Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 3
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Editors’ Introduction: Gender and Popular Fiction / Cameron Leader-Picone and Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
<1> When literary critic Nina Baym wrote, in 1978, that scholars need to question the influence of gender on “the grounds upon which certain hallowed American classics have been called great,” it was a controversial assertion. [1] It still is, and no less true. In the ensuing decades, as the field of women’s studies expanded and a new level of critical attention was paid to the role of gender in popular culture, studies of popular fiction led the way. A number of our authors in this issue of Reconstruction draw upon Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, which was certainly the most influential of these works, but not atypical in its attempt to investigate the intricate gender dynamics at work in the consumption of romance novels and a critical attention to reader reception. Radway’s text, alongside the work of other scholars of popular fiction in gender studies and literature, established the relationship between gender and popular fiction as a crucial site of analysis in understanding both gender and literature in contemporary American culture.
<2> Since then, popular fiction has secured a place in both the academy and the critical discourse. To take just one example, a 2008 CNN article documented the rise of courses focused on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, including schools such as Yale University, Swarthmore, and Kansas State University—where “Harry Potter’s Library” is not only a popular undergraduate course but is employed by the University in its marketing. [2] There are still scholars who decry such courses as a dumbing-down of intellectual discourse at the university level, of course, but their very existence acknowledges the importance of the study of popular fiction. The contributors to this issue reflect this shifting consensus. While many reflect on the denigration of popular fiction among an intelligentsia that encompasses not just scholars within the academy but also segments of the popular media, their arguments do not seek to legitimize the study of popular fiction but to embrace its possibilities.
<3> Indeed, one of the principal discourses, both positive and negative, around popular fiction more recently has been the fact that it is among the only types of literature that Americans are still reading. However, much of the debate around whether and what Americans are reading has missed the highly gendered nature of such trends. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll on American reading habits was summarized by most newspapers as “One in four read no books last year,” but a more accurate headline might have been “Women read nearly twice as much as men.” In addition, among these female readers, popular fiction (fifty four percent) ranks second only to the Bible (sixty percent) in terms of what they are reading. A National Endowment for the Arts report in 2004 came to a similar conclusion, highlighting a general decline in book reading—not an unexpected development as more Americans gain access to the internet—instead of increasingly divergent reading practices for men and women. [3] While these statistics are not news they are certainly surprising, and by themselves demand that gender be centered in studies of popular fiction in the United States. The authors in this issue force us to confront how media focus on a decline in American reading practices reflect a gendered models of reading that perpetuate the marginalization of women writers and readers through derogatory dismissals of many texts written by and for women. Laura Scroggs’ review of Stephanie Harzewski’s Chick Lit and Post-Feminism points to just one recent effort to address the dearth of scholarship on texts popular among female readers, but even the generic assignation “chick lit” misses the broader trends in women’s reading, as K.C. Harrison makes clear when she quotes journalist Lakshmi Chaudhry observing that the “inclusion of ‘Hemingway’ in the category of ‘chick-lit’ is only surprising in an environment that delineates clearly between male literary genius and women’s entertainment.”
<4> The “gender gap” in reading has actually grown in the last two decades, and even genres not traditionally gendered as female (such as romance) have reflected the market power of female readers. As Gary Schulze, owner of the Minneapolis mystery book store Once Upon a Crime puts it an interview, there “has been recently a notable increase in female authors and protagonists,” including the enormous popularity of mystery series by Sue Grafton, Janet Evanovich, Patricia Cornwell, and others, which all feature female protagonists. In addition, gendered and feminist themes have not been confined to the work of female authors. Stieg Larsson’s bestselling trilogy is a case in point; his dramatic study of systematic violence against women (the first book, Män som hatar kvinnor, was released as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo but is directly translated from Swedish as Men Who Hate Women) and graphic, elaborate revenge fantasies, has gained the kind of popularity that would be difficult to imagine a decade or two ago. As of this writing, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2008) has been on the New York Times Bestseller list for 114 weeks and The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009) 73 weeks, making Larsson the second best-selling author in the world in 2008. The former is considered the first book to sell over a million copies in its digital format. However, Schulze also illuminates the complexity of such a proliferation, noting that Lee Child’s ultra-masculine hero Jack Reacher is one of his bestselling series among female readers. Several of the essays in the issue tackle the political implications of women’s readership and authorship. In her discussion of the “In Death” novels written by Nora Roberts under the pseudonym J. D. Robb, Linda Ledford-Miller addresses the question of how these works fit into ideologies of feminism, quoting Roberts as saying that “I consider myself a feminist, one who believes in the power of women.” Such a statement shows that despite the direct connection between the feminist movement and the increasing presence of women authors in popular fiction, it remains an open question as to whether engagement with popular fiction reflects political consciousness.
