Suzanne
Romance novels provide many women with an escape and consumers are drawn to the effortlessness of escape through reading but in many ways these females can be seen as romance novel addicts. Is it harmless or is it possible for reading "escape" novels to be detrimental to a person as the word addiction usually suggests?
Simone
Do you think romance novels are "chronicles of female triumph" or are sexist and only further the idea that women are unhappy without men?
Marquis
On page 100 it says, "While the fantasy is unreal, the good feelings it gives us about ourselves and our future are real, and these good feelings are what we need to sustain us." How can we as a society work toward providing these real feelings without a unreal fantasy scenario?
Matt
At times, the author seems to imply that the women read these novels to escape into the book. Is this because they are lacking something that the book provides, or because they simply seeking different experiences, regardless of any lack in their own life?
Ashley
Radway spends a lot of time discussing the reader's expectations for a romance novel and how these are often unobtainable in real life. Do you think it is dangerous for these women to become so deeply engaged in a world that distorts reality?
Katy
Is the "escape" the romance reading provides an acceptable alternative to confronting the problems some Smithton women face in their care giving roles?
Peter
Radaway states that the women who read these novels do often as a form of escapism from the struggles and responsibilities of their daily lives. If the women who read these novels spent more time working on their relationships in reality instead of reading romance novels, would romance-novel excapism become unnecessary because they would be completely satisfied with their everyday lives?
Beth
On pg 90, Radway describes the two different ways the women were using the word escape in regards to their romance reading. Is either one more dangerous than the other?
Katie
Do you think the mentality of the women reading romances is similar to that of the men who watch sports?
Lauren H.
Women use romance novels to escape the troubles of reality. Do men and children use books of a specific genre to escape or do they rely on something else?
Brandon
Do the husbands of these "addicted" wives in any way feel threatened by their counterparts sensing that by reading these novels they are given a sense of empowerment to stand up if they are not being treated right having compared their situation to a novel?
Jarred
Contrary to women, how come most men don’t turn to reading romance as a form of “self-care"?
Ivan
Is the way that males are portrayed in Romance Novels somehow parallel with the way women are portrayed in action movies escapism for men?
Danielle
Why do you think women feel that the writers of romance novels should emphasize love and tenderness rather than physical details? Do you think that they feel that they are lacking this in their own relationships?
Meredith
In "Reading the Romance," Radway makes the assertion that "the people who read romance novels are not attending to stories they themselves have created to interpret their own experiences" (49). As readers, do you believe it is possible to interpret anything without absorbing the material through our own "narratives"?
Zach
Do these romance novels play into our gender roles by creating a woman's dream? Are these situations cliche to the point where pop culture has defined what a woman's dream is?
Collin
"Romance reading is considered so enjoyable... that they deliberately work it into busy schedules." Do you think this idea is common with other pop cultural objects or unique to romance novels?
Melissa
Chapter 3 discusses how one of the most depressing things that can happen within a romance novel is an unhappy ending-- for the girls/women who read lots of romance novels does always having a happy give them false hope, is an unhappy ending needed every so often or more often?
Laquan
Do you think women find romance fiction enjoyable and useful because they lack such excitement and intimacy in their real life relationships?
Zach
When Radway states that publishers are trying to "reduce the disjunction between readers' desires and publishers' commodities" is this an example of pop culture responding to a consumer culture's ideals. Or has the industry set the pop culture standard with the majority of books, and the disjunction is only with a few novels and writers? In other words are people responding to the pop culture, or is pop culture responding to the people?
Suzanne
As stated on p.128, the romance in these novels "fails to explain convincingly exactly why and how each individual heroine is able to translate male reticence an cruelty into tenderness and devotion." In reality do females generally make such a translation and what about cruelty and reticence makes for the "ideal romance"?
Katie
The author says that "a woman must learn to trust her man and to believe that he loves her deeply even in the face of massive evidence to the contrary" (p. 149) do you think that this is the motivation behind the obsessive reading of the Smithton women?
Greg
By reading romance novels, are women able to bring those qualities and traits they read about how men should act within novel relationships to real life relationships between husband, wife, and family?
Marquis
What is the appeal of having women being powerful in just about every way to only be turned domesticated after meeting a male counter-part that is of greater power than her? Examples of this that remind me about this would be in Dragonball and Dragonball Z when the main characters wife was his equal in combat for a long time and very powerful. But following her defeat by the main character she married him and is only shown as a women of inferior skill to all new challengers.
Allison O.
Do you believe popular culture items like romance novels cause women to unrealistically fantasize about reaching a relationship utopia? If women know that these relationships are unrealistic, why do you think they feed into the fantasy?
Allison P.
How is romantic fiction simultaneously breaking down and reinforcing gender stereotypes for men and women?
Jarred
Is it safe to assume that ideal romance challenges the traditional gender roles?
Matt
The author imples that, in a 'good' romance novel, a heroine's destablized social identity must be restored by the hero. If this despiction of female characters as the weaker gender is common in good romance novels, why do the women find them empowering?
Margaret
The explinations of the heroine and heros of the novels all are steryotypical, society constructed. All the novels end in the "perfect union" and are not empowering to women at all. Should there be concern over the idea that women are taking comfort in such ideas?
Marie
In the romance novels Radway describes, the heroines are "always portrayed as unusually compassionate, kind, and understanding." Are such characteristics a true representation of women? Why don't the women in the novels have darker sides like their male counterparts? Do you think the readers feel that women really exude these traits, or are such traits there to simply stress the feminine side of the heroine?
Lauren
In Radway's book, she describes the main female character. She says, "the ideal heroine is differentiated from her more ordinary counterparts in other romance novels by unusual intelligence or by and extraordinarily fiery disposition." She furthers this idea by saying the "heroine's personality or activities with traits and behavior usually identified with men." Considering what Radway says about the females in romance novels, why are the women who read these novels the exact opposite? Why are these women, rather than liberating and individualizing themselves like the book characters, putting men ahead of them on the social scale of society?
Peter
Much attention is paid to the nurturing capabilities of the heroine and the abliity of the heroine to transform the male into an ideal figure. Could this be seen as the reader's desire to be nurtured and have someone care for her as the heroine cares for her male counterpart?
Meredith
While codifying the differences between "failed" and "ideal" romances, Radway notices that "the most striking characteristic of the ideal romance - its resolute focus on a single, developing relationship between heroine and hero - is noticeably absent from those judged to be failures by the Smithton women" (122). Considering the importance of "escaping" through romance literature, how does Radaway's finding advance the idea that fantasy and reality are inter-related?
Collin
Does the fact that there is a very clear "narrative structure of the ideal romance" show how unrealistic these romance novels really are?
Brandon
How do you think novels including homosexual relationships would change the complexity of the Smithton's group preferences when choosing their favorite? Would they no longer read romance novels or be able to accept it.
Chris
Radway discusses the prototype heroine in romance novels as pristine and angelic. Is this lofty image of what a woman should be just as dangerous as the airbrushed supermodels we see in magazines?