The Female Eunuch (24 page)
The lover in romance is a man of masterful ways, clearly superior to his beloved in at least one respect, usually in several, being older or of higher social rank and attainment or more intelligent and
au fait
. He is authoritative but deeply concerned for his lady whom he protects and guides in a way that is patently paternal. He can be stern and withdrawn or even forbidding but the heroines of romance melt him by sheer force of modesty and beauty and the bewitching power of their clothes. He has more than a hint of danger in his past conquests, or a secret suffering or a disdain for women. The banked fires of passion burn just below the surface, muted by his tenderness and omnipotent understanding of the heroine’s emotional needs. The original for such characters is in fact romantic in the historical sense for perhaps the very first of them were Rochester, Heath-cliff, Mr Darcy and Lord Byron. However, the sense of Austen and Brontë is eclipsed by the sensibility of Lady Caroline Lamb. Exploiting the sexual success of the Byronic hero in an unusually conscious way Georgette Heyer created the archetype of the plastic age, Lord Worth, the Regency Buck. He is a fine example of a stereotype which most heroes of romantic fiction resemble more or less, whether they are dashing young men with an undergraduate sense of humour who congratulate the vivacious heroine on her pluck (the most egalitarian in conception) in the adventure stories of the thirties, or King Cophetua and the beggar maid.
He was the epitome of a man of fashion. His beaver hat was set over black locks carefully brushed into a semblance of disorder; his cravat of starched muslin supported his chin in a series of beautiful folds, his driving coat of drab cloth bore no less than fifteen capes, and a double row of silver buttons. Miss Taverner had to own him a very handsome creature, but
found no difficulty in detesting the whole cast of his countenance. He had a look of self-consequence; his eyes, ironically surveying her from under world-weary lids, were the hardest she had ever seen, and betrayed no emotion but boredom. His nose was too straight for her taste. His mouth was very well-formed, firm but thin-lipped. She thought he sneered…
Worse than all was his languor. He was uninterested, both in having dexterously averted an accident, and in the gig’s plight. His driving had been magnificent; there must be unexpected strength in those elegantly gloved hands holding the reins in such seeming carelessness but why in the name of God, why must he put on such
an air of dandified affectation?
4
Nothing such a creature would do could ever be
corny
. With such
world-weary lids
! With the patrician features and aristocratic contempt which first opened the doors of polite society to Childe Harold, and the titillating threat of
unexpected strength
! Principally, we might notice, he exists through his immaculate dressing—Beau Brummell is one of his friends—but when he confronts this spectacle—
She had rather have had black hair; she thought the fairness of her gold curls insipid. Happily her brows and lashes were dark, and her eyes which were staringly blue (in the manner of a wax doll, she once scornfully told her brother) had a directness and fire which gave a great deal of character to her face. At first glance one might write her down a mere Dresden china miss, but a second glance
would inevitably discover the intelligence in her eyes, and the de- cided air of resolution in the curve of her mouth.
5
Of course her intelligence and resolution remain happily confined to her eyes and the curve of her mouth but they provide the excuse for her naughty behaviour towards Lord Worth, who turns out to be that most titillating of all titillating relations, her young guardian, by an ingeniously contrived mistake. He, confronting her in this charming dress—‘a plain round gown of French cambric, frilled around the neck with scolloped lace; and a close mantle of twilled sarsenet. A poke bonnet of basket willow with a striped velvet
ribbon…’
6
—and most compromisingly placed shaking a pebble out of her sandal, and so having to hide her stockinged foot in her skirts, sweeps her up into his arms and hurls her into his curricle (for at this point neither of them knows their relationship) where he ‘took the sandal from her resistless grasp, and calmly held it ready to fit on to her foot’. Then to provoke her charming indignation still further he kisses her. At such a rate of conquest the novel would be merely twenty pages long, if it were not that as her guardian Worth is too much a man of principle to pay his addresses to her. She becomes, with his help, given sternly and diffidently, the belle of the season, wooed by all but loving none (but him). She has eighty thousand pounds a year, which is the motive for one sort of suitor; lustful desire for her is the motive of the rest, the most remarkable being the Prince of Wales, whose advances are so repugnant that she faints dead away to be brought around and carried home by her masterful father-lover, who alone loves her without greed or self-interest (being fabulously wealthy), steadfastly and strong. He protects her all the time, even though most of the time she is unaware of it, until her majority when, after a moment of looking down into her face, he sweeps her into his arms. Georgette Heyer has a streak of discretion, or perhaps prudery, which prevents her from exploiting the sexual climaxes in the writing: Barbara Cartland, on the other hand, over- writes the imagery of embracements and thereby reveals much more of the essential romantic preoccupations. In
The Wings of Love
she divides the love interest in two with Lord Ravenscar the forty-year- old lecher who covets tiny Amanda’s lovely body and forces his hideous attentions on it…
His hold on her tightened; his lips fastened to hers were like a vice [sic]. She felt his passion rising within him like an evil flame; and then suddenly he lifted her in his arms.
