“Friend in Need”: Cultivating homosocial communities in <i>Love Story Magazine</i>'s fiction and editorial departments

In Gerry Ann Hale's “Two in a Fog,” the short story that opens the 30 March 1935 issue of Love Story Magazine (hereafter Love Story), heroine Melina confesses to her soon-to-be hero, Erin, that she fears the happy endings presented in pulp romance magazines are unattainable: “I'm sorry…I've just discovered that romance and the working girl doesn't mix…The movies are all wrong—so are magazines and novels. Everything's all wrong!” (Hale, 1935, p. 12). This metatextual reference to the magazine's fallibility is ultimately proven wrong when a secondary female character, Jada, expresses interest in Erin and ploys for his attention. Jada's schemes prompt Melina to recognize Erin as an adequate romantic partner, and the story ends with their betrothal to prove that the working girl and romance can mix. However, working-class readers who wrote to Love Story's “Friend in Need” department did not have the same success. Every week, Laura Alison Brown responded to dozens of readers' love dilemmas that ranged in severity from lack of feelings for romantic partners to adultery and abuse. Like in Love Story's other editorial departments, Brown's responses grappled with the complexity of female homosociality (same-sex, non-sexual relationships) while stressing its importance in securing an adequate opposite-sex partner. By comparing the “flashy type of girl” (Brown, 1935, p. 148) to the “quiet girl who would make an ideal wife” (1935, p. 148)—as also exhibited in the fictional Jada/Melina juxtaposition—the magazine repeatedly negotiates and upholds gender roles within a framework of homosociality. What would you do if your husband should fall in love with another woman? Or if you are single what would you do if your sweetheart left you? What kind of men do girls like? What kind of woman do men fall in love with? These are the kind of questions that Laura Alison Brown answers every week…Do you want information, help? Laura Alison Brown is ready to aid you at all times. (1930, p. 18) In this article, I use the 30 March 1935 issue of Love Story as a representative example to consider how the magazine negotiated the discrepancy between the happy endings presented in its fiction and its readers' romantic hardships. By encouraging communication between same-sex readers as well as between the magazine and its readers, Love Story ultimately fostered a homosocial community that taught its readers to learn from its pages and from each other. To build this argument, I apply an intertextual lens that reads across the magazine. Coining the term “intertextual” in 1969, Julia Kristeva argues that “any text is constructed as the absorption and transformation of another” and a text's meaning is mediated by other texts (1980, p. 66). More recently, scholars such as Laurel Brake have argued that the magazine format, in particular, invites an intertextual reading because “each piece is instantly and always contextualized, embedded in a matrix of other pieces which make up the issue in which it appears, and extend to the issues before and after” (Brake, 1997, p. 55). In other words, texts influence and “appropriate” one other in the magazine format (1997, p. 55). This analysis further coincides with Scott McCracken's proposed framework for reading popular fiction as a cultural text: McCracken puts forth that, while popular fiction's reliance on formulaic structures makes it ephemeral, it contributes to shaping (rather than simply reflecting) contemporary cultural identities and enables readers to insert themselves into scenarios related to their own experiences (1998, p. 185). Love Story indeed makes this reader insertion explicit across its fiction and editorial departments. Applying an intertextual lens to Love Story reveals a frequently articulated narrative through which the editorial content reinforces the cultural values presented in the magazine's fiction: women can “[go] places and [do] things” (Brown, 1935, p. 152) but they must “possess a goodly amount of common sense and the determination to stick to high ideals” (1935, p. 152) if they too want a fulfilling romantic relationship. As opposed to one that separates a contribution from its magazine context, an intertextual lens thus allows for consideration of the formulaic nature of pulp fiction—within which writers were paid per word and took pride in their speed (Smith, 2000, p. 26) to the result of similar characters and plots—to focus on the ideological consistency presented across the magazine's content. Despite their immense popularity—some estimates suggest a readership of 30,000,000 in the mid-1930s (Earle, 2009, p. 77)—pulp magazines are seldomly studied for their impact on twentieth-century popular culture. The rejection of pulps, which are named for their cheap wood-pulp paper, from critical attention is rooted in their association with commercial rather than literary or intellectual goals as well as their primarily working-class readership.1 When pulps first appeared at the turn of the twentieth century, their accessible language and affordability (of ten to twenty-five cents [Goulart, 1972, p. 29]) resulted in quick growth in circulation numbers and titles.2 Though the earliest pulp magazines featured general adventure fiction, by the 1920s, they were divided into four main categories (and further