In the opinion of many recent reviewers of these "teenage" romances, such works represent a step backwards in content and philosophy, as well as a step downwards in style: their world is lily white, socially homogenous, economically untroubled, and supportive of traditional, even reactionary, values and roles. These points seem to us self-evident. Still, these books are popular; this very popularity seems to us not just a passing phenomenon associated with the recent rise of the "Moral Majority" and its censorious reactions to "permissiveness" in art: as well as life. This popularity, evident also in the appeal of Harlequin Romances to the mothers of these pre-teen readers, is the ageless, universal appeal of romance itself, even in watered down, anemic forms. (28-29)
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Not only do such books permit communal or peer-group sharing of fantasies, but they encourage tentative exploration, in perfect safety, of topics of psychological importance, even urgency, to the readers. One of Cawelti's hypotheses seems thus particularly applicable to the prepubescent or pubescent female for whom encroaching sexuality is fraught with tantalizing dangers: "Formulas enable the audience to explore in fantasy the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden and to experience in a carefully controlled way the possibility of stepping across the boundary. . . . Formula stories permit the individual to indulge his curiosity about these actions without endangering the cultural patterns that reject them." (35-36) The heroines of teenage romances play with fire without consciously recognizing or naming it, and they do not get burned—unlike their sisters who have the misfortune to be the protagonists in "realistic" problem novels for this same age group. (29)
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