09-07-2010, 09:28 PM
I have been pondering, once again, just what this experience of reading a gothic romance is about. One thing that dawned on me is how very private an experience it is. All reading is somewhat so, but I think the gothic romance even more. There is such a strong identification that develops between heroine and reader. She is in such intense trouble, surrounded by difficulties and dangers, and when her story is told well my absorption in it is complete. I am right there with her to the very end, and I want to be alone to fully experience her life. How satisfying, then, is a well-told ending, and how disappointing a bad one.
When my children were younger, my son was wont to look down upon his addle-pated mother who habitually read the same type of stories over and over. "Another woman running away from a house, huh, mom," he would say, scanning the cover in a superior manner.
So I read his sister and him a gothic romance aloud. (We often did this with other books). Do you know, the experience of the story just wasn't the same for me. I didn't engage with it in at all the same way. (This didn't happen with other types of books we read aloud). The experience had become too public, I think.
Oh, and by the way, The love of gothics is not hereditary. My children are avid readers, but not of gothics!
When my children were younger, my son was wont to look down upon his addle-pated mother who habitually read the same type of stories over and over. "Another woman running away from a house, huh, mom," he would say, scanning the cover in a superior manner.
So I read his sister and him a gothic romance aloud. (We often did this with other books). Do you know, the experience of the story just wasn't the same for me. I didn't engage with it in at all the same way. (This didn't happen with other types of books we read aloud). The experience had become too public, I think.
Oh, and by the way, The love of gothics is not hereditary. My children are avid readers, but not of gothics!