gins not with the text but with the socially patterned activity of reading itself.
Both, however, employ the useful friction of comparison to monitor and
strengthen their arguments. Long's reading of novels is bolstered by a similar
scrutiny of the literature of social criticism spanning the three decades of her
study. Radway balances her examination of a specific "reading community" with
an analysis of the romance as text, and inserts both into the frame of Nancy
Chodorow's theory of developing female identity.
Both studies attend to the institutional determinants of fiction production by
providing solid industrial histories of the book publishing business. Their conclusions are remarkably similar; while best-selling novels cater to a more upscale, diverse, middle-class readership than does the more formulaic romance,
the trend in each industry toward corporate monopoly and standardization of
output is broadly the same. Still, both Radway and Long are at pains to point
out that rationalization, in particular the aggressive marketing of books through
subscription and chain bookstores, has more than one consequence. Marketing
means, on the one hand, the stimulation of demand (a feature that reminds us
not to assume a perfect congruence between blockbuster sales and public taste).
It also suggests a measure of sensitivity on the part of authors and publishers
to readers' tastes, through surveys, letters and the computer feedback bookstores
routinely deliver to publishers. In this nuanced analysis of the links between
authors, publishers and readers (what Radway calls the '~partially predetermined
audience") lies a helpful critique of the deterministic "massification" thesis
adopted by some theorists, who slip tvo easily into a view of readers as the dupes,
or worse the dopes, of mass culture. The book business, in common with other
culture industries, both shapes and plumbs cultural response.
Long's gracefully-written thematic reading of best-sellers in three postwar decades traces the gradual slide of the entrepreneurial ethic that lies at the heart.
of the American Dream, into crisis and disarray. In the novels of the period immediately following the war, she finds individual success unproblematically tied
to public success and progress, in a social order conceived as essentially benign.
By 1955, the wedge driven between work and personal life by the corporatization of America, makes its appearance in novels as a recurring theme of privatization. In the next decade, novels like Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray
Flannel Suit exemplify what Long calls the shift to "corporate-suburban values,"
the reaffirmation of family as that haven in a heartless world whose passing
Lasch is to mourn two decades later. Other writers, like John Updike, retreat
into sexual adventure or, like Salinger and Bellow, into an inner spirituality
divorced from the public world. And between 1969 and 1975, the third phase,
best-sellers reflect a world view in full-blown crisis, with public and private
spheres depicted as fragmented and meaningless. Long's reading of Joseph
Heller's Something Happened suggests a Goffmanian world of impression
managers. Success becomes a matter of personal style, of having and being rather
than doing, and an alienated, cynical conformity replaces willing participation
in public life, while narrative resolution manifests itself in aimless escape rather
than the resolution of moral dilemma.
There is ample confirmation for Long's findings in the growing interpretive

