The Role of Romance Literature in the Education of the Adolescent Female

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to combine my love of reading with my interest in education. My exploration of romance literature and its popular appeal is based on a developmental "bibliotherapy" approach to reading. Focusing on the adolescent girl in her identity crisis, I examine potential benefits and pitfalls that romance reading might hold for her as she grows toward an independent maturity and becomes involved in intimate relationships. Although it includes classroom observations, my project is not a data-based survey of adolescent girls and their reading habits; rather, it is a theoretical exploration of moral and pedagogical concerns which I have encountered through my experiences with teaching and reading. As such, it deals with issues of gender and genre and the role of the educator in the promotion of relevant texts during the transition years of adolescence. I rely on several eighteenth-century works--Radcliffe's popular gothic romance and Austen's satire of that genre (though Austen's novel, too, contains a moving romance); on Rousseau's Emile and Gilligan's feminist theories--to develop my thesis that romance reading can provide a landscape for sublimation and delay of early sexual experience; and that it is the educator's role to guide young girls in their reading to recognize the dangers of reification and to lead them toward a stronger sense of self.