Harlequin readers and feminine anxieties

Outlining her project (on mass-produced fantasies for women), Tania Modleski writes:

“[Fredric] Jameson can speak of ‘desires’ and ‘anxieties’ as if the terms were self-evident, but when they are applied to women and women’s situation they become extremely problematic. Early followers of Freud tended to characterize women’s desire as masochism, a masochism thought to be biologically ordained, for, according to Helene Deutsch, if women did not ‘naturally’ love pain they would neither consent to sexual intercourse nor suffer the difficulties of childbearing. In a classic Freudian psychological manoeuvre, women’s very anxieties about pain which they revealed, for instance, in nightmares about rape, were construed by Deutsch as ‘proof’ of women’s repressed wish to be physically overpowered. We may smile at the doctrine of women’s masochism when it is thus baldly stated, but it survives in milder forms to this day, and is implicity invoked even by feminist critics when they try to explain the attractions of popular feminine [-p.30] texts. Here is how Ann Douglas describes the Harlequin readers: ‘[The] women who couldn’t thrill to male nudity in Playgirl are enjoying the titillation of seeing themselves, not necessarily as they are, but as some men would like to see them: illogical, innocent, magnetized by male sexuality and brutality.'” (pp.29-30)

“It is an important part of my project,” Modleski continues, “to show that the so-called masochism pervading these texts is a ‘cover’ for anxieties, desires and wishes which if openly expressed would challenge the psychological and social order of things. For that very reason, of course, they must be kept hidden: the texts, after arousing them, must, in Fredric Jameson’s formula, work to neutralize them.” (p.30)

Ref: Tania Modleski (1982) Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. Archon Books: Hamden, Connecticut

The narrative pleasure of knowing the story

“In 1973, Susanna Rowson, a writer of the ‘sentimental novel,’ remarked, ‘I wonder that the novel readers are not tired of reading one story so many times, with only the variation of its being told different ways.’ While Rowson’s observation could, with even more justic today, be applied to most popular novels, which are, of course, deeply conventional, it pertains most forcibly to Harlequin Romances, for the company which produces them requires its writers to follow a strict set of rules and even dictates the point of view from which the narrative must be told. The peculiar result is that the reader who reads the story already knows the story, at least in all its essentials. I will show that this situation both reflects and contributes to a mild ‘hysterical’ state – using this term in its strict psychoanalytic sense. In his famous case study of Anna O., Josef Breuer, who, with Freud, worked with female hysterics, discusses the way the patient’s early ‘habit of daydreaming’ to escape from her ‘monotonous family life’ prepared the way for the extreme hysteria she was to develop. Eventually, she began to experience a kind of ‘double conscience,’ as Breuer calls it, which, among other symptoms, was manifested in a need to tell stories about herself in the third person and in a feeling that even when she was at her most ‘insane,’ a clear-sighted and calm observer sat… in a corner of her brain and looked on at all the mad business.’ This kind of duality exists, as we shall see, at the very core of romances, particularly in the relation between an ‘informed’ reader and a necessarily innocent heroine.” (p.32)

“Despite the significant differences,” Modleski goes on to say, “…both [Harlequin Romance and Gothic Romance] texts share in common a sense of the insufficiency of female selfhood. The reader of Harlequin Romances finds herself, in ‘hysterical’ fashion, desiring the subversion of the heroine’s attempts at self-assertion, and the reader of Gothics identifies with a heroine who fears hereditary madness or who feels literally possessed by the spirits of other women from out of the past. However, feminine selflessness reaches its extreme in the ‘family romances’ of soap operas. And this not so much because the women portrayed on these programs embody it as an ideal; rather, because of the special narrative form of soap operas (because it has no end, because, properly speaking it has no center), the spectator is invited to disperse herself into a variety of situations which never come to a full and satisfactory conclusion. The spectator becomes the ideal woman, emptied of self, preoccupied by the perennial problems of ‘all her children’. Moreover, in directing the spectator’s hostility towards the one woman who repeatedly tries to gain control over feminine powerlessness, soap operas further insure against the possibility of somen’s becoming more self-assertive. The ‘villainess’ often figures largely as a character in Harlequins and Gothics too…[but] the emotional energy the audience invests in [this character] appears to be most extreme in soap operas. This emotion cannot be defined as one of simple loathing, however; it consists of a complex mixture of anger, envy, and sneaking admiration.” (p.33)

