In the Bedford Introduction to Literature, an invidious comparison is set up between two works of fiction: an excerpt from a Harlequin romance novel, Karen Vanderzee’s A Secret Sorrow, and a “literary” short story, Gail Godwin’s “A Sorrowful Woman.” The novel takes up the dilemma of Faye, who has an internal injury affecting her fertility. She breaks off a relationship because she knows her boyfriend wants children. He tells Faye that he still loves her and that they can adopt. By contrast the Godwin story describes a woman whose perfect life—understanding husband, beautiful child, comfortable home—causes her to have angst and commit suicide. The editor attempts to elicit a distinction between literary and formulaic fiction through an introduction that grapples with the difference between the two genres and a series of questions that illustrate this difference as it plays out in the examples.
While the editor tries not to come across as a snob, paying lip service to the legitimate “entertainment” function of formula fiction, the effect of the exercise is to assert the artistic merit of the short story and to steer students away from genre fiction. The textbook poses questions like: “How is the woman’s problem in ‘A Sorrowful Woman’ made more complex than Faye’s in A Secret Sorrow?” and, “Can both stories be read a second or third time and still be interesting? Why or why not?” That A Secret Sorrowis formulaic is true enough. That it is kitsch is true enough, too. It certainly seems to conform to the fake art idea where a happy ending inspires sentiment devoid of complexity. Politically and socially, the formula supports a conservative ideology in its portrait of a happily married wife and mother. The Harlequin romance has the features of neo-right-wing social realism. With its neat resolution as an effacement of loss and death, these novels can be located in the camp of nostalgic kitsch as described above. But while the romance is kitsch, so too, I would argue, is the story that Bedford editor Michael Meyer identifies as literary. Meyer doesn’t stress the generic features of Godwin’s story, focusing instead on its “complexity” as a key component of its literariness. But that “complexity” may be seen as part of the formula that underlies what Meyer and others are calling “literary.” While the romance novel’s formula is understandable from the perspective of nostalgic kitsch, the “complexity” of the literary story may be explained in terms of a melancholic kitsch that revels in feelings of existential loss. The “literary” story, in its melancholic kitsch, is part of an elite aesthetic that is often privileged in writing and literature classes. (11)
See pages 11-13.