Romantic Narrative Research Articles

Narratives and the romantic genre in IR: dominant and marginalized stories of Arab Rebellion in Libya

The article shows how the rebellion against Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 was romanticized in the British newspaper media and among the political elite. Combining insights from literary studies and employing a method of narrative analysis which focuses on the elements of setting, characterization and emplotment, it illustrates the process of narrative romanticization by emphasizing story elements which constitute the rebellion in an emotional setting in which the rebel is characterized as a young and brave underdog fighting against a brutal and oppressive regime for an ideal such as democracy, freedom and a better future. While romantic narratives were dominant in the discourse on Libya at the time, other less positive narratives which for example emphasize human right violations by rebels were marginalized through a strategy of silencing, denial, ridicule and justification. While the dominance of romantic narratives of rebellion aided the legitimation of British military intervention, the marginalization of negative counter-narratives contributed to the ignorance of extremism and set a bad precedent for the role of human rights in post-conflict Libya.

"Imperfect Notices": The 1820 Continental Journal of Mary Wordsworth

Through a close reading of Mary Wordsworth’s 1820 Continental travel journal, this essay challenges her peripheral status in studies of the Wordsworth writing circle. It offers a formalist analysis of the text, demonstrating the qualities and aspects of Mary’s writing that contribute to the importance of her journal in relation to the other literary endeavors of the tour. Mary’s writing, with its elliptical style and panoramic descriptions, reveals a sophisticated and imaginatively creative mind, one that was an equal participant in the coterie of the tour’s writers, including Henry Crabb Robinson and Dorothy Wordsworth. This essay seeks to free the journal from its critical relegation to a mere resource for William Wordsworth’s Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, instead approaching the journal on its own terms. The analysis calls for further consideration of Mary’s journals in relation to contexts of travel writing, romantic narrative, and women’s writing

Upaństwowianie romantyzmu” w kinie II RP. O „Panu Tadeuszu” w reżyserii Ryszarda Ordyńskiego

The article concerns the film Pan Tadeusz (1928) by Ryszard Ordyński, and issues related to the adaptation process and political reception of Mickiewicz’s artwork. In the first part of the text, the author discusses the application of 19th-century romantic ideas by the Sanacja authorities as part of their historical policy. The cult of Romanticism was realized on many levels, including everyday life as well as literature, art and journalism. Its functioning was conditioned by the existence of a holistic romantic narrative and the possibilities it brought in terms of building the continuity of tradition in social awareness. These possibilities resulted from the patriotic staffage, which over time surrounded the work of romantic bards. The second part of the text describes the tendencies dominating in Polish cinema at that time, the most important of which are the politicisation and the „Upaństwowienie romantyzmu” w kinie II RP domination of love themes. These directions influenced the final shape of the films made in the 1920s. Afterwards, R. Ordyński’s film was presented, taking into account the political and cultural background mentioned above. The production of the picture aroused great interest among the public opinion and reviewers. The subject of discussion at that time was fidelity of the film adaptation to the literary prototype. In the article, Pan Tadeusz was presented as an example of an artwork committed to ideology. The screen trivialization of the content of Mickiewicz’s poem took place at the level of creation of a world that was simplified and devoid of romantic ambivalence, as well as in meticulous presenting details at the cost of more significant elements of the work, and intentional lowering of the level of presented content. In this way, Pan Tadeusz was a commercial undertaking, and at the same time it participated in the process of a kind of social engineering. It was a tool for building national consciousness in a reborn Polish state and, in a way, for reigning souls.

Mucedorus: The Last Ludic Playbook, the First Stage Arcadia

ABSTRACTThis article argues that two seemingly contradictory factors contributed to and sustained the success of the anonymous Elizabethan play Mucedorus (c. 1590; pub. 1598). First, that both the initial composition of Mucedorus and its Jacobean revival were driven in part by the popularity of its source, Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Second, the playbook's invitation to amateur playing allowed its romance narrative to be adopted and repurposed by diverse social groups. These two factors combined to create something of a paradox, suggesting that Mucedorus was both open to all yet iconographically connected to an elite author's popular text. This study will argue that Mucedorus pioneered the fashion for “continuations” or adaptations of the famously unfinished Arcadia, and one element of its success in print was its presentation as an affordable and performable version of Sidney's elite work. The Jacobean revival of Mucedorus by the King's Men is thus evidence of a strategy of engagement with the Arcadia designed to please the new Stuart monarchs. This association with the monarchy in part determined the cultural functions of the Arcadia and Mucedorus through the Interregnum to the close of the seventeenth century.