‘Amanda!’ he said hoarsely, ‘Damme! Why should we wait?’ He was carrying her to a large sofa in the corner of the room; and as she struggled, fighting with every ounce of her strength,
she knew how small and ineffectual she was and that her resistance was merely exciting him.
‘Amanda! Amanda!’
His thick lips were on her eyes, her cheeks, her throat. She felt him lay her down on the sofa, while she fought fruitlessly to regain her feet, knowing as she did so that she was quite powerless. She
heard the fichu of her gown tearing beneath his hands.
7
The utterly ineffectual heroine is the most important part of the story, ineffectual against ravishment (for how could such a delicate thing kick a peer of the realm in his rising passion?) and against more agreeable forms of sexual conquest, at the hands of the other male, the hero who will protect her from his own animal passions and the crimes and follies of the world.
She turned towards the door and then suddenly Peter Harvey had dropped on one knee beside her. She looked at him wonderingly as he lifted the hem of her white muslin gown and touched his lips with it. ‘Amanda,’ he said, ‘that is how a man, any man, should ap- proach you. No one—least of all Ravenscar—is worthy to do more
than to kiss the hem of your gown. Will you remember that?’
8
That’s the kind of man you marry. On his knees chewing her muddy hem and still her moral tutor. Miss Cartland’s taste for titil- lation as far exceeds Heyer’s as Heyer’s researches into historical colour exceed her own. By a series of preposterous contrivances the lovers meet in a brothel bedroom where he is engaged in rescuing her. Amanda confesses her love in a more decorous setting.
‘Amanda, you are making it unbearable for me’ Peter said, and his voice sounded as if it was strangled.
‘You do not want me,’ she said.
‘One day I will make you apologize for that,’ he said. ‘Just as one day I will kiss you until you cry for mercy. Until that day comes—and pray God it will come soon—take care of yourself, my little beloved.’
He took both her hands and raised them to his lips. Instead of kissing the back of them he turned them over. She felt him
kissing the palms with a reverence, and, at the same time, a hungry passion that made her thrill until her whole body trembled with a
sudden ecstasy.
9
They have not actually kissed yet because Peter has said ‘If your lips touched mine I should not be answer-able for the consequences.’ Indeed when handkissing results in orgasm it is possible that an actual kiss might bring on epilepsy. She is at the altar repeating the vows which will bind her to Ravenscar for life when her lover un- masks him as a traitor, duels with him, and takes his place at her side.
She felt her love rise up in her like a flame. She felt her whole body tremble with the
excitement and the ecstasy of the thrill
that swept over
her, because she knew that in a few seconds she would be his wife and belong to him forever.
