Compulsive Reading
Our popular genres of escape
Sarah Brouillette
In his 1908 “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” Freud argued that what motivates the “phantasies” of unhappy people are their unsatisfied wishes: “every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correlation of unsatisfying reality.”[i] Creative writers take this common experience—daydreaming as “a correction of actual life”—and dwell in it, making it their font of creative activity.[ii] By taking a glance at the history of compulsive popular reading, whose emblem was once mass-market genre romances, we can trace a pathway that runs parallel to Freud’s emphasis on unfulfilled wishes.
Freud argues that our pleasure-reading stems from the writer’s ability to provide a “liberation of tensions in our minds.”[iii] The most widely known extension of this approach is from the literary scholar Janice Radway who argues that in the early 1980s, across suburban America, women’s compulsive reading of romance novels had become a form of compensatory escape from the ills of a modern world structured around the heterosexual family. The U.S. workers’ movement had fought successfully for more leisure time for some workers, securing a tense compromise of working-class family life. Radway’s work is both diagnosis and critique of the gendered regime subtending this compromise, separating the male breadwinner’s waged work from the sequestered suburban housewife’s labor. The spreading isolation of single-family suburban homes superadded to a loneliness temporarily offset through the reading of romance narratives.
“The structure of the suburban household is incongruent with women’s deepest wishes, and compulsive romance reading is a symptom of this incongruence and a means of wish fulfillment.”
In Radway’s treatment, the mass-market romance is an entirely compensatory literature. The readers that Radway spoke to used romance to “resist their situation as women by enabling them to cope with the features of the situation that oppress them.”[iv] Readers themselves described their activity as an “escape . . . denying the present,” and to name the “somewhat vague but nonetheless intense sense of relief they experience by identifying with a heroine whose life does not resemble their own.” Reading, Radway argued, removed them from “the psychologically demanding and emotionally draining task of attending to the physical and affective needs of their families.” Via identification with a heroine who is cared for by an intimate partner, “they vicariously attend to their own requirements as independent individuals who require emotional sustenance and solicitude.”[v] Despite the ideological scripts justifying their relegation to the home, counselling them that caring for family should fulfil and sustain them, other desires prevailed. The structure of the suburban household is incongruent with women’s deepest wishes, and compulsive romance reading is a symptom of this incongruence and a means of wish fulfillment.
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Radway had to defend studying romance readers. Her academic colleagues saw the pastime as beneath intellectual interest; it was often roundly mocked as a shameful addiction, as the readers she studied well knew. As it happens, these pleasure-seekers were merely doing a version of what had been recommended for male workers in the earliest days of spreading mass literacy, when social reformers and bourgeois moralists, concerned about the working poor, imagined that popular reading might be uniquely equipped to offer them respite.
In his 1833 address to subscribers of the Windsor and Eton public library, its then president, Sir John Herschel, laments that the “pleasant field-walk and the village-green are becoming rarer and rarer every year.” He wonders, then:
“[W]hat provision do we find for the cheap, and innocent, and daily amusements of the mass of the labouring population of this country? What sort of resources have they to call up the cheerfulness of their spirits, and chase away the cloud from their brow after the fatigue of a day’s hard work, or the stupifying [sic] monotony of some sedentary occupation? … [U]nder the pressure of a continually condensing population, the habits of the city have crept into the village—the demands of agriculture have become sterner and more imperious, and while hardly a foot of ground is left uncultivated, and unappropriated, there is positively no space left for many of the cheerful amusements of rural life.”[vi]
Working-class wages were, as yet, too low to support the emerging norms of the bourgeois household, with a wife at home and children in school instead of the factory. For Herschel, reading was one exalted and portable bourgeois practice that could “save” the working class in the absence of higher wages or otherwise changed social conditions.
The old entertainments needed to be replaced and adapted to a different but nonetheless sedentary population. A book “calls for no bodily exertion,” Herschel argues, but “relieves his home of its dulness [sic] and sameness, which … is what drives him out to the ale-house.” It is a gift to family too, then, that a man read a book. He will save money and improve himself by spending less time drinking. Through reading he “may forget the evils of the present moment,” as the book “gives him something to think of, besides the mere mechanical drudgery.”[vii] It was during this period that many regional libraries and reading rooms, like the one Herschel addressed with this speech, began to lend books for free, presaging the publicly supported library system with which we are now familiar.
In his 1957 book on the history of the “common reader” in England, literary scholar Richard Altick cites Herschel alongside Friedrich Engels, who famously itemized the horrific living conditions he observed in England’s industrializing cities. “By the 1880’s,” Altick writes:
“approximately two-thirds of the English were town-dwellers. The occupational and geographical relocation of the people—the total disruption of their old way of life; their conversion into machine-slaves, living a hand-to-mouth existence at the mercy of their employers and of uncertain economic circumstances; their concentration in cities totally unprepared to accommodate them, not least in respect to education; the resultant moral and physical degradation—these … had significant consequences in the history of the reading public.”[viii]
As a result of such conditions, he argues, not many people were able to do much reading at all in their “ruinous hovels,” having limited time, light, eyeglasses, and poor nutrition, and readier access to other light entertainments. “It would take a type of literature especially suited to men and women with dulled minds and tired bodies to turn manual workers into habitual readers,” Altick concludes.
