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BITSG539
Dated August 25, 2014

Sushant Kishore

Agenda 3 : Raymond Williams Literature and Janice A. Radways The Act

of Reading the Romance : Escape and Instruction
The process of the specialization of literature to creative or imaginative . . .
is in part a major affirmative response . . . to capitalism and especially industrial
capitalism (Williams 50).
Creative and imaginary writing emerged in response to the mechanizing progress of
industrial capitalism that reduced language and humanity into automated
processes. With the advent of Capitalism, being was reduced to work, language to
a medium of passing information and society to a systematic and political order
(50). This mechanization was challenged by literary creativity and aesthetics that
took upon itself the task of extending and preserving human sensibility and an
imaginative truth as opposed to the perfunctory facts of capitalism. Literature and
its values of creativity, imagination, aesthetics and beauty were in straight contrast
with the capitalist standards of society.
The Smithton Romance as a Literature of Rebellion against the Capitalist
Society
Janice A. Radways study of the act of reading a Romance and the genre of
Romantic literature reveals much more than the structure of the plot and its appeal
to the readers. The responses to her questionnaire reveal a common escapist
tendency in the readers, constitutive of married women. They unanimously agree
that the purpose of reading a romance is to escape the drudgery of their daily lives.
The Smithton readers are a product of a capitalist society that celebrates work over
leisure but fails to recognize the work done without an exchange of currency. An
office/factory job is credible because it involves the transaction of service and
money but the domestic work goes unacknowledged because of the absence of it.
Domestic work gets neither emotional nor monetary compensation. Radways
research concludes that the readers sensibility towards the Romance novels comes
from their unconscious association to the protagonist and the resultant emotional
compensation, which was denied to them in the real word. The plot of the Novel, the
life of the protagonist and her relationship were carefully constructed to offer, in
their happy endings, an escape and emotional support to the wife and the mother.
The escapist response is widely studied by the publishers and the authors and these
responses to literature were notably integrated (Williams 49) in the Smithton
novels. The relative integration of [this domestic] reading public (Williams 49) and
their need to fill this emotional void became the basis of the production of Romantic
novels.
In their affinity for romance fiction the women responded to the pressures of being
what you are [domestic labors] . . . in this [capitalist] society (Radway 178). The

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act of reading a Romance was an act of passive rebellion, an affirmative response
(Williams 50) against the expectations of the capitalist society.

Works Cited
Radway, Janice A., The Act of Reading the Romance: Escape and Instruction. The
Consumer Society Reader. Ed. Juliet B. Schor, Douglas B. Holt. New York: The New
Press, 2000. Print.
Williams, Raymond. Literature. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: OUP, 2010. Print.