Seeing as how romance literature has been dubbed as trash, pesky and ugly, one might find reading such literature alien. However, the attitude surroundinng romance literature is quite ambivalent. This study aims to find what circumstances lies beneath this ambivalence, and particularly the negative view of the genre. By processing the collected material qualitatively, viewed from a gender and sociological perspective and adopting a hermeneutic interpretation, a result consisting of primarily two main focuses emerges: history and gender. History's Dime novel (romance literature's ancestor) quickly recieved negative response from scholars. Society's gender regime breeds a contempt for women, who differs from the norm solely based on their gender. After analyzing the result, the answer to this thesis can be concluded as follows: the circumstances behind romance literature's low status is due to the fusion between the disdain for scorned literature and society's disdain for women, resulting in a disdain for the genre.