Becoming a feminist reader: Romance and re-vision

The romance narrative has vexed feminist thinkers for over two hundred years, provoking ardent responses that range from delight to disquiet to disdain. Highly conscious of the power romance has---in its many discursive forms---over women's psychic and social existence, their desires and expectations, feminist critics have been anxious to understand its enduring appeal; they are considerably less eager, however, to examine their own histories as readers of romance. And yet the feminist reader's construction of her critical persona, and of her determinedly conscious "re-visionary" practices, owes much to her romance reading double---the novel-gazing naif whose fantasies dim a more communal awareness. This dissertation reviews the uneasy bond between feminist criticism and romance reading, moving from the present critical scene to the past in order to recover buried strategies for romance reading and a hermeneutic history "becoming" a feminist.;Tracing the concerns of present-day romance critics to their two most influential and censorial predecessors---George Eliot and Mary Wollstonecraft, I excavate a lost language of romance criticism: recurrent and unexpected metaphors of ingestion and entrapment which tell the tale of an unconscious reader caught in a web of fantasy, irrationality, and vanity. But the critical views of both take on a kaleidoscopic complexity in their fiction, where the plots of romance reading heroines reflect a strong ambivalence about the narcissism fueling their ambitions and affirmations. Recasting the familiar objects and ends of romance in a more realistic light, the novels continue to perform a critical function, offering implicit instructions for reading romance.;Engaging more intimately and immediately with the form, and highlighting the critical power of collective readings, these two writers shed "new" light on the performance of feminist revisions. I have followed their lead, asking my colleagues, contemporary literary critics who claim the label "feminist," to rewrite a romance that compels their return. Blurring the boundaries between research subject and object, and reader/critic/writer, the revisionary readings with which I conclude demonstrate that feminist readers can learn much indeed by losing themselves in romance.