10
Both these books I bought for three and sixpence in a supermarket, but it could not claim to have been a random choice, because I re- membered these names, Heyer and Cartland, from my fantasy-ridden teens. Indeed I met Miss Cartland in a cascade of aquamarines at a university debate where the topic was ‘Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever’, Miss Cartland of course taking the affirmative, as if it were possible to be good without being clever! Nowadays she seems to have set up as a sentimental counsellor and purveyor of honey-based aphrodisiacs and may point to her daughter’s success in happily marrying into the peerage. If women’s liberation move- ments are to accomplish anything at all, they will have to cope with phenomena like the million-dollar Cartland industry. The third book bought on that same day was bought on spec. It was called
The Loving Heart
, and described as ‘another great romantic story of the Australian outback’. All the well-tried paraphernalia of romance were there. In inventing Grant Jarvis, Lucy Walker availed herself of the feudal paternalism of the sheep-station set-up. Not only is her
hero wealthy, he directly rules a society of loyal retainers, white and relatively infantile, as well as black and totally infantile.
In order to bring the elements of her story unto the juxtaposition that will provide the maximum in sentimental thrills, Lucy Walker devises a situation so intricate and unlikely that it would take as long to summarize as it did to invent. All we need to know is that Elizabeth Heaton is posing as Grant Jarvis’s fiancée to protect him from designing women who desire him for motives of alliance and ambition. They are fast, energetic and gorgeous, but she has an English complexion and purity, as well as a trick of imitating the queen in carrying out her functions as lady of the worse-than-feudal manor. Her modesty is so excessive that she suffers acutely when, on her first night on the station, the resolution of a crisis involves her in sleeping in her slip on the ground beside the fire, with Grant’s body shielding her on the cold side. When Grant visits her bedroom in broad daylight, despite the fact that she is not alone she cannot ‘for the life of her’ prevent ‘the tell-tale blush that crept up her cheeks’. She is thankful that ‘the breakfast tray lay across her
knees…some kind of symbolic shield’.
11
Physically Grant is well-
constructed as the father—phallus, ‘extremely handsome’, ‘with
cold grey-blue eyes’, which coupled with his straight mouth and firm jaw ‘gave an impression of hardness…and indifference’.
12
All
her efforts in the book are expended to earn his approval, and in her quiet moments when not teaching the children, or washing the Union Jack (truly!), she falls to contemplation of his hard masculine beauty, and to masochistic reverie.
Yet as she looked at Grant, leaning on that balustrade, staring out over the plain, with that fine white scar showing on his arm, she felt he was, for all his wealth and power, a lonely man. Whether he was isolated by his personal tragedy or by his great wealth Elizabeth did not know. If he required her to stay on she would not raise diffi-
culties. She had a strange compulsive inclination to serve him.
13
All romantic novels have a preoccupation with clothes. Every sexual advance is made with clothing as an attractive barrier; the foot fetish displayed in Miss Walker’s descriptions is an optional
extra.
14
The book has been through four impressions in the Fontana
edition, and the authoress has written eleven others at least. The climax of the titillation comes when Grant Jarvis joins the ship in which Elizabeth is travelling home to London at Colombo.
She knew he was real because the tweed of his coat hurt her nose, and she could feel the great power of his arms as he crushed her to him…
The incredible had happened. Someone in the world had crossed continents and flown oceans to get
her
…Elizabeth Heaton, typist… He bent his head and his lips met her lips. For a long moment
Elizabeth had the taste of heaven on her mouth.
15
This is the hero that women have chosen for themselves. The traits invented for him have been invented by women cherishing the chains of their bondage. It is a male commonplace that women love rotters but in fact women are hypnotized by the successful man who appears to master his fate; they long to give their responsibility for themselves into the keeping of one who can administer it in their best interests. Such creatures do not exist, but very young women in the astigmat- ism of sexual fantasy are apt to recognize them where they do not exist. Opening car doors, manoeuvring headwaiters, choosing gifts, and earning money, are often valued as romantic attainments: in search of romance many women would gladly sacrifice their own moral judgement of their champion. Many a housewife thrills to the story of Charmaine Biggs, and in telling her story to the dailies the train-robber’s wife or her ghost has known just which aspects of a
relatively sordid and confused life to delineate and emphasize.
16
Biggs’s size, physical strength and daring are reiterated, along with his impudence in courtrooms and remand