Ref: Tania Modleski (1982) Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. Archon Books: Hamden, Connecticut

The utopian component of mass dreams and fantasies

“It is important not to overlook the utopian component of mass dreams and fantasies, as [Fredric] Jameson, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and others have recently pointed out. The Frankfurt School strenuously denied this component, insisting that only ‘great’ art could give us foreshadowings of a better world to come. As Herbert Marcuse, waxing poetical, puts it: ‘There is no work of art which does not, in its very structure, evoke the words, the images, the music of another reality, of another order repelled by the existing one and yet alive in memory and anticipation, alive in what happens to men and women, and in their rebellion against it.’

But Jameson accurately notes that precisely in order to legitimatize the status quo, the works of mass culture must ‘deflect… the deepest and most fundamental hopes… of the collectivity to which they can therefore… be found to have given voice.’ To commit ourselves to a search for the utopian promises of mass art for women, or as I put it…, to a ‘search for [-p.31] tomorrow,’ is to put ourselves in the way of answering the great vexed question of psychoanalysis first posed by Freud: ‘What do women want?'” (p.30)

Ref: Tania Modleski (1982) Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. Archon Books: Hamden, Connecticut

Mass culture performs a transformational work on real anxieties

Discussing Fredric Jameson’s essay, ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, Tania Modleski explains that Jameson “makes a two-pronged attack on some of the main ideas of the Frankfurt School. In the first place,” she writes, “he shows that high art – the ‘modernism’ valorized by the Frankfurt School and, more recently, by the Tel Quel group in France – has not remained apart from the processes of the ‘commodification of art.’ For instance, although modernism may have arisen out of a desire ‘not to be a commodity,’ the very effort of avoiding the repetition and ‘standardization’ characteristic of mass art means that modernism must stress ‘innovation and novelty,’ must therefore, capitulate to the “pressure… to ‘make it new'” and thus act in accordance ‘with the ever swifter historicity of consumer society, with its yearly or quarterly style and fashion changes.” (p.27)

“More important for our purposes,” Modleski continues, “is the other half of Jameson’s argument, which is the one he most fully develops. If, on the one hand, high art does not represent an absolute, uncompromised alternative to mass art, on the other hand, mass art may be said to possess some of the negative, critical functions the Frankfurt School and its numerous followers have attributed to high art alone. This is true on the most general level. As Hans Robert Jauss points out in a critique of Adorno’s theories, every work of art presupposes ‘an aesthetic distance on the part of the spectator; that is, it presupposes a negation of the immediate interests of his everyday life.’ But as Jameson shows, mass art often contains many specific criticisms of everyday life, in addition to this rather global ‘negation’ (which, however, was of the utmost importance in the Frankfurt School’s philosophy of art). As opposed to those critics who claim that mass art is designed to create ‘false anxieties,’ manipulate ‘false needs,’ and impose ‘false consciousness,’ Jameson argues that mass culture performs ‘a transformational work on [real] social and political anxieties and fantasies which must then have some effective presence in the mass cultural text in order subsequently to be ‘managed’ or repressed.”” (p.27)

“Jameson is right,” Modleski asserts, “to claim that his discussion leads us some distance away from the concept of mass art as ‘manipulation,’ as ‘sheer brainwashing.’ Nevertheless, there are problems with this part of his essay [the part discussing Norman Holland’s The Dynamics of Literary Response], specifically with his notion of the social ‘management of desire,’ which suggests that there is someone doing the managing. Indeed, in his remarks on The Godfather, which Jameson uses as a test case for his theory, he speaks of the ‘intent to mystify,’ thus conjuring up, like the text itself, a sort of ‘Godfather’ on whom to project blame. Jameson and other left-wing critics of mass culture are the latest heirs to the old reformist/Populist belief in a group of conspirators ruthlessly holding us back from the attainment of a golden age. Ironically, it is the politically conservative mass-culture critic who has on occasion warned against the tendency, as Leo Spitzer puts it, to ‘oversimplify the psychology of the advertiser [and, by extension, of any other so-called captain of consciousness] – who is not only a businessman but a human being: one who is endowed with all the normal potentialities of emotion and who finds expression of these in the exercise of his profession.’ More recently, European Marxists like Louis Althusser have opposed the facile assumption that there are two groups of people – those within ideology (the masses of people) and those on the outside who, without illusions themselves, manage to control the others by feeding them illusions. We are all ‘inside’ ideology, Althusser has persuasively argued.” (p.28)