The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature. Suzanne M. Edwards. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xv+193.

<i>The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature</i>. Suzanne M. Edwards. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xv+193.

The Maiden Switch: New Possibilities for Understanding Japanese Shōjo Manga (Girls’ Comics)

This paper aims to expand the scope of studies of Japanese shōjo manga (girls’ comics) by examining early 1980s and 1990s shōjo manga that were primarily targeted at the youngest band of readers, stories with early adolescent heroines in light, romantic, and fairytale-like narratives. These have been paid comparatively little scholarly attention thus far compared with texts that enact more explicit gender subversion, such as stories that feature same-sex male love and cross-dressed fighting girls. We argue, however, that the “maidenesque” (otomechikku) subgenres enact complex and fascinating versions of girlhood. Furthermore, we propose that these neglected manga benefit especially from an analysis that prioritises the visual dimensions of shōjo manga. We apply these suggestions to our analysis of fashion and aesthetic in heretofore neglected “maidenesque” works by Takase Ryō. Rather than simply maintaining conservative norms of femininity and heterosexual romance, these works explore gender issues within the “safe” trappings of girlishness. Examining the visual and textual dimensions of such works is vital for a more accurate picture of girlhood and gender as it is more broadly imagined in shōjo manga.

Murders in Shocking Pink: Women, Love and Desire in Rossana Campo’s Noir Fiction

This article analyzes Rossana Campo’s Mentre la mia bella dorme (1999), Duro come l’amore (2005) and Il posto delle donne (2013) in the context of Campo’s work in general, showing how her use of crime genre conventions is specifically designed to reveal flaws and pitfalls inherent in romance narratives. By establishing a complex dialogue between noir and rosa, and by offsetting both traditions with female protagonists who question in different ways the heterosexual paradigm, Campo’s crime novels occupy a unique place in her production, especially in regard to the representation of female desire.

Amores oblicuos sobre paisaje en guerra: el colaboracionismo en Suite francesa de Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky traza uno de los primeros testimonios literarios de la Segunda Guerra Mundial pues el tempo novelesco es contiguo a los acontecimientos de la historia simultánea. La versión cinematográfica reciente del bestseller (Saul Dibb, 2015) atiende a uno de los dos relatos conservados, Dolce, sobre la primera ocupación alemana de Francia en 1940. Alejada de la narración romántica, cinta y relato narrativo convocan un fresco descriptivo –aval del estilo minucioso de la autora– que descubre las guerras íntimas y minúsculas subsumidas en el gran decorado del conflicto internacional, en las que pespuntan la crueldad, la muerte y la sinrazón predecibles en continuidad con la valentía, la solidaridad y la entereza moral improbables. De las dos partes conservadas, la primera (Tempestad en junio) se articula sobre cuadros narrativos que fijan la visión en la hecatombe; la segunda, Dulce, es una novela que ahonda en las diversas formas de colaboracionismo.

Romancing the American Dream: The Coen Brothers' Raising Arizona

ABSTRACT Raising Arizona (1987), written, directed, and produced by Joel and Ethan Coen, draws on various conventions of well-established film genres. Although the Coens employ an array of generic elements—including the western, noir, and road films—it is the romantic comedy that provides coherence and drives the film. This article explores Raising Arizona in a sustained context of romantic comedy formula and its relationship to popular notions of the American Dream. It argues for viewing the film as two distinct but interrelated romantic comedy narratives. A close reading of the film in this context reveals a conscious and sustained manipulation of the genre and demonstrates that Raising Arizona is a more coherent and challenging film than viewers may have considered.

