I’m done with the Mid-Twentieth Century Love Stories unit of the Romance MFA Reading List! What have I learned in the months it’s taken me to work through all of these long historical epics?
This unit has really beat me over the head with books that the General Public (TM) talks about as “romance” …but which aren’t Romance.
Gone With the Wind? No HEA.
Rebecca? Gothic AF, but the love story is secondary (and not very believable IMO).
Forever Amber? Cheating, cheating, more cheating and no HEA either.
Désirée? Basically cheating, love story secondary to biography of Napoleon.
Angelique? No HEA. Love story secondary to political intrigue.
Still, each of these stories is romance-adjacent, and I hope I’ve learned something from each of them.
Gone With the Wind: Subtle Expressions of Love
As I wrote in my original post on GWTW, Rhett Butler would be one of my favorite heroes if not for the marital rape and all the racism baked into the story. Rape and racism are both lady-boner-killers as far as I am concerned. But what Rhett excels at is showing his love for Scarlett without ever uttering the fatal words. I invite you to consider the “Five Love Languages” framework in considering Rhett.
The five “languages” are receiving gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service (devotion), and physical touch. While “words of affirmation” are avoided at all costs by both Rhett and Scarlett, he is all over the other four. He gives Scarlett gifts, both before and after they marry. He spends time with her just to talk. His acts of service are numerous: getting her out of a burning Atlanta, lending her money for her business ventures, covering for her husband and almost-lover when they commit murder. Once they’re married, there’s plenty of physical touch as well.
I think that in many romance novels the characters over-focus on when/whether they state their love out loud, in the “words of affirmation” love language, but there’s an awful lot to be said for balancing that with the many other ways that love can be expressed.
Rebecca: Upstairs, Downstairs
Back in August I noticed some folks on Twitter discussing the royal wedding, American interest in mesalliances, and the improbability of historical “Cinderellas” actually making it as in the position of Duchess.
I think this is amply displayed in Americans loving to write/read mésalliances. I mostly find myself thinking, "No way that poor girl can do the job a duchess has to do. This marriage is doomed."
— 🦇Isobel Carr🦇 (@IsobelCarr) August 9, 2018
It immediately put me in mind of the heroine of Rebecca (written by British author Daphne Du Maurier) and her misadventures as she attempts to take on the tasks that her predecessor covered in the role of Mrs. De Winter. The marriage of the heroine and Maxim is certainly an example of such a mesalliance–a marriage across social classes–and the things that can go wrong. Pamela may be about the rise of fortunes for a (virtuous) chambermaid, but it leaves off without truly addressing how Pamela will rule her household, other than giving out monies to the staff who have been her friends. Rebecca is, among many other things, a treatise on the influence of the staff and an example of the disastrous results which might befall a lower class girl attempting to step into the position of upper class wife.
While many romances may leave off with the assumption that the new wife will grow into the role, in Du Maurier’s book the crushing responsibility is relieved, not by the heroine finding an inner strength, but by the forced decision of the hero and heroine to leave Manderley and live abroad without any household to manage.
Forever Amber: Detail, Detail, Detail
Kathleen Winsor’s book really gets down into the, umm, earthy details. As much information about privation and hardship and calloused hands as Margaret Mitchell may have included in GWTW, I never had the impression that her characters were ever actually dirty (though occasionally sweaty). Winsor, however, is all in on the 17th century grossness of plague boils and terrible dental hygiene. Take her description of Amber’s first husband.
Not very much taller than she, he was stockily built with a broad flat snub-nosed face, and his two front teeth had been broken off diagonally; there was a kind of slippery green moss growing along the edges of his gums.
Ewww. I did not know that mouth-moss was a thing, but it’s an image I can’t forget! And Winsor’s heroine isn’t immune to the hygeine problems of the age, either.
Amber sat in a great wooden tub full of warm water and soap, sought out the lice and cracked them while they were wet and immobilized.
I think it would be unusual for an author writing now to include such descriptions for the love interests in a romance novel, but they’re worth remembering for next time I want to make a bad character more repulsive.
Désirée: Broken Promises
Desiree made me cranky. My thoughts on Selinko’s novel boil down to “If you want to write about Napoleon, then write about Napoleon.” I do remind myself that Selinko set herself a harder task than any of the other authors in this unit who wrote historical love stories because she was following a historical person. Scarlett, Amber, and Angelique are all fictional characters who move through their own highly researched historical moments, and that gave the authors telling their stories a good deal of freedom that Selinko didn’t have.
However, the best part of the novel for me is the opening: “A woman can usually get what she wants from a man if she has a well-developed figure. So I’ve decided to stuff four handkerchiefs into the front of my dress tomorrow…”
The lesson I’ll take from this book is that a reader like myself will be pretty dang disappointed if a book doesn’t follow through on the promise of the opening lines!
Angelique: Progress vs the Lost Cause
Reading Angelique sent me down a rabbit-hole to learn about courtly love, troubadours, and medieval French love poetry. That exploration gave me a wider understand of Golon’s story, which turns out to be every bit as political as Gone With the Wind! It just happens to be about the South losing its way of life to the North …of France rather than America. And that makes me think about the universality of theme: the romantic mythology that the underdogs build around the Lost Cause, whatever it may be. Plus, Golon turns the whole thing on its head by presenting the religiously conservative elements of Northern France and the Catholic Church as the ones who are holding onto the past while Joffrey tries to advance modern science within the novel. But she’s clearly also making a statement about holding on to the medieval past of the Occitan. It makes my head spin!
I’m not sure exactly how I would incorporate this sort of theme into the romances I’m writing right now, but it’s something I will continue to think about. And I do have vague plans for an alt-history or steampunk sort of series eventually, which can definitely dig into this sort of thing.
Thanks for following along with my reading of these Mid-Century Love Stories! Next up will be Regencies, and I’m starting–of course–with Georgette Heyer.
Header image from a 1947 Ad for Cashmere Bouquet Soap.