“Therefore,” Modleski explains, “while my analyses support Jameson’s theory that mass-cultural texts both stimulate and allay social anxieties, both arouse and symbolically satisfy the ‘properly imperishable’ desires and fantasies of women, I avoid imputing to, for example, the board of directors of the Harlequin Company, an omniscience [-p.29] about the nature and effects of their product.” (pp.28-29)

“The work of Althusser, itself influenced by the psychoanalytic thought of Jacques Lacan, has spurred renewed interest in psychoanalysis among other Marxists. For, if the production of ideology is not the work of any identifiable group, it must be located elsewhere. Rejecting the notion of ‘false consciousness,’ many Marxists have turned to a study of the unconscious, as it is tructured in and by the family. This emphasis has the merit of beginning to explain why people cling to oppressive conditions even after it is pointed out to them that their own best interests lie elsewhere. It helps explain, for example, why the sales of Harlequin Romances have not simply remained steady in recent years but have actually increased along with the growth of feminism. Only by taking psychoanalytic insights into account, by understanding how deep-rooted are the anxieties and fantasies contained in (and by) popular narratives for women can we begin to explain why women are still requiring what Jameson calls the ‘symbolic satisfactions’ of the texts instead of looking for ‘real’ satisfactions.” (p.29)

Ref: Tania Modleski (1982) Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. Archon Books: Hamden, Connecticut

Romantic lineages… 3

“By far, the most popular form of literature for women throughout most of the nineteenth century were the ‘domestic novels.’ These novels and the sensation fiction of the 1860s, mostly from england, come together to form the prototypes of the modern soap opera. Elaine Showalter credits sensation writers with a subversive appeal, claiming that they inverted ‘the stereotypes of the domestic novel.’ Certainly the sensationalists ‘expressed female anger, frustration, and sexual energy more directly than had been done previously.’ Nevertheless, several important studies by women scholars have shown that the domestic novel itself was subversive, thus challenging the orthodox view of the genre, advanced by Herbert Brown: ‘The domestic novels in which these writers sought to glorify the American home were as limited in scope as the narrow sphere of interests of the women readers for whom they were designed. …Domestic fiction records few instances of discontent with this circumscribed life.’ James Hart corroborates Brown’s assessment when he speaks of the women novelists as ‘middle-class ladies… busy fashioning their homes into the land of the heart’s content.’ In sharp contrast, Helen Waite Papashvily characterizes the novels as ‘handbooks… of feminine revolt,’ encouraging ‘a pattern of feminine behavior so quietly ruthless, so subtly vicious that by comparison the ladies at Seneca appear angels of innocence.’ How is it possible for people to read the same group of books and come up with such wildly divergent ideas about them? The answer, I believe, is that many critics tend to take at face value the novelists’ endorsement of the domestic ideal and ignore the actual, not very flattering portraits of domesticity which emerge from their works. To be sure, as Brown notes, the novelists tended strenuously to affirm the sacredness of the marriage tie, but they were concerned primarily to show how far short of the ideal many marriages in real life tended to fall. Some of the very titles of the fiction of Mrs E.D.E.N. Southworth, one of the most prolific writers of the age, suggest the grievances against marriage, fathers, and husbands Brown says are nowhere to be found: The Fatal Vow, The Discarded Daughter, The Deserted Wife.” (p.22)