Between Friends

The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler’s 1946 film about three World War II veterans returning home to a small Midwestern town, has long been notable for its frank treatment of wartime trauma, disability, and the personal and cultural crises of masculinity precipitated by the end of the war. At a moment when disability studies has gained a firm foothold in the academy, the article returns to this touchstone text to reconsider the film’s staging of the disabled male body. The article complicates the equation of disability with castration implicit in readings of masculinity and heterosexuality in the film’s rehabilitation narratives by considering the role of friendship in the film’s depiction of masculinity and disability. The argument is that to focus on heterosexual romance in The Best Years of Our Lives is to tell only half the story; the narrative of homosocial friendship between Al, Fred, and Homer is equally important to their reintegration into the civilian world. Friendship provides an ameliorative space outside the narratives of heterosexual romance that structure the film’s logic of rehabilitation, and does not demand elision of the war’s traumas and the traces, visible and invisible, that it leaves behind.

Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature by Lee Manion

Reviewed by: Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature by Lee Manion Mimi Ensley Lee Manion. Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. ix, 306; $98.00. In his 1395 Epistre au Roi Richart, Philippe de Mézières urges the English and the French to cooperate in order to recover the Holy Land and spread the teachings of Christianity in the East. In making his appeal, Philippe turns to figures made famous by romance, telling Richard II and Charles VI "one of you [will] be the noble Roland and the other the [End Page 363] very perfect Oliver … one of you may imitate the very valiant … Charlemagne and the other that very bold … King Arthur, when you fight against the enemies of the Faith" (116). In Philippe's letter, the discourses of chivalric fiction bleed into the political and religious concerns of the contemporary world. Throughout Narrating the Crusades, Lee Manion traces similar interactions between romance narratives and the historical contexts in which they were read and purposed to ideological ends. Manion uncovers the topical resonances of a group of texts that he labels "crusading romances," a genre whose contours coalesce over the course of his book. Certainly, the problem of genre is not an unusual concern for a scholar of medieval romance, but Manion's focus on a subcategory of romance, rather than on the genre as a whole, opens up new associations among texts not often read in conjunction with one another. Of obvious interest to historians and literary scholars, medievalists and early modernists, Manion's book demonstrates the value of using literary texts, and especially romance, in the study of the crusades, and of viewing the crusades as a fruitful context for cultural production. While scholars have previously recognized that military-focused romances such as The Siege of Jerusalem are relevant to crusading history, Manion extends the definition of the "crusading romance" to include texts that exhibit one or more of the features that he argues are central to "crusading discourse"—including less-than-obvious documents such as Philippe's Epistre. The defining tropes of crusading discourse include: imagery of the cross, military campaigns against non-Christians, and pilgrimages undertaken in conjunction with combat. These features need not all appear in a given text for it to be considered a "crusading romance," a subgenre that Manion argues is unified by a rhetorical emphasis on "loss and recovery"—both territorial and salvational. In the crusading romances, Manion claims, the conflict of the narrative focuses on "reconquest," a trope encompassing both "the recovery of legitimate possessions for Christendom as well as the individual's 'recovery' of a state free from sin" (9). Thus, Sir Isumbras, with its story of one knight's penitential pilgrimage, and The Sowdone of Babylone, with its Christian military campaigns, can be understood as part of the same tradition. Narrating the Crusades proceeds chronologically, tracing the development of the "crusading romance" alongside the equally active evolution of crusading from the early fourteenth century through the post-Reformation period. Although much of his study focuses on romances [End Page 364] heretofore not understood within a crusading context, Manion begins with Richard Coeur de Lion, a military-focused account of Richard I's participation in the Third Crusade. Manion's intervention lies in his reading of Richard as an "anti-nationalist" text. While the trend in Richard scholarship—evident in the work of Thorlac Turville-Petre, Geraldine Heng, and others—has been to see the romance as an early attempt to craft an English national identity, Manion highlights Richard's interest in cross-cultural alliances. Additionally, his reading of Richard is distinguished from recent analyses that have foregrounded the more fantastic elements of the narrative, such as Richard's cannibalism or his demonic mother's inability to receive the Eucharist. Instead, Manion traces a lexicon of "associational forms" in the poem—words such as "frend" or "felawrade"—which, he argues, serve to highlight the "diverse, non-nationalistic" army privileged in the romance (21, 41). Throughout, Manion questions a teleological perspective...

