When I was an adolescent, I used to steal my grandmother’s romance novels. While almost none of the particular storylines have stayed with me, the habit and genre sensibility this practice bequeathed to me have. My stealthy, surreptitious reading was the definition of a guilty pleasure I thought known only to me.
As I would come to learn years later, my actions replicated the gestation and genesis of romance readers everywhere. Similar stories abound in the romance reading community, where readers and writers recount formative secret encounters with another reader’s stash of books, usually a mother, grandmother, sister, or female cousin (“About The Smart Bitches,” Smart Bitches Trashy Books blog, https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/about/). The familiar recital of what I term "juvenile stash theft" establishes the practice as a critical consideration for the genre, discursively implicating ethics in ways unexpected and often unseen.
Popular romance novels are often superficially judged and dismissed by a cursory narrative reading; here, I take a book historical approach that attends to the book as material object, with materiality understood as the condition for narrative form. What I call romance readers’ “stash stories”—stories of thieving, taking, hiding, sharing, reading, and re-reading material often deemed illicit, un-literary, age-inappropriate, pornographic, or bad taste—offer accounts of moral formation. I argue that stash stories record a countercultural ethics that maps out, through romance reading, what womanist ethicist Katie Cannon describes as women’s unseen moral agency (Cannon 1989; Keri Day 2016).
This paper analyzes the idiom of stash theft in Black romance readers’ stories by connecting it to womanism’s etymological origin (“womanish” from the Black vernacular, meaning “acting grown”; Alice Walker 1983) and to Cannon’s foundational womanist virtue ethics (Cannon 1989). Womanishness infuses many Black readers’ stash stories of their behavior as girls or young women, where, through stash theft and other means, they assert themselves and act in a womanish way with characteristic boldness, audacity, courage, and willfulness. I submit that womanish behavior is an embodied form of Black girls’ moral reasoning. This behavior involves “power analyses, biotextual specificity, and embodied mediated knowledge,” much like the behavior of the Black women it emulates or evokes, through romance reading (Cannon, in Deeper Shades, 2006, 23). It establishes an incipient, characteristically defiant virtue which expresses Black women’s strategies of dissemblance (Darlene Clark Hine 1989) and canonical womanist virtues, including unshouted courage and invisible dignity (Cannon 1989).
I examine several Black romance readers' and writers’ stash stories, offering an extended ethical analysis of lawyer and romance writer Evelyn Palfrey’s account of her juvenile stash theft in the 1960s and her daughter’s decades later. Palfrey’s account, initially given as a speech and later reprinted as an article, describes Black women’s and girls’ generational moral formation through material interactions with romance novels (Palfrey, Black Issues Book Reviews, 2005). Habits of reading and sneaking, leisure and reading for pleasure build up to an enjoyable, humorous narrative drama of juvenile subterfuge and parental mind-changing through which Palfrey, her fellow Black romance writer friends, and her romance-novel-thieving daughter articulate moral formation through, not against, these things: pleasure, leisure, reading, sneaking. Through all permutations, in both childhood and adulthood, as reader and as writer, Palfrey’s relationship to romance is an ethical thinking vehicle. Excavating the moral reasoning embedded in stash stories like Palfrey’s identifies Black womanist virtues which “redefine…virtue” itself (Day 2016, 65, original italics) and stake out embodied flourishing.
Refocusing the lens on Black women readers and moving analysis into an explicitly ethical register, this paper introduces new subjects and interlocutors for popular romance studies while extending foundational and ongoing scholarly insights. In her 1984 ethnography Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Janice Radway notes that she had to relinquish her preoccupation with the narrative details of the text and instead re-tune her attention to the act of reading, if she were to understand what romance reading meant to the (racially unnamed, presumably white) women readers she analyzed in the Midwestern town she anonymized as “Smithton.” These readers heard and interpreted her question, “what do romances do better than other novels today?” in a different way than she anticipated – whereas Radway expected comments on plot development, character, and story evolution, the romance readers interpreted “doing” as “a transitive question about the effects of romances on the people who read them” (Radway, 1991 edition, 87, original italics). What romance reading did for these readers, in their words, was “escape” (87). Their emphasis and articulation led Radway to make a critical analytical distinction between “the event of reading and the meaning of the text” (87, original italics). She subsequently investigated the context and effects of romance reading alongside, if not more than, the narrative content of the books.
My analysis of the stash materializes this focus and identifies the critical purchase it offers for religious scholarship on popular romance. Conceptually, Radway’s learned shift informs how we might appeal to recent scholarship which perceptively identifies romance fiction as “eschatological narrative” through the requisite happily-ever-after ending (“HEA”) (Catherine Roach 2016). Much celebrated and defended by romance readers and writers, the “HEA” is the constant target of criticism, disdain, and dismissal from literary critics and the general public. This gap reflects not merely differences in taste, but different understandings of how romance reading mediates ethical visions and of the ethical capacities of happy endings -- distinctions undergirded by different lived understandings of materiality, text, moral formation, and eschatology. Even when unarticulated and kept hidden, as is the case for most romance readers, stash encounters reflect womanist realized eschatology (Day 2016), where flourishing manifests from the ground up. When we shift our lens from a preoccupation with narrative contents to the text as material object, we gain a new purchase on the ethical resources and potential of this genre. Looking at Black women romance readers whose actions constitute a legacy redefining moral agency, I show how popular romance does not simply imagine a different vision of the good life in the future, but inaugurates a different way of being in the present.
As recounted in the popular romance fiction community, many women readers and writers got their start in the genre as youth by stumbling upon an older female relative (mother, grandmother, sister)’s stash of romance novels, and surreptitiously secreting books away to read in private. The commonality and repetition of this act as a habit establishes it as a rich site for ethical analysis which directs us not simply to literary analysis at the level of narrative depiction, but to book historical considerations of circulation, material culture, and embodiment, among reader reception. In this paper, I argue that this romance reader rite of passage – stash theft – is a form of moral agency. I show how Black readers’ juvenile pilfering of their mother’s and grandmother’s stashes generationally communicates “womanish” ethical sensibilities through Black women’s strategies of dissemblance, hiddenness, and sociality, grounding a womanist virtue ethic for romance reading and embodying flourishing.