Focused rather than encyclopaedic, this thesis does not purport to put forward a definitive or totalising analysis of love triangles. Instead, this study concentrates on the permutations of love and desire engaging a husband, a first wife and a second wife. So far ignored by criticism, this specialised version of the love triangle is a highly variable constellation with a changing set of ideological implications. It is a dynamic and versatile configuration rather than an unvarying and mechanical model. As I will demonstrate, the marital triangle is a persistent and re-emerging structural convention of popular women’s fictions. In my analysis, I will trace the cross-historical tenability and the cross-generic heterogeneity of this specific triangular formation. In the process, I will delineate a literary network that links historically and ideologically diverse texts through the overarching geometric structure of the marital triangle. (2)
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I forge inter-connections between the contemporary romance, the Victorian sensation novel, the modern female Gothic, the popular feminist and the postfeminist text, arguing that the dynamics of the marital triangle change according to the dictates of the above genres. In this way, I contend that the romance genre breaks up the erotic triangulation to celebrate the male-female bond while the popular feminist text concentrates on the female-female tie to underline notions of sisterhood and female collectivism. (2)
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Chapter 3 focuses on "Generic Expansion and Innovation: The Romantic Marital Triangle in Contemporary Romances":
‘With the right husband, I know I can have it all. Home, family and career’, the heroine of Debbie Macomber’s This Matter of Marriage (1997) states, exemplifying the complex social and cultural position of progressive contemporary romances (Macomber, 1997: 8-9). Textualising a popular feminist stance, these innovative romances increasingly and insistently affirm the importance of female advancement and independence, while at the same time retaining the notion of heterosexual dyadic love as the primary and definite objective of female aspiration. Incorporating progressive contents within the heterosexist romantic meta-text, such narratives particularly articulate the ideological heterogeneity of the romance as they give expression to both generic continuity and change. Extending themselves and operating within patriarchal structures, these romances often give expression to progressive, rather than radical, social positions. They present a modernised model of desire that takes into account feminist demands for an egalitarian love relationship and for female authority and bonding as well as resisting patriarchal schematisations of women into moral and sexual opposites. Using the convention of the marital triangle as a revealing indicator of ideologically varied attitudes to womanhood and demonstrating the influence of feminism on popular culture, the primary aim of this section is to investigate romantic textual possibilities and generic expansion. Distinguishing between conservative and innovative romances, I emphasise the importance of a differentiated approach to the popular culture text and affirm the pluralistic unity and ideological diversity of the romance. (152)
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Chapter 3 focuses on "Generic Expansion and Innovation: The Romantic Marital Triangle in Contemporary Romances":