Ma Xianglan and Wang Zhideng Onstage and Offstage: Rethinking the Romance of a Courtesan Theatre in Ming-Qing China

Ma Xianglan and her literati partner Wang Zhideng are remembered as one of the late Ming romantic pairs between a faithful courtesan and her talented scholar. Many Ming-Qing writers wrote about the Ma-Wang romance, and yet Ma Xianglan’s voice is missing from her stories. This essay reconsiders the romance by investigating the relationships between literary and theatrical representations and their social contexts. It focuses on Ma Xianglan’s performance tour to Suzhou in 1604. Most historical sources treat this tour as Ma’s celebration of Wang’s seventieth birthday and thus evidence of Ma’s faithful love for Wang. This essay excavates less-circulated sources and examines the competing narratives of multiple literati writers and of Ma Xianglan herself. By revealing the contradictions in the narratives of the Ma-Wang romance, this study inquires into a specific historical context, the Longwan era (1570–1620), when the story of Ma and Wang unfolded. It asks how the romance served as a vehicle in cultural and commercial networking during the Longwan era and in the construction of Ming loyalism in the Ming-Qing transition.

“To Banter the Age”: Sir William Phips and the Wonders of the Modern World

“To Banter the Age”Sir William Phips and the Wonders of the Modern World Joe Conway (bio) Upon William Phips’s return to London from his successful 1687 treasure-hunting expedition to the Caribbean, a broadside titled “An Exact and Perfect Relation” appeared in print to tell the history of this remarkable man and his seemingly magic voyage. The “Relation” claimed that the story of the New Englander and his crew’s exploits, financed by a group of investors led by the Duke of Albemarle, was one “to surmount belief it self ” (1). Indeed, the broadside’s insistence to its potentially incredulous readers that its words constituted “An Exact and Perfect Relation” of true events, howsoever “wonderful,” parallels the recounting within the text of the “Relation” of the serial efforts of Phips to convince Charles II, James II, Albemarle, and other capitalists to overlook the “improbability of the Adventure” and finance it (1). No wonder many balked at funding Phips’s project, and “lookt upon [it] as a Chimera” (1). Claiming to know the specific whereabouts of a long-lost Spanish vessel sunk forty years prior off the coast of Hispaniola, Phips proposed to recover the gold and silver from the bottom of the sea and bring it back to England. Who, the broadside asks, would lend credence (or cash) to such a scheme? “For certainly,” it continues, “to tell Mankind of taking up the Cargo of above 40 years Wreck in full Sea 17 fathoms from any Shoar in nine Fathom Water, would be thought to banter the Age, and turn the same to ridicule” (1). Nevertheless, Captain Phips succeeded, bringing back £250,000 in treasure (mostly silver), a feat for which James II knighted him. Always in desperate need of hard money, the king welcomed an influx of precious metals into his realm. Meanwhile, the public was sent buzzing over Phips’s success that promised, in the broadside’s words, to “fill our Pockets with Coyn, as well as our Ears with astonishment” (1). As this last line indicates, the narrative of Phips’s success stimulated [End Page 271] both public finance and public fantasy. Economic historian Christine MacLeod has shown that the wide publicity received by Phips’s voyage sparked an investment bubble in diving-engine patents throughout the decade of the 1690s (558). People, as one commentator noted, were “tickled in the ear with the vast Wealth of Gold and Silver that should be taken out of the Sea” (Angliae 21). The story’s ability to prompt what the broadside alternately calls “astonishment” and “wonder” in its readers simultaneously “tickled” and troubled many of the authors who wrote about the culture of irrational exuberance that followed in the wake of Phips’s sensational return. Indeed as I will argue in this essay, the affective excess produced out of the textual event that Daniel Defoe called “Phips his Wreck-Voyage” (16) ultimately compelled its many commentators across the Anglo-Atlantic empire of letters to confront the limits of those secular, rational, and scientific discourses that prevailed in the Enlightenment public sphere. If, as many cultural critics have noted, what distinguishes secular modernity is the diminished feeling of enchantment that pervades it, Phips’s story, so often accompanied by literary tropes borrowed from the magic narratives of romance, seems to recall events belonging to more archaic times (the broadside, for example, compares his actions to a scene out of The Odyssey [2]). This is so, even though the obscurely born, unbaptized, and unlettered Phips’s skillful negotiation of circum-Atlantic information and finance networks marked him as a mobile social actor whose secular path through material achievement to social prestige might serve as the very model of a modern life history. The cognitive dislocation that Phips often produced in those contemporaries who wrote about him seems to derive from this liminal position he held in the 1690s Anglo-American imaginary. Phips: both a sign of the present and a spirit from the past. Phips’s success, while celebrated throughout the 1690s Atlantic world, had a direct biographical influence on the three writers I will consider here: Daniel Defoe, Cotton Mather, and Hans Sloane. Of the three, Mather’s...