This would be a literature neither too challenging nor too expensive, and one sufficiently diverting to fill what he calls the “imperative need for escape on the part of the physically and spiritually imprisoned.”[ix] Penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and preludes to the cheap mass-market paperback fit the bill. These were all firm fixtures of the landscape of popular entertainment by the time that the English literary critic Q.D. Leavis wrote in the early 1930s: “It is generally recognised that the universal need to read something when not actively employed has been created by the conditions of modern life.”[x]
Leavis’s book, Fiction and the Reading Public, was a first in the systemic sociological study of popular reading behavior. After extensively surveying writers and readers, she argues directly that popular fiction had become for many people an outlet for Freudian “phantasy”: “a means of easing a desolating sense of isolation,” in Leavis’s words, “and compensat[ion] for the poverty of their emotional lives.”[xi] No such compensation used to be necessary; the need is produced by modern life. The “old order,” in which leisure itself was rare, “made reading to prevent boredom unnecessary, whereas the narrowing down of labour that specialisation has produced has changed the working day from a sequence of interests to a repetition of mechanical movements of both body and mind.” Life is increasingly split between one’s work (“exhausting and yet not generally possible to take pleasure in”) and one’s leisure (“for rest and amusement”). Compulsive reading was “designed to be read in the face of lassitude and nervous fatigue.”[xii]
The consequences that followed for literature were in her view mainly negative. One novelist tells her that “[t]o my mind an author can have no greater compliment paid to him or to her than to be told that his or her characters appear to the reader real people.” Wanting fiction to “compensate for life,” readers prefer to meet “recognisable people” in books—relatable characters, they might now be called, and Leavis laments their preponderance as a sign of dissipation and the need for “substitute living.” Authors of popular fiction were additionally required to place these relatable characters in unusually exciting or fantastical settings and twisting plots, so as to “excite in the ordinary person an emotional activity for which there is no scope in his life.” Excitation of emotion takes precedence over inducements to contemplation. The whole point about reading for escape is precisely that it alleviates the temptation to ruminate on the unpleasant facts of one’s social circumstances.[xiii]
“Compulsive escape into reading arises from and responds to capitalist social realities.”
Escapist reading was hardly new to the romance readers that Radway surveyed, though their particular social circumstances produced different kinds of unmet needs and so different kinds of “phantasies” in fiction. Part of what is unique to romance reading is that it has been historically one of the forms of mass consumption most looked down upon, occasioning readers’ heightened awareness of the shame attached to it—knowing that it is not viewed as fit leisure after hard work and social isolation, but rather as an unhealthy and prurient addiction for lazy people who probably have better things to do. One of Radway’s interviewees explained that her husband was annoyed when she read novels in his company because he wanted her to be fully there in the room with him, even if he was watching sports on TV. He could tell that on some level, lost in a book, she wasn’t entirely present. Radway wrote that, in reading, women “declare themselves temporarily off-limits to those who would mine them for emotional support and material care.”[xiv]
In this light, the sheer refusal to see domestic labor as work produces some of the hostility toward romance reading as a form of relief. The inability to acknowledge the unmet needs of the lone woman working to take care of her family in a solitary home is both what occasions romance reading and leads to its castigation—a castigation that can give the activity itself an additional frisson of pleasure for those who then envision it as a secret reward they have earned for surviving the day. The husband sitting with his reading wife perhaps took her partial absence as something of a slight: what was she avoiding? What was it about the situation there with him that didn’t fully satisfy her?
We can observe something similar in recent journalistic commentaries on rising rates of depression in teenage girls, which suggested that poor mental health was due to the rise of social media and smartphone addiction.[xv] Could we hear in these complaints, often penned by people old enough to have raised their own teenage children, an echo of the slighted male psyche that Radway exposed: why don’t they want simply to be fully with me? Is it me that they flee from when they go into their devices? Similar concern has been attached to the figure of the compulsive reader of YA (Young Adult) fiction, again often a teenage girl or young woman. Why do they obsess over certain titles, building their whole identities around fandom? Why do they return to the same books, the same tropes, the same formulae, again and again? Are they too attached to these works—reading too uncritically?
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Compared to the habits of Radway’s suburban housewives, new forms of compulsive reading reflect the unravelling of the normative domestic family, now increasingly unobtainable and unappealing. Fewer and fewer families can afford to keep an adult out of the workforce, and more people live alone or remain single. Couples have fewer children, have them later in life, and mitigate risky futures via close control of children’s time. Children stay at home longer and delay entering long-term relationships or parenting situations. Stagnant or declining wages and the dismantling of the welfare state, as M. E. O’Brien has argued in her book Family Abolition, means that people are forced into new forms of intensive dependence on family, with “growing responsibilities of newly privatized care … expected to be borne by feminized family members.”[xvi] These realities are relevant to any discussion of why people continue to read YA beyond their teen years. In the eyes of some commentators, activities that might be acceptable for younger readers—compulsive rereading as well as reading “beneath” one’s educational level—are habits adults should have matured out of.[xvii] But the extended adolescence that many people now experience means that the concerns of YA remain pertinent to its adult readers.
