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Endless Rapture: Rape, Romance, and the Female Imagination
Demonstrates how feminism as an intellectual discipline has taken the wrong approach and examines the underlying passion that links feminists and readers of romance fiction
184 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1983
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November 11, 2023
This book is not what I was expecting. I thought it was a feminist book, but in one sense it is a critique of feminism. A legitimate critique, to my mind. I do have a few complaints, though.
I think Hazen undercuts her own argument by dismissing rape and sexual assaults as rare events in women's lives, because I've known boatloads of women who were raped or assaulted, and most of those who weren't knew someone who was. For some women, rape fantasies are a coping mechanism, something that started after the assault which wasn't part of their fantasy lives beforehand. That idea is completely off Hazen's radar because she doesn't recognize how common rape is.
She also severely underestimates the violence in pornography. Rape has been dead common in porn going back at least to the nineteenth century, and when her book came out the letters section of Penthouse Forum was full of tales of rape and so-called rough seduction. Something like 80% of porn now includes acts of violence -- it's just that a lot of the violence porn portrays has been normalized.
That said, I think Hazen makes many legitimate points. Some of them I agree with because it was my opinion going in, such as the parallels between male and female genre fiction:
"Men continue to read stories of courage in the adversity of overcoming evil, and women continue to read about courage in the adversity of overcoming men. ... Men enjoy a good cowboy or spy story. They identify with the hero, follow him through his conflict, suffer through his pain, and rejoice in his victory. Women enjoy a good romance for exactly the same reasons. They identify with the heroine, follow her through her conflicts, suffer through her pain, and rejoice in her victory.
"The difference between the cowboy/spy story and the romance is the object of the adversity. The male story requires an evil opponent, while the evil in a female story, the wrong that needs righting, is the disaffection of the male. The tension in both plots is similar, the structure the same, and the respective hero or heroine always wins in the end."
I had *not* thought things through this deeply, however:
"...women writers build their stories on a predictable list of generic complaints. They are:
"Bad men treat women badly.
"Good men treat women badly.
"Men do not understand that all woman are creatures of fine intelligence, character, and sensitivity.
"Life in any society debases women and fails to support their physical and emotional needs and desires.
"Men impose themselves on women’s bodies and inflict abuse and pain.
"One or a combination of these grievances is the tension and the reason for every romance novel and for most of the novels from the finer women writers. They are also the basic grievance of the feminist. "
That much-repeated point that genre romances are grappling with many of the same points as feminism is one I hadn't consciously considered, and although I haven't read all the feminist classics she's talking about, I think she is correct. She then goes on to explain why I enjoy a lot of feminist non-fiction, but find feminist fiction dreary and pointless; she comes to a different conclusion than I had come to on my own, and I find her explanation compelling.
While I generally agree with her that men and women are different, I see those differences as primarily statistical rather than absolute. To my mind, Hazen is too prone to sweeping statements about both genders:
"No woman has ever written an epic, fiction, or dramatic work eliciting critical acclaim or having historic significance whose subject is the imminent destruction of the world and whose goal is to prevent that destruction. Women are not terrified by the universe and its problems; there is every indication that their fears arise from imagining very different catastrophes. When women write about their horrors, the subject is the antithesis of love. It is not the terror of no love but the terror of a love that is evil, a lover who is satanic, a coupling that will result in disaster."
And:
"The male imagination dabbles in romantic love and is able to sustain interest in it perhaps through the length of a sonnet, but only rarely does it wallow farther. When it does, in literature or elsewhere, the purpose is not titillation: Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Cozzens’s By Love Possessed, and more recently Spencer’s Endless Love are completely immersed in love, but their purpose is to describe the disintegration of the human spirit through obsessive love."
For the most part in her book I think Hazen skews too hard toward "the great classics" and high literature in general, ignoring genre examples. In this passage, for example, she ignores the fact that Zane Grey's highly romantic westerns were often serialized in women's magazines, etc. But in claiming men don't find romantic love interesting, she also ignores a boatload of romantic literature from the nineteenth century, like Longfellow's Evangeline, which is in no sense describing "the disintegration of the human spirit through obsessive love."
I suspect literary men avoid the topic of romantic love nowadays because it isn't considered manly; through much of the nineteenth century, manliness was defined in a profoundly different way, and men were "allowed" to have a much deeper appreciation for the more domestic aspects of life without their masculinity being questioned. Hazen seems to have missed that.
