At Long Island University’s Southampton College, a literature student was so appalled by his reading assignment — a romance novel by Danielle Steel — that he sliced the book in two and brought the halves to class.
“This is what I think of Danielle Steel,” he told the professor.
At Ohio State University, a graduate student was so dismayed by a professor who repeatedly dismissed romance novels that she decided to make a point. Assigned to read to the class from a “trashy” novel such as a romance, the student recited an over-the-top love scene with admirable gusto, calling out “Oh, Rodolphe!” at a key moment.
Oh, Rodolphe?
The class roared. The professor, delighted, pronounced the novel garbage.
And only then did the student reveal that the book from which she was reading was “Madame Bovary,” the 1857 classic by Gustave Flaubert.
The humble romance novel — a category that includes racy bodice rippers, short reads such as the Harlequins, and higher-end best sellers such as Nora Roberts’ “Montana Sky” — has invaded academia, showing up on the reading list of lit courses from coast to coast.
And because of it — perhaps fittingly — passions are running high.
More than a dozen schools have, in the last few years, offered courses with at least one romance novel amid the assigned reading, among them Duke University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Texas at Dallas, Skidmore College, Wheaton College, the University of Southern California, Western Kentucky University and Michigan State University.
Professors say they have no way of knowing how many college courses have begun including romances on their syllabi, but few dispute that the number has increased since 1990.
“Ten years ago, we barely heard putting a popular romance in a course. Five years ago, people might have been complaining about it: `Is it valid? Is it valid?'” says Julie Tetel, an associate professor of English at Duke University who has taught romance novels.
“Nowadays nobody lifts an eyebrow.”
Among the tipoffs that romances are a growing presence in the classroom: an explosion of related scholarship. A search of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) International Bibliography, a major index of academic work, found only 20 articles and dissertations on the popular romance novel and related topics for the period 1963-1990. For 1991-2000, there were 108 articles and dissertations.
Articles included “Interrelated Frontier Quests of Self in Contemporary Historical Romance: A Study of Rosanne Bittner’s `Savage Destiny’ Series” and “Mean, Moody, and Magnificent: The Hero in Romance Literature.”
Not everyone is happy with the rise of romance-for-credit. Jerry Martin, president of the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni, says popular culture materials, such as romance novels, are crowding out the classics on college campuses.
A 1996 study by his organization found that many colleges offer courses on topics such as best sellers, soap operas and urban bikers. At the same time, the study found, a majority of colleges — two-thirds of the 70 surveyed — do not require English majors to read Shakespeare or similar great authors.
“If the English major doesn’t read Shakespeare, who’s going to?” Martin says.
The defenders of romance novels respond that Shakespeare was once regarded as a popular and mildly disreputable author. Tetel points out that Shakespeare himself wrote “romances,” a scholarly term that basically means love stories. Examples include “The Taming of the Shrew.”
“Do you think that all the good romances have been written?” Tetel says. “Well, I guess I beg to differ.”
Popular women’s fiction has been controversial since at least the 1790s, when Jane Austen leapt into the fray, penning “Northanger Abbey,” a gentle satire of the popular Gothic romances of her day.
In 1855, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne lamented, “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”
With the rise of academic feminism in the 1970s, romance novels gained new enemies. Once dismissed as the frivolous fantasies of sentimental women, the books were attacked as sexist propaganda. The story at the center of the romance — a single woman overcomes obstacles to marry a highly attractive man — was seen as contributing to female dependence and male power.
But by the early 1980s, romances had changed, at least to an extent, with the rise of independent, career-minded heroines.
Meanwhile, feminist scholars were bringing a wider range of women’s books into the college curriculum and popular culture studies were enlarging the definition of research material to include gangster movies, mysteries, magazines and comic books.
For once, the romance novel was in the right place at the right time.
Today, romance novels are taught in psychology, women’s studies, English and popular culture courses. But it would be a mistake to call this development “the revenge of the romance.” For one thing, the romance generally appears as a single item on a long reading list. For another, some of the attention from academia is distinctly unflattering.
At Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., English professor Sarah Webster Goodwin says she has students in her Gender and Romance course read a “schlock” romance such as a Harlequin as well as classics such as Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre.”
“I can’t bear to read them myself,” she says of romance novels, which she includes not for their value as literature but as “sociological evidence” of patterns of romantic fantasy in American culture.
Indira Ganesan, an assistant professor of humanities at Southampton College, says she thought it was “brilliant” when the student sliced Danielle Steel’s novel in two to indicate his displeasure with the reading assignment.
“You get an A,” responded Ganesan, who says the novel was “tawdry” and riddled with anti-female sentiment.
Ohio State University graduate student and best-selling romance writer Jennifer Crusie is the source of the anecdote about the student who tricked her professor into publicly condemning a love scene from Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.”
“If you go back and read that love scene, it is over the top, but then, so is Flaubert,” says Crusie, one of several scholar/novelists who strongly object to negative characterizations of contemporary romance.
“It’s the only genre that is written by women, read by women, and edited by women,” she says. “It’s completely female and it’s also the only genre that is ruthlessly criticized on the basis of genre: `All romance novels are trash.’ Nobody would say all literary fiction is good. I mean, that’s a fat-headed thing to say.”
Some professors are pro-romance: Tetel at Duke, Lee Tobin McClain at Seton Hill College in Greensburg, Pa., and Jim McGoldrick, who recently left DeSales University in Center Valley, Pa., to join the thin ranks of full-time male romance writers.
But the most popular position among teachers of the romance novel is probably neutrality, withmany professors saying they don’t read series romances such as Harlequins for their literary value, but for what they reveal about literary conventions, American culture and human behavior.
“There’s a lot of interest in feminist scholarship in figuring out `What is it that romances offer women?’ ” says Judith Kegan Gardiner, an English and gender studies professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Erin Smith, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas who includes a romance in her course on American popular literature, says she is intrigued by the fact that the books are so widely read.
In 1999, romance novels accounted for 58 percent of all mass-market paperback fiction sold in the U.S., according to statistics compiled by the Romance Writers of America (RWA). A 1999 survey conducted for RWA found that one in three women had read a romance in the last year.
“This is an incredibly culturally important genre and if we’re going to be responsible cultural historians we ought to look at why it’s so popular and why it’s appealing to its particular audience,” Smith says.
Student reaction to romance novels ranges from enthusiasm to outrage.
Ganesan says many of her students were insulted that they had to read a Danielle Steel novel, but one student offered a touching counterpoint, saying his mother worked hard all the time, never took a vacation, and relied on Danielle Steel for entertainment.
McGoldrick, who has taught Nora Roberts and his own work — he and his wife, Nikoo, write historical romances under the joint pseudonym May McGoldrick — reports a positive response in his Introduction to Fiction course.
“It worked so well, even with the men in the course, they just sailed right through it,” McGoldrick says. “They were surprised at themselves; they even said of course they would never have purchased a romance novel for themselves, but they enjoyed the stories.”
Some romance writers are excited about the changes on campus. But others want even more for their genre. Jayne Ann Krentz, a best-selling romance writer and editor of the book “Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance,” would like to see more scholars study romance novels as works of literature, not just cultural artifacts.
“There’s a great line from one of the `Star Treks,'” she says.
The Starship Enterprise duo of Capt. Kirkand First Officer Spock find themselves in modern-day San Francisco. They get on a bus where Spock, using the appropriate slang, persuades a boy to turn down his radio. Kirk is astounded. Where did Spock learn 20th Century colloquial English?
Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins, Spock responds.
Kirk nods solemnly: “Ohhh, the greats.”