subcategories): detective, Western, adventure, and romance (Peterson, 1956, p. 307). The latter category remains the most neglected in scholarship. McCracken credits the scholarly neglect of romance to a combination of its association with “mass-market formula publishing” as well as the “identification of that market with women readers and their supposed concerns—love, desire, fantasy and imagination” (McCracken, 1998, p. 75). Erin A. Smith (2000), Quentin Reynolds (1955), and McCracken (1998) have tracked and traced pulp magazines from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century with brief examinations of romance titles, and more recent criticism has questioned this neglect of romance pulps. In particular, Michelle Nolan considers how romance pulps helped shape their comic successors (Nolan, 2018, pp. 8–9), Laurie Powers highlights Daisy Bacon's influence on twentieth-century working-class women in her biographical work on Love Story's prolific editor (2019, p. 3), and Renée Belliveau considers how the genre navigated shifting gender expectations during the Second World War (2021, p. 24). However, no focused analysis of romance pulp magazines yet exists. This scholarly neglect does not mean romance pulps were not as popular as their adventure, detective, or Western alternatives—in fact, Love Story became Street & Smith's “most valuable magazine property” by the 1930s (Goulart, 1972, p. 181).3 By 1938, there were eighteen different romance pulps that sold a combined total of roughly 3,000,000 copies per month (Uzzell qtd. in Peterson, 1956, p. 307). Though Love Story was initially a quarterly when it launched in May 1921, its quick success resulted in semi-monthly publication after the August 1921 issue (Reynolds, 1955, pp. 195–6). Within this first year, Love Story's circulation grew to 100,000 copies (1955, p. 197), and that number reached 600,000 copies after Bacon became editor in 1928 (1955, p. 198), by which time the magazine was published weekly. Every major pulp magazine publisher had a romance title by the mid-1930s, and they tried unsuccessfully to emulate Love Story's structure and content (Bacon qtd. in Reynolds, 1955, p. 199) characterized by its “deeply emotional and romantically idealized fiction” (Goodstone, 1970, p. 131). Love Story thus serves as an advantageous example of romance pulps for critical attention because of the number of imitators and its unparalleled success. Though Love Story affirms that its stories concern “the love of the one man for the one woman” (qtd. in Powers, 2019, p. 44), the bulk of its plots in the 30 March 1935 issue are concerned with the heroine and secondary female characters. Indeed, in some stories, more text is dedicated to the heroine's relationships or conflicts with other women than their developing relationship with their soon-to-be betrothed. However, their formulaic structure necessitates a happy ending—each heroine overcomes external situations and is betrothed or married by the story's conclusion. In her study of the romance novel, Pamela Regis argues that this happy ending is not the major moment in the text for most readers and writers (2013, p. 14). Regis breaks down the formulaic romance structure into eight elements: Definition of Society, Meeting (between the hero and heroine), Attraction, Barrier, Point of Ritual Death (when a betrothal seems impossible), Recognition, Declaration, and Betrothal (Regis, 2013, p. 14). The Barrier and the Point of Ritual Death are what the characters must overcome to be together, and these elements are crucial to “determining a novel's meaning” (2013, p. 14). Though Regis's analysis is concerned with romance novels, the eight structural elements are present in pulp romances as the forms follow similar conventions, so I apply her framework and terminology to Love Story, where the Barrier and the Point of Ritual Death are particularly integral to how the magazine negotiates gender roles within a framework of homosociality. In Love Story's short stories, female homosociality is crucial to both the Barrier and the Point of Ritual Death, and these elements often present themselves through competition or conflict between the heroine and a secondary female character who may be a friend, family member, stranger, or foe. In six of the seven complete short stories included in the 30 March 1935 issue, both elements at least partially occur because of conflict or competition between female characters.4 For example, in two such stories, Ives Tudor's “Heartless Flirt” and Ethel Le Compte's “Violet Eyes,” a secondary female character tries to stop the developing romance between the heroine and the hero by attempting to make one of them look undesirable to the other.5 In the former story, Francine publicly purports that heroine Reine had bet that she could make “Bart fall in ten minutes” (Tudor, 1935, p. 88). Hero Bart then flees because he assumes Reine's feelings are illegitimate and she is just a “heartless flirt.” In the latter story, Diane lies to heroine Mabrue when she confrontationally tells her that she is married to hero Norman, who is always “unfaithful to [her]” (Le Compte, 1935, p. 100). Norman must then convince Mabrue that his previous marriage was annulled because Diane had “gone through the wedding ceremony several times…without bothering about divorces” (1935, p. 105). Both Reine and Mabrue must navigate the secondary female characters' deceitful actions to overcome the Barrier