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literature on other popular media, especially movies and television. Her own
basis for comparison, though, is the growing body of intellectual cultural criticism covering the same period (the work of Riesman, Whyte, and Mills in the
1950s; Lasch, Bell, and Sennett in the 1970s). Her project here is not to compare the "subjective" meanings of novels with the more "objective" knowledge
of cultural critics, but to subject both to a rigorous textual analysis. Indeed, Long
takes social critics to task for their indulgence in broad historical sweeps that
reify the abstract categories of"the Past" and "the Present," and with a breezy
disregard for traditional canons of evidence, oversimplify social change and render a deterministic view of American cultural life. Long's excavations produce
striking parallels between the concerns of novels and social criticism-the decline of the secular Protestant Ethic, the growth of alienation, hedonism, the
collapsing boundaries between public and private spheres. But she notes that
novelistic themes contain a richness and specificity that qualifies the bolder
strokes of cultural criticism. The novels show, in her view, that the entrepreneurial ethic is severely attenuated but not, as many social critics would have us
believe, stone dead. It survives, severed however from its transcendent ties to
moral and social progress. Moreover, alongside the growing social isolation evidenced in each decade of best-sellers, Long detects a growing openness and heterogeneity, a genuine pluralism that suggests "a new flexibility and relativism
in the American popular imagination" (p. 147). Accordingly, her conclusions
about the cultural state of the nation are more affirmative than those of critics
like Bell, Lasch, and others; she sees active resistance and innovation as well
as accommodation to the alienating forces of modernity.
Like Long, Radway wants to attend to individuals' active construction of their
social worlds, but she proceeds first from the activity of reading itself. On the
basis of interviews with forty-two romance readers (all suburban women) linked
by a bookstore employee who functions as an opinion leader in their midwestern
town, Radway posits a "reading community" symbolized by a "composite
Smithton reader." For these women, regular romance reading offers a safe escape (one that doesn't challenge their existing family relationships and gender
roles) from a routinized domestic world that offers them scant emotional nourishment, into a fictive world that always, in the end, delivers unflagging devotion
from a nurturant male in a romantic, monogamous love relationship.
Turning to the text (but based on the Smithton readers' categorization of"ideal"
and 'Tailed" romances), Radway sees a close resemblance between character and
narrative progression in successful romances, and the theory of female identity
developed by feminist social psychologist Nancy Chodorow. Ideal romances are
marked by the inevitable development of an intense, uninterrupted relationship between an initially remote hero and a spunky, rebellious but ultimately
compliant heroine. Those that fall short of this pattern are, to varying degrees,
rejected as partial or total failures. Radway concludes that the ideal romance
speaks to the relationality in which most women are schooled from an early
age, fulfilling women's regressive urges to be nurtured as fully as they were
by their mothers-but in the romance that devotion is, more acceptably, provided
in adulthood by a man. What is palpably missing in women's lives, and in the

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socialization of their male partners, is here supplied at the imaginary level.

Radway's final, and most intriguing strategy is to find out not just what the
romantic text says, but how it works on the reader, by digging beneath the more
conventional analysis of plot and character to a discussion of the way the
romance's narrative discourse locks the reader into a quiescent relationship to
patriarchy. The properties of the romance, she argues~ are at once mythic (every version retells the same tale, with its fixed, known outcome) and novelistic
(its realism and wealth of material detail suggest that the ending is a matter
of individual choice, not an eternal law). In Radway's view, this confers a double legitimacy on the conservative patriarchal message of the romance, which
offers "a myth in the guise of the truly possible."
Radway concludes that, if construed as an activity, romance reading can be
inferred as a partial protest against patriarchy. By withdrawing from the complete availability they habitually offer their husbands and families, by identifying with the heroine's anger at the initial aloofness or evil of the hero, readers
can signal their dissatisfaction with their lives. But the discourse of the romance
positions them, ultimately, to accept and indeed endorse the very conditions
against which they rail. Like Long, Radway ends with an affirmation, if not
of romance fiction, then of the way women use it to articulate symbolic resistance.
Taken together, these studies raise questions about what it means to be a regular reader in a culture of viewing, that could serve as a springboard for further
research. Do these people read instead of watching television or attending movies, or in addition to those activities? Do romance readers also watch daytime
soaps, and how does the relatively weak autonomy of the romance heroine measure up against the (often diabolical) power of the day- and night-time soap opera villainness?
There are, of course, unresolved questions of argument and method in each
study, to which neither author is blind. Can the seasoned critic, alert as she
is to the deeper mechanics of the text, '~read" a book in the same way as a less
self-conscious reader would? If texts have multiple meanings, how can she know
she has isolated the salient ones? Is the ~'composite reader" a legitimate con~
struct? Can a group of readers who never meet be called a community? If the
often hair-raising methodological problems of interpretive work are not resolved
here, they are reflexively discussed along the way in both studies. Each author
builds checks into her analysis by contemplating her material from a number
of angles. With a rare combination of rigorous detail and interpretive verve,
each patiently unravels the complicated processes by which modern cultural
artifacts are made and consumed, then fits them together again in order to extrapolate, from a more informed position, their broader social significance.
Elizabeth Long has given us an elegant, sophisticated account of changes in
the central values of middle-class American culture. Janice Radway has
documented the equivocal relationship of suburban women to the patriarchal
culture that simultaneously promises and forbids pleasure, autonomy, and fulfillment. And if her inferential reach occasionally exceeds her empirical grasp,
this is a small price to pay for her pioneering inroads into the ethnography of
audiences, one of the thorniest methodological problems of cultural analysis.