Review: Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance (1982)

[truepenny]

Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women by Tania Modleski

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


So, yes, this was written in 1982, but I still found that it had interesting and useful things to say.

Modleski talks about three kinds of stories aimed at women: Harlequin romances, Gothic novels (Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Wheatley style Gothic), and soap operas. And I think her basic question is, why do women want to read/watch things that are so formulaic? She quotes Harlequin's rules for its writers and explores how the formula plays out in ways that are both satisfying and unsatisfying---meaning that you always want to read another one because this one didn't quite scratch the itch; she talks about the validation of paranoia in Gothics and the way the story they tell about marriage is very different from the story the Harlequins tell about courtship; she discusses the intentionally never-ending structure of soap operas and the way that they're designed for a distracted audience (a middle-class housewife, who's cleaning and cooking and the baby may wake up from its nap at any moment). I remember watching soap operas at my babysitter's house as a little kid, and Modleski explains for me WHY the narrative jumps so quickly from character to character and WHY none of the stories ever seems to get anywhere.

She is mildly Freudian, by which I mean she uses Freud, but uses him non-programatically, taking the bits that are helpful and leaving the bits that are unhelpful on the floor. And I think her use of Freud assists her argument because it enables her to talk about the deep structures beneath, say, the Harlequin rule that all novels must be written in third-person.

I'm sure, 40 years on, that other people have written other literary criticism of these forms, and I will probably find some of them as I continue to read about Gothic novels (in the broader sense in which The Shining is a Gothic novel, which it totally is). But Modleski's monograph (140 pages including notes and index) is sharply intelligent and clearly written, and it gave me a way of looking at its subjects that I hadn't had before.

Four and a half, round up to five stars.



View all my reviews