A Translation from German into English of Joseph von Eichendorff's Romantic Novel Ahnung und Gegenwart (1815) by Joseph von Eichendorff

Reviewed by: A Translation from German into English of Joseph von Eichendorff's Romantic Novel Ahnung und Gegenwart (1815) by Joseph von Eichendorff Erlis Wickersham Joseph von Eichendorff. A Translation from German into English of Joseph von Eichendorff's Romantic Novel Ahnung und Gegenwart (1815). Ed. and trans. Dennis F. Mahoney and Maria A. Mahoney. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2015. 426 pp. It is a notable event for students of Romanticism and general readers alike that renowned scholars Dennis F. Mahoney and Maria A. Mahoney have prepared the first English translation of Ahnung und Gegenwart (1815). Indeed, it is the first translation of this unjustly neglected novel into any language at all. The authors hope that this groundbreaking example of a late Romantic narrative with its ethereal and musical poetic inclusions will serve as a text for college classes in several disciplines while opening the way for specialists in comparative literature and other humanities or social sciences to integrate consideration of this novel into their scholarship. The sturdy paperback format of this book with its attractive youthful photograph of Eichendorff is both practical and reasonably priced. It offers a competent introduction consisting of a biography and a welcome overview of influences on his life and work. There are also accurate assessments of his place in the Romantic era and modern scholarship. Finally, the authors offer interpretations of salient aspects of the text to guide general readers as they approach an unfamiliar story. The authors provide informative notes throughout the text. They appear on the pages where individual items need elucidation rather than at the end of the book. This benefits general readers who may find endnotes cumbersome. It also tends to minimize intrusion on the narrative flow. Notes sometimes refer to secondary works pertinent to a particular passage. They serve the function of a selected bibliography and do not intrude on the translators' intention to provide an approachable story for contemporary readers. In a literary work of this kind a translator must decide the vexing question of whether to render the familiar poetry in its original form or to give prose translations. Happily for future readers, the Mahoneys successfully retain the original spirit of Eichendorff's language while keeping the English poetic lines as close to the original as possible. Here is one of many lovely examples: "Oh valleys wide, oh heights / Oh forest green so fair, / In pains and my delights / I found sweet [End Page 297] refuge there" (145). The German reads: "O Täler weit, o Höhen / O schöner, grüner Wald / Du meiner Lust und Wehen / Andächtiger Aufenthalt." Another example is "Mild air comes down blue and flowing / Springtime, springtime it must be" (165), and, in German, "Laue Luft kommt blau geflossen, / Frühling, Frühling soll es sein." When the translators depart from the poetic form of a poem, as they do in the ballad "Der Reitersmann," they explain their rationale: "The following long ballad … has an 'ABAB' rhyme scheme with an irregular rhythm. As with other long ballads within the novel, we have elected to concentrate on the story line, with rhymes for the second and fourth lines, while following Eichendorff's original rhythm as far as possible" (320). The task of translating Eichendorff is complicated not just by the great familiarity of his language but also by the disarmingly simple emotions and phraseology of the original. Indeed, the poetry is so musical that composers have always been attracted to it. Many Germans think of these poems as folk songs rather than the achievement of one person. Another difficulty of translation concerns the rendering of the novel's title into English, which the translators neatly sidestep by keeping the original German. While the notes that accompany the narrative elucidate the action, they also provide comparisons to other literary works, and these can be very helpful. To illustrate the scope of such notes, here is a straightforward example from chapter 14. Friedrich is looking at "a collection of old paintings that he had only recently purchased and … had planned to enjoy" (232). One of them is a surprisingly vivid depiction of Genevieve: "and the sun shines splendidly, everything making music in...

