Ever After: Reading the Women Who Read (and Re-Write) Romances

Mitchell, who wanted to write a play about romance fiction, collaborated with members of a romance reading group, who selected Lisa Gregory’s The Rainbow Season as the romance which would be at the centre of the performance.

Using the stories of the women readers as the raw material to frame various sections of the dramatized novel helped me accomplish two goals. First, I could give voice to those women readers who often go unheard and unnoticed by the general public. Through hearing the juxtaposed perspectives of the various readers, the audience is exposed to the values of the romance genre and to the ways that readers re-interpret these values in light of their own experiences. Second, creating a “frame” for the re-telling of the story of Luke and Sarah allowed me to demonstrate how these women use their reading and their group membership to resist the pressures in their private lives, to form a support system for readers, and to combat the prejudices they experience as romance readers. (56)

Part of the story involves Luke raping Sarah and

Some of the women readers who came to see the performance found viewing this “staged” rape more disturbing than reading the scene in the novel. (62)

Mitchell suggests

readers may choose to resist the violence and rape by “re-writing” the scene as they read in order to make it more acceptable. When reading, they can control the experience, change it if necessary [...]. However, when readers are confronted with a visual representation of the scene, they find it more difficult to change or resist the violence. (63)