Book Review: Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels

Abstract

Thrill of Chaste: The Allure of Romance Novels. By Valerie Weaver-Zercher. Young Center Books in Anabaptist & Pietist Studies, ed. Donald B. Kraybill. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. xvii + 315. ISBN 978-1-4214-0890-3. $50.00 he. ISBN 978-1-4214-0891-0. $24.95. In flipping through a Christian mail-order gift catalog this past summer I was startled to find, among cotton tunics, costume jewelry, and prayerful plaques, a sizeable number of romance novels featuring heroines. One or two forays into fascinating cultural landscape of would have been unsurprising, but book covers graced by demure young women in white prayer kapps popped up on page after page. Intrigued into some impromptu statistical analysis, I found that nearly half of romance novels in catalog, fifteen out of thirty-three, were Amish-inspired. Two of twelve cookbooks, moreover, featured and Mennonite cuisine. Here was new territory for scholar of popular culture, and I lay aside catalog with a desire to explore its meaning. Fortunately, editor and writer Valerie Weaver-Zercher has paved way with Thrill of Chaste, first scholarly monograph to analyze what she terms the marriage of inspirational fiction and and its offspring, Amish romance (xii). Weaver-Zercher's engaging study builds on two strains of scholarship: analyses of contemporary evangelical fiction by scholars of religion and popular literature such as Lynn S. Neal, Anita Gandolfo, and Pamela Regis, and cultural studies of Amish, a field that sociologist John A. Hostetler pioneered in mid-twentieth century. Weaver-Zercher's analysis incorporates work of several of Hostetler's academic descendents, including linguistic anthropologist Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, sociologist Donald B. Kraybill (series editor), and historian David L. Weaver-Zercher, author's husband. Her critical method combines cultural criticism with transactional reading theory. Weaver-Zercher, however, also writes from her own experience. She readily acknowledges her enjoyment of romances and is equally transparent about her religious affiliation (she and her husband belong to Mennonite Church). In composing her study, Weaver-Zercher elected to blend her location into her analysis and to make her engagement with her subject matter a story in itself. In this she succeeds very well, for resulting work of narrative scholarship has a liveliness that, without sacrificing scholarly rigor, makes it accessible to interested lay readers (xiii). Despite allure that romance holds for her, Weaver-Zercher maintains a critical distance from her subject. Thrill of Chaste is divided into ten chapters and roughly three parts. In chapters 1-3, Weaver-Zercher sets stage by examining sudden rise of romance novel to popularity. Chapters 4-7 examine various social and cultural functions genre plays in lives of both producers and readers, while chapters 8-9 assess reactions of themselves. Chapter 10, which serves as conclusion, speculates on future of genre. The romance novel, as Weaver-Zercher presents it in chapter 1, is less than two decades old. The trend began with publication of Beverly Lewis' The Shunning in 1997, but grew exponentially beginning in 2008. The author provides a chart showing number of titles published roughly doubling every year between 2008 and 2012, while noting that three most popular writers, Lewis, Wanda Brunstetter, and Cindy Woodsmall, have sold a combined total of twenty-four million books (5). While acknowledging that 2008 recession may have increased public interest in simplicity, Weaver-Zercher attributes striking popularity of romance mainly to its capacity to provide an antidote to two aspects of contemporary life that many readers find oppressive, namely, hypermodernity (excessive speed and intensity) and hypersexualization. …