while a number of researchers such as Radway and Christian-Smith have maintained that romance reading operates primarily as an unfortunate but justifiable effort to escape from the adversities of real heterosexual relations, it may also offer an escape from what its readers construe to be even less favorable depictions of women in other genres. Fundamentally, I would argue, romance readers really like to read, they like to read about women, and they don't want to read about their unmitigated despoilation and dispatch. But once readers venture out of the fomulaic romance genre, fiction is a wild card and identification with female protagonists an emotional risk. It's very likely most women first learn this in language arts classrooms. (58)
-----
One might argue that literature about women written from a feminist perspective is meant to function as women's "literature of need," but reading about women's oppression - particularly if one is already disempowered by academic, familial, or social circumstance - does not necessarily engage readers or enable them to significantly change their relationships with fathers, brothers, and lovers. [...] Indeed I wonder to what degree English teachers' preoccupation with the tragic - with Piggy's murder, Ophelia's madness, Tess's rape - simply, at some point, compels our student readers to make a sharp turn toward the comic and consolatory. (59)
-----