![]() ![]() She then enters into the Symbolic Order through recognizing her sexual difference and speaking a language, creating her social identity and no longer unified: her Imaginary self. Once the child looks in the mirror (this is described as the “Mirror Phase”), she recognizes her existence and realizes that the person in the mirror is not her as a literal person, and until she “is differentiated from others, it cannot represent in terms of a social identity,” (Williamson 62). The Imaginary self is when a child is unable to perceive herself and there “is no clear boundary between the child’s self and the surrounding world” (Williamson 61). By living through the female heroines, these women are able to unify what Jacque Lacan calls the Imaginary and Symbolic self. ![]() The novels, “permits its readers the experience of feeling cared for and the sense of having been reconstituted affectively, even if both are lived only vicariously,” (Radway 97). ![]() Their roles as mothers and wives are defined by taking care of others, with no one to care of them emotionally. The women Radway interview justify reading these books in several ways, including fulfilling an emotional need that they might not get from being a housewife. In Janice Radway’s chapter “The Act of Reading the Romance: Escape and Instruction” in her book Reading the Romance, she uses interviews with women who buy and read romance novels to uncover the reasons behind their attraction to these books. ![]()
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