“Nina Baym,” Modleski goes on to say, “who is more moderate than Papashvily in her account of the [-p.23] novels, even takes issue with the term ‘domestic,’ which she says reinforces the stereotyped idea that the novelists wallowed in domestic bliss. On the contrary, in this fiction
‘home life is presented, overwhelmingly, as unhappy. There are very few intact families in this literature, and those that are intact are unstable or locked into routines of misery. Domestic tasks are arduous and monotonous; family members oppress and abuse each other; social interchanges are alternately insipid or malicious.’
In much ‘domestic’ fiction men are the culprits responsible for the intense suffering of wives and daughters. Mrs. Southworth, in particular, delighted in portraying men as tyrannical, foolish, untrusting, and untrustworthy.” (pp.22-23)

Soap operas continue the tradition…

“Soap operas continue the tradition of portraying strong women, who, if they no longer single-handedly run large farms, nevertheless must struggle to keep intact the worlds which the weakness and unreliability of men threaten to undermine. However, men in soap operas tend not to be the bullying tyrants frequently found in domestic fiction. The evil ‘villain’ in soap opera is generally female, and in this respect soap opera closely resembles the nineteenth-century sensation novels written by and for women. In the fiction of Mary Louise Braddon and the recently discovered ‘thrillers’ of Louisa May Alcott, the happiness of the ‘good’ woman is jeopardized by the infernal machinations of a clever and beautiful temptress who gains control over the haples man with ridiculous ease. In the chapter on soap operas I will explore the appeal of such a character and show that this plot is not really the ‘inversion’ of the ‘domestic’ plot but it s complement. Soap operas may also be indebted to the sensation novels for the emphasis on violence, crime, and sexual scandal.” (p.23)

“Not only did the domestic novels call into question the felicity women were supposed to experience in making home-life the center of their existence, but they also revealed, as Papashvily shows, covert longings for power and revenge.” (p.24)

“…even the contemporary mass-produced narratives for women contain elements of protest and resistance underneath highly ‘orthodox’ plots. This is not to say that the tensions, anxieties, and anger which pervade these works are solved in ways which would please modern feminists: far from it.” (p.25)

Ref: Tania Modleski (1982) Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. Archon Books: Hamden, Connecticut [refer also: Romantic lineages… 2]

the pop-culture heroine and the feminist

“If the popular-culture heroine and the feminist choose utterly different ways of overcoming their dissatisfaction, they at least have in common the dissatisfaction.” (p.26)

Ref: Tania Modleski (1982) Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. Archon Books: Hamden, Connecticut

A woman must continually watch herself

“In Ways of Seeing, John Berger, Marxist art critic, screenwriter and novelist, has discussed the way in which the display of women in the visual arts and publicity images results in [and Modleski quotes Berger:] a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.'” (37)

Ref: Tania Modleski (1982) Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. Archon Books: Hamden, Connecticut

The second ‘Gothic revival’

Tania Modleski explains that, “After dying out for over a century, Gothic novels again became popular upon publication in 1938 of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, a novel about a woman marrying a man whom she subsequently suspects of still being in love with his (dead) first wife, but who, it turns out, has actually murdered the wife out of anger at her promiscuity. Significantly, this second ‘Gothic revival’ took place at the same time that ‘hard-boiled’ detective novels were attracting an unprecedented number of male readers. While Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were persistently scapegoating women…, the paranoid fears of women were receiving new life. In the forties, a new movie genre derived from Gothic novels appeared around the time that hard-boiled detective fiction was being transformed by the medium into what movie critics currently call ‘flim noir’. Not suprisingly, film noir has received much critical scrutiny both here and abroad, while the so-called ‘gaslight’ genre has been virtually ignored. According to many critics, film noir possesses the greatest sociological importance (in addition to its aesthetic importance) because it reveals male paranoid fears, developed during the war years, about the independence of women on the homefront. Hence the necessity in these movies of destroying or taming the aggressive, mercenary, sexually dynamic ‘femme fatale’ whose presence is indispensable to the genre. Beginning with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 movie version of Rebecca and continuing through and beyond George Cukor’s Gaslight in 1944, the gaslight films may be seen to reflect women’s fears about losing their unprecedented freedoms and being forced back into the homes after the men returned from fighting to take over the jobs and assume control of their families. In many of these films, the house seems to be alive with menace, and the greedy, sadistic men who rule them are often suspected of trying to drive their wives insane, or to murder them as they have murdered other women in the past.” (p.21)

Modleski continues: “The fact that after the war years these films gradually faded fromt he screen probably reveals more about the [-p.22] changing composition of movie audiences than about the waning of women’s anxieties concerning domesticity. For Gothic novels have continued to this day to enjoy a steady popularity, and a few of their authors, like Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart, reliably appear on the best-seller list.” (pp.21-22)

Ref: Tania Modleski (1982) Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. Archon Books: Hamden, Connecticut

Romantic lineages… 2

Gothic Romances

“The Gothic novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis achieved their peak of popularity in America at about the same time as the sentimental novel. Critics often attribute their immense popularity to the public’s desire for ‘mere’ entertainment. James Hart’s The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste succinctly concludes that many people found in [-p.20] these novels ‘a new form of escape from their own humdrum lives, allowing them vicariously to experience thrilling adventures. From the middle class of America to the Middle Ages of Europe was a wonderfully exciting journey, when made through the medium of a Gothic novel.’ However, it is possible to see the exotic settings of Gothics as possessing a much more important function: because the novels so radically displace reality by putting the action in distant times and strange and ghostly lands, they are uniquely equipped to become a site for the displacement of repressed wishes and fears. In other words, Gothics can present us with the frighteningly familiar precisely because they make the familiar strange – which is, it will be recalled, the way Freud said the uncanny sensation in literature is produced. Thus, set in a remote place, in a faraway time, the female Gothic as created by Ann Radcliffe in The Mysteries of Udolpho expresses women’s most intimate fears, or, more precisely, their fears about intimacy – about the exceedingly private, even claustrophobic nature of their existence. So it is that the house, the building itself, to which women are generally confined in real life, becomes the locus of evil in an entirely make-believe sixteenth century Italian mountain setting.” (19-20)

The nuclear family in Gothic novels… predecessors to the domestic novel…

“The plot of Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, on which the later Gothic novels are based, has a villainous Montoni carrying off the heroine Emily and her aunt, whom Montoni marries for her fortune, to a castle in the mountains where he imprisons the aunt and persecutes the niece in order to gain control of her fortune. I will argue that this plot became popular at a time when the nuclear family was being consolidated in part because it portrayed in an extremely exaggerated form a family dynamic which would increasingly become the norm. It spoke powerfully to the young girl struggling to achieve psychological autonomy in a home where the remote, but all-powerful father ruled over an utterly dependent wife.

In a sense, then, gothics are domestic novels too, concerned with the (often displaced) relationships among family members and with driving home to women the importance of coping with enforced confinement and the paranoid fears it generates. Thus, although nineteenth-century readers soon dropped Gothic novels in favor of the ‘domestic novels,’ it could be argued that the later novels are somewhat continuous with the earlier ones.” (p.20)

“Indeed,” Modleski continues, “Jane [-p.21] Austen, preeminent among novelists of manners, who antedated the domestic novelists, began her career not simply burlesquing the Gothic tradition, but extracting its core of truth: her mercenary and domineering General Tilney of Northanger Abbey may not be capable of imprisoning his wife in a turret, but, like the Gothic villain, he is capable of rendering her existence miserable, and of coldly ruining the heroine’s hopes for happiness.” (pp.20-12)

Ref: Tania Modleski (1982) Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. Archon Books: Hamden, Connecticut [refer also: Romantic lineages… 1]

Romantic lineages… 1

In her study of Harlequin Romances, Gothic novels, and soap operas, Tania Modleski introduces what she describes as “an admittedly overschematized lineage for the three forms under consideration.” (15) Overschematized, perhaps, but interesting nonetheless! She writes: “Harlequins can be traced back through the work of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen to the sentimental novel and ultimately …to the novels of Samuel Richardson, whose Pamela is considered by many scholars to be the first British novel (it was also the first English novel printed in America); Gothic romances for women, also traceable through Charlotte Brontë, date back to the eighteenth century and the work of Ann Radcliffe; and soap operas are descendants of the domestic novels and the sensation novels of the nineteenth century. In turn, the “antecedants” of the domestic novels, according to Nina Baym, “lay… in the novel of manners, with its ‘mixed’ heroine as developed by Fanny Burney, and even more in the fiction of the English women moralists – Mrs. Opie, Mrs. Barbauld, and especially maria Edgeworth, with her [-p.16] combination of educational intention, moral fabulating, and description of manners and customs.”

