Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women by Tania Modleski

Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women Reviews

• 
  Michael

  161119: girlfriend who really liked popular romantic fiction, the sort here, asked me to write one for her. i tried, we tried, but did not know what we were doing. this book might have helped. divided in three, it covers harlequins (mills & boon in uk), gothics, soap operas. girlfriend especially liked bodice-rippers, something between the first two. i had read none, understood less, but was willing to learn... i was always interested in litcrit of popular culture, knew mostly sff and crime, and this promised me some insight into girls/women...
  
  many years (decades...) later, i have no interest in writing popular romantic fiction, but still am interested in women’s culture. this is of its era, the ‘80s. second wave feminism. i find most intriguing how she is able to recast aspects of works called ‘faults’ as particularly significant, as points to notice, for example in her section on soap operas the (male) complaints of lack of story arc, beginning, middle, end, as recognition that ‘story’ is ideological construct, that everything is middle. or that, contra classic male theory, there is no central character or central conflict or controlling narrative because... this is a more ‘realistic’ portrayal of life: after all, stories end, life just goes on and on with no apparent ‘author’... realism’ is something different here: it is about emotional life/psychological life that determines the story, in gothics the fear of the father/separation from mother, love of father-figure etc... in harlequins the necessary innocence to achieve marriage etc...
  
  so maybe this book does not encourage me to read harlequins or gothics or watch soaps but it does make me think...
• 
  Ioana

  Harlequins, Gothic novels and soap operas are looked as women's means of coping and eventually fulfilling social expectations. The harlequins are tools to transform the young woman anxiety generated by a meeting with the man, the taking in of the blatant aversion of the man and its transformation into something else, that allows the continuity of current social structures. The Gothic novel, claims the author, allows the woman to face the unknown of her own marriage, and all her fears that the husband might indeed be her enemy. That and the distancing from the mother figure, serving to reassure the heroin that she will not face the same fate as the previous generation of women. The soap opera is - according to the present book - a fluid type of storytelling reinforcing the role of the woman in the family, as pillar. The infinite story lines of the soap opera preserve the unbeknownst character of the lived time.
  The author's attitude to all these types of mass literature is almost reverent. She shows in the introduction some of the critics that were raised against this type of oeuvre, but dismisses them as not perceiving the importance of the pieces. If one desires to study how and why women comply with the petty roles assigned by society, this is the book. My question is why should one pretend that coping is desirable?
• 
  Neslihan Cangöz

  Harlequin’ler (Türkiye’de beyaz dizi adıyla yayınlanan seri), gotik romanlar ve soap operaların ne anlama geldiği üzerine düşünen feminist eleştirinin çok iyi örneklerinden biri bence. Popüler kültür ürünlerini sadece aşağılayarak yok saymanın yararsızlığını bir kez daha gösteriyor.
• 
  Katherine Addison

  So, yes, this was written in 1982, but I still found that it had interesting and useful things to say.
  
  Modleski talks about three kinds of stories aimed at women: Harlequin romances, Gothic novels (Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Wheatley style Gothic), and soap operas. And I think her basic question is, why do women want to read/watch things that are so formulaic? She quotes Harlequin's rules for its writers and explores how the formula plays out in ways that are both satisfying and unsatisfying---meaning that you always want to read another one because this one didn't quite scratch the itch; she talks about the validation of paranoia in Gothics and the way the story they tell about marriage is very different from the story the Harlequins tell about courtship; she discusses the intentionally never-ending structure of soap operas and the way that they're designed for a distracted audience (a middle-class housewife, who's cleaning and cooking and the baby may wake up from its nap at any moment). I remember watching soap operas at my babysitter's house as a little kid, and Modleski explains for me WHY the narrative jumps so quickly from character to character and WHY none of the stories ever seems to get anywhere.
  
  She is mildly Freudian, by which I mean she uses Freud, but uses him non-programatically, taking the bits that are helpful and leaving the bits that are unhelpful on the floor. And I think her use of Freud assists her argument because it enables her to talk about the deep structures beneath, say, the Harlequin rule that all novels must be written in third-person.
  
  I'm sure, 40 years on, that other people have written other literary criticism of these forms, and I will probably find some of them as I continue to read about Gothic novels (in the broader sense in which The Shining is a Gothic novel, which it totally is). But Modleski's monograph (140 pages including notes and index) is sharply intelligent and clearly written, and it gave me a way of looking at its subjects that I hadn't had before.
  
  Four and a half, round up to five stars.
• 
  Nacho

  Es uno de los imprescindibles.
• 
  Pomme de Terre

  The chapters on Gothic novels and soap operas were fascinating, but chapter on romance novels was ON POINT. The internalised male gaze, the preoccupation with innocence, the sublimated feelings of rebellion - this was written nearly thirty years ago and it all still rang so damn true for the stuff written today. And I'm glad this book didn't go down the route of "all mass literature is trash/opiate for the masses/proof the proles are uneducated idiots" but instead considered a more complex view of how they acknowledge, work through and resolve women's anxieties in a manner that both challenges and preserves the status quo. This is excellent reading for anyone doing pop culture or women's studies.
• 
  majoringinliterature

  Though it was written in the early eighties, this book makes a strong case for critical study of popular fictions, particularly those generally consumed by women. A lot if what Modleski says is probably still very relevant, and some of her thoughts on psychoanalytic criticism (particularly the uncanny) were very useful.
• 
  Stephanie

  An interesting book that discusses why women are so attracted to genres of entertainment dedicated to them like chick lit, soap operas, chick flicks--the 2007 edition even has an introduction with some comments on yaoi.
• 
  Clark

  The book was more technical and detailed than I was able to process but that was my problem. Now I know why women are attracted to these romance tales, but I didn't learn why men were. This book will make my future reading of the old gothic romance novels more enjoyable.
• 
  Rebecca Maher

  Revenge is ours! Whether you like this book or not, you will never be able to un-hear Modleski's compelling argument.
• 
  dreamwell

  ground-breaking at its time, now sadly outdated...
• 
  Maya White-Lurie

  Though there are some generalizations and some information is a little dated, this analysis is incredibly interesting and thought provoking.