Doomed to become heroines? Identification, women and fiction (BL)

The fear that readers will want to become like the main characters of novels they read has accompanied prose fiction throughout its history, 1970s feminists in particular were convinced that women were being duped into subscribing to patriarchal stereotypes by canonical or popular romances. The present study examines this topos.

While literary criticism and cultural studies tend to use the term for short-term processes such as vicarious experience, sympathy etc., identification in psychoanalysis is a long-term process. Freud's account of identification provides the basis for a quasi-Lacanian theory of how subjects form themselves on the model of others. This process involves a subject, an other, desire and point of view.

The reading subject cannot be read off from the text. A theory of identificatory reading has to start from a theory of the identifying subject, and texts have to be examined as to how they allow identification, rather than forcing it. Readers form a representation of the other in the text, the character, on the basis of an ideology of the person. Desire is staged in a fantasy about a person, the ideal subject, getting attention. Fiction can focus attention on one character by using narrative point of view (absent narrator/focaliser, focalisation from within). This allows readers to construct something like a fantasy much more easily than other structures. Readers may then confuse the pleasure of the text with the pleasure of being the person on whom the text focalises and seek to recapture that pleasure by becoming the focalised person. However, fiction is not itself a fantasy, but can be used to confirm and refine a fantasy the reader already has. Romance thus contributes to a homogenisation of its females readers' fantasies, but cannot implant fantasies in subjects with different desires.