ABSTRACT
To understand the ‘ritual’ which romances repeatedly perform, Radway mobilises Nancy Chodorow’s analysis of feminine individuation, which argues that women form identities dependent on tender relationship, modelled on the infant’s relation to the mother; but that males, to establish their distinct gender, reject such dependence. This produces an essential mis-match between the qualities women need in intimate relationships and the qualities men can supply: a lack which Radway, using a Proppian analysis, finds ‘mythically’ supplied in the basic story of fulfilling heterosexual love which romances continually repeat. Radway also identifies patriarchy’s insistence that women can only find fulfilment in monogamous relations with men, and sees romances, in their aspect as ‘realistic novels’, reinforcing that message.