and the Point of Ritual Death before the Betrothal can occur. Conflicts between heroines and strangers or foes also operate on a symbolic level to juxtapose desirable traits with undesirable ones. In “Heartless Flirt” and “Violet Eyes,” both heroines secure their desired romantic partners at the end of the story while their counterparts remain single. Francine's and Diane's is on at in their In “Heartless Francine is present at Reine and Francine tells Bart to of is a (Tudor, 1935, p. a secondary character then that Francine's is a of (1935, p. In “Violet Eyes,” Norman is presented as the in his previous relationship with Diane because of her as well as the that he was to her her When Diane lies to Mabrue about their marriage to the Barrier, Diane that she would have had the Mabrue of if Mabrue did not so and (1935, p. 100). Indeed, Mabrue is not by lies but also because of the he her Mabrue is she the Norman her as she does not Diane from The is that of their can traits that make them of for marriage is through to undesirable women who traits of and In both “Heartless Flirt” and “Violet Eyes,” characters external to the Barrier can Reine and Mabrue navigate Francine's and Diane's deceitful but in Hale's “Two in a Fog,” the characters are in an to The that heroine her her soon-to-be hero Erin, and characters to the and between the man and the woman of her as (Hale, 1935, p. and at her with (1935, p. her a (1935, p. 18) before attempting to her because she Melina as a Though Melina to for Erin, she does so Melina Erin in to Melina so she can for attention. This that Melina can be desirable her to and can be undesirable her who and is to end his relationship with Melina because of her does not the of an romantic partner. Erin, who does not about and can through Jada's Melina at and Erin Jada's man and the woman are with the Betrothal for Though competition between female characters can to juxtapose the heroine's and desirable traits with undesirable it can also to influence the heroine to her expectations of In heroine is to her hero because she to her female about the 1935, p. who her on must a to the when her to relationships between women both the Meeting and the between the heroine and the former and her hero, had before the of the story, but their Meeting that to the romance does not occur the of to consider if he would be an adequate romantic partner. The that is she does not want after their Though there were men who had interest in she fears they her For example, on one she at the of in his and to (1935, p. 55). the other is for his to he is (1935, p. and he could be for (1935, p. does not romantic feelings for he a (1935, p. to her female homosocial relationships communication between the heroine and the In Love Story's short stories, female homosociality also serves to romantic In to consider as a romantic for and because purports that she has of 1935, p. that it for she have (1935, p. before other man had (1935, p. after she The is that, while the importance of with romantic partners as by her previous lies in the to her she does not to follow through with such goals she the of homosociality in “Two in a who has no interest in Erin, to This Melina to Erin as a romantic a for Melina that you he is (Hale, 1935, p. Both in and Melina in “Two in a are to the romance because of homosocial and In the two short stories, and and the relationships with their the and of Ritual In the former story, two and interest in heroine who is as when by an 1935, p. who is in in she the attention her is the of her who is as (1935, p. and a (1935, p. However, and are not in is a who for an and is a who to When this is confesses his love for and the of her and the of a In who 1935, p. tries to heroine Diane and hero from with one another in an to from before for the on a work However, is to through a the had Though is not Diane she does not want the to yet for she they do not each other well for Diane to on his her husband his first in the and she to stop Diane from in (1935, p. In both stories, the the Barrier, the heroines can in the romance However, their must to the Diane must convince her that her relationship with is not the result of an and must learn that lies with her rather than her a from a more Like in the other short stories in Love Story, and Diane are to the secondary female because these their are presented as and they are not left single and undesirable by the conclusion. of married to Diane's Though she is as a she is imagination” and with a of 1935, p. who is the of to Diane and relationship. the is by the end of and Francine in “Heartless Flirt” or Diane in “Violet Eyes,” the she was married too to a man two and to make up for the of 1935, p. is to to that she was and indeed the of her in to be as rather than her In both the homosocial relationship between and to one both women to the magazine's of what it to be a across the 30 March 1935 issue of Love Story's short stories reveals the importance of female homosocial relationships in securing an adequate romantic in what man would be an but also in the heroine as what the magazine is a thus a woman of In most the heroines are as of through between themselves and their female To to the in one of Love Story's editorial departments, the “flashy type of girl” (Brown, 1935, p. 148) is indeed with the “quiet girl who would make an ideal wife” (Brown, 1935, p. When the heroines as when to to her or when ploys to from