My classification is,” Modleski continues, “as I say, overschematized, for the genres do overlap. Thus the plot of the sentimental novel, which often depicts a young, innocent woman defending her virginity against the attacks of a rake, who might or might not reform, would frequently find its way into the domestic novel, which tended to center around women’s activities in the home.” (15-16)

Harlequins

“The sentimental novel flourished in America at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century. It was, however, an [-p.17] English import rather than an indigenous American product. Like the Harlequins of the present day, the novels repeatedly insisted on the importance of the heroine’s virginity. In the classic formula, the heroine, who is often of lower social status than the hero, holds out against his attacks on her ‘virtue’ until he sees no other recourse than to marry her. Of course, by this time he wants to marry her, having become smitten with her sheer ‘goodness’. The early women novelists became preoccupied, not to say obsessed, with the morality of this plot. Whether or not a rake would really reform was a burning question: some novelists said no, some said yes, and many said no and yes – i.e. put themselves on record as being opposed to the idea that a rake would ever improve his morals and then proceeded to make an exception of their hero.

In these debates, however, the sexual double standard was seldom seriously challenged; very few women went so far as one female character, who, in any case, is not the heroine of the novel: “I could never see the propriety of the assertion [that reformed rakes make the best husbands]. Might it not be said with equal justice, that if a certain description of females were reformed, they would make the best wives?” Rather, the inequality between the sexes was dealt with in other ways [which Modleski goes on to discuss].” (16-17)

“In Harlequins, the battle continues to be fought out not in the sexual arena, but in the emotional and – stretching the term – the ethical one. If the Harlequin heroine never questions the necessity of remaining a virgin while the man is allowed to have had a variety of sexual experiences, there is a tacit insistence that the man share her ‘values.’ … the man… is usually even capable of identifying a material as ‘tulle’. More, in novel after novel, the man is brought to acknowledge the preeminence of love and the attractions of domesticity at which he has, as a rule, previously scoffed.” (17)

“Another typical, but far more somber plot, dealt with the woman who gave in to the libertine, and at the end of the novel [-p.18] died a penitent and often excrutiating death. This is essentially the story of the two most popular women’s novels of the period, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte: A Tale of Truth and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette. …The emotional force of these novels seems often to lie less in the act of sin, the ‘elopement,’ than in the death scenes themselves, a fact which has disturbed and puzzled many critics. But death is too convenient to women fantasists to be easily relinquished, for it can serve a variety of functions. On the one hand, it endows the woman with something like ‘tragic hero’ status: ‘What can a heroine do?’ asks Joanna Russ in pointing out that men have taken all the active plots. She can die. And in dying, she does not have to depart from the passive feminine role, but only logically extend it. On the other hand, death can be a very powerful means of wreaking vengeance on others who do not properly ‘appreciate’ us, and it is in this form that the fantasy of death can be found in Harlequin Romances, which, with their happy endings, seem on the surface to have nothing in common with the tragic Clarissa plot.” (17-18)

“From one point of view nothing could be easier than to ridicule the prevalence of the seducer in these early novels, and scholars, especially male scholars have not been behindhand in doing so.” (18) However, Modleski explains, the use of this character is more than mere repetition. “The figures of Mr. B in Pamela, Lovelace in Clarissa, together with their numerous successors, enhanced the importance of women … and at the same time provide the means by which women can localize their diffuse and general sense of powerlessness. / In giving vent to this sense of powerlessness, the sentimental novels look forward to the themes, fantasies, and preoccupations of both the domestic novels and the Gothic novels. The ‘reformed rake’ plot and the debate which raged around it pointed to [-p.19] women’s sense of vulnerability in regard to marriage and hence foreshadowed the critique of the family which would be the covert project of the so-called ‘domestic’ novelists. As Foster’s The Coquette makes clear, one of the great attractions of the rake was that he seemed to provide an exciting alternative to the staid domestic ‘pleasures’ which were all good women were supposed to want.” (17-19)

Ref: Tania Modleski (1982) Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. Archon Books: Hamden, Connecticut