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review: jay Dixon, The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon, 1909-1990s
One of the annoying side effects of switching jobs is that I'm going to have to return all my library books -- and several of them have been checked out as research for my current scholarship. When I started taking notes on these books so I would remember which ones I wanted to go back to, it occurred to me that blogging some form of my brief notes wouldn't hurt. So over the next couple of weeks I will be writing short annotations for ... *counts pile* ... 12 books. Don't worry, I'll put them all behind cut tags.
Dixon, jay. The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon, 1909-1990s. London ;: Philadelphia : UCL Press, 1999.
Dixon's book, as the introduction by Rosemary Auchmuty points out, "challenges many popular myths about Mills & Boon novels". Perhaps the most important myth debunked by Dixon is that of a static romance genre. By exploring the romance tropes that have existed through the history of the genre of mass-market romance (specifically in the Mills & Boon publishing lines), Dixon shows how characterization, gender roles, and the relationships between the hero and heroine have changed over time. She even explores a short period in the 20th century in which the heroines were older and stronger than the heroes. She explores love and romance and social constructs and discusses (in far less depth than I wish she did) how romances reflect those changing social constructions.
Dixon's project is to defend romance novels as having been frequently feminist and in support of feminist ideals throughout their history. While she does an excellent job at revealing genuine feminism in a genre often reviled as anti-feminist, her pro romance stance does lead her to gloss over some of the problems which have been very present in the genre during its history. Racism in Mills & Boon books gets 2 pages; homophobia gets another two. Moreover, while there is nothing invalid per se in Dixon's re-inscription of feminist ideals into the rape-filled romances of the 1980s, she struggles too hard to find something positive in every element of an extremely problematic and thankfully passé trope. Her interpretations are legitimate, but they would carry more weight if she didn't struggle so hard to counter all of the -- frequently substantive and well researched -- critiques against rape--based romance. After all, Dixon argues strongly that romance is a fluid genre that has been changing constantly over the past century; her overall claim that the genre has frequently been feminist would still hold even if she were to acknowledge breaks in that feminism over the years.
Dixon, jay. The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon, 1909-1990s. London ;: Philadelphia : UCL Press, 1999.
Dixon's book, as the introduction by Rosemary Auchmuty points out, "challenges many popular myths about Mills & Boon novels". Perhaps the most important myth debunked by Dixon is that of a static romance genre. By exploring the romance tropes that have existed through the history of the genre of mass-market romance (specifically in the Mills & Boon publishing lines), Dixon shows how characterization, gender roles, and the relationships between the hero and heroine have changed over time. She even explores a short period in the 20th century in which the heroines were older and stronger than the heroes. She explores love and romance and social constructs and discusses (in far less depth than I wish she did) how romances reflect those changing social constructions.
Dixon's project is to defend romance novels as having been frequently feminist and in support of feminist ideals throughout their history. While she does an excellent job at revealing genuine feminism in a genre often reviled as anti-feminist, her pro romance stance does lead her to gloss over some of the problems which have been very present in the genre during its history. Racism in Mills & Boon books gets 2 pages; homophobia gets another two. Moreover, while there is nothing invalid per se in Dixon's re-inscription of feminist ideals into the rape-filled romances of the 1980s, she struggles too hard to find something positive in every element of an extremely problematic and thankfully passé trope. Her interpretations are legitimate, but they would carry more weight if she didn't struggle so hard to counter all of the -- frequently substantive and well researched -- critiques against rape--based romance. After all, Dixon argues strongly that romance is a fluid genre that has been changing constantly over the past century; her overall claim that the genre has frequently been feminist would still hold even if she were to acknowledge breaks in that feminism over the years.