Mills & Boon: guilt without sex

Publication year
1982
Journal
Red Letters
Volume
14
Pages
5-13
Comment

The database isn't set up for me to enter the year as 1982-1983, but that's in the full information I have.

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Devotees of Mills & Boon romances average between four and eight volumes a month. At this rate I examined something between two and four months' worth of reading, choosing volumes published from 1979 to 1982, mostly at random but also selecting those authors I was advised had a more progressive outlook. A treatment of literature that makes little distinction between specific works might seem strange to people accustomed to Eng. Lit. discussion, but readers speak of reading 'a Mills & Boon' (the generality, rather than specifying individual texts) and, despite significant differences between individual romances, it was the conventions and general characteristics of romance that seemed to me to have most potential to shape attitudes. (5)

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Awareness of the audience's taste controls much of the writing. In effect, there is editorial direction, not in positively demanding certain production, but in refusing severely non-conforming work, a form of censorship called 'giving the readers what they want' but guided by commercial rather than ideological principles. (6)

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Usually the heroine is offered either marriage or career, but cannot have both. The idea that marriage is the proper role for women is 'naturalized' by the absence of alternatives - careers are hardly given any development in the text. At work the heroine is often subjected to sexual harassment, treated in a way that no man would be treated. She resents being humiliated but usually does not question it. Thus sexual harassment becomes 'naturalized'. Apparently nothing can be done about it and marriage, not work, is where the heroine must seek fulfilment. It should be mentioned, however, that the heroine of Sally Wentworth's Semi-Detached Marriage (1982) explicitly challenges this and asserts a woman's right to useful employment outside the home. [...] One of the other areas in which 'naturalizing' of behaviour is clearly seen is male violence. It is presented as inherent, something that the heroine must accept if she is to be romantically involved with the hero. (7)

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The psychological landscape in which all the Mills & Boon romances take place is insecurity. The heroine not only doubts that she could be attractive to the hero, but sees herself also as the object of laughter. [...] Her insecurity makes her blind to the many indications that the hero does in fact care for her and, when he finally displays passionate interest, she usually reflects that he never said he loved her and begins again to doubt the possibility of a relationship.

Insecurity is enough a problem of everyday life not to be considered opposed to realism, but the romance's concentration on it is obsessive and promotes the sense that it is a necessary aspect of being a woman. This 'naturalizing' is intensified by the fact that the heroine is usually following a career of some sort - journalist, musician, ranch manager, television researcher, even industrial designer - and the competence she displays professionally makes her insecurity seem the result, not of some particular personal inability, but of something 'natural', an inherent quality that the reader is likely to share as a result of her womanhood. The claustrophobic vision provides no alternative perspective. (11)

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