My older sister was, growing up, the coolest and smartest person in the world. She would kill me if I didn’t clarify that she still is, but as a middle and high schooler, I watched her excel socially and academically with a confidence that I spent years studying and failing to replicate.
She also introduced me to romance novels.
Along with access to her Kindle account, Caroline gave me permission to enjoy this kind of literature. That gift transformed my perception of books and reading. Before, I had understood that certain books were serious and certain books were not, and that certain people read serious books and kept quiet about the others. Romance novels were meant to be carried with shame and without a cover, on a Kindle and in private, like Biff Tannen’s nudie mags tucked within “Sports Almanac.”
I was a Smart, Serious Girl headed to a Smart, Serious College and then to a Smart, Serious Job. The books worth mentioning were by Hemingway, Salinger, Franzen, Plath, Woolf, and Gladwell. The other books were meant to be kept secret, guilty, saccharine pleasures to binge when no one was watching.
At my Smart, Serious College, I was a Smart, Serious English Major, and four years of close reading, literary theory, and seminar tables full of 21-year-olds with strong feelings about Chaucer, Eliot,1 and great American authors gave me a thorough education in what the culture considers Serious Literature.
Romance novels don’t qualify unless they’re Shakespeare or Austen, in which case they’re not called romance novels — even if “Romeo and Juliet” and “Pride and Prejudice” are the urtexts of the genre. Neither does most “chick lit,” a category loosely defined to include any book marketed toward women, whether because it’s about family, desire, or features a woman protagonist — or even simply because it’s written by a woman.2
Despite their popularity, these books are overwhelmingly read with shame among people who are taught to prize intellectualism and prestige, especially among women in male-dominated spaces. The usual counter-argument against this embarrassment and for embracing romance is that these books are actually good — underrated literary achievements, emotionally sophisticated, dismissed only by misogynists who haven’t read them carefully enough. This is true enough in some cases, but arguing for the genre on the grounds of literary merit concedes too much.
I’ve read romance novels I think are excellent. I’ve also read some that are jaw-droppingly, almost impressively bad. And those are worth reading, too. Certifying books as Literature based on merit accepts the premise that “literary merit” is the relevant standard and then tries to prove that the under-appreciated genre meets it. That argument undercuts and misstates the true value of this kind of “women’s literature.”
The value of these books is not in their quality. It is in their broad appeal, how pleasurable they are to read, and, when the shame is removed, how much fun they are to share.
The “Yesteryear” problem
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