And I quite like her claim that Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful reaches perfectly reasonable conclusions about men -- but has it completely backward for women. Burke's book has been on my monstrous "To Read" list for a while and maybe I should give it a higher priority.
I think Hazen undercuts her own argument by dismissing rape and sexual assaults as rare events in women's lives, because I've known boatloads of women who were raped or assaulted, and most of those who weren't knew someone who was. For some women, rape fantasies are a coping mechanism, something that started after the assault which wasn't part of their fantasy lives beforehand. That idea is completely off Hazen's radar because she doesn't recognize how common rape is.
She also severely underestimates the violence in pornography. Rape has been dead common in porn going back at least to the nineteenth century, and when her book came out the letters section of Penthouse Forum was full of tales of rape and so-called rough seduction. Something like 80% of porn now includes acts of violence -- it's just that a lot of the violence porn portrays has been normalized.
That said, I think Hazen makes many legitimate points. Some of them I agree with because it was my opinion going in, such as the parallels between male and female genre fiction:
"Men continue to read stories of courage in the adversity of overcoming evil, and women continue to read about courage in the adversity of overcoming men. ... Men enjoy a good cowboy or spy story. They identify with the hero, follow him through his conflict, suffer through his pain, and rejoice in his victory. Women enjoy a good romance for exactly the same reasons. They identify with the heroine, follow her through her conflicts, suffer through her pain, and rejoice in her victory.
"The difference between the cowboy/spy story and the romance is the object of the adversity. The male story requires an evil opponent, while the evil in a female story, the wrong that needs righting, is the disaffection of the male. The tension in both plots is similar, the structure the same, and the respective hero or heroine always wins in the end."
I had *not* thought things through this deeply, however:
"...women writers build their stories on a predictable list of generic complaints. They are:
"Bad men treat women badly.
"Good men treat women badly.
"Men do not understand that all woman are creatures of fine intelligence, character, and sensitivity.
"Life in any society debases women and fails to support their physical and emotional needs and desires.
"Men impose themselves on women’s bodies and inflict abuse and pain.
"One or a combination of these grievances is the tension and the reason for every romance novel and for most of the novels from the finer women writers. They are also the basic grievance of the feminist. "
That much-repeated point that genre romances are grappling with many of the same points as feminism is one I hadn't consciously considered, and although I haven't read all the feminist classics she's talking about, I think she is correct. She then goes on to explain why I enjoy a lot of feminist non-fiction, but find feminist fiction dreary and pointless; she comes to a different conclusion than I had come to on my own, and I find her explanation compelling.
While I generally agree with her that men and women are different, I see those differences as primarily statistical rather than absolute. To my mind, Hazen is too prone to sweeping statements about both genders:
"No woman has ever written an epic, fiction, or dramatic work eliciting critical acclaim or having historic significance whose subject is the imminent destruction of the world and whose goal is to prevent that destruction. Women are not terrified by the universe and its problems; there is every indication that their fears arise from imagining very different catastrophes. When women write about their horrors, the subject is the antithesis of love. It is not the terror of no love but the terror of a love that is evil, a lover who is satanic, a coupling that will result in disaster."
And:
"The male imagination dabbles in romantic love and is able to sustain interest in it perhaps through the length of a sonnet, but only rarely does it wallow farther. When it does, in literature or elsewhere, the purpose is not titillation: Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Cozzens’s By Love Possessed, and more recently Spencer’s Endless Love are completely immersed in love, but their purpose is to describe the disintegration of the human spirit through obsessive love."
For the most part in her book I think Hazen skews too hard toward "the great classics" and high literature in general, ignoring genre examples. In this passage, for example, she ignores the fact that Zane Grey's highly romantic westerns were often serialized in women's magazines, etc. But in claiming men don't find romantic love interesting, she also ignores a boatload of romantic literature from the nineteenth century, like Longfellow's Evangeline, which is in no sense describing "the disintegration of the human spirit through obsessive love."
I suspect literary men avoid the topic of romantic love nowadays because it isn't considered manly; through much of the nineteenth century, manliness was defined in a profoundly different way, and men were "allowed" to have a much deeper appreciation for the more domestic aspects of life without their masculinity being questioned. Hazen seems to have missed that.
And I quite like her claim that Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful reaches perfectly reasonable conclusions about men -- but has it completely backward for women. Burke's book has been on my monstrous "To Read" list for a while and maybe I should give it a higher priority.
January 6, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews