Barbelith Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing > Why is everyone so down on romance?

So OK, there's a really good bit in Freud's Creative Writers and Day-dreaming where he talks about "The Hero Romance". Essentially he talks about those novels or narratives where the heroic figure performs death-defying stunts, drives fast cars, is extremely cool and gets all the women. He then points out how clearly these things are identical to day-dreaming activities and personal conscious fantasies of wanting to perform all these actions yourself. He strips them down to fantasies of power and fantasies about sex and suggests that we use these books to identify with the main characters in pretty unsophisticated ways and get some instinctual satisfaction from pretending that we were in their places. That - basically - there's little difference between reading a book of this kind and being a child playing superheroes in the garden.

Now, interestingly, he doesn't talk about women or the pure romance genre but I imagine if he did he'd probably talk about it in terms of it being the female analogue to the more masculine Bond-ish fantasy structure. More interestingly - and in a gloriously Freudianesque touch - he both dismisses these kinds of books (both for men and women) as kind of blandly functional while also declaring them the purest expression of the most simple desires and hence (effectively) the basic foundations of all literature.

Now I find that lot of stuff interesting enough in and of itself, but it occurs to me - with regards to the question about women not having trouble with male authors - that there might be another connection going on with Screen theory and theories of the 'male gaze' that Laura Mulvey used a lot - particularly her theory was that the act of looking - the scopophilic act was heavily gendered masculine and that (if I understand it correctly) mediated looking, such as in films and in other narratives where somewhere there's an 'author' often meant that women were more often than not forced to identify with the male protagonists in these dramas, locating themselves with the male fantasy figure as he goes around conquering other women. Whether that remains the case (or whether I've given a ludicrously bastardised view of the debate) is open for debate, but it might go some way to explain why men now find the experience more disconcerting. It could also be part of the same process that means that women can wear male clothes without feeling less feminine but men who wear feminine clothes are ludicrous or debased - the idea that a man would identify with a romantically submissive woman could simply be too ego-threatening.