The Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels

When I was an undergraduate, I did a minor in American Studies, and I took a great class on the romance novel.  This is an interest that hasn't waned, even though I seldom read them now.  People who don't read romance novels do not really understand just how big the sales can be for Amish romance novels, and I find this topic endlessly fascinating: I know romance novels are big business (I have friends who write them and make much better livings than everybody else I know who isn't an entertainment lawyer or real estate mogul)....I had no idea that the Amish genre was as big as it is.  From John Hopkins University Press comes   arguably the best title I've encountered in ages--The Thrill of the Chaste: the Allure of Amish Romance Novels by Valerie Weaver-Zercher.   I'm not really capable of saying anything intelligent about the critical literary analysis, but there is enough material here for the nonspecialist that  I certainly kept on reading.

 The takeaway thesis is that Amish romance novels fit beautifully in the oppositional, fundamentalist, and consumerist  Christian mindset of contemporary American evangelicals.  These novels trade in on markets serving contemporary American Protestants nicely; the romances are an antidote to the fast-moving, technology-oriented, gender-bending, hyper-sexualized mainstream where these readers feel alienated and adrift.  These romance readers are served up cherrypicked quaintness of a social and religious subgroup shorn of their details: brides and quilts and storybook farms. Skipped over  are the practices within Amish tradition that splatter up against evangelical modernity: pacifism (not extended to their animals, btw) and communism. (Yes, communism).  The effect is the superficial sharing of a counter-modern narrative that is no way based on deeper consensus about values other than the mainstream is big, scary, corrupt, distressingly cosmopolitan and decaying. The novels are written, Weaver-Zercher notes, like many others in genre fiction--for readers who are already convinced of their lifestyle and beliefs and want those mirrored back to them in wholesome, unchallenging ways.

Valerie Weaver-Zercher wrote up this essay on Bonnet-Rippers for LARB that is also worth reading.