her the of their and their feelings before the wrong type of women for the as per the magazine's As Love Story's heroines navigate homosocial relationships within their romance the magazine's editorial homosocial its readers to them navigate their own the Love Story editorial that communication same-sex readers as well as between the magazine and its The first and six or seven and answers to readers' questions that concerned romantic on their The roughly six in about a brief of their and what they to be their would the before and between The Brown's “Friend in six to as a on love and (Brown, 1935, p. responded to readers' romantic and about previous The latter two the bulk of the in Love Story's “Friend in Need” department that its of at (qtd. in Reynolds, 1955, p. content as in its 1921 editorial as and and Brown's negotiates this by readers on how they to the and goals of the magazine's These goals of happy are indeed by the is the of the editor of Love Story from 1928 she working for the department to her as editor 2019, p. When she the Brown was to suggest as a (2019, p. if she did not have a to suggest that an could be in the magazine's fiction (2019, p. This explicit of the magazine's fiction as for its readers is not in of Brown's she the importance of the that the magazine's heroines For example, Brown the first in the 30 March 1935 issue by what type of women men should want to are men with adequate who could romance and make the girl they men the type of and the girl who would make an ideal wife” (Brown, 1935, p. This the presented in the magazine's Francine of “Heartless Diane of “Violet Eyes,” and of “Two in a are girls who do not traits of an ideal they and and are and and their are proven to be the women for as by their happy As a of the that follow this men that do not want to to the reader or Brown that these are not the men her readers should consider for of the is the to an partner. Love Story's “Friend in Need” department more than readers simply in for from Brown their own love the in the 30 March 1935 issue, romantic and are responses from readers to published in previous The department thus as a in which readers also one another or an marriage partner. For example, in one as to or not she should a man she is love who she as the (1935, p. for responses from readers who have in a similar if other readers have had a if I would more than it if they would in and what they would do in (1935, p. there of no responses to in this issue, there are from women who married men who to be marriage the from women who are or have married to men and adultery or may to the magazine's focus on “the one man for the one woman” (qtd. in Reynolds, 1955, p. 197), they as a for the readers who are with or not to who undesirable Brown's to married women is to their another she readers to their time or not to and to other Brown the importance of female homosociality in readers' in some of her particularly when suggest a lack of for on how to convince her love interest to The man is because of her that to her and a lack of female in her she is in of a no to turn (1935, p. and she has all other (1935, p. to her romantic Though Brown argues that should not be because of her her on the lack of would suggest that you your former or make and do not from the of other is always a for woman to simply because she has the one (1935, p. Brown does not further attention to her that have helped if she had a community to her navigate her romantic relationships and a more partner. Brown her by that homosocial relationships is a “any woman” can thus serves as a and for the magazine's readers as she their in homosocial such as is through the magazine. who this to it that you be to make with other readers, of may must be that to between men and and women and girls and be in the of (1935, p. The included in a of gender and through with readers their most desirable to traits in a short each For example, that in and can on and a 1935, p. and the that can on (1935, p. is is at in the and (1935, p. The text that as of who and and all 1935, p. Indeed, through such of readers what they and what they other readers of the magazine the most desirable traits in a a is then its readers to the of as it tells to that are to (1935, p. This department thus contributes to a community Love Story's readers that them and their values within this In the 30 March 1935 issue of Love Story, Brown the of twentieth-century women in her to a of a goodly amount of common sense and the determination to stick to high in of the that they are places and things” (Brown, 1935, p. editorial the exhibited by the magazine's heroines in the Indeed, the of romance included in the fiction and editorial that the pages of Love Story in the 1930s were As Love Story's heroines navigated relationships with other women within romance plots to their as adequate the magazine's editorial fostered homosocial its readers to them navigate their own across the magazine with an intertextual lens thus reveals a narrative that negotiates and upholds gender roles within a framework of homosociality. The circulation estimates of romance pulps in the 1930s suggest that a of one in ten women at least one such magazine per month (Nolan, 2018, p. in popular to study how readers navigated relationships and as well as how the magazine negotiated readers' experiences with the idealized romance plots in its

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