<5> The essays in this issue interrogate the way in which gender structures many criticisms of popular fiction. In her discussion of popular women’s fiction of the 1930s, Jan Goggans tackles a subject that has been ignored by most scholars and illustrates how popular female novelists such as Kathleen Norris and Ruthe S. Wheeter responded to the Depression and modernism by subtly transgressing the social expectations of gender (as well as those of women writers) through their fiction. Although Goggans deals specifically with the 1930s, her investigation of the absence of female authors in much Depression-era literary and cultural criticism is in line with a history of broader critiques of the supposed superficiality of popular fiction, such as the dismissive response to Oprah’s Book Club that K.C. Harrison discusses.
<6> In her article on the works of the pseudonymous J. D. Robb, Linda Ledford-Miller argues that it is precisely the elements that define much of popular fiction, the genre “contracts” implicit in the text, that enables the romance novelist Nora Roberts to subvert the expected representations of gender roles in both detective and romance fiction in the “In Death” series. While the seemingly minor transgressions of individual novels or series, such as the “In Death” series or the Norris and Wheeter novels analyzed by Jan Goggans, might be dismissed as either exceptions that do not reflect political intentions on the part of the author (or effects on the readers), the body of essays that make up this issue offer a convincing argument that challenging gender roles has been, and continues to be, central to popular fiction. Indeed, the parallels drawn between the content of such novels, the careers of the individual novelists and the consistently denigrating tone of the literary establishment towards popular fiction and its readers suggests that these transgressions serve as a microcosm of broader struggles for legitimization for female novelists and their works.
<7> In her essay “Pamela, Twilight, and the Mary-Sue in Literature: Patterns of Popular Criticism, ”Ashley Barner’s directly engages with the persistence of patterns of criticism of popular fiction by connecting the critical and popular responses to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight (2005) through the fan fiction trope of the “Mary Sue” story. One of Barner’s key contributions is to remind the reader that supposedly new cultural formations such as fan fiction often have a deep history in the discursive responses by both fans and critics. Barner’s insight that impugnment of Meyer’s alleged “authorial self-insertation” into the Twilight series—playing out romantic fantasies through her fictional characters—reflects centuries-old gendered claims about the danger of “absorbed female reading” parallels Erin Hollis’ exploration of the concept of “bibliomania” in contemporary literature.
<8> As Hollis points out in “On Getting Lost in a Good Book: Bibliomania and the Harry Potter and Twilight Series,” we must move beyond simply asking whether people are reading or not and ask how they are reading. Hollis analyzes message board posts and the creative work of fans alongside the texts themselves to argue that the Harry Potter structurally enables and thus requires more critical readership than Meyer’s Twilight series. By provocatively critiquing the pathologization of reading as “bibliomania,” she forces the reader to examine how the structures of popular texts serve as models for their readership. Hollis’ method of rooting active reading in the characterization of Hermione Granger is especially relevant in a discussion of two series written for younger readers, as such texts have been used educationally to enable strong reading practices among students.
<9> In its early stages, moral crusaders and critics feared that novels might corrupt their largely female readership. Implicit in several of the essays in this issue is the assertion that while the market for popular fiction has expanded with new forms and technologies, many of the same critical associations between popular novels and gender stereotypes have been maintained. In “Highbrow, Lowbrow, No-brow: Women’s Reading Practices and the Vitality of New-Format Fiction,” K.C. Harrison points out that critiques of book clubs and new media, such as the audiobook, have tended to adopt a similar form of fear-mongering as the “bibliomania.” Harrison argues that critiques of new models of reading, from book clubs to audiobooks and e-readers, reproduce gendered arguments used to delineate what constitutes high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow culture regardless of the value such structures might have for broadening readership. Oprah’s Book Club, for example, has been derided as providing “literature-as-therapy” to its largely female audience, allowing critics to dismiss the increased readership of even the classic texts within the book club as illegitimate. As Harrison puts it, “misogyny can be seen as part of the founding impulse of the distinction between utilitarian motives and those imagined to be more transcendent or disinterested,” implying that contemporary critics complaining of such superficial readings supposedly enabled by both new media and popular fiction merely reproduce efforts to limit true reading to an intellectual, male, elite. Harrison argues that such debates over new media continue modernist definition of the “brows” that disenable scholars and educators from engaging with and evaluating changing reading practices and the role that various technologies play within those changes.
<10> In addressing the myriad ways in which gender structures the discourse around reading, the essays and reviews in this issue occupy an intersection between two fields of study—popular fiction and gender studies—that have long been a fruitful site for scholarship on American culture, society, and politics. The influence of new media forms of reading, which has grown with the acceptance of and enthusiasm over technological developments such as the iPad, tablet PCs and smartphones, has broadened access to both creating and consuming literature for authors and fans alike. “Gender and Popular Fiction” argues implicitly that the number of total pages turned is of only tertiary significance, behind what we read and how we do it, in determining the meaning of popular fiction and reading practices.
Endnotes
[1] Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978: pp. 15.
[2] Lee, Patrick. “Pottermania lives on in college classrooms.” CNN, 25 Mar. 2008. 14 Sept. 2011.
[3] See, for example, “One in four read no books last year.” USA Today, 21 Aug. 2007. 16 Sept. 2011; National Endowment for the Arts. “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America.” National Endowment for the Arts: Washington, 2004.
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