Happily Ever After for Whom? Blackness and Disability in Romance Narratives

Happily Ever After for Whom? Blackness and Disability in Romance Narratives

Revisionary Historical Metatext or 'Good Mills and Boon'?: Gender, Genre, and Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl

In recent decades, literary critics have become increasingly interested in the ways that contemporary historical novels are used to write “history from below.” In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1978), Adrienne Rich describes a process she calls “re-visioning,” a process that is defined as “looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (35). Many female authors of contemporary historical novels engage in exactly this process, looking back in time and reinserting the histories of women into the dominant narrative of history in which they are often excluded or marginalized. Novelists like Philippa Gregory, Diana Gabaldon, and Tracy Chevalier have made feminist politics clearly visible in their bestselling historical novels. And yet, for all their potential and visible disruptions of patriarchal ideology, many of these popular novels also make use of literary archetypes, tropes, and narrative patterns that reinstate hegemonic ideologies about individual identity and social structure. Using Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) as a case study, this paper argues that popular women’s historical novels often exist in tension between the pulls of revisionary feminist historiography and the popular romance narrative.

Tokyo Tower and Tokyo Skytree: History and Symbolism in Contemporary Japan

The Tokyo Tower and the Tokyo Skytree are the two most recognizable landmarks on the skyline of Japan’s capital. By means of a documental revision, a textual interpretative analysis of media contents, participant observation and unstructured interviews, the objective of this article is to identify the development of these towers as symbols of Tokyo and Japan. It is found that, with more than half a century of existence, the Tokyo Tower represents the successful postwar Japanese society, while in just five years the Tokyo Skytree has become a symbol of Japanese national spirit and resilience in an era of multiple crises. Both broadcasting towers are regularly portrayed in Japanese media linked to narratives of romance, dreams, family and community. Also, enhanced by their special lightening at night, they stand as attractive poles for locals and visitors to choose them as background in relevant events in their lives.

English

Time is a major theme in John Green's young adult and romantic novel, The Fault in our Stars (2012). Green spent ten years trying to write the book. Even though Hazel and Gus experience typical teenage problems, as well as extreme physical hardships and psychological conflicts due to their cancer disease, they still manage to have a great time together. They fall in love with one another, meet their favorite author, and share a common interest in reading books. They decide to live a life that could be short overflowing with content, notwithstanding their impending death, breathing tubes and worried parents. In this paper, I choose to approach the notion of time that passes in the narrative and how it plays out through the structure of TFIOS based on the narrative theory of time by Paul Ricoeur in his book Narrative and Time (1984). Ricoeur’s 'unfolding representative stages' are called threefold mimesis—prefiguration (pre-understanding), configuration (emplotment), and refiguration (embedded contextuality)—all three are used to create a triadic bridge model of structural relations between narrative and time. However, it is Green himself who offers the greatest insight into his work. Through his readings, writings, the Vlogbrothers channel and interviews, he provides the readers with tools to share his imaginative vision and empathetic character portrayals. A major influence on the development of TFIOS was Esther Earl, a concrete case of a girl who died of cancer at the age of 16. The structural time devices in TFIOS are not always linear, but also synoptic conveying the narrative formations of time. Elements like flashbacks and flashforwards are employed. Green deals with time as duration, both chronological and psychological, the time it takes a reader to actually read and time as an organizational device. Time is also a subject both Green and the characters speculate about, particularly in their fear of oblivion and their need to be remembered after death. The author presents how time passes and how a disease like cancer affects young adolescents in real life. Key words: 21st-Century young adult literature, romantic narrative, time, John Green, TFIOS, life and death, cancer disease, teenage issues.

The Postwar Medicalization of Planning: Planned Parenthood’s Conservative Comic, Escape from Fear

ABSTRACTIn light of recent criticism targeting Planned Parenthood, this essay turns to Planned Parenthood’s 1956 comic book, Escape from Fear, as a rich historical text for considering the implications underlying the negotiation of ideological positions in the context of an increasingly conservative society. In this case study, I contend that this Planned Parenthood comic book uses a generically familiar romance narrative in ways appealing to conservative readers and situating birth control as a normative part of the ideal American <family>. However, beyond normalizing white, middle-class, heterosexual, married women’s use of Planned Parenthood resources, this domestication of contraception also subtly masked the normalization of professionalized medicine within the <family>. While contemporary readers should be wary of this narrative’s medicalization of women’s bodies, the comic book’s subtle representation of expanded female autonomy and authority also signals how women’s health organizations might consider advancing feminist politics in a contemporary conservative era.

Strategies for Media Reform: International Perspectives

Strategies for Media Reform: International Perspectives