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Abstract
This study traces the development of popular women's romance in America and its relation to American feminist history. Women's romance and feminist writings have debated the same questions and addressed each other, often obliquely and often in code. Much of this project concentrates on narrating the shadow-boxing of feminism and romance as they compete for the allegiance of American women.
Part One is a study of the novels of three of the most popular writers of women's romance in the 1980's. Chapter 1 discusses recent changes in the genre and parallels the search for positive female identity in the bestselling novels of Jude Deveraux with the evolution of feminist scholarship on women's romance. Chapter 2 examines Lavyrle Spencer's romances as anti-essentialist arguments which blur distinctions between male and female; the second half of the chapter takes a close look at the social meaning of the romance's portrayal of sexuality. Chapter 3 explores the intersection of two gendered genres in Janet Dailey's Western romances, focusing on her appropriation of the Western hero as foil and replacement for the traditional husband, and the psychological functions of the Western landscape.
Part Two is a backwards trace of the roots of American women's romance, identifying and analyzing classics in the genre and providing explanations for their social function. Chapter 4 explains the explosion of violence and rape in the 1970's bodice ripper through Jessica Benjamin's theories of recognition. In Chapter 5, Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind provide the basis for an exploration of why, during some periods of history, women's favorite romance heroines seem to flaunt all standards of socially acceptable behavior. Chapter 6 concentrates on Edna Ferber's use of frontier landscapes and theorizes the processes by which physical and imaginative spaces become gendered. Chapter 7 examines E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand in relation to historical accounts of Victorian sexuality and Alison Jaggar's theories concerning the political usefulness of outlaw emotions.