The heightened dependence on the family is accompanied by fears of a resulting loneliness—particularly of suffering poverty and ill health in isolation in the absence of a domestic partner. Conversely, the stress and terror of not having family supports can encourage people to stay in abusive and unhappy relationships. These happen to be the grounds for the contemporary romance industry. Its compensatory pleasures are afforded by a continuous opportunity to engage with themes of loneliness and connection, self-sufficiency, self-love, and the search for “the one.” YA and romance genres overlap considerably here, both in their readership and the prevalence of romantic plotlines in so many YA novels. There has been significant diversification of characters in recent years, but most YA and romance fiction nevertheless continues to be fixated on heterosexual coupledom. Consider the nature of many of the YA titles that are read compulsively—i.e. The Fault in Our Stars or The Hunger Games or, more recently, Heartstopper.
Nowadays, there is an unprecedented push for compulsive consumption of any media. Fans of any kind of content encounter their preferred genres whenever they access social media. They also experience a greater constancy of self-performance in public. Reading and writing practices are themselves increasingly blurred. Readers produce fan content, but they often now write. Writing is then re-imagined as further engagement with favored content, especially in the form of fanfiction. This extension of escapist reading into writing has proven useful to corporations and platforms that would prefer not to pay people for creative production.
And so, in addition to harrying work regimes, both inside or outside the home; the gendered pressures of emotional management of one’s private relationships; the fear of isolation; and encounters with the impossible demands of femininity, people feel a heightened ambivalence about—and a need to escape from—the reflexive performance of selfhood online. Reading still provides this, yet it is highly manipulable. It is easy to market books as conduits to escape, as the kind of indulgence that one deserves and as an aid to resilience and survival. Constant work is always just one click away, but so is escape from work, where one’s favorite book is found mediated in a thousand images and videos and fan interactions: ambient compensation is there to tap into throughout the day—a complement to, and reminder of, the pleasure of being lost in a truly, reliably, self-consuming, “bingeworthy” book.
Escapist consumption of any popular culture has often been figured negatively, as a bad desire associated with laziness, inactivity, and the loss of agency—with giving up and giving in. The cultural theorist Greg Sharzer, however, has more recently advocated for a “politics of escapism” that “acknowledges and empathizes with peoples’ predicaments.”[xviii] Escapist consumption is inseparable from the ills of capitalist life: a way of living with realities that are at once unsatisfying and seemingly intractable. Compulsive reading is no different; it always mediates underlying conditions, with the apparent immovability of these conditions producing the “unsatisfied” person who “phantasizes” because of it. This pattern of compulsive escape through reading has evolved alongside capitalist social realities, from the early decades of spreading industrial urbanization, to the rise of the suburban family home, and now to the deepening conditions of immiseration and isolation exacerbated by data-driven self-curation and sociality.
In other words, the corporate exploitation of escapist desire can never circumscribe its whole meaning. “Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work,” Adorno and Horkheimer wrote. This was always a denunciation of work itself—not of the worker, materially compelled to “escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again.” Escapist popular reading is yet more evidence of what Sharzer calls “dis-identification with the ruling order.” To describe it as politically passive is not very illuminating for this reason. The unmet needs that propel us toward reliable comforts are always signs, however muted, that “complete integration of the subject into the capitalist lifeworld has failed.”[xix] Compulsive reading is a condemnation of what Freud called “actual life.”
[i] Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989), 439.
[ii] Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989), 299.
[iii] Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” 428.
[iv] Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 12.
[v] Ibid., 90-93.
[vi] John F.W. Herschel, “Address to the Subscribers of the Windsor and Eton Public Library [1857],” in Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. (New York: Arno Press, 1981), 7-8.
[vii] Ibid., 10.
[viii] Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 84.
[ix] Ibid., 95-6.
[x] Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and The Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932), 48.
[xi] Ibid., 58.
[xii] Ibid., 48-9.
[xiii] Ibid., 59, 207, 64.
[xiv] Radway, Reading the Romance, 12.
[xv] See for example Ross Douthat, “American Teens are Really Miserable. Why?” The New York Times (18 Feb 2023): https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/18/opinion/depression-teen-social.html
[xvi] O’Brien, Family Abolition, 146, 155.
[xvii] See for example Ruth Graham, “Against YA.” Slate (5 June 2014): https://slate.com/culture/2014/06/against-ya-adults-should-be-embarrassed-to-read-childrens-books.html
[xviii] Greg Sharzer, Late Escapism and Contemporary Neoliberalism: Alienation, Work and Utopia (Routledge, 2021), 162.
[xix] Ibid., xiii.