Jack Zipes (1979) takes the argument one stage further and suggests that popular
work too will be found to be contradictory. He links popular literature and film with its
precursors in folktale and romance, and suggests that it offers the hope of autonomy
and self-determination, in admittedly utopian forms, while at the same time affirming
dominant capitalist ideology. In other words, while the closure of popular texts almost
always reinforces dominant ideology, in the unfolding narratives there are always
countering moves in which it is challenged. Zipes, then, denies the implications of
Eagleton’s work that only texts that sit athwart the prevailing ideology can be open to
countervailing readings, and he denies too the implications of Belsey’s work that
popular forms sit within the classic expressive realist tradition, and as such demand
readings that are congruent with the dominant ideology.
For example in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, many of the plots are predicated on
the refusal of the central female character, George, to accept her role as subservient,
domesticated and non-adventurous, despite repeated exhortations to ‘behave like a girl’.
She even refuses to accept her ‘real’ name, which is Georgina. Countering this is the fact
that Blyton only offers her the alternative of ‘tomboy’, an alternative that is itself
determined by a predominantly male discourse; and the closures of the books re-
establish traditional domestic order with the sexes acting according to conventional
gender stereotype. (Zipes himself later turned his attention to children’s fiction (Zipes
1983), and see also Sarland 1983.)
While this analysis is still essentially theoretical, supporting evidence is beginning to
emerge from studies that have been done of readers themselves. The focus has been on
popular fiction, and on teenagers. Popular fiction causes educationalists particular
concern since it appears to reinforce the more reactionary values in society, particularly
so far as girls and young women are concerned. The research evidence uncovers a
complex picture of the young seeking ways to take control over their own lives, and
using the fiction that they enjoy as one element in that negotiation of cultural meaning
and value. Gemma Moss showed how teenage girls and boys were able to turn the
popular forms of, respectively, the romance and the thriller to their own ends. She found
unhelpful some of the more determinist ideological analysis that suggested that, by their
reading of romance, girls were constructed as passive victims of a patriarchal society.
The girls who liked the romances were tough, worldly wise working-class girls who were
not subservient to their male counterparts. ‘Girls didn’t need to be told about male power,
they were dealing with it every day of their lives’ (Moss 1989:7). The traditional
assessment of ‘teen romance’ by most teachers as stereotyped drivel was applied to the
girls’ writing, too, when they chose to write in that form. However, Moss shows how the
teenage girls she was working with were able to take the form into their own writing and
use it to negotiate and dramatise their concerns with and experience of femininity and
oppression. Romance offered them a form for this activity that was not necessarily
limiting at all.
In Young People Reading: Culture and Response (Sarland 1991) I have argued that
young people engaged in ‘aberrant’ readings of pulp violence and horror, readings which
ran against the reactionary closure of such material, and they thus were able to explore
aspirations of being in control of their own lives, and I further argued that the official
school literature as often as not offered them negative perspectives on those same
50 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES